DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BARI “A. MORO” Energy consumption consists of two parts. The first is necessary for the conservation and the reproduction of life. The second is used for non-productive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, religion, games, spectacles, the arts, perverse sexual activity. All told, these activities – qualified as – are ends in themselves.dépense Any society has an excess of energy, defined precisely as all that energy that is not needed for the mere reproduction of life.

In a wider sense, which includes nature, indicates that share of energy which cannot be employeddépense by living organisms, owing to their physiological limits. This portion continues to circulate aimlessly in the environment up until the point where it extinguishes itself.

George Bataille introduces this definition of excess energy in his essay “The Idea of ” appearingDépense for the first time in (1/1933). As with all of Bataille’s theoretical constructs, the contentsLa Critique Sociale and contours of are flexible and never defined in axiomatic categories. There are seven differentdépense versions of this essay alone. Bataille eventually attempted to construct a theoretical project for a “general economy” departing from the notion of The first fragmentary versions of it appear in the essays dépense.

(1946) and (posthumously published in the completeL’Économie à la mesure de l’univers La limite de l’utile works, 1976) The project was fully born in the work (1949) A second part to this work. La part maudite . followed with the title (1957) and then a final third part entitled Histoire de l’érotisme La Souveraineté (Bataille 1976). Some resonances with can be found in the Freudian concepts of dépense Vergänglichkeit (transience) and the death impulse (Freud 1990) but mainly in Marcel Mauss’ analysis of in potlach The Gift (1925). All these works deal with a perturbing tendency of human beings and societies toward loss, reversing their alleged “natural” vocation to self-advance.

From an anthropological framework, energy could be redefined as the fuel of action, that is, the fuel that calls us to act. The portion of energy that a living being employs for either sustenance or biological growth, Bataille terms “servile.” In fact, mere biological sustenance can be achieved spending only a miniscule portion of the total amount of available energy. The basic problem relates to the residual energy that exceeds the share devoted to such servile use. Excess energy requires a “sovereign” use: it is necessary to choose a destination for the fuel of action on the basis of the philosophical intent of a political prospect (Romano 2014). It is the sovereign employment of excess energy that qualifies us as “humans.” The different patterns of excess energy use characterize and distinguish different types of societies across space and time. Excess can be spent on sacrifice or festival, in war or in peace. The Tibetan society, for example, almost entirely employs excess energy to support a specific class of monk.

The human encounter with excess energy is a crucial moment. In this sense, excess energy is an “accursed share”: it forces human beings to question the meaning of life and their path in the world. The non-use of excess energy would signal the incapacity of human beings to exercise their own freedom. For this reason, all human societies have designed forms of ritual for – that is, forms of destruction of that energy whichdépense lies beyond the servile.

These forms of ritual have different degrees of sophistication and respond to different functions:

They serve to humanize excess waste, bringing it from the dominion of uncontrolled natural processes into the realm of culture and the symbolic.

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They release energy from the utilitarian dimension (the biological-functional) to access the sacred – in fact, the destruction of the objects is aimed to destroy their servile status as useful things, in order to relocate them in the realm of the sacred (this is the true meaning of sacrifice: producing sacred things through their ritual destruction). They physically delete the stressful presence of excess and therefore, the call to be and to act.

The concept of helps identify a main hole in the “society of .” How should we go about thedépense growth removal of the problem of energy and excess? The worship of the servile moment is in fact at the foundation of this society. Modernity arose in a context of existential emergency and fear for the survival of the species, unleashed by an unexpected demographic explosion (and therefore an increase of social needs) that was incompatible with the productive capacities of the communities of the time. This imbalance resulted in the deconstruction of traditional communities whose symbolic codes did not permit them to confront the new challenge. In order to satisfy their unfulfilled needs, individuals tried to break bonds with their communities and to autonomously take up new and more effective, -oriented, courses of action. For Europe,growth Riesman (1950) dates this crucial demographic shift, and its social consequences, to the seventeenth century.

The process of individualization deprived communities of their ability to manage energy. This included rituals that burned off excess energy. Still imprinted by this “original emergency” of survival,dépense

modern society continues its momentum without stopping. Making permanent the originalgrowth emergency situation removes the problem of excess energy, so we avoid confronting the “meaning” of action. Perpetually in pursuit of survival (which requires continuous ), we are liberated from the state ofgrowth paralysis when faced with the necessity of “being,” which arises from the emergence of excess energy. In other words, remaining animal frees us from the fatigue of becoming human. At the same time, we expunge

from the “official” public forum. Instead it is “privatized” and hidden in shame (as any “wasting”dépense activity becomes morally incompatible with the alleged perpetual state of emergency).

Given the individualization of society, single individuals take on the burden of waste through small trade-offs: from perverse sexuality to alcoholism, gambling and flashy consumption – what Bataille called the “vulgar eructation” of the petty bourgeoisie. In the era of there is no longer sumptuous andgrowth collective , only its private dissolution informally consumed. Hence modern societies try to solve thedépense problem of energy with a twofold strategy: they first expand to an unprecedented level their servile use (i.e. the obsession), and second they privatize . But this strategy appears inadequate for the crucialgrowth dépense cause of putting the available energy to work. A large amount of energy remains unused; it continues to circulate and to stress human beings. Lacking tools of deliberate and symbolic catastrophe (i.e. the ritual collective ), the inhabitants of societies begin to dream and to desire a “real” naturaldépense growth catastrophe.

Dépense is a key concept, then, for theorizing a way out of the society. Yet, paradoxically, it doesgrowth not figure among the epistemological pillars of mainstream theories of degrowth, nor is it a source of inspiration for the movement of growth objectors. This is perhaps because truly embracing woulddépense entail the dismantling of a cognitive frame of catastrophe and scarcity that is at the basis of the degrowth paradigm. In light of , the catastrophe threat haunting Western societies is only a symptom of thedépense failed disposal of excess energy. For degrowth supporters it is a “real” risk. Degrowth thought is therefore implicitly subordinated to the dominant culture, one that justifies neoliberal capitalist restructuring. It denounces a shortage of resources necessary to sustain contemporary lifestyles and indeed acts out a mere reversal of the foundational problem of the society. According to Bataille:growth

[A]s a rule, existence always risks succumbing for lack of resources. It contrasts with particular general existence whose resources are in excess and for which death has no meaning. From the pointparticular of view, the problems are posed by a deficiency of resources. They are posed in the first instance in the

by an excess of resources if one starts from the point of view.first instance general (Bataille 1988: 39)

The individualized being is bound by the precarious nature of its existence and therefore obsessed with the problem of its survival. When isolated, it embraces a fundamentally servile position and reverts to the status of an animal, in which obtaining resources is central. The challenge of excess energy becomes visible only if we are able to relocate our point of view to a systemic level. Degrowth supporters do little more than transfer

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the servile position typical of the individualized subject to the general system; humanity’s complexity becomes subject to “the rule of needs,” supported by a utilitarian logic of survival. The individual point of view that emphasizes the insufficiency of resources gets applied to the general collective.

As a result, the theory of degrowth risks to reanimate and give new momentum to the basic precept of economics, that is, the principle of scarcity. It risks mirroring the myth of by using the samegrowth imaginary from a reversed viewpoint, an imaginary that entails the employment of all the energy in circulation for the preservation of existence, this time round by means of “virtuous” lifestyles and efficient techniques. The degrowth project could gain a wider breath and appeal by emphasizing instead its concern towards the collective construction of meaning in life and the restoration of political sovereignty. That is the only way for us moderns to face the challenge of excess energy.

References Bataille, G. (1933) “La notion de dépense.” , 1: 7.La Critique Sociale Bataille, G. (1946) “L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers.” In (1976), vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard.Œuvres complètes Bataille, G. (1949) “La Part maudite.” In (1976), vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard.Œuvres complètes Bataille, G. (1957) “Histoire de l’érotisme.” In (1976). vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard.Œuvres complètes Bataille, G. (1976) . Paris: Gallimard.Oeuvres completes, Tome VIII Bataille, G. (1988) . New York: Zone Books.The accursed share. An essay on general economy vol. I Consumption Freud, S. (1990) . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Beyond the pleasure principle Riesman, D. (1950) . New Haven: Yale University Press.The lonely crowd Romano, O. (2014) . London & NewThe sociology of knowledge in a time of crises. Challenging the phantom of liberty

York: Routledge.

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18 DEPOLITICIZATION (‘THE POLITICAL’)

Erik Swyngedouw

DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER ‘The political’ is the contested public terrain where different imaginings of possible socio-ecological orders compete over the symbolic and material institutionalization of these visions. Indeed, the terrain of struggle over political-ecological futures – a terrain that makes visible and perceptible the heterogeneous views and desires that cut through the social body – and how to achieve this is precisely what constitutes the terrain of ‘the political’. The political refers, therefore, to a broadly shared public space, an idea of living together, and signals the absence of a foundational or essential point (in nature, the social, science, the cultural, or in political philosophy) on which to base a polity or a society. The political is an immanent domain of agonistic practice.

Transformative politics in the direction of ‘de-growth’ therefore require particular forms of politicization adequate to the situation the world is currently in.

However, while the normative view of the need for ‘de-growth’ substantiates its claims on the basis of the analysis of the entropic energetic imbalances of capitalist metabolisms of nature, and the socio-ecological inequalities and conflicts that inhere in these processes, the transformation of a ‘growth’ to a ‘de-growth’ based socio-ecological configuration has to extend its concern from ‘scientific’ and social arguments to consider the political.

I consider politics or policy-making, in contrast to the political, to refer to the power plays between political actors and the everyday choreographies of negotiating, formulating, and implementing rules and practices within a given institutional and procedural configuration in which individuals and groups pursue their interests. Politics, then, in the forms of the institutions and technologies of governing, and the tactics, strategies, and power relations related to conflict intermediation and the furthering of particular partisan interests, contingently institute society and give society some (instable) form and temporal coherence.

Politics as public management stands in contrast to the political as the sphere of agonistic dispute and struggle over the environments we wish to inhabit and on how to produce them. There is a tendency for the first to suture, and ultimately disavow or foreclose, the former. This process is marked by a colonisation of the political by politics or the sublimation of the political by replacing it with ‘community’ (as an imagined undivided unity), a particular sociological of ‘the people’ (as nation, ethnic group, or other socialimaginary category), ‘organization’, ‘management’, ‘good governance’. In the current de-politicizing neoliberal climate, the public management of things and people is hegemonically articulated around a naturalization of the need for – the unquestioned mobilization of market relations and forces as the only possibleeconomic growth mode of accessing, transforming, and distributing (transformed) nature – and as the onlycapitalism reasonable and possible form of organization of socio-natural metabolism. This foreclosure of the political in terms of at least recognizing the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions constitutes a process of de-politicization. In other words, de-politicization takes the form of the increasing domination of a series of inter-related managerial and technical forms of governance aimed at maintaining and nurturing andgrowth understood as the uninterrupted accumulation of economic wealth (see Swyngedouw, 2011). For example, the dominant ecological concern today is one whereby sustainable development refers primarily to the mobilisation of technical and institutional configurations, like the Kyoto protocol to mitigate climate change,Co

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