Visions of Excess

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Notes

notes

1 The installation element of Break Down was carried out between 10 and 24 February 2001 at the abandoned C&A store at 499 Oxford Street. This account was constructed from a series of accounts of the work, primarily Michael Landy/Break Down and Inventory (the artist's texts) but also from the DVD The Eye: Michael Landy (Illuminations, 2004) and also from Lingwood and Morris; Cork; Dorment; Cumming, “Going, Going, Gone.”

2 This necessary and generative understanding of excess can be traced through philosophy, in Marx's surplus, in Lacanian jouissance, and in Badiou's “wandering of the excess to be the real of being” (Badiou 61/81). For Deleuze, excess appears to be productive of the subject and it is the source of the creative act.

3 There is a certain sense of the violent endeavour about these forms of thinking. Excess and informe strike “low blows,” Derridean difference “makes tremble,” “it is the domination of beings that difference everywhere comes to solicit, in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety” (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy 21).

4 Mauss’ “total system” may be related to Bataille's general economy. In both cases it is the cycling of material and immaterial – gifts and their giving, excess, its destruction and the meanings which result – that allows a mapping of the whole of society.

5 Comparable to the status and reputation that were generated by potlatch in Mauss’ The Gift.

6 Compare this with contemporary understandings of disposal as a performance of self, identity and social relations (Gregson; Gregson and Crewe; Gregson, Metcalfe and Crewe; Hawkins and Muecke; Hetherington, “Secondhandedness”; Marcoux).

7 Interestingly, a spectral community of similar make-up is overtly acknowledged by contemporary material culture and consumption literature (Miller, Materiality; Gregson).

8 “[T]he foundation of one's thought is the thought of another … what is offered to the reader … must be an ensemble … a self-consciousness” (Bataille, Theory of Religion 9). We read here Bataille for excess and generative unproductive expenditure, but every text binds in other texts, is potentially a supplement; all writers have their antecedents and are in turn the antecedent. Bataille is no exception – and I am uncomfortably aware of those whom I evoke here, only to dispose of them and hence create the inevitable haunted text. Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Habermas all read Bataille most immediately (see, for example, the writings collected in Botting and Wilson). Dean, Weiss, Pefanis, Hollier read and write Bataille through his own texts and those others have written on him. There are others: Žižek, Badiou, Deleuze, who write Bataille into their own works, and still more who comment on these critiques of Bataille.

9 For further discussion see Pefanis on what he describes as “The Issue of Bataille.”

10 It was twenty-three years after his death that the English-speaking world gained access to Visions of Excess in 1985 and six years later volume 1 of The Accursed Share. This means that to think Bataille is to develop the non-singular, the other, of the historical narrative of his contemporary Continental philosophers and thinkers and to offer a resistance to the singular narrative of history or the trans-historical concept.

11 The term “work shop” nicely recovers the evacuation of production relations, the “work,” from the “normal” shop floor.

12 Bataille's work is often mentioned with respect to the theorisation of marginal spaces; see Edensor, Industrial Ruins; Hawkins and Muecke; Hetherington, “Secondhandedness”; and Nielson, whose examination of city planning theorises the urban spatial excess. The “practised” nature of landscape that Bataille's ideas develop has a central part of Rose's astructural account of landscape.

13 See Baker and Ades.

14 Compare Carol Duncan's analysis of the museums, entitled Civilising Rituals.

15 For further discussion of the juxtaposition of Bataille's text and Lotar's photographs see Baker and Ades; Bois and Krauss.

16 Compare here Foucauldian heterotopias, elucidated by Hetherington (Badlands). These spaces, which Hetherington terms “Badlands,” are “constituted in relation to other sites by their difference.” As he goes on: “heterotopias are spaces in which an alternative order is performed, these are spaces in which a new way of ordering emerges and stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of the social order that exists within society” (40). Foucault's heterotopias were based on medical terminology and developed in the shadow of de Sade and Kafka and potentially influenced by Bataille – see Foucault's essay “A Preface to Transgression.” Such spaces develop places of otherness as spaces whose existence sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate objects which challenge the way we think and “especially the way our thinking is ordered.”

17 In both popular narratives as well as academic discourses there is a recognition of the erasure of the birth of the commodity, its production processes and the political economies of labour from the commodity form. Various conceptual and empirical strategies have been developed to reinsert these relations; see, for example, Cook; Cook et al., “Follow the Thing”; Hartwick.

18 A series of ideas form common touchstones in contemporary studies of rubbish and its related concepts. These include: fragments, the “illuminatory” potential of the outmoded of Benjamin's trash aesthetics (see discussion by Highmore), or Adorno's processes of ruination, or the potentially dangerous half life of the “pulverising, dissolving and rotting” objects which emerge from Douglas's work. See, for example, disposal – Hetherington (“Secondhandedness”); remains and remnants – DeSilvey; ruins – Edensor, Industrial Ruins; trash – Stallabrass (Gargantua) and assemblage art (Boaden). While Douglas's breakdown processes may be very different from Landy's, her suggestion that “it is unpleasant to poke about in refuse for that revives identity” (Douglas 160) broadly reflects the way in which Landy's retraction of objects form critiques the stable subject.

19 Here we find the liberation from the semantic that marks out “informe” from the “abject,” the latter being “thoroughly indentured” to a thematics of essences and substances (Derrida, Kristeva, Krauss) that develops the “contract of truth with itself in the logos” (Derrida, Postcard 439). Where the abject thematises the marginalised, the excluded “informe” operationalises them against the very idea of a theme and of essence; for a more prolonged comparison see Bois and Krauss's discussion.

20 The exhibition “l’Informe: Mode d’emploi” was held at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, from 21 May to 26 August 1996.

21 In their exhibition catalogue Bois and Krauss make a compelling argument for “informe” as an art historical tool alongside such conventional techniques as content analysis and iconography.

22 See note 17.

23 This is not the paper in which to ponder whether this denigration of art is the equal and opposite movement of the elevation of the everyday object to the status of art in terms of the critical effect on the art objects. There is not yet a prolonged literature on rubbish and art which would serve to frame such a question.

24 Bataille on Manet cited in Bois and Krauss.

25 See Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye” and “From Work to Text.” Similar ideas are also developed in chapter 1 – “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” – in Derrida's Of Grammatology, and by other theorists such as Edmond Jabès. For the reference to the latter I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer.

26 Now is not the time or place to enter in depth into the much larger debate regarding the relationship between person and thing, subject and object. Miller's introduction to his edited collection Materiality develops a brief history of these relationships, ultimately situating standpoints on object/subject relations as various reinventions of a wheel. Such cyclical and unending developments are being carried out in the “messy” world which exists in the shadow of the mountain-top Hegelian objectification which has apparently solved the problem; “that which objectifies and that which is objectified are creations of the same process” (Miller, Material Cultures 54). This does not stand up, Miller argues, in the real world, but rather what endless inventions do develop Miller (Materiality) suggests is “a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self construction and respect for their mutual dependency.” Colloredo-Mansfeld pushes forward this debate in ways especially relevant here with his demonstration of the potential value of the materially ephemeral and transient in these broader debates. What is interesting to ponder is the way in which the fluidity and immanence of the material forms which these ephemeral forms and my research elsewhere on rubbish have developed intersects with the importance of such ideas to contemporary philosophy; see, for example, Mullarkey's treatise on post-Continental philosophy and its pre-occupation with immanence, and with a coming back down to earth from the “inconsequential heavens of transcendence” (3).

27 The term “mute mark” is one by which Derrida knows his inaudible replacement of e with a in differance. As well as an “oblique,” the colloquial description for the “/” mark is a slash, which would have opened up a whole series of potentially interesting discussions surrounding the violence towards subject and object that the slash implicates. The “/” could also be the enaction of an arithmetic division, the dividing of the objects into their parts and hence of the posing of the question: “what happens if you divide, or rather define, Landy by his objects?” Dixon and Jones argue for the limited value of binary analysis; they note “the boundaries between terms – whether defined by a dash or a slash – have only the appearance of clean separation. They continue:we know that binary oppositions are constructions, socially and historically situated, open to redefinition, and subject to valence reversals … We also know they are relationally constituted, defined by a process of negation in which the “outside other” provides the raw material for the construction of any pole in an opposition. (382)

28 Owing to their bodily proximity, clothes are charged objects where memory work is concerned; see Gregson and Crewe (155–63) for a discussion of the relations between people and their clothes. Stallybrass uses the story of Marx's coat to develop a critique of Marxist materialism's separation of an object's physicality and sociality. It is also worth thinking of the poignancy of the work of artist Boltansky, whose heaps of clothes, photographs and other belongings have been understood to explore themes of memory and absence, in particular with respect to Holocaust memorials.

29 See Kirsch and Mitchell for a discussion of Marx's “living machine.” They also mention the Scottish natural philosopher Andrew Ure, who described the factory machines as “autocrats,” detailing the problems that Marx had with the nature of Ure's anthropomorphism of machines (698).

30 The non-discursive existence that Bataille is seeking in the face of a world oriented by means-end rationalism, by futurity and utility, is one he frequently describes through the triad of immediacy, intimacy and immanence. It is a world that cannot be understood in the language of dialectics. As Nigro notes, to speak a language stripped of dialectics meansto draw thought back towards the limit of the impossibility of language, towards the limit at which the essence of language is called into question, discursive language can no longer speak, it is silent. The non-discursive, non-representable space is a silent space, it is one impossible to speak … the point at which language reaches its bounds, overreaches itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter, tears and ecstasy. (656–58)

31 Hetherington explores similar ideas when he thinks about unfinished disposal. Disposal is not just concerned with “semiotic mobility but with mutability and translation as well” (“Secondhandedness” 159), for when we get rid of something we do not necessarily get rid of the semiotic presences and the effects generated around it.

32 Compare this with what Tim Dant describes as compound subjectivity (6). In this case Dant is much less concerned with the affectual relations of humans and objects and much more with equipment, technology and embodied practices.