The Accursed Share - An Installation by Alex Rizkalla

The Accursed Share, detail, 1994

In Georges Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. Either it is spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain; in the arts, non-procreative sexuality, spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring in war. In Alex Rizkalla's installation, the viewer is impelled towards a consideration of both these propositions and the moral responsibility which comes with them. Either we allow the accursed share to be ignorantly consolidated into the grotesque loci of hysterical power, or we take control of this excess and spend it with the full cognisance that nothing can be gained from it.

Rizkalla suggests the consequences of this ill-fated ignorance by situating Bataille's thinking in a recognisable impoverishment in the history of fascism. Bodies. Bodies whose nightmare proportions fed the dream-like irrationality of the swastika and the Führer, the surreal goose-stepping of Nurenberg and the ovens of Auschwitz. Mountains of bodies heaped together in a non-differentiated mass of abject flesh which bears the mark of what Bataille called heterogeneity. The rotting body is but one portion of the accursed share for in this heterogeneous realm Bataille includes all manner of useless and fearsome dejecta. As he explains, the "very term heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate. . . waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body, persons, words. . . In summary, compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be represented as something other, as incommensurate. . ." ¹

So too with the six-fingered hand. We could no more find a rational use for rotting bodies than we could make an extra finger work in the service of rationalised nature. Both are excessive and radically other in relation to the enlightenment desire for order and reason. Their inability to be absorbed into these privileged orders of culture or nature is determined by a non-logical difference, ² and it is from this position that Rizkalla is most critical of not only fascist authority in the context of Nazism, but any authority which has relinquished prudence.

The absence of any well-worn symbols of authority in Rizkalla's work is consequently filled by the emphasis of that which such symbols consume. It is stock wisdom to understand these dejected bodies as the outcome of a kind of demented machine hell-bent on the destruction of all racial, sexual and physical differences. Although Rizkalla's use of old projectors and the images they produce lends itself to this kind of reading, it is not production which is important here but consumption. Rizkalla avoids any simple recourse to mechanistic metaphors but instead concentrates on the bizarre strictures of authority and the way it is nourished by the very things it seeks to destroy. The distinction is crucial. For if all authority can be shown to be predicated on the differences it loathes the most, then a space is opened for both to be seen, not as opposites, but informed by the same desire. Authority, and the differences it simultaneously consumes and annihilates are equally heterogeneous. They make up the central dualism in the heterogeneous world, an opposition "between glory and dejection."³ The strength of Rizkalla's work is in its representation of this dualism. For every libidinal investment the social body makes in idealised political symbols (in flags, its leaders, nations and border wars), a race must be banished, a finger lopped off, or a body incarcerated and burned. You cannot have one without the other, or more to the point, the very thing authority and social and political cohesion expels, organises it nonetheless.

The way that these historical figurations are abstracted into decorative motifs and become wallpaper is not ironic but consistent with Bataille's awareness that abstraction itself is the select mode of Western thought. One way to see Rizkalla's gradation into patterns is to view it as the logical conclusion of modernity which "brings new and seemingly irreversible forms of domination: the reification of experience and the introduction of the abstract measure of utility."⁴ The predominance of abstract life in the West can be read at either end of the figurative and abstract moments which punctuate the work. Abstraction itself is seen as a form of domination which empties corporeal life of all its human value.

The other way to see this movement into abstraction is linked with the second role which Bataille reserves for the accursed share. It is a gesture towards an aesthetic in which we become answerable for the way that we consume the excesses of our culture. As viewers we are confronted with this moral predicament. Either we use this excessive portion in unproductive expenditure and expect nothing in return, or like Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus, we allow the debris of this misspent currency to accumulate at our feet.⁵

Though couched in the historically specific moment of Nazism, Rizkalla's inquiry into the workings of authority is motivated by contemporary concerns for the rise of extreme right-wing responses to geographical and cultural change. Dull-headed conservatives have gained mainstream support in America where AIDS, for example, has sent the likes of Jessie Helms and Jerry Falwell running for a newly invigorated rhetoric of moral damnation. The rhetoric has emerged elsewhere in Europe in the guise of 'ethnic cleansing' as its eastern borders change in the wake of the cold-war collapse. Ultimately, however, the viewer is asked to consider how Rizkalla's work has both local and national relevance and how ideals such as nationhood, the corporate state, or a hygienic and uniform social body are bought at the expense of cultural, racial and sexual differences.

Robert Schubert
1994

Endnotes
1. Bataille, G., "The Psychological Structure of Fascism", Visions of Excess, Stoekl, A., (ed.) Stoekl, A., Lovitt, C.R., Leslie, D.M., (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989, pp.140-143
2. Bataille, G., "The Notion of Expenditure", ibid., p.129
3. Bataille, G., "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" ibid., p.144
4.Comay, R., "Gifts without Presents: Economies of 'Experience' in Bataille and Heidegger", On Bataille, Stoekl, A., (ed.) Yale French Studies, No.78, Yale University Press, New Haven, p.69
5. This reference is to Walter Benjamin's essay "Thesis on the Philosophy of History". "Thesis IX" concerns Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, which Benjamin uses as a metaphor for history. "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." Benjamin, W., Illuminations, Arendt, H., (ed.) Schocken Books, New York, 1989, p.257

The Accursed Share, detail, 1994