From Base Materialism to Base Culture: Georges Bataille and the Politics of Heterogeneity

During two highly productive years, Georges Bataille was the main editor for the journal Documents. Together with his close friend – the writer and would-be ethnographer – Michel Leiris, the German art critic Carl Einstein, and the museologist Georges Henri-Rivière, Bataille edited fifteen volumes of a journal which would transcend the confines of the Parisian art world and call it into question. While Documents was first of all an art journal, the artworks reproduced in the journal were juxtaposed with reproductions of ethnographic artefacts and objects from popular culture, which, when placed together, destabilized the distinctions between high and popular culture, Western and non-Western art, together with the more general distinction between art and non-art. Although Bataille only served as the main editor of the journal for two years, the legacy of Documents would live on in an almost un-paralleled way. In fact, the influence of this short-lived journal is almost impossible to survey: articles, anthologies, and monographs have been written and exhibitions have been curated, all of which seek to uncover some of the many threads that were interconnected in the journal. Considering how formative the historical avant-garde has been for the development of modernist art, this is perhaps not that surprising. However, if one revisits some of the most influential essays of the journal, such as Bataille’s programmatic essay “Formless,” the reception is striking. The essay in question is barely half a page long and has, on its own, given rise to monographs, anthologies, and exhibitions.¹

As a result, the philosophical and art historical reception of the journal has by now covered almost all of the facets of Bataille’s work in Documents: the montage technique being employed has been analyzed in depth by Georges Didi-Hubermann and the convergence of surrealism and ethnography has been discussed at length by James Clifford and others.² However, there is one important aspect of Documents that has only received scant attention in the existent literature: the introduction of popular culture in the journal and the implicit, and at times explicit, attempt at questioning the distinction between bourgeois culture and the burgeoning popular culture of France. While the popular culture that was introduced in Documents was not as extensive as the reproductions of ethnographic artefacts, it was a recurring theme. New jazz records were reviewed by Leiris and Rivière, illustrated posters from popular films, as well as the illustrated covers of weekly published detective novels were reproduced and one of the earliest comic strips in France was analyzed. Not only was this in keeping with the montage technique of the journal, it was also an important aspect of Bataille’s famous notion of “base materialism” that he developed during these formative years and that was instrumental for the political orientation of the journal as a whole. In this article, I will revisit Bataille’s reflections on “base materialism” and seek to connect it to the broader analyses of popular culture in Documents, with the aim of analyzing some important, but overlooked, aspects of his political thought during the 1920s and 30s.

1 Base materialism

For Bataille, Documents was first of all conceived of as a declaration of war against all forms of idealism and, as Leiris would later describe it, as “a war machine against received ideas.”³ With Documents as his mouthpiece, Bataille waged a war against idealist philosophy and bourgeois politics, but also against the art world, and then especially Breton’s surrealism (to which I will return later on), and he did so by debasing and deforming the elevated, moralistic, and ideal forms of thought. However, this critique of idealism also entailed an attempt at developing a new understanding of materialism. In this, Bataille was clearly influenced by the Marxist tradition, even though his specific conception of materialism was formulated as an explicit critique of orthodox Marxism.

Most materialists, orthodox Marxists included, simply invert the hierarchical relation between the spiritual and the material dimension of reality. By way of this simple operation, in which matter replaces spirit at the top of the ontological hierarchy, they think they have escaped the impasses of idealist thought. However, according to Bataille this does not constitute a break with idealism, but merely a tiresome continuation of it. “Dead matter, the pure idea, and God,” Bataille writes, “in fact answer a question in the same way,” namely “the question of the essence of things, precisely of the idea by which things become intelligible.”⁴ Matter has in this way only replaced spirit; matter has become the new God or the new ideal form to which reality must conform. This, purportedly materialist, position is thus nothing but a “senile idealism” according to Bataille, since it forgets or represses its own idealism. If and when the concept of materialism is used it must instead “designate the direct interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw phenomena.”⁵

These “raw phenomena” are the object of base materialism. They are raw or base since they disgust and disconcert us whenever we are confronted with them, and we do encounter them wherever we turn, as long as we do not shy away in disgust. In this sense, they constitute the seamy underside of human existence which, although often hidden from view, makes up the material reality that undergirds all idealist thought, however much idealist thinkers try to ignore them. In his essays in Documents, Bataille turns to different examples of this raw and base dimension of reality, indexing their different facets and properties. Among these phenomena, the big toe is a case in point. While serving as the base for our erect posture, a posture that is fundamental for our aspirations towards the heavens and all that which is elevated, as well as for our morality (our correct and steadfast composure), it serves as a constant reminder of our ignoble origins, even in the most idealized of moments.

The distinction between high and low, introduced in the essay “The Big Toe” as a distinction between the ideality of the heavens and the mud below our feet, is an important and recurring distinction in Bataille’s conception of base materialism as a whole. In the essay “The Language of Flowers,” he turns to the symbolism of flowers and to so called floriographies, which list the specific meaning and value associated with different flowers. Here the distinction between high and low is emblematic of the difference between the noble flower and its ignoble roots, which comingle with vermin and maggots. However, flowers are not only base because they are rooted in the same mud in which our toes are submerged, their baseness (bassesse) is also manifest in the flowers as such, at least if we strip away all of their petals. Stripped of their petals “all that remains is a rather sordid tuft” and we can clearly see, Bataille writes, that “even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs.”⁶ Although all flowers are both noble and base, they are, more often than not, seen as symbols of the ideal. In this transposition from appearances to words, from base reality to the lofty and ideal symbols of poetry and philosophy, the ignoble aspects of the flowers disappear. In this respect, the symbolism of floriography is a first step towards the abstractions of idealist thought, which will build upon the idealizations of nature in order to construct ideal and abstract concepts, thereby severing all ties with the mud and soil from out of which these idealizations originally sprang forth. However, the transposition from appearances to words is not only an idealist subterfuge, designed to keep base reality at bay, but a fundamental and seemingly necessary aspect of philosophical thought. It is, Bataille writes, “only the word [that] allows one to consider the characteristics of things that determine a relative situation, in other words the properties that permit an external action.”⁷ Were it not for words and concepts, we would never be able to circumscribe and define the phenomena under study. However, this process of abstraction constantly runs the risk of exceeding its own bounds, thereby giving rise to a false sense of freedom and to the unworldly speculations of idealist thought. In light of this, Bataille calls for a return to appearances since appearances introduce “the decisive value of things […].”⁸ While this return to appearances is reminiscent of the rally cry of phenomenology with which Bataille was familiar, his “return” is not epistemological in nature, but critical: the appearances to which he returns are not the lived experiences of the life-world, but precisely the base and ignoble appearances that the history of philosophy, phenomenology included, has tried to silence and repress. Hence, base materialism can also be read as a critical project of excavation; as an attempt to shed light on appearances that have been inhumed and hidden from view by bourgeois thought and culture. Base materialism would thus constitute an inversion of Platonism, since the imperative of thought is no longer the liberation from the cave, but a return to it.

This “return into the cave” is predicated on the idea that appearances reveal “the decisive value of things.” However, what is revealed is often quite disconcerting. Instead of sparking our curiosity, these appearances shock us, and instead of drawing us closer, they repel us: it is the troubling revelation of that which is normally hidden from view by way of taboos and prohibitions. Thus, the materiality in question is not a neutral surface awaiting an inscription, but an active materiality in the sense that it always gives rise to some kind of re-action. The active capacity of this materiality is addressed by Bataille in the essay, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in which he also provides us with a short and significant, albeit idiosyncratic, genealogy of materialism:

It is nevertheless very remarkable that the only kind of materialism that up to now in its development has escaped systematic abstraction, namely dialectical materialism, had as its starting point, at least as much as ontological materialism, absolute idealism in its Hegelian form […] Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel’s period, apparently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among other, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.⁹

The first step of this genealogy, which takes us from Marx to Hegel, is familiar. However, the second one, which traces the history of dialectics all the way back to the Gnostics, is more surprising. In Gnosticism, Bataille finds not only an important precursor to his own conception of base materialism, since the Gnostics “introduced a most impure fermentation into Greco-Roman ideology,” but also a precursor to Hegelian dialectics.¹⁰ By introducing a radical dualism inWestern thought, a dualism in which evil and darkness were no longer seen as privations of the One, but as principles of their own, Gnosticism broke with the monism of Greek and Christian thought. According to Bataille, this radical dualism lives on in Hegel’s dialectics. However, in a footnote to the text, he adds that “the base elements that are essential in Gnosticism” only exist in “a reduced and emasculated state” in Hegel’s thought.¹¹ The baseness of Gnosticism and the destructive capacity of the base elements is thus retained, but only in a reduced or, to phrase it differently, sublimated form. Even if Hegel reduced the destructive potential of these base elements to a moment in the dialectical process that would finally be sublated, the baseness, inherited from Gnosticism, nonetheless lived on in his thought.

It is this “after-life” of Gnosticism which is of interest here. While Bataille’s reading of Hegel can certainly be questioned on this point, his idiosyncratic genealogy of materialism tells us something important about his understanding of Marxism, and of materialism. After having chastised Hegel for “emasculating” the base elements of Gnosticism, Bataille claims that Marxism has inherited not only the Hegelian dialectic, but also its gnostic roots. When Marx stood Hegel on his head and substituted a materialist dialectic for Hegel’s idealism, matter, Bataille writes, “was no longer an abstraction but a source of contradiction.”¹² In Marx’s thought, material contradictions famously propel history onward. In Bataille’s understanding of Marx, however, these material contradictions are not only socio-economical in nature (the contradictions between the productive forces and the existing social relations), but also include base and raw matter that contradicts the elevated forms of bourgeois thought and practice. By way of his short genealogy, Bataille thus tries to suture the materialism of Marx with base matter and to show that the after-life of Gnosticism haunts Marx’s thought just as much as Hegel’s. As a result, it is possible for him to claim that “Gnosticism, in its psychological process, is not so different from present-day materialism.”¹³ The short caveat “in its psychological process” is essential here, since it tells us that the base materialism that Bataille envisions ultimately is of a different nature than that of Marx. It is a psycho-social, or affective, materialism and not an historical or economical one.

This affective materialism implies that one should not submit oneself “to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being.” Instead, one should submit oneself to base matter, since it is “external and foreign to all human aspirations” and “refuses to allow itself to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.”¹⁴ Here a Nietzschean transvaluation of values is at play, but with a specific inflection. One should indeed submit oneself to that which is low rather than to the elevated forms, and one should, concomitantly, debase the higher forms by soiling them with base matter, but this does not imply that the low should be reinstated as a first principle. If this was the case, one would merely repeat the traditional materialist gesture, i.e. replace spirit with matter and invert the hierarchical order. Far from being a new principle or ground (arché), base matter instead forces us to recognize, as Bataille puts it, “the helplessness of superior principles.”¹⁵ Matter should, in other words, be valorized; all of that which the history of philosophy has relegated to the dust heap of history and which idealism has emasculated by reducing to pure contingency and chance, should be re-valorized so that it can become the anarchic Abgrund of thought and politics. This is, however, a paradoxical move and one that constantly runs the risk of being overturned into yet another form of idealism and into yet another idealist form. In an attempt at clarifying this paradox, one can draw on Foucault’s reading of Bataille and speak of this affirmation of base materialism as an affirmation that “contains nothing positive,” but which instead is “an affirmation of division.”¹⁶ It does not reinstate a new foundation, nothing “positive” will come out of it, yet it nonetheless affirms the existence of something “negative.”

This affirmation of negativity is, to use a more Bataillean turn of phrase, an affirmation of uselessness, even an affirmation of the use-value of the useless – to paraphrase Denis Hollier. As Hollier has shown, Documents was organized around “a return, even a regression, to that which one might call the primitivism of use-value.” In this, the ethnographers and Bataille were in agreement, albeit for different reasons.¹⁷ While the ethnographers who participated in Documents were animated by a museological aspiration to re-contextualize ethnographic artefacts in their original practical milieu, Bataille was primarily interested in use-value since it gave access to base reality, which had been made invisible by the logic of capitalist exchange. For Bataille, capitalist society is not only defined by its reduction of everything to exchange value, but also by a utilitarian logic in which everything and everyone is useful for something else. Capitalist society is, in short, homogenous and homogenizing in nature and eradicates all that is heterogeneous – it eradicates difference. In this respect, Bataille’s return to base matter is also, as Hollier writes, a return to “the inexchangeable heterogeneity of the real, an irreducible kernel of resistance to any kind of transposition, of substitution, a real which does not yield to a metaphor.”¹⁸ The reality revealed by such a return, and by such an excavation, is useless at the same time as it constitutes a use-value precisely because it introduces something heterogeneous in a homogenous world, it introduces “an affirmation of difference.”

This useless existence is made manifest by the big toe, by the ignoble centers of flowers, as well as by all those appearances from which bourgeois society and culture shields itself. But it is also made manifest in politics by and through the sheer appearance of the working class. In the early essay “The Solar Anus,” Bataille will for instance write: “Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.”¹⁹ To be sure, Marx also understands the proletariat by way of its negativity: it is the negative or obverse side of the bourgeoisie and the class that is destined to abolish all classes. But whereas Marx understands this in historico-materialist terms, i.e., as the result of a historical process in which the bourgeoisie “absorbs all propertied classes” while all the “earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied classes” are transformed into a new class (the proletariat), Bataille understands the negativity of the proletariat as an heterogeneous and affective force, which instigates a political as well as a cultural rupture within bourgeois society.²⁰

However, it is not only in politics that the heterogeneity of base matter is made manifest; it is also perceptible in art. Bataille writes towards the end of “Base Materialism and Gnosticism”: “certain plastic representations are the expression of an intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that comprises the powers that be in matters of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivalling stupefying scarecrows.”²¹ Even though Bataille never – aside from some oblique references to Picasso’s work – specifies what kind of art he has in mind, it is clear that he is pointing towards the art and visual culture being reproduced in Documents.

2 Heterogeneity

However, Documents was not only conceived of as a manifestation of base matter, it was also a “war machine,” directed against the idealism inherent in surrealism. In the essay, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealism,” Bataille begins by writing that materialism is “a crude liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive, indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts, and ridicules spirit.”²² In relation to this base understanding of materialism, surrealism is nothing but a “childhood disease” according to Bataille, since it sought to create values of its own instead of finding sustenance in the baseness of human existence. The values and ideals of bourgeois society and culture were to be replaced and subverted, but with new ones that were even more noble and elevated than the existing ones; values placed above (sur) reality and which could usher in what Breton called a “revolt of the spirit.”²³ In order to accomplish this, surrealism had to annihilate all that is contingent, since the contingent is nothing but an annoying disturbance if looked upon from up high. Hence, the materialist identity of surrealism is at best the symptom of a self-deceptive senility and at worst a conscious manipulation.

The opposition between high and low thus reappears in this essay as well, but is re-described as an opposition between the soaring eagle and the rummaging mole in a way which further accentuates the political dynamic of the opposition. In a political sense, the eagle is identified with the splendor of imperialism; it signifies elevation, as well as absolute authoritarian power. By insisting on that which is elevated, surrealism identifies itself with the eagle, and with an eagle that soars high above reality – the very symbol of an idealism that has transcended reality altogether. In contradistinction to the eagle we find the mole who undermines all that seeks to rise above and which “hollows out chambers in a decomposed soil repugnant to the delicate noses of the utopians.”²⁴ This is the same mole that Marx speaks of in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: the mole of the revolution that “is still journeying through purgatory,” but that “does its work methodically.” It began by perfecting parliamentary power only to overthrow it, then it concentrated all its efforts on the executive power and unleashed all its destructive force upon it. When its work has been completed Europe will “leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: well burrowed old mole!”²⁵ As is well-known, the mole that resurfaces in Marx’s work can, in turn, be traced back to Hamlet. However, in Hamlet the mole is no longer revolutionary, at least not in any explicit sense, instead it is the “vicious mole of nature,” which in the form of alcoholism and debauchery corrupts the Danish people.²⁶ The methodical, political mole is thus counterpoised by the alcoholic one and the materialism of Marx is once again sutured with base materialism. By way of this operation, Bataille can also write that Marx’s analysis, just as the ignoble and revolutionary mole, “begins in the bowels of the earth, as in the materialist bowels of proletarians.”²⁷

Bataille’s reinterpretation of Marx, and his attempt to show that Marx was a base materialist avant la lettre, can certainly be questioned. Of all the categories that appear in Marx’s work, only one truly merits to be called base or ignoble and that is the Lumpenproletariat, which Marx famously dismisses as a notoriously untrustworthy, even reactionary, segment of society. It appears, as Marx writes in The Class Struggles in France, in the form of the “unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites” among the most debauched parts of the aristocracy, thereby giving rise to a Lumpenproletariat “at the pinnacle of bourgeois society,” but more often than not it is identified with the lowest echelons of bourgeois society, with outcasts, criminals, and paupers.²⁸ While these people are capable of great heroism, they are also easily misled; they constitute a formless and heterogeneous multitude that can be molded into almost any form and that can be used for almost any political purpose. While the Lumpenproletariat can be interpreted as a base element in Marx’s thought, it is thus ultimately rejected as being nothing but a hotbed of inchoate desires, unruly passions, and unlimited violence. It is, as Marx and Engels puts it in The Communist Manifesto, “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.”²⁹

Bataille’s attempt to turn Marx into a base materialist is thus highly questionable. Far from being a base materialist, Marx in fact appears to be just another idealist thinker who instinctively shies away from the base materiality that surrounds him, at least if we follow the logic of Bataille’s argument. Ultimately, Bataille’s materialism is thus radically different from that of Marx, even though Bataille clearly sympathizes with Marxian politics. We have already touched upon the main difference between their respective understanding of materialism, namely the fact that base materialism must be understood in affective terms and not in historical and/or economical ones. It is also this difference that accounts for their divergent accounts of the Lumpenproletariat. While Marx considers it to be dangerous, since its heterogeneity precludes any clear class identity, Bataille understands the heterogeneity of the Lumpenproletariat as an explicit negation of bourgeois politics and as the class that can give rise to an emancipatory revolution. For this to be possible, however, the Lumpenproletariat must leave its purely heterogeneous state and such a transformation can take place only by way of an affective and political articulation.

In order to fully come to terms with Bataille’s affective materialism it is instructive to turn to his article “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” from 1932. Here, Bataille seeks to understand the rise and success of fascism and he does so by proposing a psychological analysis of society. The analysis is psychological or affectological in nature, since it, in Marxist terms, focuses on the superstructure of society rather than on the economic base. To be sure, Bataille concedes that an analysis of the economic base is important, even though he emphasizes that the rise of fascism can only be properly understood by and through a renewed psychological analysis of the superstructure, something which Marxism, according to him, has failed to provide. The operative terms in this psychological analysis of society are homogeneity and heterogeneity. The basis for the homogenous aspect of society is production and, as Bataille puts it, “homogenous society is productive society, namely, useful society.”³⁰ Everything useless is therefore excluded in principle from the homogenous dimension of society. Instead, everything is useful for something else; a utility and exchangeability that ultimately rests on the law of general equivalence. Because of this commensurability, the homogenous aspects of society lack a value that is valid in itself: that which is useful is after all only useful in relation to another activity which in turn is useful for something else. This notwithstanding, the homogenous dimension is the foundation upon which large parts of society rest: production, social hierarchies, and law all rest upon the homogenizing principle of general equivalence. But in and of itself, the homogenous structure of society can at best give rise to an administered society and never to any sense of community or belonging. In order to create a sense of unity, society must instead appeal to values that are valid in and of themselves; it must appeal to heterogeneous values.

The heterogeneous dimension of society is, first and foremost, defined negatively vis-à-vis the homogenous one: heterogeneous elements are defined by way of their exclusion from the homogenous dimension and by the fact that society is incapable of assimilating them. But the heterogeneous elements are also sacred. They are enclosed by way of taboos and prohibitions that differentiate them from the rest of society. The difference between homogeneity and heterogeneity can therefore also be described as a difference between the profane (homogenous) and sacred (heterogeneous) dimension of society – a distinction that Bataille inherits from Emile Durkheim’s analyses in The Elementary Forms of Religion. From Durkheim, Bataille also inherits the idea that the sacred is divided into two united, but distinct, parts.³¹ Not only does the sacred dimension include phenomena that we normally consider to be holy, but also their purported opposite, i.e., everything that is considered to be ignoble, dirty, and disgusting. At this point, the reference to base matter is unmistakable. But whereas Bataille had earlier described this in more materialist terms, he is now speaking of base matter as the ignoble form of the sacred and as a base form of heterogeneity. Base matter and all of the waste that the homogenous world refuses to acknowledge is thus sacred since it is circumscribed by the same kind of taboo as the elevated and traditional sacred forms.

Both the noble and the ignoble elements are excluded from the homogenous dimension of society; they are excluded and screened off with the help of taboos that sustain the continued existence of homogenous production. As with Bataille’s earlier descriptions of base matter, the heterogeneous dimension thereby constitutes the hither side of society, which is kept at a safe distance from our ordinary and profane existence. Unlike his earlier analyses, however, Bataille now makes clear that the heterogeneous elements are not only an ever-present heterogeneity in an otherwise homogenous world, but that they are necessary and constitutive of all forms of community. The heterogeneous elements represent something around which people can rally and coalesce (the glory of the nation, the sovereignty of the leader, God’s blessing, etc.) and which lend the repetitive and homogenizing tendencies of society a value that it is lacking in and of itself. Traditionally this takes place by way of an operation that will simultaneously exclude all of the ignoble and impure heterogeneous elements: everyone and everything that constitutes a perceived threat against the glory of the nation or the sovereign is stigmatized as refuse and vermin (specific ethnic groups of course, but also the Lumpenproletariat). The appeal to heterogeneous values has thus followed a double logic of attraction and repulsion throughout history. Certain heterogeneous elements are incorporated into society, in a way which at least partially homogenizes them, but these elements must at the same time be set off against contrasting ignoble elements that are excluded from it. Large parts of political life are thus played out in this affective register, which Bataille identifies with the superstructure of society.

More often than not, this affective dimension is only present in an unthematic way. But if and when the foundations of society are threatened it must resort to heterogeneous and affective elements which, as Bataille writes, “are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.”³² During periods in which the homogeneity of society is not under direct threat, the state can regulate potential anomalies by way of parliamentarian compromises, the ultimate goal of which is to reduce the antagonistic tension in society. In periods of crisis, however, “the State cuts matters short with strict authority.”³³ The problem here though, is that the state does not possess any authority of its own, but draws its authority from heterogeneous forms. This is also the point at which fascism will make its entrance. Fascism enters as the ultimate defense barrier for bourgeois society. The fascist leader, and the heterogeneous values that he represents, become a focal point around which people rally and he lends his heterogeneous capacity to the state, which can thereby enforce its authority. At the same time, the elevated heterogeneous forms of fascism are contrasted with ignoble forms that are eliminated or transformed. The Lumpenproletariat, which would play an important role in the militias of fascism was, by and through such a process, transformed from a formless and heterogeneous mass into a homogenous and “geometric order”:

There is thus, as Peter Stalybrass has argued, “a ceaseless process of conflict and negotiation between the homogenous and the heterogeneous” at play in times of political upheaval.³⁴ Elements that were previously considered to be a pure heterogeneity, such as the Lumpenproletariat, are transformed into homogenous ones but, as Bataille puts it, “without a decrease of the fundamental heterogeneity.”³⁵ The Lumpenproletariat is certainly being homogenized (it is ordered and given form), but its homogeneity still bears within itself the heterogeneous opposition, its “affirmation of difference,” vis-à-vis the homogenous dimension of society.

This process is indicative of authoritarian forms of politics, and as such we find traces of it in bonapartism as well as in fascism (two forms of authoritarian rule that Bataille discusses in his text). However, Bataille is not only interested in a descriptive analysis of fascism. He also seeks to give an account of how the anti-fascism of the left should be organized. On this point he is clear: the resistance against fascism can only be successful if the left makes use of the same affective strategies that fascism has relied upon. Contrary to earlier forms of utopian socialism, the left can no longer base itself upon moral and idealistic principles. Instead, what “presents itself as a weapon” for the left is precisely the affective movement of attraction and repulsion, which permeate the superstructure of society.³⁶ It is only by way of these affective movements that the Lumpenproletariat can be articulated and transformed into a political class which, in turn, necessitates an affective strategy from the left that can counter the strategies being employed by fascism. In contradistinction to Marx, who considered the Lumpenproletariat to be predisposed to fascism, Bataille thus views it as an open-ended potentiality for an attack on the homogenous nature of capitalist society and as a group that is waiting for a political articulation (from either side of the ideological spectrum). However, the question remains as to how the masses could be drawn into an emancipatory, rather than reactionary, struggle; how they could be articulated as a revolutionary, rather than a conservative, force?

In “The Psychological Stucture of Fascism” the answers to these questions are only adumbrated. Bataille makes clear that the future of the left hinges upon its capacity to rally the masses by affective means, but he never spells out how this would actually look, let alone what affects the left should coalesce around. However, in the texts that he wrote for Contre-attaque – the revolutionary movement and journal that Bataille founded with Breton in 1935 – his political position would become more pronounced. In fact, whereas “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” constitutes the theoretical framework for Bataille’s political position during the first half of the 1930s, Contre-attaque can be read as its practical implementation.

In Contre-attaque, Bataille will stress that the left must “know how to appropriate the weapons” of its adversaries and use the affective strategies of fascism against it.³⁷ “We must,” he continues, “learn how to use for the liberation of the exploited those weapons that were forged for their greater enslavement.”³⁸ In the political conjunction of the 1930s, this, in turn, entailed a form of affective politics that took the omnipresent anxiety of the people as its starting point in order to transform it into a political force. It is only emotions such as anxiety and despair that, so Bataille holds, can drive “the crowds into the streets;” contagious emotions that “from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being.”³⁹ And it is precisely this frenzy and enthusiasm that Contre-attaque sets out to provoke in an attempt to transform the passivizing affect of anxiety into an active, and violent, force, which would be capable of competing with the frenzied masses of fascism. In this, Bataille, and by extension Contre-attaque, would come dangerously close to fascism. Not only did he call for a leftist politics that would use the same strategies as fascism, the affects around which the left would organize itself were themselves almost identical to the affects that fascism had engendered in the masses (i.e., violent frenzy, blind enthusiasm, and paroxysms of violence). It was also this proximity to fascism that ultimately led to the dissolution of Contre-attaque.

If one only were to judge Bataille’s political position from out of the failures of Contre-attaque, it would be easy to dismiss his entire political trajectory in the 1930s – from his earlier texts on base materialism to his later theories on heterogeneity – as being nothing but an ideologically confused, and potentially dangerous, venture. However, it is precisely in relation to these aporiae that it is important to read Bataille somewhat against the grain and return to Documents, and then especially to the journal’s attempt at re-evaluating popular culture, since this can provide us with a more fruitful understanding of base matter and the affective movements to which it can give rise.

3 Base culture

When addressing how the Lumpenproletariat should be articulated as a political class, one is immediately confronted with a problem that has accompanied, even haunted, modern political thought, namely the problem concerning who or what will actually lend form to the formless masses? Admittedly, this is not a problem for authoritarian forms of politics, such as fascism or Soviet Communism, in which the leader or the party will act as the natural, and more often than not, unquestioned mold for the people, but it is a problem for emancipatory forms of politics that are organized democratically. In a truly democratic politeia the articulation of the people must come from an auto-formative act, such that it is both by and of the people themselves.

Even though Bataille will not phrase the problem in these terms, it is clear that he was conscious of it. When criticizing Breton and the surrealist movement for creating new ideal values in an attempt at securing a new form of authority that could counteract the values of bourgeois society, he is, in fact, pointing to precisely this problem. It is for this very reason he calls for a politics, which in contradistinction to Breton relies upon “presently lower forms,” that is, on base forms that stem from the working class itself – from the burrowing of the mole and not from the searing eagle. What is needed is thus not an invention of new forms (pace Breton), but an excavation of existing heterogeneous forms that can give rise to a new sense of unity.

This attempt at an excavation of heterogeneous forms characterizes large parts of Bataille’s oeuvre, but nowhere was this excavation so pronounced as in Documents, in which popular culture would be one of the “presently lower forms” under scrutiny. Bataille’s main contribution to this analysis of popular culture was a short article dedicated to one of the earliest comic strips in France, Les Pieds Nickelés [The Nickel Plated Feet]. The publication of the comic started in 1908 in the weekly magazine L’Épatant and would continue to exist long thereafter, making it one of the longest-running comic strips in France. It centers on three anarchist slackers and the adventurous hustles they were engaged in. It was widely read in France during the first half of the 20th century, so much so that the expression pieds nickelés made its way into informal French as a description for slackers and social outcasts. In this respect, the comic was clearly in line with Bataille’s privileging of the base and lowly aspects of society in both a cultural and a socio-economic sense. L’Épatant, and the comic strips contained therein, were, as Bataille notes, “sold for one sou before the war, that is, it was meant for children from classes that were, not without a certain cynicism, called disinherited (désheritées).”⁴⁰ It was, one might add, a base form of popular culture, which was written for a base audience.

For Bataille, the three characters in the comic strip are a testament to a derisory activity in human nature that is “indispensable for the solidity of the edifice, upon which our intellectual existence rests.”⁴¹ As such, the three characters make manifest a sense of playfulness which has accompanied man throughout history; thereby making them, as Bataille notes, into modern instantiations of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who, among other things, was famous for “taking pleasure in sliding down from mountain tops on a small board.”⁴² However, even though this playfulness has reverberated throughout history, it has often been hidden from view, just as all other base and vile forms. The same holds true in bourgeois society, in which parents repetitively tell their children that “Life is not a laughing matter,” at the same time as they hand them the latest number of their favorite comic strip. But this playful activity is not only hidden from view, it is also nameless or, rather, it escapes any clear-cut designation. Dada attempted to “name” it, but ultimately failed and surrealism is “out of the question” according to Bataille, since it only culminated in a “morose occultation.”⁴³ By virtue of being both hidden from view and nameless, this derisory and playful activity, of which Les pieds nickelés is an example, clearly warrants the designation base matter: it is, to once again quote Hollier, “an irreducible kernel of resistance to any kind of transposition, of substitution, a real which does not yield to a metaphor.”⁴⁴

However, here it is important to note that it is not only parents who, from out of a misplaced sense of parental authority, fail to take cognizance of how important this playfulness is for human existence. The same attitude is found among intellectuals, who instinctively shy away from it since that which is playful contradicts all of their lofty and ideal aspirations, thereby turning them, as Bataille puts it, into toys themselves – toys and playthings that are subjected to the repetitive ebb and flow of the homogenous world of the bourgeoisie.⁴⁵ In order to destroy this transcending movement that characterizes idealist thought, “there has to be laughter,” and to laugh at God – the pinnacle of transcendence – requires, as Bataille would later put it, “simplicity, it needs the guileless rancor of children.”⁴⁶ For Bataille, Les pieds nickelés represents precisely such a form of “guileless rancor,” which is not only ridiculous itself, but which makes manifest how ridiculous and unworldly its purported (serious, and idealized) opposite is. However, this is not a mere methodology for Bataille: the amusement that accompanies all playful activities is, as he puts it, “the most acute need and, of course, the most terrifying aspect of human nature.”⁴⁷ In order to resist the temptations of idealism, which are inherent in a bourgeois culture, nothing else is needed than an excavation of the base matter that is always already digging tunnels under our feet.

If we interpret Bataille in the way that I have proposed here, another conception of the heterogeneous nature of base matter, and of its affective character, emerges. Whereas Bataille’s political undertaking in Contre-attaque ultimately founders because of its affective proximity to fascism, the base materialism in Documents points in a radically different direction. What is at stake here is not a frenetic enthusiasm, the only outlet of which would be violence, but an affective politics that is based upon the playfulness inherent in certain forms of culture and in the clashes and productive tensions that are manifested when they are brought together. One example of this is Bataille’s short analysis of Les pieds nickelés, but it is not the only one. In the recurring reviews of recent jazz records by Leiris and Rivière, a similar re-evaluation of popular culture is evident. By drawing on Rivière’s earlier analyses in the journal, Leiris makes clear that “jazz today represents the authentic sacred music (i.e. the music that is most capable of putting a crowd ‘into trance’).”⁴⁸ Jazz is sacred, and sacred in the same sense that Bataille would give to the word: it breaks with the profanity and homogeneity of everyday life by introducing an heterogeneous affectivity, which is capable of, at least temporarily, uniting the masses in a moment of ecstasy. While this ecstatic state is reminiscent of the frenetic enthusiasm of Contre-attaque, it is ultimately of a different nature. To be sure, it is, as Leiris writes, a form of “music that frightens,” but only because it is, first and foremost, a “music that gives rise to love.”⁴⁹ We do get frightened, but it is the same fright or ecstasy that love engenders; the fright of losing ourselves in others, the horror that arises when we surpass our own limits.

Whereas Contre-attaque sought to provoke frenetic affects of violence, the affective register at play in Documents is based on playfulness and, at least in some instances, on ecstatic love. The aim is, arguably, still to articulate and unify the masses, to bring them out into the streets as a collective unity and not as a frenzied mob, but as an ongoing carnival and festival that finds sustenance in art and culture.⁵⁰ However, it is not only the analyses of popular culture that can be interpreted in this way. In fact, Documents as a whole, and then especially its montage technique, can be read in terms of the same sort of festive playfulness that Bataille returns to in his texts. In this sense, base matter is not only locatable on the level of content, but on the level of form as well, albeit a form that is constantly on the brink of a playful “formlessness.”

While Bataille’s more explicit political analyses were only formulated after he had been forced to leave Documents, there are striking indices in his earlier texts, which suggest that his later reflections on heterogeneous forms were present already in Documents, something which in turn warrants a political interpretation of the journal (such as the one that I have proposed here). In such a reading, Documents would in and of itself, testify to the use-value of the useless, to the use-value of artistic forms, which by virtue of their uselessness, could give rise to a sense of political unity and lend a formless form to the base masses. Far from being a purely aestheticist and avant-garde experiment, Documents should thus be understood in relation to the political context in which it appeared, and in relation to the revolutionary and anti-fascist struggles that many of its contributors were, and would continue to be, engaged in.

4 Coda

Even though this political dimension was certainly present in Documents, one must, nevertheless, recognize that the journal never realized any political unity, and nor did it reach the population at large. Instead, it remained an exclusive avant-garde journal that to a large extent addressed itself to people who were already part of the artistic, intellectual or political avant-garde. What Documents, as well as Contre-attaque and other avant-gardist groups, failed to consider was thus how their revolutionary aesthetic should be mediated, in both a technological and an institutional sense. While Bataille himself never took any interest in such issues, some of the other contributors in Documents would, interestingly enough, address them. After Documents was disbanded, both Paul Rivet and Georges Henri-Rivière would put their more theoretical work in Documents into practice by seeking support for different museological projects, which were in keeping with some of the tenets of the art journal and which would become an important part of the cultural policies of the French Popular Front during the latter half of the 1930s.

In 1928 Rivet was appointed director of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and in 1937 he would found the Musée de l’homme in Paris, a museum housing anthropological and ethnographical collections. Rivière, who worked closely together with Rivet at the Musée d’Ethnographie would, in turn, work towards founding the first folkloristic museum of France, the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires, which would also open in 1937 as a subdivision of the Musée d’Ethnographie, only to become an institution in its own right in 1972 when the museum was opened by the Bois de Boulogne. Whereas Rivet thus continued the ethnographical work being pursued in Documents by giving it an institutional setting, Rivière would put the journal’s theoretical work on popular culture into museological practice. The latter of the two would also understand his project in terms of “a museum of the people for the people,” in a way which, at least implicitly, built upon the notion of an auto-formation of the people.⁵¹ This can, of course, be interpreted in nationalist terms as well, i.e. as an attempt to glorify and valorize the national specificities of the French people. However, as Jacqueline Christophe has emphasized, for Rivière “the people is here understood as a social category in the tradition of a revolutionary rhetoric and not in line with an identitarian logic.”⁵²

In this sense, the legacy of Documents would live on and influence not only these museological projects, but also the cultural initiatives of the Popular Front which, in turn, would become the basis for the first official cultural policies of France after the war.⁵³ While the excommunicated group of surrealists who flocked around Bataille certainly constituted an avant-garde, and while they, in conformity with other such groups, formed an exclusivist and unorthodox community, their work would have an impact outside of their own tight-knit circles. As a consequence of this, we would be well advised to question Peter Bürger’s famous account of the historical avant-garde and his insistence that it should be characterized by “an aestheticists’ rejection of the world” and by its concomitant attempt at organizing “a new life praxis from a basis in art”; a neo-romanticist attempt, which ultimately led to a cul-de-sac.⁵⁴ Although Bürger’s characterization is certainly true when it comes to the self-understanding of many of the members of the historical avant-garde, the institutional afterlife of Documents suggests that the delimitations between the avant-garde groups and the wider cultural context in which they operated were not as clear-cut as Bürger suggests. In order to fully understand the cultural experiments in France during the 1930s, we should instead take a broader view of the period under study in an attempt to understand the many interconnections that existed between the historical avant-garde and the institutional projects of the Popular Front.