I love to eavesdrop in the shop because the whole neighborhood is very foreign to me–immensely wealthy, mostly Jewish, 7 banks in 3 blocks, and many people eat out for 2 meals a day.  I want to recall a conversation between a coworker of mine and a regular customer, but first I’d like to characterize them both, and then add a third character–my supervisor.

The customer came into the shop one month ago, an hour after I started my first day at the shop.  He said he wanted a specific blend of three coffees.  I said, ok.  He eventually said, “Make a Presspot, you’re new, and I want you to taste this.”  So, I brought out the pot.  ”Too Small.”  I brought out a larger one, and we tried the “perfect blend” of African, Indonesian, and Central American coffees.  I now know that the man had returned from Indonesia, and he was to become a regular who has meetings with future restaurant business-partners and potential employees.

My coworker is typical in a few respects.  His arm-broad tattoos and gages in his ears indicate that he evaluates life visually, loves “do art,” has art in gallery shows, and slightly surprisingly, wants to illustrate for Family Guy.  From the Northeast, he calls life as he sees it, and most people are “out” or at least throw quite a few strikes.

Customer and Coworker began to agree about the sad consequences of the Bush administration.  This moved toward Indonesia, and some comment that was typically multicultural in a Pop sense.  Customer says he is Jewish Italian and his Indonesian wife was Catholic.  He just believes that whatever is the heart must be authentic, and he’s so proud that his kids have had such various experiences in life.

Coworker has the religion of art.  His spirituality is art.  This is his religion.

Michigan native Supervisor declares that, “I just try to give my boy the most experiences he can have,” adds some other comment to agree with the scope of the conversation.

I thoroughly agree with a specifically defined multiculturalism that is the basis for a Western culture that defends different groups’ rights to exist, to speak, and to live life.  But, what’s with all this agreeing about religion?  What is this new religion that we all have in common?  I should have joined the conversation, but I was sweeping.

If you’re interested in reading the book for yourself, it’s available on AAAARG [which all TVA readers should be involved in, of course].

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Summary: Bataille begins his theory of religion, surprisingly enough, with the question of how we humans can conceive of the “immanence” of the animal. These are the distinctions Bataille makes between this immanence and the perceiving of a human: the animal does not subordinate its objects to itself, the animal does not experience the duration of its object, and the animal cannot regard itself as an object. All of these restrictions have to do with the animal’s inability to transcend its object — hence, immanence. Bataille equates transcendence with self-consciousness; so another way to describe the immanence of animals is to say that they perceive without consciousness.

The consequence of this immanence, he imagines, is something half-way between our human consciousness and a world without consciousness. The latter can be glimpsed in the “meaningless” layers of nature uncovered by the hard sciences, in the bounding of atoms and gurgling of chemical processes; but animal immanence dazzles and eludes the eye of the mind. The mystery of it prompts what Bataille calls The Poetic Fallacy of Animality — because we simply cannot imagine perception without consciousness, so “the correct way to speak of it can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable.” But because such poetry does not penetrate what it addresses but simply puts a vague “fulguration” of words, a halo around the emptiness of incomprehension, Bataille finally insists that the only clear (ie., non-poetic) description he can offer of animal immanence is that animals are like “water in water.” This is an important and recurring phrase.

(Incidentally, he does offer us, by way of disavowing its use, the following poetic description of animal perception: “There was no vision, there was nothing — nothing but an empty intoxication limited by terror, suffering, and death, which gave it a kind of thickness…”)

Commentary: There isn’t much here, yet, that seems to point toward religion or a theory of religion, except the poetic intensity of Bataille’s language. On that note, I admire his characterization of poetry as that which slips “toward the unknowable.” It is this aspect of his style — that it slipped toward the unknowable — that repelled his contemporaries like Sartre, who avoided him because of his “mysticism,” and it is also (I’ll bet) what attracted posterity, like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida.

Regarding his description of animal immanence, an obvious question is this: why does he distinguish the animal from the human? Aren’t humans in fact animals?

I think this question — though it is in some ways a wrong one — gets at the path that will eventually lead Bataille from animal immanence to religion: humans are animals, yet the definition of animality must be a definition in contrast to human consciousness. In some ways, the performance of this definition is a kind objectifying and sacrificing of the animality in humans — though for the purpose, as will become clear in later posts, of regaining intimacy — which ceremonially displays the anguish of the tension in us which he will argue leads us to religion. He concludes the introduction to the book with these words: “The basic paradox of this ‘theory of religion,’ [...] brings a powerlessness to light, no doubt, but the cry of this powerlessness is a prelude to deepest silence.”

At any rate, I think it is important to the argument of the rest of the book for the reader to perform his thought experiment with him, to attempt to conceive of perception without consciousness, to fail but feel the “sticky” temptation of poetry.