The Excessive Everyday: Nurturing alternate life worlds within the unruly material real

Abstract

This thesis draws upon feminist, non-philosophical, new materialist and de-colonial perspectives in order to build an ontology of excess detailed through an intersecting nexus of artistic, artisan, theoretical and cultural productions. Drawing upon Georges Bataille’s (1897-1972) notion of a ‘general economy’ from the first volume of The Accursed Share (1991) this thesis resituates Bataille’s version of ‘excess’ within the affective, immanent and politically loaded site of the everyday. The practices written on in this thesis are seen to develop their own alternate economies of excess through explosive, joyous and exuberant expressions of generosity. These practices are also seen to directly engage with the particularities of lived relations, experimenting with building and nurturing life worlds and modes of the social that are not modeled upon a market economy. The excesses that these practices produce are understood to pose a threat to the perpetual debt servitude that the financial economy demands, as well as to the Freudian notion of lack that arguably still haunts the western psyche. Starting from the molecular, this thesis explores the fermenting non-human life worlds of ginger beer cultures that create explosive surpluses in spite of the life denying forces of the capital driven food industry. It then looks to the role of semi-autobiographical feminist fiction in imagining and building alternate life worlds to create world-changing fictions. Shifting then to intensified bodily expressions, this thesis explores the performative shedding of tears and mucous by mourners at tangihanga according to ceremonial traditions specific to tikanga Māori. Then finally in the realm of art making, the work of Dorothy Iannone is written on in relation to her prolific pattern making and palpable emanations of excessive libidinal energies. In looking to the everyday this thesis places emphasis on the experiential rather than a-priori decision making in an attempt to re-route the abstracting, alienating and seemingly unanswerable forces of ‘advanced’ capitalism back into an accountable material present. By focusing on philosophies of immanence and practices that directly engage with the sensuous ‘material real’ this thesis rejects the notion of the subject as a universal and structurally predetermined individual. Attuning to and engaging with the situated, psychic, carnal and unruly dimensions of lived life also declares a refusal to reproduce a capitalist realist futurity in which present conditions are locked in an endless deferral to a capitalist horizon.