Formless

Social theory and good tunes go so well together. One of my favorite writers in this vein is Georges Bataille [1897-1962] and the songs collected below are assembled in the spirit of his work. Mystic, pornographer, frustrated dialectician, art critic, political and economic visionary –Bataille’s oeuvre is frighteningly bizarre and profound. Most people know of him for Story of the Eye, a classic pornographic novel. But in truth his best writing is social theory; in particular his ideas of the low, debasement, economic surplus, and useless expenditure seem as timely as ever. His later mystical writings about self-consciousness describe a poetic sensibility who seeks out an “internally wrenching violence that animates the whole, dissolves into tears, into ecstasy and into bursts of laughter, and reveals the impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears” (Theory of Religion). Pretentious or not, it’s the latter part of this statement that matters most for Bataille: the idea of the limit or impossible that makes transcendence unattainable even though human desire insatiably strives to transgress that boundary. In Inner Experience, the exploration of the limit is given in the form of a theory of (non)knowledge. In Erotism, this is described in terms of sexuality. In Tears of Eros, this is explored in pictorial form.

Sartre said of Bataille: “he has a holocaust of words,” but I somewhat disagree with this statement, as Bataille is not about just setting down words on a page. In the following entry, entitled Formless, Bataille explains at the outset of his career that his goal was to deflate idealist nonsense:

“A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.”

Rather than giving a mathematical frock coat to Bataille’s work by explaining to you what it means, I instead offer to you the following musical selections.

1. The Germs – “Forming”

2. Cock E.S.P. – “Hologram of Balls”

3. Massaccesi – “I’m Positive that I’ve Seen My Hands Running Through a Sea of Bodies”

4. Noxagt – “Acasta Gneiss”

5. Esoteric – “Only Hate (Baresark)”

6. Dying Ground – “Descension of Vapors”

7. Kousokuya – “The Dreams of the Recollections”

8. Kaneko Jutok – “Longing for the Ray”

9. Masayuki Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit – “Fragment IV”

10. Fushitsusha – “Untitled #2”

11. Naked City – “Leng Tch’e”

12. Solar Anus – “Don’t Run”

contributed by Lou Ghee