Immeasurable Extravagance: Proposals for an Economy of Abundance in an Age of Scarcity

Extravagance is commonly associated with wastefulness, irresponsibility, self-indulgence, and a lack of restraint in spending money or using resources. Indeed, in a world in which the lives of ordinary people are increasingly dominated by the rhetorics and economics of scarcity at a global level, it is often specifically associated with such ‘non-essential’ practices as the creation and acquisition of art.
Drawing on historical and contemporary practices of art-making, visual/material display and performance, and informed by current studies in continental philosophy and material culture, this panel explores the possibilities of thinking about extravagance differently. For what if we were to disconnect it from its negative connotations and, instead, associate its ‘lack of restraint’ with practices capable of releasing a more fundamental but barely acknowledged economy of abundance? An abundance that—following Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others—persists beyond the contemporary cruelties of austerity?
Such a reconceptualization is desperately needed today. In The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1949) Bataille contrasted an original condition of wasteful abundance with a restricted economy based on scarcity. Indeed, austerity as it is now practiced—historically it was associated with the virtues of prudence and frugality—results in constriction, siphoning, cordoning, separation, and segregation. Ultimately, it may be seen to serve self-interest. But extravagance, we suggest (from the Latin extra "outside of" + vagari "to wander, roam"), may be aligned with the virtues of generosity and openness, union, and inclusion, self-forgetfulness, and the transgression of established boundaries.