Consequently, far from wanting institutions to domesticate and control a dangerous
and savage type of experience, contemporaries can actually seek these outside
instituted forms.^9 This echoes Bastide, who states that any eventual solution to the
‘problems’ of a transitional society can only be found in a space ‘beyond ideas’: not
from abstractions above (myths, ideologies, institutions, discourses and other
representations) but from the ‘immanence’ of sociality and its correlate of affect,
imagination and social ‘heat’ (Bastide 1997:222).
The ‘accursed share’: Georges Bataille and the necessity of
excessMax Weber showed how Western culture was built on thoroughly rational
foundations, an edifice in which nothing was to exceed the all-encompassing grip of
Science, Progress and Reason. Here Bastide agrees with Bataille, for whom this
enterprise is judged profoundly foolish since it ignores one of life’s essential
dimensions—that which is uneconomic, gratuitous, violent and expensive. To
illustrate this, Bastide calls up the mythological image of Prometheus’s Vulture,
gnawing at his liver, a symbol of sapiens’ inextinguishable hubris, or excessiveness
(Bastide 1997:163–82). Bataille, for his part, mobilized a whole theoretical system
around what he calls the ‘damned’, ‘blasted’ or ‘accursed share’^10 of humanity.
Bataille deems the principles of usefulness, propriety and productivity to be
highly insufficient for understanding the foundations and workings of societies’
economics. These principles, although necessary, only account for one share of
human activity: that which is submitted to an end, inscribed within reason and
projected into duration. Another share, the accursed one, is that of excess,
expenditure, un-usefulness, waste, luxury, mourning, cults, games, aesthetics, war,
debauchery, drunkenness, (sacrificial and erotic) consumption, that which cannot
be ‘accounted for’ and must be spent (as lovers are) outside any productive end
(Bataille 1949:28).^11 It is exuberance and violence, an unproductive necessity, which
limit the human realm through the accursed share and which, ultimately, open on
to the possibility of a rapport with a radical otherness, the sacred: ‘that prodigious
effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things hold in check,
and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence’ (Bataille
1989:42).^12
Modernity, through a fantasy of total control and domination over the arbitrary
(and notwithstanding its project of liberation), made usefulness itself, work, into a
sacred value. In so doing, modernity has negated the accursed share by trying to
integrate it in a consumerist economy, substituting leisure and reason for religion
and ritual. Tumultuous expenses and collective effervescence, therefore, were
deemed characteristic of premodern, archaic, bygone, uncivilized and therefore
lesser societies. Some anthropologists had consequently noted that proper religious
celebrations, effervescences and festivities such as bacchanals, carnivals and orgies
had virtually disappeared from the face of the (Western, and therefore civilized)
earth (Duvignaud 1977; Caillois 1980). Rather, it seemed, luxury, expense and
THE ‘INSTITUANT’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF RAVE 65