The Spiritual Link: Waste and Recycling
“Aztec sacrifices brought out that which makes us human—our ability to feel and experience intensely, which gives human life and experience an intrinsic value beyond its utilitarian function.”
by Tan Wanxin Gracia
In his 1949 work, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille introduces his idea of the general economy, an economy which is driven by the consumption and not production of wealth (Noys 104). He further distinguishes between productive consumption, which is necessary to sustain society, and non-productive or profitless expenditure, or as Bataille calls it, the accursed share (Noys 106). It is the latter idea that is the focus of his work; he attempts to prove its existence using case studies of various different civilizations, including the Aztecs in the chapter "Sacrifices and Wars of the Aztecs." The ancient Aztec civilization placed an "extreme value" on consumption. It consumed "immoderately" (Bataille 58), without keeping anything in reserve. Bataille is in favour of such excess as he feels that the Aztec sacrifices brought out that which makes us human--our ability to feel and experience intensely, which gives human life and experience an intrinsic value beyond its utilitarian function.
In contrast, Andrew O'Hagan shows his disapproval of excessive waste in his 2007 article "The Things We Throw Away," which discusses the morality of our refuse management methods. While the modern society depicted in this article faces a similar situation in which waste is prevalent, O'Hagan clearly views waste as a problem for modern society. O'Hagan even goes so far as to call the trend of the proliferation of rubbish "the style of our death" (par. 1), an allusion to the environmental destruction of our planet and eventually the human race that would result from the rate at which waste is being produced.
At first glance, there seems to be no way of reconciling the two attitudes towards waste. However, both works recognize a common motivation for these seemingly disparate reactions to excessive waste. Both Bataille and O'Hagan identify an underlying spirituality in the motivations driving the Aztecs to excess and modern society to recycle: the seemingly antithetical practices of wasting and recycling are driven by man's desire to escape from the entrapment of the material world. While Bataille ascribes the Aztecs' frenzied sacrificial practices to the need to restore communion with the sacred world (Bataille 55), O'Hagan postulates that on some level, we recycle to free ourselves from being "enslaved" by the world of commodities (par. 28).
The Aztecs' world view centred round their religious beliefs. They created wars "so that there would be people whose heart and blood could be taken so that the sun might eat" (Bataille 49). This suggests that they believed that their gods were hungry for human life and it was their greatest obligation to satiate their gods. Thus for them "the only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods" (61). Such a philosophy would dictate that to satiate their gods, the only acceptable way was to consume to extremes, in a way that spared no expenses. Bataille can be seen to agree to some extent with the idea of consumption which does not yield productive work. He portrays humanity at work as a state where man is "enslaved" (45) and is "misled by what it takes for full humanity" (46). Labour could be seen as restrictive when man becomes captive to the demands of his work; it prevents man from enjoying the complete experience that life has to offer. The working man "confuse[s] gentleness with the value of life, and life's tranquil duration with its poetic dynamism." Thus the working man's life is less harsh, but at the same time, he does not fully realise the true worth of life and what is important to humans. Although life is more peaceful, life is not as vibrant as compared to that of less civilized societies. In contrast, Bataille proposes that sacrificial rituals bring out the "anguish" and "the profundity of living beings" (59). Through sacrifice there is "passionate release" (58). This clearly reflects that the rituals bring out extreme emotion and fervency that encapsulate what makes life worth living. The zeal for life and the intensity of human emotion is precisely what is lacking in civilized societies. Bataille thus demonstrates preference for the disorderly exuberance and extreme orgiastic excess of sacrifice insofar as it draws out the essence of all that is human and alive.
In contrast to Bataille's position, O'Hagan is clearly against waste. The overwhelming amount of refuse produced in the UK, and the way in which the rubbish is being treated, is portrayed as a large problem. The average person throws out their body weight in rubbish every three months and most of it is sent to incinerators or landfills (O'Hagan par. 27). O'Hagan describes the gases that result from the combustion of rubbish as a "toxic canopy over our heads" (par. 28). We can be seen to poison ourselves through our use of incinerators. O'Hagan recounts his visit to the Calvert landfill incinerator plant to illustrate the horrifying amount of waste created by modern society and show how even the landfill incinerator industry has shifted towards recycling waste in response to societal trends; for example, Calvert uses the energy from burning refuse to generate electricity. He extends Calvert manager April Jennings's metaphor of an apple pie to describe the landfill, comparing the landfill system to an apple pie that had a "hot, sticky, unstable filling and a thin crust" (par. 57). This suggests the precariousness of our current waste situation as the system of disposing of rubbish in landfills is barely able to support the enormity of our waste and may give way at any time. On the other hand, he supports the concept of Zero Waste, which revolves around the creation of a system that not just "minimis[es] the waste stream but realis[es] value from it," but more importantly, "design[s] society so that you're not stuck with rubbish"(par. 78). Every process is structured so that every resource is recycled to extract the maximum possible value from it. "Zero waste" is described as a "new beginning" (par. 80) which demonstrates the hope that man may yet be able to salvage the waste situation. O'Hagan expresses the view that as a result of the "Zero waste" concept, the incinerators will one day be relegated to memory (par. 94). He can thus be seen to hope that waste will eventually be eliminated as objects like the light bulb and fridge may have an "afterlife" (par. 95) and be recycled instead of thrown away.
Yet in spite of the dichotomy in how waste is perceived by the societies in these two texts, the practices of sacrifice and recycling lead to the same realisation of the insignificance of humans. In The Accursed Share, the warriors are sent to war to bring back prisoners as sacrifices or to have their lives taken in battle and become sacrifices themselves. Thus the warriors themselves are of no real significance beyond being pawns moved for the satiation of the hungry gods (Bataille 54). In addition, Bataille introduces the concept of how the victim is a "second self" to the sacrificer (56) since a warrior who has captured a prisoner would treat him like his own flesh and blood, akin to his son (53-54). The sacrifice and sacrificer could in some ways thus be seen as interchangeable entities. At the same time, Bataille points to the "sacrifice of substitution" where a chosen prisoner is "given the 'honours of a god'" and sacrificed in place of the king. This would imply that the roles of sacrifice and sacrificer are contingent, for the king is easily replaced by a prisoner and such roles could easily be reversed. Even one as esteemed as the king in truth had no true worth since the likes of a slave could stand in his place. All human life was therefore insignificant, since any two humans could easily be substituted for one another.
Likewise, O'Hagan proposes that the physical evidence of our consumption causes our acknowledgement of human insignificance, and this drives us to transcend the boundaries that define the relationship between humans and the divine order through recycling. O'Hagan echoes Bataille's idea that man is "reduced to the order of things" (Bataille 56) when he states that there is a "part of ourselves that is enslaved to the world of goods and the body's functions" (O'Hagan par. 28). He postulates that the idea of recycling is thus an attempt to find what Emerson calls "an original relation to the universe" (qtd. in O'Hagan par. 29). Man attempts to create a new relationship with the universe by establishing himself as the planet's saviour. Recycling can thus be seen as an exertion of "mastery" over the "life of everyday stuff" (par. 29). Through this, man transcends the boundaries of the material and ascends into the realm of the divine. O'Hagan concedes that, with recycling, we are "not dots on a linear track of time" but are "constituent with all that has been, or will be" (par. 62). Our lives are not significant in themselves; they are merely part of the continuity of history. The recycled items serve as "deposits" or remnants of a previous time whose presence demonstrates how we are but a trickle in the sands of time. Since there is a sense that there is "more to one's life than one's life," there falls upon one's shoulders the responsibility for the lives of those in the future. This would make recycling "transcendental" since man is in a way able to surpass the boundaries of time to make an impact on the future.
Similarly, Bataille suggests that the Aztecs sacrificed to enable themselves to overcome the limitations that non-productive consumption in the form of slavery imposed on man. The purpose of sacrifice is to "restor[e] to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane" (55). "The slave bound to labour and having become a property of another man is just a thing just as a work animal is a thing" and this "severs the tie that links him to his fellow man" (56). Through this, Bataille suggests that man can be reduced to the level of an object. The slave is but a commodity that belongs to his owner and has no value beyond his utilitarian purpose. Master and slave are separated by the limits of a thing that marks one as human and the other as a mere commodity. The act of sacrifice thus acts as a form of retaliation that challenges the boundaries imposed onto man by the world of things. Sacrifice serves to restore the sacrificial victim to the "truth of the intimate world" by destroying the "tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity" (58). Bataille suggests that the tie to the world of things is destroyed as sacrifice, as a form of immoderate consumption, works in defiance of and rejects the ideas of rational enterprise that characterize the order of things. He states:
The subject leaves its own domain and subordinates itself to the objects of the real order as soon as it becomes concerned for the future. For the subject is consumption insofar as it is not tied down to work. If I am no longer concerned about "what will be" but about "what is," what reason do I have to keep anything in reserve? I can at once, in disorder, make an instantaneous consumption of all that I posses.... If I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately. Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely. (Bataille 58)Rational thinking dictates that one should plan ahead for the future, thus to focus only on the present would be to rebel against the world of logic. When there is no need to worry and think ahead, there is no need to hold back from the consumption of resources, and man can reveal and communicate his desires and nature fully and freely to others. Thus intimacy between the sacrifice and the sacrificer is restored. The victim sacrificed is able to surpass the limits of a "thing" that has been imposed by the world of labour and, vicariously, so does the sacrificer, for whom the victim is a second self.
It may seem ironic that man ends up behaving differently in the two societies when they share the same goal to transcend the boundaries. Yet, on closer reconsideration, such a split can be explained. For the Aztecs, appeasement of their gods was their priority. On the contrary, however, modern society follows the "rational principles of enterprise" (Bataille 54) that are antithetical to the Aztec way of life. Thus waste reduction is rendered into practical terms as there are financial gains to be made (O'Hagan par. 61) and society would be saved from its destruction.
Ultimately, the differing attitudes to waste are chiefly determined by the cultural values of each society--rational progression against religious superstition. However, the spiritual reasons of wanting to transcend the boundaries imposed by the world of material goods would further contribute to the disparity in attitudes. The Aztecs believe that excessive consumption will enable them to tear down the segregation between men, as man has become part of the order of things. On the other hand, modern society would recycle in order to transcend the very same bounds that tie man to the world of things. Therefore, the same spiritual philosophy would be able to culminate in opposing views on excessive consumption.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 45-77.
Noys, Benjamin. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000. 104-106.
O'Hagan, Andrew. "The Things We Throw Away." London Review of Books 24 May 2007. Cited 19 October 2007.
About the Writer: Tan Wanxin Gracia is a student in the School of Business. She wrote this paper for Michael Maiwald's class Interpreting Consumerism.Go back to volume 7, 2008