I am taking a somewhat Freudian approach. And I am considering Bataille and shamanism.
How it seems to me is that we humans have a certain propensity for destruction. Let us call it Thanatos, as Freud does.
What that means is that we have an instinct that will out. Now the old cyclical view of life — the pagan naturist religions and Dionysian sects — used to allow for a certain period of acknowledging and engaging in destructive processes. The change of the seasons, or the descent into winter deadness was seen to imply the naturalness of this cycle of destruction and regeneration. Shamanism, too, acknowledges that destruction of one’s self, of one’s psyche, leads to insight as well as to regeneration. So very many traditions in the past gave a place to Thanatos, to ensure their citizens didn’t become psychologically repressed and thereby destroy their own civilization.
However, the Enlightenment is marked by a concept of scientific optimism, above all. It holds that humans can rise above their instincts to control their environments and bring themselves happiness. Relentless progress in this vein, however, has not automatically brought us happiness. The 20th Century saw some of the most violent outbreaks of death seeking through war that the world has ever seen.
It seems that if we do not acknowledge our instinct for Thanatos, with various destructive rituals, we become its victims. It’s not the linear view of history as such, but the lack of acknowledgment of instinct that it at fault.
3 comments:
Yes - in fact in the novel, "evil" doesn't manifest itself as a force of chaos or even a force at all. What we see is mainly a series of ritualistic, socially and individually constructed transgressions - ones that are so systematized, in very visual as well as symbolic ways. I suppose you could say that both this narrative and Bataille's "Erotisme" define the two polarities not as good/evil, but perhaps two different organized systems of behavior, each arising from different drives.
At the same time, following on from what you said, the state of death (and continuity) itself is inherently unknowable (as is the act of being born), so when these transitions between the two states of continuous being and discontinuous being actually occur, it's outside the scope of our consciousness. In this way the whole idea of the taboo, organized transgression, etc, that brings one closer to a state of continuity is only a perception of "chaos", when in fact it's as rigidly controlled as anything else.
As for this "continuous" state, that is what I would call absolutely unknowable, yet in Bataille's theory, the control it has over our social behavior is all due to our perception of it and our attempts to either suppress and avoid it, or the opposite.
And thanks for the reference - will check out Bataille's psychology of fascism too.
This is not entirely unlike Lacan's view (via Zizek) that the Symbolic excludes the Real of experience and thereby created the Real.
So, I agree with you that in this particular sense both aspects ARE created prior to the experience of them. I guess they are either created by psychological or social conditioning -- probably most broadly by what we call "socialising".
But --ok that is the ontological sense, somehow. It is not Manichean -- rigid, metaphysical, mechanical feeling -- it is more of an organic social construction of reality.
Or maybe "ontogeny" is the correcter term (not ontology).
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