The Subversive Image

In the Story of the Eye the narrator, a thinly veiled adolescent Bataille, experiences obscene images that flash through his mind and 'these images were, of course, tied to the contradiction of a prolonged state of exhaustion and an absurd rigidity of my penis' (SE, 30). All of Bataille's subversive images share this contradictory structure of exhaustion and sexual excitement (jouissance). They at once exhaust the possible functions of the image and subvert it with a jouissance which touches on death and that the image can only indicate but not represent. He pursued these multiple images across various media, including painting, photography and writing to the point where we can find no clear distinction between the pornographic tableaux described in his novel Story of the Eye (1928) and the photographic images Bataille commented on in the journal Documents (1929–31). I want to trace Bataille's subversion of the image through his analysis of specific images to his subversion of vision itself. Documents is the beginning because here Bataille not only writes on images but works with images: Documents is a multimedia production. It engages with Bataille's other works at the time and also with his later works, prefiguring his fractured and condensed writings which work by producing images of thought. It also raises the question, why has Bataille had so little impact as a writer on the image?

Perhaps the reason for Bataille's lack of impact is that his subversion of the image can never be assimilated by a theory of the image. It is this impossibility of a theory of the subversive image that is first sketched out in Documents by Bataille and his companions. At the centre of Documents is a series of entries written for a planned critical dictionary, with Bataille and Michel Leiris writing most of the entries until the magazine ceased to exist in 1931. Although this meant that the critical dictionary remained incomplete, from the beginning it was always intended to be incomplete. The incompletion of the critical dictionary was a critique of the tendency of dictionaries to try to define all the significant words in a language by freezing their irruptive energies into stable meanings. For Bataille 'A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words but their tasks' (VE, 31). 18

Instead of being organised by meaning the critical dictionary was organised by the tasks of words, trying to release their irruptive energies. This release often involved a play between the critical dictionary entry for a word and its accompanying image. Moreover, the entries were not originally placed alphabetically (although they have been now in EA) but worked together with their accompanying images in a disjunctive, non-hierarchical 'structure'. The tasks of words would be explored through the selection of words analysed which ranged from the question of materialism (EA, 58) to a discussion of Buster Keaton (EA, 56). Through this selection process links are made between the tasks of words and a strange 'logic' emerges where Keaton's sang-froid could be the basis of a materialism of 'raw phenomena'.

After only the first issue of Documents one of the co-founders wrote to Bataille that 'The title you have chosen for this journal is hardly justified except in the sense that it gives us "documents" on your state of mind.' However, the journal is far more than a catalogue of Bataille's own state of mind and personal obsessions. Through the critical dictionary he intervenes into the founding classifications that define the meaning of our world. The critical dictionary subverts these classifications by shifting from a word's meaning to its tasks and effects. These effects are also visual, coming through the images that accompany the 'definitions' in the critical dictionary. Bataille and his co-writers are pursuing images that overwhelm the viewer. For Bataille the 'noble parts of a human being (his dignity, the nobility that characterises his face)' (VE, 78) cannot 'set up the least barrier against a sudden, bursting eruption ...' (VE, 78). The critical dictionary registered these bursting eruptions as chance instants in which the image would rear its head and shatter the calm world of the dictionary. The destruction of the classifications of the dictionary would then affect the order of language and of the world itself. Far from being documents of Bataille's state of mind these are documents of sudden bursting eruptions that are impossible to classify.

The critical dictionary is an act of 'sacrificial mutilation' (VE, 61–72) of the classical dictionary. It is 'charged with this element of hate and disgust ...' (VE, 71) for the tranquil orderings of a world bound by meaning. In Documents, however, there is an anomalous image which appears to remain within this world of meaning. It is a photograph taken in 1905 of a provincial wedding party lined up in two regimented rows in front of a shop (EA, 99) which accompanies an essay by Bataille called 'The Human Face'. The image is anomalous to the critical dictionary because it is so utterly conventional; it is an image out of place. Why is it there when for Bataille 'The mere sight (in photography) of our predecessors in the occupation of this country now produces, for varying reasons, a burst of loud and raucous laughter; that sight, however, is nonetheless hideous' (EA, 100)? What fascinates Bataille is that this conventional image should provoke this reaction, a reaction which combines contradictory experiences of laughter and fear. These supposedly incompatible effects are brought together in this image and make it unforgettable. Although we may laugh at the wedding party it still haunts us with a fear that remains with us even in our most acute moments of pleasure. Bataille comments that it forces a youth to confront 'at every unexpected moment of rapture the images of his predecessors looming up in tiresome absurdity' (EA, 100).

Lodged within the critical dictionary, lodged within its images of base eruption, is this haunting image of propriety. It is an image that has the power to destroy our rapture and to limit the subversive image. The image of the wedding party always threatens to loom up before the subversive image and put an end to the subversion that it promises. What is worse is that these ghosts from the past are not the powerful monsters that once terrified us but banal representations of the provincial bourgeoisie. Once we had to be held in check by horrifying phantoms that possessed a terrible power; now, 'The very fact that one is haunted by ghosts so lacking in savagery trivialises these terrors and this anger' (EA, 100–1). The ghosts of our ancestors destroy the subversive image in two ways: firstly, they block any effect of rapture by appearing before us at our moments of pleasure and secondly, they make the horror they cause us appear trivial. Bataille has to counter this neutralisation of the subversive image or his subversion of the image could always be accounted for as the results of his own personal...