Tournament: UT | Round: 1 | Opponent: Tays Kelvin Meng | Judge: Matthew Doggert
Part 1 is Accumulation
The modern economy is grounded in systems of utility and excess. This modern system is completely represented in a fetish for productivity through utility that seeks to generate profit at the expense of those that dwell within. This is an ontological impact that is the root of the problem of the postmodern era.
Winnubst, Shannon 15 ed. Reading Bataille Now. Bloomington, IN, USA: Indiana University Press, 2006.Pp 260-261 ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 May 2015.
Bataille does, then, implicitly face the question of carrying capacity. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is nuclear war. The modern economy, according to Bataille, does not recognize the possibility of excess— and therefore limits; the Protestant, and then Marxist, ideal is to reinvest all excess back into the productive process, always augmenting output in this way. "Utility," in this model, ends up being perfectly impractical: only so much output, finally, can be reabsorbed into the ever-more-efficient productive process. As in the case with Tibet, ultimately the excess will have to be burned off. This can happen either peacefully, through various post-capitalist mechanisms that Bataille recommends, such as the Marshall Plan, which will shift growth to other parts of the world, or violently and apocalyptically, through the ultimate in war: nuclear holocaust. One can see that, ultimately, the world itself will be en vase clos, fully developed, with no place for the excess to go. The bad alternative— nuclear holocaust— will result in the ultimate reduction in carrying capacity: a burned-out, depopulated earth. Humanity is, at the same time, through industry, which uses energy for the development of the forces of production, both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the infinite faculty for burnoff in pure waste ~facilité infine de consumation en pure perte~. (Bataille 1976a, 170; 1988, 181) Modern war is first of all a renunciation: one produces and amasses wealth in order to overcome a foe. War is an adjunct to economic expansion; it is a practical use of excessive forces. And this perhaps is the ultimate danger of the present-day (1949) buildup of nuclear arms: armament, seemingly a practical way of defending one's own country or spreading one's own values, of growing, in other words, ultimately leads to the risk of a "pure destruction" of excess— and even of carrying capacity. In the case of warfare, destructiveness is masked, made unrecognizable, by the appearance of an ultimate utility: in this case the spread of the American economy, and the American way of life, around the globe. Paradoxically, there is a kind of self- consciousness concerning excess, dépense, in the "naive" society— which recognizes waste for what it is (in the form of unproductive "glory")—and a thorough ignorance in the modern one, which would always attempt to put waste to work, even at the cost of apocalypse.
Don't even try to claim otherwise, the pandemic has underscored just how restrictive our economic system is and how it focuses only on accumulation of more, at the expense of those who stand in its way.
TimofeevaO. (2020). From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille's Political Economy. Stasis, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-144-165 Pp 156-157
In the face of the pandemic with its catastrophic effects, restricted neoliberal economies show how narrow are the limits of their possibilities. As noted by Michael Marder, it is not a mere coincidence that the virus received the name "corona": "Transgressing old borders, the virus becomes a figure of sovereignty in the age of the dispersion of power" (Marder 2000). States' reaction to the pandemic is analogous to the one on migration: they create barriers, but the virus goes through. If we were to think of responses on a planetary scale, we would have to discuss the possibilities of "global coordination and collaboration" (Žižek 2020), of using state power "to channel resources from the private sector to socially necessary directions" (Sotiris 2020), and, finally, reshaping the entire system of the world economy according to the principles of solidarity, gratuitousness, sharing, and thinking of the whole. Pandemic invites the glorious spending of the enormous wealth of certain countries and individuals and to transfer their excessive resources to the most affected areas where they are really needed. Instead, restricted local economies tend to isolate particular units: first countries close their borders, then provinces and cities, then families lock inside their apartments, then individuals must develop social distance and defend their bodies with facial masks, glasses, gloves, and sanitizers. These restrictive measures are taken in order to slow down the outburst in order to avoid the healthcare system's overload and gain time until a new vaccine is developed. They seem reasonable, indeed, but in a situation of global inequality throwing all countries upon their own resources leads to Darwinian strategies of the survival of the fittest that in some areas — due to the lack of medical infrastructure like beds and ventilators for intensive care — compel doctors to decide whose lives are worth struggling for — as in the case of Italy, where some infected elderly people were left without medical care. Thus, in fact, a restricted economy becomes a human element of planetary destruction: instead of consciously expending wealth to provide healthcare for everyone regardless of their age and nationality, it squanders people.
This failure to expend makes violence inevitable – without a transgressive expense we collapse in upon ourselves, we otherize individuals and prime them for slaughter.
Allan Stoekl, 2007, professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability, 36-38
Bataille’s Version of Expenditure The Accursed Share, first published in 1949, has had a colorful history on the margins of French intellectual inquiry. Largely ignored when first published, it has gone on to have an interesting and subtle influence on much contemporary thought. In the 1960s, fascination with Bataille’s theory of economy tended to reconfigure it as a theory of writing: for Derrida, for example, general economy was a general writing. The very specific concerns Bataille shows in his work for various economic systems is largely ignored or dismissed as “muddled.â€8 Other authors, such as Michel Foucault and Alphonso Lingis, writing in the wake of this version of Bataille, have nevertheless stressed, following more closely Bataille’s lead, the importance of violence, expenditure, and spectacular transgression in social life.9 The basis for Bataille’s approach can be found in the second chapter of the work “Laws of General Economy.†The theory in itself is quite straightforward: living organisms always, eventually, produce more than they need for simple survival and reproduction. Up to a certain point, their excess energy is channeled into expansion: they fill all available space with versions of themselves. But inevitably, the expansion of a species comes against limits: pressure will be exerted against insurmountable barriers. At this point a species’ explosive force will be limited, and excess members will die.Bataille’s theory is an ecological one because he realizes that the limits are internal to a system: the expansion of a species will find its limit not only through a dearth of nourishment but also through the pressure brought to bear by other species.10 As one moves up the food chain, each species destroys more to conserve itself. In other words, creatures higher on the food chain consume more concentrated energy. It takes more energy to produce a calorie consumed by a (carnivorous) tiger than one consumed by a (herbivorous) sheep. The ultimate consumers of energy are not so much ferocious carnivores as they are the ultimate consumers of other animals and themselves: human beings. For Bataille people's primary function is to expend prodigious amounts of energy, not only through the consumption of other animals high on the food chain (including man himself ) but in rituals that involve the very fundamental forces of useless expenditure: sex and death.11 Man in that sense is in a doubly privileged position: he not only expends the most, but alone of all the animals he is able to expend consciously. He alone incarnates the principle by which excess energy is burned off: the universe, which is nothing other than the production of excess energy (solar brilliance), is doubled by man, who alone is aware of the sun’s larger tendency and who therefore squanders consciously in order to be in accord with the overall tendency of the universe. This for Bataille is religion: not the individualistic concern with deliverance and personal salvation, but rather the collective and ritual identification with the cosmic tendency to lose. Humans burn off not only the energy accumulated by other species but, just as important, their own energy, because humans themselves soon hit the limits to growth.Human society cannot indefinitely reproduce: soon enough what today is called the “carrying capacity†of an environment is reached.12 Only so many babies can be born, homes built, forests harvested. Then limits are reached. Some excess can be used in the energy and popu - lation required for military expansion (the case, according to Bataille, with Islam ~OC, 7: 83â€" 92; AS, 81â€"91~), but soon that too screeches to a halt. A steady state can be attained by devoting large numbers of people and huge quantities of wealth and labor to useless activity: thus the large numbers of unproductive Tibetan monks, nuns, and their lavish temples (OC, 7: 93â€" 108; AS, 93â€"110). Or most notably, one can waste wealth in military buildup and constant warfare: no doubt this solution kept populations stable in the past (one thinks of the endless battles between South American Indian tribes), but in the present (i.e., 1949) the huge amounts of wealth devoted to military armament, worldwide, can lead only to nuclear holocaust (OC, 7: 159â€" 60; AS, 169â€"71). This final point leads to Bataille’s version of a Hegelian “absolute knowledge,†one based on the certainty of a higher destruction (hence an absolute knowledge that is also a non -knowledge). The imminence of nuclear holocaust makes it clear that expenditure, improperly conceived, can threaten the continued existence of society. Unrecuperable energy, if unrecognized or conceived as somehow useful, threatens to return as simple destruction. Bataille’s theory, then, is a profoundly ethical one: we must somehow distinguish between versions of excess that are “on the scale of the universe,†whose recognition -implementation guarantee the survival of society (and human expenditure), and other versions that entail blindness to the real role of expenditure, thereby threatening man’s, not to mention the planet’s, survival. This, in very rough outline, is the main thrust of Bataille’s book. By viewing man as a spender rather than a conserver, Bataille manages to invert the usual order of economics: the moral imperative, so to speak, is the furthering of a “good†expenditure, which we might lose sight of if we stress an inevitably selfish model of conservation or utility. For if conserva - tion is put first, inevitably the bottled -up forces will break loose but in unforeseen, uncontrollable, and, so to speak, untheorized ways. We should focus our attention not on an illusory conservation, maintenance, and the steady stateâ€"which can lead only to mass destruction and the ultimate wasting of the worldâ€"but instead on the modes of expenditure in which we, as human animals, should engage.13 But how does one go about privileging willed loss in an era in which waste seems to be the root of all evil? Over fifty years after the publication of The Accursed Share, we live in an era in which nuclear holocaust no longer seems the main threat. But other dangers lurk, ones just as terrifying and definitive: global warming, deforestation, the depletion of resourcesâ€"and above all energy resources: oil, coal, even uranium. How can we possibly talk about valorizing heedless excess when energy waste seems to be the principal evil threatening the continued existence of the biosphere on which we depend? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stress conservation, sustainability, and downsizing rather than glorious excess?
This transcendent violence, a violence that is used in order to place ourselves above, is curtailed through a sacred immanence that turns violence on its head. Engaging in forms of violence that are transgressive and expend the surplus energies housed in the modern economic machine.
Direk, Zenyep. "Bataille on Immanent and Transcendent Violence" IBulletin dela SocieteAmencainedePhilosophiedeLangueFranfais Volume14,Number2, Fall 2000
Violence is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts in Georges Bataille's thought. This essay aims at discussing it by concentrating on Bataille's Theory of Religion.' I shall argue that, in order to understand what Bataille means by "violence," we should distinguish between "immanent violence" and "transcendent violence," and that this distinction is implicit in his thought. Such a distinction is helpful in clarifying several ontological issues. It enables us to distinguish the violence in nature from the violence in the profane world and to put into question the naive view that all violence is a return to animality or the return of animality to inter-human relations. To conceive human violence in terms of animality attests to the metaphysical opposition between ~us~ man and animal in which ~we~ "man" stands as the higher term, which affirms the superiority of the human species over all the other animal species. Thus a return to animality would be represented as a regression, which is necessarily negative. For Bataille, on the other hand, it seems that being in touch with our own animality may be an important way to experience immanence and a powerful resource for a critique of Western civilization. What I call "transcendent violence" is not a return to animality, nor is it a "sovereign experience" in Bataille's sense. It gives rise to the regimes of servitude in which the subject loses itself in the power relations that belong to systems of production and restricted regimes of consumption and serves to establish the hierarchical differences among individual human beings. "Sovereignty" is misread when it is taken to mean an affirmation of the violence that gives a human being a feeling of superiority or transcendence over others. Bataille conceives of "sovereignty" in terms of "imminent violence." An inquiry into the phenomenon of sacrifice is only one way of approaching immanent violence, for laughter and erotic experience are other experiences in which immanent violence manifests itself. The key to that kind of violence can be found in Bataille's statement that "intimacy is violence" (TR 3l2/ 51). Bataille locates intimacy in the realm of immanence, which I take to be the impersonal, incarnated ground of our existence in which we are always already interconnected with other living beings…
In opposition to the immanent violence in nature, violence is seen as a mark of transcendence in the human world. It bears in itself the promise of elevating man to God, enabling hirn to incorporate an image of Hirn. Revealed religions bal~ homicide and human sacrifice. In the Muslim religion, to take away someone's life, given to hirn/her by God, is to transgress the limits of the realm in which human beings can legitimately use their power. To kill someone is to usurp God's authority over life and death and thus to set one's self as an equal to God. This is why only wars fought in the name of God can legitimate the killing of human beings. The idea that, in killing, the murderer substitutes hirnself for God, bears in itself the implicit tendency to trunk that violence can deify a human being. Physically abusive husbands, parents, torturers and rapists take themselves to be transcending their victims. This sense of transcendence is accompanied by a pleasure stemming from their perception of physical superiority as constituting an ontological, epistemological, and even a moral difference. In Theory of Religion, Bataille writes, "The lion is not th.e king of the animals. In the movement of waters, he is only a higher tide that can reverse the weaker ones. That an animal eats another does not change a fundamental situation: every anima! is in the world like waterin water' (fR 292/18-19).6 By contrast, nlan is not in the world like water in water. Even a superficial glimpse of "social status" in the human world will show that factors such as "education," "gender," "ethnicity," "race," and "class" intersect to constitute quite incomparable situations.
Thus we advocate that a just government ought to recognize an unconditional right to strike as a manifestation of the general strike
The strike holds, within it, the revolutionary potential to challenge the system of utility that is ingrained within our restricted economies. We only have to use it and recognize it for the revolutionary force that it is. An unconditional right to it would preserve its ability to challenge that system, wholeheartedly.
TimofeevaO. (2020). From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille's Political Economy. Stasis, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-144-165 Pp 160-162
. In nature, there is no "me" and "you." The earth does not really strike back, does not act responsively and all the more intentionally. It stays indifferent to human affairs. The divine violence of the nonhuman is asymmetrical to the restrictive violence of reason, capital, or Anthropocene; the whole does not behave as an individual. The indifference of nature and the incommensurability of the two languages, two economies, and two kinds of violence — to put it bluntly, human and planetary — does not mean, however, that general politics, relevant to the general economy, is not possible. As was already emphasized, according to Bataille humanity can and must think of the economic models that overcome the restrictedness of existing forms of exchange and production, that always end up with destruction, be it warfare, as Bataille suggested, or climate change in my interpretation. General economy takes the luxurious character of nature as its starting point and develops it into quite an elevated form of self-consciousness that transforms the destruction, or waste into nonproductive expenditure, of the gift economy. Behaving restrictedly, that is, competing, striving for profit, accumulation and growth, is not self-conscious. It is a mere survival strategy of individual organisms, be they humans or other animals, but also entire nation-states that, particularly in the face of crisis, act as egotistic individuals. Becoming self-conscious means, economy-wise, learning to share. The idea of the necessity of sharing that takes nonhuman nature as its model is adopted by contemporary philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, who claims that the future will be one of sharing, if there will be one at all: "Starting from the sharing of organic and inorganic nature, it would be possible to elaborate a way of thinking and living that is ecological, instead of economic — in other words, non-possessive, non-appropriative, but participatory with regard to a greater whole…" (2015). In Irigaray's view, learning to share is an urgency in our economies because "the prospects for life on earth depend on it" (Ibid). It is true, of course, and it seems that, understood as such, the ecology that must replace economy echoes Bataille's general economy that must replace a restricted one. Yes, general economy could stay for today's ecology, but there is one nuance: the urgency of today's ecology — to save life on earth — seem to send it back to the all-too-human register of means and goals. Bataille's sun shines aimlessly. All life on earth is just an effect of its sovereign violence. We must learn to share not because we want to live, but because sharing is glorious. It breaks with utility, with the logic of survival. In the Bataillean perspective, understanding the earth, or nature, or the nonhuman in a broad sense, as an economic agency that, like humans, pursues its interests, would be wrong. The point is not to translate from the general to the restricted, but from the restricted to the general: if we want to commensurate our economies with our environments, we have to become solar, and not the other way around. Bataille's notion of violence — and the difference between the two kinds of violence — allows for the creation of a bridge from general economy to general politics that is only sketched here but deserves to be developed at a greater length in some future work. Basically, the idea is the following: for a general emancipatory politics, the point is not to interpret solar violence — pandemic outbreak, climate change, volcano eruptions, tornadoes, and so on — as nature's revolt analogous to human emancipatory struggles, but to grasp human emancipatory struggles as solar violence that correlates to the solar economy. Roughly said, nature does not strike, because it does not care, but: what if a human strike could go really general — not in terms of Sorel, but rather in terms of Bataille? Thus, one of the most shocking effects of the coronavirus is that it interrupts, not entirely, of course, but partly at least — due to necessary quarantine measures — the processes of capitalist production and exchange. Some employed become unemployed, others are sent to a kind of involuntary vacation. Offices and institutions are closed, and the work is stopped or reduced, with a serious loss for individuals and countries relying on their restrictive policies, so that the considerable intervention of states is needed in order to preserve the capitalism system, in whose indissolubility the absolute majority of people so strongly believed only yesterday. Does this sudden interruption not refer to some perverted image of the general strike? From the quarantine to the viral strike; from climate change to the solar strike — these could be the mottos for a general politics in times of pandemics and global warming. If we put it like this, we should explain the strike not as an expression of need, but as an excessive wave of dangerous festivities that replace work. Decolonization or revolutionary violence, too, can be interpreted as general, if we extend it from the domain of human history to the domain of natural activities, and grasp not, say, climate change as a rebellion of the colonized Earth or revolutionary movement of the oppressed nature, but human decolonizing struggles and revolutionary movements as radical climate change: it is getting hot. To make things clear: general economy as political project comprises the self-conscious activity of people that takes the solar economy of the universe as its model. In this, it is opposed to the restricted policies that seem to save and preserve as well as to grow and accumulate, but in fact unconsciously follow the planetary drive for destruction, which is seemed to confront. In turn, self-conscious activity will seem to repeat planetary debauchery, but in fact will dialectically transform it into glorious nonproductive expenditures. I do not suggest any new form of politics, but invite the rethinking of existing ones. Every progressive protest movement, every strike, every revolution already carries this sovereign, festive, luxurious moment, but it remains shadowed by the restricted, one-sided logics of usefulness that cannot encompass the totality of the ecological whole
Affirming solves, using legal forms as a challenge to the squo is necessary to engage with the restricted economy
Reddy 21
Diana S. Reddy (Doctoral Fellow at the Law, Economics, and Politics Center at UC Berkeley Law). "'There Is No Such Thing as an Illegal Strike': Reconceptualizing the Strike in Law and Political Economy." Yale Law Journal. 6 January 2021. JDN. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-illegal-strike-reconceptualizing-the-strike-in-law-and-political-economy
Labor's historical antipathy to the "political" rendered it particularly vulnerable to the neoliberal turn. Labor's New Deal accommodation, born of its Progressive Era "mortal weakness," made an economic case for labor unions, and left the normative case for them underspecified. Keynesian demand-side economic policy and industrial peace were the NLRA's leading rationales.137 Neoliberal political economy undermined both. It flipped the Keynesian script, depicting capital as the driver of economic well-being, rather than worker income-qua-consumer spending. And, a few crushed strikes provided a watered-down version of industrial peace. Ronald Reagan's decision to use the power of the federal government to end the 1981 federal air controllers' strike (an illegal and unsuccessful strike) by firing striking workers, replacing them, and decertifying their union,138 dramatized this shift. Private employers began replacing workers on strike too. Workers in turn stopped striking.139 And for some, this was taken as proof that labor law had done its job of achieving industrial peace, and was no longer needed.140 And so, while there is a tendency to see hostile law as the reason for worker quiescence, it is not formal law alone that is the problem. The problem is equally an economic and cultural milieu which renders these rules cognizable, legitimate, and enforceable. In recent decades, a vision of capital as the driver of economic growth and unions as rent-seeking interest groups has enabled the permanent replacement of strikers, the deployment of union avoidance consultants, and a host of anti-union practices that used to be illegitimate, but not necessarily illegal. Labor lost "the contest of ideas."141 At one level, the importance of political economy is acknowledged in the literature. Craig Becker concedes in a footnote that "~t~o emphasize the law's role is not to imply that the efficacy of strikes rests solely on formal legal rights, for strikes were waged with success prior to the advent of legal protection."142 And White notes that law can be "malleable and . . . within the province of workers to reshape around their own interests and visions."143 Still, through emphasis on formal legal rules, legal scholarship has at times failed to recognize the magnitude of neoliberalism's impact, not just as a material change in conditions, but as an ideological change in what is possible to imagine.144 Reflecting a more nuanced approach to the relationship between formal legal rules and what happens on the ground, labor organizers are themselves ambivalent about how much bad law matters. A well-known maxim within the movement declares that "there is no such thing as an illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one."145 Labor-movement activists speak matter-of-factly about a union's strategic choice to disregard legal rules: A union that decides to break anti-worker laws should do so united, and with a plan for the consequences. Is your leverage great enough to make the law moot? (They can't fire us all.) Do you have lawyers on hand for the fallout? Can you make withdrawal of legal charges part of the strike settlement? Will the public put the fear of God into politicians or police chiefs that try to harm the union? Balance the potential risks against the possible gains.146 Law is one source of leverage, activists proclaim, but it is not the only one. This more nuanced account of the relationship between law, power, and culture is particularly important in the current historical moment.
Part 2 is Framing (3:30)
The debate space is one that is academic, which demands a critical interrogation into structural inequity. This entails resisting structural doctrine in the educational setting and prioritizing positions that gesture towards identity rather than conforming to the institutions of oppression that exist in the Squo.
Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, "Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University," 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live.
Educators must find ways to understand and offer continuous resistance of capital, the best way to approach this is through immanent violence via sacrifice.
Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the best praxis to resist capital, we must direct our focus to the ways in which education has been tainted by capitalism and the insidious logic of utility. Embrace the Bataillean pedagogy of excess and become the great squanderer.
Mahalingam etc. 13 Ram and McCarthy, Cameron. Multicultural Curriculum: New Directions for Social Theory, Practice, and Policy pp 116-117 Routledge, Oct 28, 2013
Transforming labor and consequently student work requires a revolutionary disposition toward relations of production. In particular it is imperative that educators link the transformation of the economy with a critique of whiteness. However, theories of whiteness must be linked to the idea that capitalism is not only the exploitation of knowledge for profits, but the simultaneous repression of expenditure, or what Georges Bataille (1997, 1991. 1988, 1985) describes as the human proclivity to expend energy and not to accumulate it. Transformation of labor produces social relations that flourish in conditions free of alienation and exploitation. A discourse on production must also consider alternative theoretical frameworks to explain students' inner experiences and the knowledge they gain from them. Transforming relations of production allows students, as concrete subjects, to experience schooling in new ways, but Bataille's theory of expenditure provides a general framework that explains how we come to know these inner experiences themselves, a theory that functions not within the logic of production, but within that of waste. As Bataille (1988) explains. "On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be squandered. . . . The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter implies him ~sic~, and he cannot stop it; . . . it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption. The latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually, like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us. (23; emphasis on the original)". Schools accumulate useful knowledge to the point where they cannot hold it. Students memorize, tabulate, and synthesize knowledge for future-oriented purposes. Eventually, unproductive student behavior erupts and then spreads as students resist and rebel against work as a guiding principle. The conventional explanation for disruptive student behavior is "unproductivity." Resistant students are either alienated or lazy, and they willfully opt out of work. Bataillean pedagogy understands this to be a state of wasteful activity that cannot be fully explained by a productivist logic. It represents the "blind spot" of the discourse on work. Bataille's pedagogy attempts to transgress the utility of current school knowledge. Educators isolate unproductive students from their peers to ensure that they "do their work" or detain them after school to give them extra work. Meanwhile, what escapes our understanding is the principle of expenditure, or how students squander schoolwork for no apparently useful or productive reason. The theory of expenditure does not deny the presence of work, let alone the importance of liberated labor. It acknowledges the production of life for purposes of subsistence, survival, and improvement of the species. Furthermore, the modified theory of expenditure we are presenting recognizes the importance of revolutionizing student work as part of an overall transformation of social life. In fact. Bataille (1997) clarifies. "Class struggle becomes the grandest form of social expenditure when it is taken up again and developed, this time on the part of the workers, and on such a scale that it threatens the very existence of the masters" (I78), it is at this intersection between work and nonwork that we locate a revolution both of student work and waste. Injected in this dialectic is the indictment of whiteness as an ideology that alienates students from real knowledge as well as preventing them from rejoicing in the event of knowing, unfettered from utilitarian concerns. School knowledge has become not only a commodity in the Marxian sense, but has taken on the quality of a thing that exists for other things. And as things go, school knowledge is deemed useful for something outside of itself, to fulfill a destiny that has been predetermined, such as grades or higher education. Bataille's perspective decries this utilitarian condition wherein students are subjected to schoolwork that apparently has no intrinsic worth but an exchange value in the markets of white capitalism.