From Federico Garcia Lorca, Theory and Method of the Duende:
Those dark sounds are the
mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore,
but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of
the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a
definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no
philosopher has explained.’
So, then, the duende
is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro
of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende
surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of
skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning,
it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.
From Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art":
Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our
really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on
the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to
decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or
these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence,
try to look through the cracks in the world. One of these cracks is the
cruel custom of sacrifice..
Caught in the trap of life, man is moved by a field of attraction
determined by a flash point where solid forms are destroyed, where the
various objects that constitute the world are consumed as in a furnace
of light.
From
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share:
I will simply state, without further ado, that the extension of
economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic
principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing
from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general
economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal
of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough
estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use
without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to
surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and
simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the
possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The
industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that
they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of
having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network
cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It
expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it
cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe
to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that
exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.
From
Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure, by Mayfair Mei‐hui Yang:
What [Bataille] proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing
book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern
capitalist productivism, we have lost sight of this
fundamental law of physics and material existence: that
the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic
conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth
have been satisfied must be expended. If this energy is
not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled
explosion such as war. Given the tremendous productive
power of modern industrial society and the fact that its
productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues
of ritual and festive expenditures, energy surpluses
have been redirected to military expenditures for modern
warfare on a scale unknown in traditional societies. Bataille
thought that the incessant growth machine that is
the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected
from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only
by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving
away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Marshall
Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States
could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and
influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of
industrial modernity’s radical reduction of nonproductive
expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate
an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive
expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist
and state socialist modernity.
No comments:
Post a Comment