Overcoming Semio-Phobia/Semio-Philia: George Bataille's "General Economy" and the Symbolic Order as Background


Steve Bailey, York University

Though perhaps less evident in the Anglo-North American context, the theorization of a “symbolic order” (Lacan) as constitutive of the grounds of subject-formation and cultural meaning making has been crucial in attempts for formulate a “background” for social practice within the Continental Social Theoretical tradition, present in a diverse array of thinkers from Georges Bataille and Alfred Schutz in the early-mid 20th century to more recent work by Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, and Hans-Herbert Koegler. Today, though, there is a notable tendency for synoptic social theoretical work, work aimed an uncovering a fundamental grounding for socio-cultural practice, to lapse into two poles in regard to issues of meaning-making. The first, what I describe as “semio-phobic” tends to screen out questions of meaning as innately subordinate to material, technological, or even biological/neurological factors. The second, the “semio-philic,” accords weight to issues of meaning but fails to take proper account of the instabilities of any system of signification and lapses into a proto-behaviorist formulation of meaning; in the realm of pedagogy, this is evident in discussions of “trigger warnings” and other attempts of contain meaning. In this paper, I consider the work of author and anthropologist Georges Bataille and particularly his formulation of a “general economy”, one that exceeds the boundaries of “restrictive economies” and focuses on the interplay of material, semiotic, and ritual practices. Bataille had a profound impact on the thought of philosopher-sociologist Jean Baudrillard and anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in building models—“symbolic exchange” and “cultural reason,” respectively—for a kind of background for social action and conceptualizing the whirl of symbols, material objects, and human affect. The possibility for a kind of holism here (of the sort that Badiou locates in the Deleuzian tradition) is immediately undermined by the multiply de-stabilizing presence of sliding signifiers, liquid modernity, and the vertiginous speed of socio-technical change (see Virilio, esp.). In this sense Bataille’s work refines the subsequent Lacanian paradigm of the “symbolic order” as much as it anticipates it, and allows for an accounting of the vicissitudes of cultural meaning without a necessary reduction to social constructivist idealism. The value of this rethinking of the “general economy” and “the background” is the dual movement of opening up a wider sense of what might constitute a “last instance” (Althusser) grounding for a social totality beyond brute materialism while building a theoretical apparatus for exploring the interplay of material, semiotic, and potentially cognitive/neurological factors. The second is particularly important as it suggests the possibility for greater integration of research from a wide range of often-marginalized approaches within social theory without a full acceptance of the conceptual foundations of the same. As an example, affect theory and symbolic interactionism are grounded in, respectively, a biocultural emphasis on pre-cognition and, for the second, a view of meaning-making as existentially innate, and both face opposition for “astructural bias” and sometimes a kind of methodological individualism. I’ve argued elsewhere that symbolic interaction could be productively placed in dialogue with the neo-Bataille tradition in French thought (2017) and in this presentation I expand this to a wider possibilities of reformulating “the background” as a general economic space of meaning and self-formation. With particular reference to the conference theme, hate is perhaps ideally suited to consideration along such lines, given its frequent rooting in socio-economic and more broadly material circumstances and yet necessarily holding both a pre-cognitive affective intensity and an individuating psycho-symbolic structure.

This paper will be presented at the following session: