Having just watched an episode of Shameless where the residents of the Chatsworth Estate were plunged into darkness following a blackout (resulting in lots of drinking, violence and sex as is the case with 100% of Shameless episodes) my thoughts turned to French writer Georges Bataille's work on eroticism and being human.
According to Bataille (and others I'm sure), eroticism, a state of transcendental reality, is induced via the loss of self. The self, in this context, being the person we identify with in our day to day lives: Lucy, 26, student, wife, black hair, two eyes, one nose, etc. During this loss, experienced for example in orgasm or la petite mort (the little death) to use the French idiom, we enter a state of non-knowledge, oblivion. For those who don't have orgasms it can be likened to losing your temper or being excessively drunk. For those who don't get angry or drink alcohol, go and read another blog.
After this 'loss' we eventually reconnect with the self we were before, it may be somehow altered following the experience but we retrieve a sense of self once again. There may be feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety, increased desire; all things that will hold sex/anger/intoxication in a state of reverence until an energy founded on desire overwhelms us once more and we seek another transgression (have sex/get drunk). Simone de Beauvoir, despite being involved in a notoriously hostile feud with Bataille (alongside Sartre) appears to have encapsulated the 'real life'/eroticism dynamic in her superb book 'The Second Sex' (1949): 'desire, which frequently shrouds disgust, reveals disgust again, when it is satisfied'. Such desire may occur after a tough week of being communicated at by people and computers trying to extract or insert something in you for reasons not entirely known to you. This is a seemingly continuous rotation. It is, according to Bataille, what makes us human. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing it just is; good and bad are binaries that we must not bog ourselves down with when considering such matters as the human condition.
For Bataille, what makes us human is work. Our human work. Having sex all day, drinking all day, being enraged all day (although I often do the latter quite well) is not conducive to productivity. Lying around in our own filth, shagging anything that moved would not have invented wheels, would not have built houses. No McDonalds. No Twitter. No blogs. Having sex occasionally, getting wrecked at the weekend, however, have uses in that they appear to 'renew' the ordered, day to day running of our lives. For example, going on holiday and coming home to your own bed, a bed you couldn't wait to leave 2 weeks previously before the excesses of rest, sun, food and alcohol in the Costa del Somewhere. Once home your bed feels like your mother's womb, your friends are interesting again and your morning cup of tea has a new charm. Put simply, the holiday is needed as much as the non-holiday. The suspension of daily life is required in order to keep the cogs of, in our case, Capitalism turning: you’ll turn up for work after two days away from the office doing something else. With this in mind we could suggest, in a Daily Mail kind of way that the characters portrayed in Shameless contribute little to society as we are expected to know it. That they aren’t quite as human as the rest of us.
The residents of the Chatsworth Estate don't have 'proper' jobs. They are on benefits, they make money on black markets, they have sex at 2pm on a Wednesday, they give in to violent impulses and they often drink all day. We're supposed to laugh at this, Other them, view them in such a realm of ridiculous that we couldn't possibly entertain the fact that they might be experiencing something that could well rival the shiny BMW on our driveway. Their supposedly chaotic lives seem perversely simpler than ours. They've cut out the middle man, the tax man, the policeman and are getting on with it. They aren't, however, going to build hospitals or schools anytime soon; they aren't going to provide security and safe peaceful family homes. They are also not going to start any world wars or make decisions that will affect the lives of millions of people. Wallowing in the muddy depths of base urges leaves little time for such things as civilisation, being human; often identified as being good/evil, something.
If I were to suggest Bataille was onto something (and I do) this ‘being human’ malarkey is an interesting position to consider. It seems to involve denying that which makes us animal in favour of that which generates money and power but also that which writes books, music, dances, sings and makes witty comments on social networking sites. The question to ask yourself in relation to your self, then, is where you'd really like to stand. If the grass really is greener or, if you prefer, muddier on the other side.
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