Nature’s Kill Switch

A photograph taken by the artist Robert Zhao Renhui haunts my thought. The image is indeed worth more than the several thousand words that follow, but it marks a critical point of departure for this essay, which attempts to develop a philosophical response to Ho Tzu Nyen’s One or Several Tigers (as well as to many conversations in recent years with both artists), by way of the varied images of thought which tigers provoke in their human neighbors.1 To begin with this photograph of a Sumatran tiger sleeping on her side amidst small yellow flowers in an otherwise darkening forest is to start near the end of a story about abundance and colonization. Not so long ago, tigers from Sumatra—no doubt ancestors to the one in the photo—were an uncontrollable threat to colonial occupiers in the Malay world. The threat posed by this tiger has been greatly reduced; after being bred in China as part of a renaturalization scheme, the creature was transported to Sumatra and dispatched into an invisibly-fenced territory. Her collar, barely visible in the photo, is outfitted with a transmitter that communicates her movements to the imperceptible surveillance apparatus; if the tiger approaches any edge of the assigned zone of conservation, the collar will issue a “warning.” Should the tiger cross this electronic threshold, a kill switch will immediately end her life. How might we begin to historicize these human architectures of enclosure, which now dominate the entire Earth, in order to denounce the wanton violence that our ubiquitous technoscientific anthropocentrism perpetuates in the name of conservation?

Robert Zhao Renhui, A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World. Tokyo: The Institute of Critical Zoologists, 2013, Plate 40: a re-wilded tiger fitted with a kill switch. Courtesy of the artist

§ 1 Consequences of Philosophy

Among the litany of philosophical metaphors intended to relay the experience of loss related to the fleeting condition of meaningfulness, Georges Bataille, in his “Theoretical Introduction” to The Accursed Share (La part maudite), offers an exemplary, halting simile: “tigers are to space what sex is to time.”2 If Bataille’s metaphoric riddle seems in opposition to the more perspicuously argued claims of traditional economists, this is no doubt because his intention is to destroy, with his theory of general economy, the ubiquitous presumptions of traditional economic logic. As with nearly all of his literary works, in even this most abstract and philosophical text Bataille captures our attention with descriptions of the flesh, all the better to entangle our desire with matters of conceptual concern. A third pair of terms further implicates the sociality of bodies: for Bataille, as sex is to time, and as tigers are to space, potlatch is to society—a prolific arena for a flourishing of extremity and expenditure.

In order to more fully unfold Bataille’s notion of expenditure within the context of his philosophy of a general economy, two additional considerations are required: Bataille’s cosmogonic description of the tellurian expansion of nature within the general economy must be read first alongside the interspecies implications of colonial expansion, not least because it is this mode of aggression that reveals the literal tiger anticipating its metaphoric, European-philosophical double. Second, Bataille’s cosmic narrative must be read against the actual processes of economic restriction that characterize colonial expansion. Regarding the former, we do well to remember that colonial perpetrators were met with the fearsome reality of interspecies violence embodied in the figure of the tiger, a being so cruel, so brutal, and so violent that it could kill human beings faster and more effectively than they could kill it. Because of this, one persistent if largely residual effect of terrestrial globalization through colonization is an image of the tiger as a form of life more predacious than the human. Because they are an embodiment of a powerful and violent nature, completely indifferent to the annihilation of humans and their frenzied imperial projects, from a colonial point of view, a tiger was nothing other than nature’s own kill switch. On the latter point, namely the actual processes of economic restriction, the potlatch is both the origin of Bataille’s thought on the notion of expenditure as well as an exemplary case of colonial violence as a moral restriction on general circulation. Therefore, we will first consider the philosophical consequences of Bataille’s argument against energetic scarcity; next, we will examine more closely the tiger as a metaphor of nature and as a colonial figuration used to legitimize extermination; then, by considering the colonial origins of this metaphor-image-figure of evolutionary expenditure in relation to the bodily restrictions imposed on sexuality, we will evaluate the potential excesses of anal intercourse; finally, by examining the colonial history of the potlatch, we will determine how the actual process of economic restriction drives colonial expansion and reifies an annihilating violence in the form of the state.

If the problem of expenditure was of interest only as an academic exercise, and if the concerns of this essay played out solely within the controlled and prescribed platforms of scholarly debate, the significance of economies of restriction would be of little consequence. However, because the restrictive logic of investment has such dramatic and enduring effects on questions of social organization, resource extraction, consumptive activity, and economic life, this process of restriction is of primary political importance. How is the process of economic restriction articulated by Bataille in philosophical terms?

Tiger skulls in the scientific collection of the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense/Indonesian Institute of Science, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author

The activity of expenditure—an activity exceeding the structure of linear, purposive action and thus denying a recuperative investment strategy—suggests a relation to the exuberance of energy on the surface of the Earth at odds with economic accumulation. “Humanity is,” according to Bataille, “at the same time—through industry, which uses energy for the development of the forces of production—both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the infinite faculty [facilité infinie] for burn off in pure loss.”3 Humanity thus stages the tension between purpose and purposelessness, vying for a freedom that it repeatedly suppresses in order to accumulate. In Theory of Religion, Bataille writes unequivocally: “A basic problem is linked to the very idea of philosophy: how to get out of the human situation.”4 If the goal of The Accursed Share is to lift the “curse” that plagues this human situation, it is necessary to stress that such a curse is a specifically human problem. Accumulation and its antinomy, expenditure, are human activities and only retain their meaning in relation to other human affairs of ordering and conservation. Thus, Bataille contends:

It is the problem of escape that is, for Bataille, of primary importance. Can expenditure be oriented toward purposeless forms of cultural activity that maintain a relation to the general economy by emphasizing the tenuous modes of restriction that govern the social consumption of energy? How is the conservation of solar energy indicative of Bataille's general economy and its implications for social and political life? How does his articulation of a logic beyond accumulation unfold?

§ 2 Space–Tigers

Bataille’s task is to complete a fatal reversal of the logic of scarcity. “I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”6 For Bataille, the catastrophic spending of energy is indelibly related to the prerequisite conservation of energy and is thus connected to his disgust for accumulation. Energy must be spent, regardless of the human attempts to conserve a surplus of energy through modes of purposive conservation (including the technologies of warfare). Bataille is emphatic: “I insist on the fact that there is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form! The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance; the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life.”7 From this cosmic perspective, it is all but impossible to contend that any expression of this energy–matter relay called nature is purposive; the dizzying splendor of the natural world is less a testament to order and purpose than an orgy of energetic consumption without end and without meaning. This absence of definitive purpose is not to be lamented, however, because it is the very force, for Bataille, which gives the concept of expenditure its disarming potential to interrogate the social order.

He continues, in the following section, with the bold assertion:

While the consumptive relation connecting increasingly burdensome forms of life appears obvious enough, it seems at least a little curious that William Blake, a well-known Londoner, is cited here as an authority on the deep solar economy operative in the eyes of the tiger. Without any especially rigorous recourse to the annals of natural history in the late eighteenth century, we can safely say that Blake’s tiger was no indigenous resident of Europe. Nevertheless, the colonial fixation on the “extreme incandescence” of Asian tigers operated on more than just the zoological imagination of European poets; the colonies were the site of an extreme moment of confrontation between two natural predators. The European colonialist as predator, in a fashion characteristic of his tendency toward exterminism, described the tiger as a ruthless manifestation of natural cruelty. Sieur Jean de Lacombe of Quercy, following his visit to Java from France in the late seventeenth century, offers the following adumbration: “But the tygers there are so monstrous that it might be thought they endeavored to attain the greatness of camels: for even a tall man would have sufficient difficulty to raise his hand as high as they carry their backs. […] To this prodigious height is added a fury and malignity so great that everything flees before and around them, so as not to be exposed to their butchery.”9 If the size of the monster is evidently exaggerated, its suggested tendency toward “butchery” should be no less suspect.

The “tiger” is a semi-automaton (complete with a wind-up organ that generates grunts of pain and predation) mauling a British soldier; it was designed for Sultan Tipu in Mysore, India, to celebrate his defeat—with the aid of the local tiger population—of the British East India Company army. “Tipu’s Tiger,” 1780s or 1790s, Mysore, India. Museum no 2545 (IS). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In fact, these exaggerations characterize a process of description that anticipates the trajectory of colonial, state-sponsored exterminism. The aggression between human settlers and the tigers they sought to destroy is exemplary because, as Ho Tzu Nyen has noted in his entry “W for Weretiger” in The Critical Dictionary for Southeast Asia, tigers and people “occupy similar ecological niches, in which they neither have a relationship of direct competition or mutual cooperation.”10 He continues, “The tiger’s preferred habitat is an ecologically liminal or transitional zone: spaces near water and at the edges of forests. Similarly, the people of Southeast Asia had historically settled along water, while their agricultural activities created forest edges, the tiger’s preferred transitional zone. The agricultural produce of men attracted deer, pigs, and monkeys, which in turn attracted the tigers that hunted them, leading tigers to populate the liminal areas between villages and the forest.”11

As the pressure for increased productivity in the colonies provoked increasing expansion and development, the encounter between human settlers and tigers would culminate in a program of extermination, which operated with varying speeds and intensities according to the availability of resources, the public enthusiasm for “retaliation” after tiger attacks, and the outlook of colonial and regional administrations. Regardless of these specificities, the outcome today is undeniable. According to Matthias Glaubrecht, tigers were once so numerous in Singapore that they killed an average of one person per day, yet, by 1896, the last tiger was killed; the species was “officially” exterminated by the Singapore government in the 1930s.12 While Ho Tzu Nyen is no doubt correct to claim that, “[t]he tiger is an inhabitant of the liminal zone between the civilized and the wild, and as such, the relationship between the human and the tiger is one of deep ambiguity,” this ambiguous relation produced an extremely violent project of exterminism which has led to the near-extinction of the big cats of Southeast Asia. If, as Bataille suggests, “the history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance,” it is equally, at least in the Anthropocene, a history of the confrontation among forms-of-exuberance wherein predators as perpetrators impose the order of their restricted economies with an unrestrained violence of exterminism.13

§ 3 Sex–Time

Before we consider the social implications of expenditure by way of the relation between potlatch and society, let us return to Bataille’s startling analogy to consider its implications within the human register, and, more specifically, with regard to human sexual practices. To do so we approach again the passage in question within its broader context:

Contrary to the logic of scarcity at the basis of political economy, how does Bataille argue that luxury, or an excess of energy, is the fundamental problem of humankind? He must determine the means by which to provoke this decisive encounter: “Thus the question arises: Is the general determination of energy circulating in the biosphere altered by man’s activity? Or rather, isn’t the latter’s intention vitiated by a determination of which it is ignorant, which it overlooks and cannot change?”15 But what specifically does Bataille mean to invoke with this question? “Humanity exploits given material resources, but by restricting them as it does to a resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters (a resolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal), it assigns to the forces it employs an end which they cannot have. Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the uselessness and infinite fulfillment of the universe.”16 From this assertion of the uselessness, of the purposelessness of the universe, Bataille unfolds the dissipative logic of expenditure as sex.

Jumana Manna, Homage to George Bataille, 2008. Courtesy of the artist

In order to emphasize the squandering of energy exemplified by the sexual act, Bataille must dislocate the reproductive functionality of sex from its awesome energetic release, which reveals something more fundamental about the circulation of energy and its requisite release. As Bataille contends, “[…] the luxury of death [including the killing and eating of other animals] is regarded by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first as a negation of ourselves, then—in a sudden reversal—as the profound truth of that movement of which life itself is that manifestation.”17 Sexuality, a “luxurious detour” in the expenditure of energy, reveals through its ecstatic intensity “the occasion of a sudden and frantic squandering of energy resources, carried in a moment to the limit of possibility (in time what the tiger is in space).”18 Bataille adds, suggestively, that such a “squandering goes far beyond what would be sufficient for the growth of the species. […] It leads to the wholesale destruction of property—in spirit, the destruction of bodies as well—and ultimately connects up with the senseless luxury and excess of death.”19

The senseless luxury of sexual expenditure is a familiar excitation in Bataille’s writing; despite the valences of this concept within his own work, we may summarize Bataille’s concept by following his early formulation of it in the essay “The Notion of Expenditure”: “Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinctive parts. The first, reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity.”20 Bataille continues, “The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)—all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”21 From this point of view, expenditure is the unproductive or wasteful exercise of energy wherein the activity or organization facilitating such practices does not aim to reinvest them within another regime or framework (i.e. restricted economy). As in The Accursed Share, “The Notion of Expenditure” refuses to allow “genital finality” to cast a retroactive, morally restrictive reading on the pleasure and perversion of the body.

In another early essay, “The Solar Anus,” Bataille provides an additional premonitory exposé relating to the energy of the sun, the sexual movements, and excitements of the cosmos and of terrestrial life, and the anus of an eighteen-year-old girl. Operating at the intersection between his sexually explicit literary works and the mature articulation of the general economy of expenditure in The Accursed Share, “The Solar Anus” provides a rich if conceptually underdeveloped reading of the cosmic and terrestrial with regard to their potency, fertility, and fundamental antagonism. Bataille writes:

As the text reaches its most speculative, cosmic crescendo, Bataille reintroduces the object (of desire) of his philosophical reflection: “The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years old to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night.”23 What to make of this anal copula of blinding nocturnal potential? How can we characterize Bataille’s expressly “intact” anus as an image of thought?

With the publication of The Accursed Share, Bataille reveals that the “curse” on human activity is disturbingly simple: the Earth is bombarded with so much energy from the Sun that it simply cannot spend it all without disaster. Over the course of millions of years of solar bombardment, the creatures enslaved to this “celestial fertility” by way of photosynthetic-reliant metabolic systems are forced to become increasingly burdensome forms of life. By the end of the Ediacaran, we discover animals with bones, teeth, and claws; eventually, even more flamboyant expenditures like tigers emerge; later still, stately office buildings. The powerful and exuberant body of the tiger is the evidence of a superabundant energetic relay as a channeled, evolutionary expenditure. What the notion of expenditure calls into question then, in its most precise philosophical reading, is the division between useful and wasteful (flamboyant) practices; this is because in order for any theory of use value to be coherent, it must first restrict the economy, or field of operations, within which it is operating. The restriction of this field of energy exchange is a moral action inasmuch as it sets up the conditions for any action in the field to be read as either productive or wasteful. Just like a tiger as an evolutionary form-of-life, the desire for penetrating the anus—a desire for the non-reproductive expenditure that defines anal sex—must be beyond reproach. The general economy thus permits us to evaluate the terms of restriction as a means to call into question the cultural values and forms of social organization they engender, and, because of this, the anus must be intact: as a potential for pure loss, for a pure expenditure of energy without reserve and without reproduction. We know all too well that the penalties for such “misuses” of the body—especially when they include desires rigidly coded as homosexual—include countless state projects of extermination, each legitimized by a moral order determined to subjugate the pleasures of the body to a destructive violence of reordering.

§ 4 Society against Anthropology

It is important to remember that in his discussion of the potlatch of the Pacific North Coast—the first “living” example Bataille uses to describe the notion of expenditure in The Accursed Share—he makes the following crucial remark: “It would be futile, as a matter of fact, to consider the economic aspects of potlatch without first having formulated the viewpoint defined by general economy.”24 His note to this remark is essential:

With this note, then, a remarkable attribution toward the origin of Bataille’s thinking about the general economy; but, what of the movement from the activity to the thing? The construction of the potlatch as an object of knowledge for colonial governments reveals an especially brutal example of the process of economic restriction, albeit one that Bataille was largely unaware of. Before we turn to Isaiah Lorado Wilner’s reading of this debt to indigenous thought in European philosophy, it is important to outline the features of the colonial encounter with potlatch on the Northwest Coast.

According to the historian Christopher Bracken, the Indian superintendent of Victoria, Israel Wood Powell, “instructed George Blenkinsop, a former Hudson’s Bay Company trader who had found work with the Indian Branch, to visit the Nuu’chah’nulth of Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in May 1874.” Following this visit, Blenkinsop declared that “until they are cured of their propensity for gambling and accumulating property, solely for the purpose of giving away to other Indians, there can be little hope of elevating them from their present state of degradation and bettering the condition and appearance of their wives and families.”26 In Bracken’s careful estimation, “What both Powell and Blenkinsop find on the west coast of Vancouver Island, [is] the practice of non-productive expenditure as it is manifested in gambling and giving away. The gambler spends property in a way that invites a return but cannot guarantee it, while the person who gives property away without hope of getting it back incurs a pure loss, which brings no apparent material benefit.” Because of this, “Blenkinsop asserts in his 1874 report that the dominion government has the right to control the lives of any people that gives all. It is as if the principle of classical utility empowers the representatives of European civilization to lay down a regulatory grid to restrict every nonproductive expenditure, no matter where it occurs.”27

Although Bracken’s description of the fear that circulated through the post is exceptionally argued and deserves further attention, for us it is most important to understand how the colonial state responded, finally, with an Act of legislation brought before the House of Commons on February 12, 1884, a decade after Blenkinsop’s initial report. The statute would come into effect on January 1, 1885, and in 1886 it became section 114 of chapter 43—“An Act Respecting Indians”—of the Revised Statutes of Canada; it is known more commonly as “The Indian Act.”28

Notably, the majority of British Columbia’s aboriginal population rejected the law, typically by actively and publically defying it. Yet, because the law banning the potlatch failed to define what exactly the potlatch was, the violence it permitted was substantial, and any gathering of First Nations could become the site of targeted police violence committed to exterminating the practice of potlatch. Why was this political institution so feared by the settler colonial state?

Franz Boas posing for the US National Museum exhibition entitled Hamat’s Coming Out of a Secret Room, c.1895. Negative MNH 8304. © National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

In his extremely compelling reading of the history of potlatch, Wilner offers a rigorous, insightful rejoinder to the discourse on gift economies that echoes through the writing of Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida. Wilner’s essay “A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought,” is careful to present the longer history of this political economic institution and to locate its context more completely within the colonial incursions on Canada’s West Coast. Wilner examines with masterful detail the encounter between the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas and the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Vancouver Island. According to Wilner, what Boas was to discover as the most “authentic” of primitive rituals on the Pacific North Coast was, in fact, a political economic institution responding to the ferocious brutality of a continental genocide. In 1862, the Kwakwaka’wakw had been subject to the biopolitical warfare of the settler state as smallpox killed over half the population.29 The smallpox devastation and the hardships that followed from it, “when survivors along the Northwest Coast were forced to pull down the house of friends and family, stack the corpses, throw them into the sea or set them ablaze, and cast off to seek the remnants of other decimated communities, inspired by Kwak’wala-speaking lineages to explore a common identity, giving rise to a new society.”30 Here Wilner’s description is invaluable to correct the misinterpretations of the potlatch within the European discourse of the gift:

Wilner goes on to explain the evolution of the potlatch as a political institution just prior to Boas’s appearance on the colonial scene:

Yet, there is a further question regarding opposition to the colonial state that must also be addressed. “Kwakwaka’wakw people of the late eighteenth century did not explain the potlatch as a form of resistance.” In fact, as Wilner reveals, “Evading the state was not their first purpose, nor did they yearn passively for a past that could not be restored. Instead they sought to establish an alternative future: a form of governance that, unlike state capitalism, would limit warfare, distribute wealth widely across their society, and encourage cooperation and active citizenship.”33 So, although Bataille would draw on the activity of potlatch as a particular form of the gift, or, more precisely, as an instance of expenditure, the dynamics of the practice should be understood as both a response to colonial violence and an attempt to suture the rupture such violence had caused within the indigenous communities of the Northwest Coast. The concept of the general economy, then, begins with the misreading of Boas, by way of Mauss, who had esteemed the practice of potlatch as a radically authentic precolonial institution of political economy; what is more radical, and more relevant to any thinking of the Anthropocene as a condition of inescapable brutality, is that the potlatch—as a ritualized transference of rank, inheritance, and wealth to develop resilience to a plague of colonial invasions—is an active, communal response that confronts violence with a new practice of social vulnerability and solidarity.

§ 5 Exterminism

According to anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “To make people think is to make them take thought seriously, beginning with the thought of other peoples, since thinking, in itself, always summons up the powers of otherness.”34 This essay was an attempt to think through several intersecting colonial relationships, to locate the violence of exterminism within them, and to take seriously Bataille’s provocation to think the otherness of evolutionary flourishing and sexuality in their entangled, cosmological relations. To the dynamic expenditures of space–tigers and sex–time, the social expenditure of the potlatch has been added, both because of its profound influence on Bataille’s thought, and because the history of the potlatch encapsulates the colonial project of imposing restriction on a general economy of social welfare. What does such a description amount to in the face of the overwhelming brutality of the Anthropocene and its legacy of exterminism? Is there still a savage thought to be cultivated out of the ruins of this inherited, colonial modernity? “If one had to grant me a place in the history of thought,” Bataille once suggested, “I believe it would be that of having discerned the effects, in our human life, of the ‘disappearance of the discursive real,’ and of having drawn a senseless light from the description of these effects: this light is blinding, perhaps, but it announces the opacity of the night; it announces the night alone.”35 As Stuart Kendall explains, “the disappearance of the discursive real” is, ultimately:

Still from Ho Tzu Nyen, One or Several Tigers (2017). Courtesy of the artist

If one were to begin to summarize the effects of the game in the Anthropocene, such a list would necessarily include the architecture of a colonial imagination, with its radical aspiration for species’ isolation, alongside a tendency toward the extermination of forms-of-life that jeopardize the securitization of restricted economies of accumulation, be they feline, sexual, or social. While the physical traces of these forms of violence are everywhere in evidence, perhaps the most incapacitating inheritance they have proffered is the construct we call modern thought, with its attendant experiential regime of shame, sadness, and despair. “Therefore an attack on architecture,” Bataille observes, “whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man. Currently, an entire earthly activity, and undoubtedly the most intellectually outstanding, tends, through the denunciation of human dominance, in this direction.”37 Such a denunciation enacts an unbecoming of colonial exterminism.38 In this spirit of denunciation—in the spirit of weretigers—we might also begin to dismantle the kill switches with which we continue to colonize the planet.