On Social Vortexes: Contributions to a metaphorology of Georges Bataille's social ontology

Neither machine nor the elan vital: life as self‑organising matter

Authors such as Haraway (1976), Hui (2019) and Mossio (2024), to mention just a few with diverse trajectories, agree on the general conceptual coordinates that structure the relationships between mechanicism, vitalism and organicism. I frame this discussion around the metaphor of the vortex, which serves as a visual and conceptual tool within organicism to articulate a position beyond mechanistic linearity and vitalist transcendence.

Biological mechanicism, heir to Greek atomism and Newtonian physics, conceives the organism as an aggregate of elementary constituents whose operations, independently of each other, are explained by physico‑chemical processes. As Haraway explains, ‘the parts of the machine are simple, unorganised and not intrinsically altered if installed in a different place in the mechanism […] sum means aggregate without additional principles or regularities specified or necessary to explain the animal–machine’s operation’ (Haraway 1976, 27). The fundamental metaphor of the mechanistic paradigm is the machine, most commonly exemplified by the human body conceived as a clock (Haraway 1976; Hui 2019). Vitalism, by contrast, conceives organisms as totalities whose properties determine the activity of the parts and attributes to them goal‑oriented behaviour. Its specific feature is the invocation of a metaphysical entity – vital or spiritual force, extraordinary matter, vital élan, etc. – presented as the foundation of organic totality (Haraway 1976; Hui 2019).

Organicism emerged in the early 20th century as an attempt to overcome both paradigms: it rejects the aggregative model of mechanicism and the metaphysical postulates of vitalism, while retaining holism and teleology (Haraway 1976; Hui 2019). In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the classic point of departure, an organism’s parts do not exist by themselves but rather depend on each other, forming together the organic totality which, in turn, is both the condition of existence and the cause of existence for the parts. An organism is, thus, effect and cause of itself; it produces itself (Hui 2019; Kant 1987 [1790]; Mossio 2024; Toepfer 2024; Wolfe 2024). This recursive model echoes in 19th‑century biology (Goethe, Cuvier, von Baer, Bernard) but consolidates only with 20th‑century physics, when the equivalence between matter and energy allowed organisation itself to be conceived as an immanent property of matter (Haraway 1976).

Contemporary organicists such as Mossio define organisation as a regime of mutual dependence among differentiated parts forming a self‑maintaining whole. Such systems are operationally closed yet thermodynamically open: they sustain themselves by channelling external flows of energy and matter (Mossio 2024). In other words, the operational closure that guarantees organic self‑production requires thermodynamic openness – that is, the exchange of energy‑matter with the environment to execute the self‑determination circuit. Here, again, circular causality ensures recursive feedback between parts and whole (Hui 2019).

Organisms are, thus, open systems, which, ‘unlike “self‑organising” dissipative structures, […] constrain and canalise the thermodynamic flow through the collective activity of their functional parts, which realise a specific form of mutual relationship’ (Mossio 2024, 11). For Mossio, biological systems show greater stability and capacity to maintain themselves over time than non‑biological self‑organised physical structures, such as cosmic vortexes, by means of their regime of mutual dependence.¹ Vortexes, however, a specific case of self‑organising physical structures, already appear as a metaphor for organicism in its origins. Schelling, for example, defines organisation as follows:

For Schelling, organisms are defined by the interruption of the linear causality in the flow of inorganic nature, producing a circular movement as those of vortexes, which function as a visual metaphor for recursive organisation (Morin 1992, 1999). Schelling explicitly uses this figure to illustrate the organic in its insertion into the becoming of nature:

Hui, in this regard, explains: ‘The visual example of the whirlpool demonstrates the becoming of the infinite of nature, and its manifestation in finite beings, and [it] situates them in a system in which finite beings are carried within the force of nature, whether it is generation or corruption’ (2019, 64–65). In short, for organicism, an organism is neither a mere collection of separate parts nor a totality animated by an external vital force. Rather, it is a self‑referential movement embedded within the immanent flux of becoming. Within this framework, vortexes exemplify the organicist insight by illustrating how the convergence of flows generates a circular, self‑sustaining structure that remains thermodynamically open, simultaneously stabilising the organism while allowing it to adapt and transform.

The vortex in bataillean sources

Schelling was not the only philosopher to use the image of vortexes; whether as metaphors, as concepts or as a result of the description of physical phenomena, they appear frequently in the history of philosophy, physics and even biology. Long before him, they were used in the philosophy of nature since the pre‑Socratics – Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Democritus – but also in Plato and Aristotle. In turn, none other than Descartes used the figure of the vortex in the elaboration of his cosmogony. Finally, there was a theory of the constitution of matter from vortexes created and defended by William Thomson, William Hicks and J. J. Thomson, which was also very relevant in the late 19th century, especially in British philosophy of nature (Kragh 2002).

The vortexes reached Bataille through different channels; they were present, for instance, in Le problème du devenir et la notion de la matière dans la philosophie grecque, where Arthur Rivaud (1905) highlights the place of vortexes among the atomists, for whom the whirling motion of matter produces the cosmos.² Similarly, Henri Bergson refers to Thomson’s vortex theory in Matter and Memory.³ Curiously, however, it seems to have been the Cartesian vortexes that inspired Bataille most directly, albeit indirectly. According to Descartes’ cosmogony, the universe is full of tiny particles that form infinite vortexes in constant interaction that create and move heavy bodies (see Descartes 1985 [1640], 248–266). The Cartesian model is distinguished from Newtonian cosmogony, which asserts that the motion of celestial bodies is explained by the law of universal gravitation (Tanton and Curtis 2003). The opposition between these two theories also appears in some of the texts that Bataille consulted, such as the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, where Lenoir (1923) and Brunschwicg (1922) mention the tension between Cartesian and Newtonian cosmogonies.⁴ This constellation of references situates Bataille within a broader conceptual history in which the vortex functions as a privileged figure for thinking the genesis of order out of turbulence.

That said, two names occupy a central place in this respect for Bataille’s conceptualisation. One of them is Emile Belot, French engineer and astrophysicist, author of a theory on the origin of the planets and stars called ‘cosmogonie tourbellinnaire’. He never abandoned his dualistic and antagonistic theory on the origin of the stars, which he presented in ‘Essai de cosmogonie tourbillonnaire: l’origine dualiste des mondes’, published in 1911, and summarised in ‘Les idées cosmogoniques modernes’, an article published July 1912 in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.⁵ Belot criticises monistic theories that explain the origin of stars on the basis of a primitive homogeneous chaos. He states that ‘everywhere, we find systematic overall movements [mouvements d’ensemble] in the nebulae, in the currents of stars’ (Belot 1978 [1912], 517). That’s why he defends the ‘doctrine of Descartes’ whirlwinds’, which ‘involves a dualism’ because ‘an antagonistic current of bodies is necessary to create a whirlwind’ (Belot 1978 [1912], 526–529). Further on, Belot adds: ‘Thus, the existence of a swirling nucleus [noyau tourbillonnaire] in the stars corroborates the presumption of their dualistic formation’ (Belot 1978 [1912], 529). Like Descartes, he believes that the celestial bodies, including those that make up the solar system, are the result of ‘generative whirlwinds’ (Belot 1978 [1912], 530). Belot maintains that there is a pre‑eminence of repulsive forces over attractive ones, and claims that Newtonian mechanics only focuses on the latter, which represent a second phase ‘when the attraction fixes the condensed stars in positions of relative stability’ (Belot 1978 [1912], 535), concealing their initial cause.

Vortexes also appear in Arthur Stanley Eddington’s texts, one of the most important astrophysicists of the 20th century and a highly successful populariser of both relativity theory and quantum mechanics (Gherab‑Martin 2013). His works circulated, among others, in the surrealist movement, and it seems it was through this channel that his texts reached Bataille (Parkinson 2008). There is one text in particular that Bataille quotes (see Bataille 1970, 515; Bataille 2023 [1973], 58): ‘The Rotation of the Galaxy’ (1930), where Eddington describes our galaxy as a swarm of particles, gas and stars rotating around its centre, distributed as ‘transient eddies in a whirlpool, continually forming and dissipating’ (Eddington 1930, 20). The rotation of this ‘whirlpool nebula’ (Eddington 1930, 15) is fast enough so that this gas does not collapse into a dense nebula at the centre as a result of the pull of gravity (Eddington 1930). This is why Eddington states ‘that such disc‑shaped arrangements of matter are precarious, and that their stability should not be relied upon’ (1930, 30). In short, for Eddington, our Galaxy is a cosmic vortex composed of stars and gas caused by the meeting of opposing forces, which has a transient and weak stability (Eddington 1930). For Eddington, as for Belot, cosmic vortexes are explained as the effect of attractive and repulsive forces.

Finally, vortexes are also present in the biological works of Georges Bohn. In La forme et le mouvement (1921) – a book that Bataille also read⁶ – Bohn explores the genesis of forms, or morphogenesis, of living organisms. At the core of the paradigm shift in physics and in biology, he at first frames his approach in mechanistic‑reductionist terms; nevertheless, examining the text in detail, it is possible to identify conceptual twists that seem to take the author in a different direction.

Thus, Bohn states, on the one hand, that the form of living organisms result from ‘the laws of chemical mechanics’ (1921, 8). However, on the other hand, we note a significant slippage of perspective, almost immediately: ‘In this book, I have another, and perhaps more fruitful, point of view. Instead of considering living beings as aggregates of chemical substances, I am going to consider you as systems of forces, of movements’ (Bohn 1921, 9). Later on, he expresses himself in a similar way, stating that, instead of seeing living beings as ‘multitudes of chemical substances’, he prefers to conceive them as ‘systems of force, as the seat of directed movements, ordered according to a certain plan’ (Bohn 1921, 64). The opposition between aggregate or multitudes of chemical substances and ordered systems of forces is relevant in the framework of the paradigm shift from mechanicism–vitalism dualism to its overcoming in organicism. The notions of ‘order’ and ‘plan’ suggest that the forces interacting in that system are organised according to a certain goal. Thus, while it is true that Bohn’s proposal cannot be considered fully organicist, it is undeniable that it distances itself from the mechanistic–reductionist approach and deviates in the direction of the emerging paradigm.

The adoption of this approach is always presented as an experimental hypothesis and includes a strong metaphorical burden, openly defended by the author.⁷ In fact, in addition to the system of forces’ metaphor, Bohn uses the figure of the vortexes: ‘I shall be led, in the course of this book, to consider living beings [...] as vibrating swirling [tourbillonnaire] systems, as systems of lines of force’ (Bohn 1921, 36). Thus, for the French biologist, living beings are not aggregates of particles, but vibrating, swirling systems, governed by ‘internal forces’ (Bohn 1921, 10). These swirling systems result from the specific property of living particles to transmit or communicate to each other their motion (Bohn 1921), which are in ‘mutual orientation’, meaning they tend to move ‘in relation to each other’ (Bohn 1921, 64). In a word, vibrating living particles propagate their movement to each other, creating the vortex dynamic that shapes the organic whole.

In view of the above, I claim that Bohn’s position, especially considering the sense of its metaphorical content, expresses a conceptual tension in accordance with a context of paradigm shift and conceptual creation in which he wrote this paper. On the one hand, this metaphor, according to which organisms are systems of ordered forces forming vortices, includes organicism’s notions of totality, organisation and self‑reference. Moreover, as we have seen, also the idea of mutual orientation of the constituents of the living organisms can be related to the notion of mutual dependence, a key element of the emerging paradigm. However, there is no clear causality of the organic totality over the constituents, since the author tends to explain the swirling movement only on the basis of the mutual orientation of the particles. In view of the above, although Bohn is not an organicist, some of his ideas and the images he uses indicate an organicist direction.

Having established the significance of the whirlwind as both an organicist metaphor and a foundation of cosmic beings within the texts that influenced Bataille, we now turn to examine how this imagery emerges and operates within his own writings. By tracing the use of this notion in Bataille’s work, I aim to uncover the ways in which the whirlwind serves as a conceptual tool to articulate his social ontology.

Georges bataille’s social vortex

The sources indicate that the vortex image took hold in his work gradually. During the 1930s, the author often seems to have it in mind without using the word vortex or whirlwind. This is the case, for example, of the famous article, key in all of Bataille’s social theory, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ (1984 [1933]). In this work, Bataille argues that human activity is organised into two main categories: utilitarian and expenditure activities. On the one hand, the domain of the useful is made up of activities oriented towards the maintenance and reproduction of lives. On the other hand, expenditure is made up of ‘unproductive expenditures’, – that is, ‘luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) […] activities which […] have no end beyond themselves’ (Bataille 1984 [1933]), 169). Expenditure is constituted by those activities of destruction of energy and matter, including wealth, without a utilitarian sense. While utilitarian activities are oriented towards the accumulation of matter‑energy for the preservation of life, in expenditure practices, the emphasis is on the useless loss.

However, these two types of practices do not have the same value for Bataille, since, for him, expenditure is the foundation and the sense of human life, considered as an open system. In Bataille’s view,

Bataille does not yet speak in terms of whirlwinds or vortexes; however, he defines human life as a system in deficit, open, like vortexes, which thus accumulates to lose matter‑energy.

Towards the end of the 1930s, between 1937 and 1940, the vortex image becomes more present, albeit implicitly, in my view, partly due to the influence of Emile Belot. In the context of the College of Sociology⁸ he quotes the French astrophysicist for the first and only time (see Bataille and Caillois 1988 [1937], 77–78). In the cited article, ‘Le rôle capitale de la astrophysique dans la cosmogonie’ (1937), Belot summarises the dualistic and swirling theory of the origin of cosmic beings⁹ and, in the last section, entitled ‘Biogenetique et biologie des etres cosmiques ou non dans les univers’, extends this theory to the field of biology. Belot argues that all beings in the universe, cosmic and living organisms, have a dualistic origin, an abrupt ‘fertilisation and birth’, which, in addition to other shared features, proves that ‘there exists in our universe a unity of genetic plan for all cosmic or living beings’ (Belot 1937, 82). Relying on this speculation, Bataille states that every cosmic or terrestrial being is composite, i.e. complex, involving, thus, addition and differentiation (Bataille 1988 [1937]). That which aggregates the parts giving birth to a differentiated being is what Bataille calls overall movement.

This is evident, for example, in ‘Les mangeurs d’étoiles’, a short article from 1940, dedicated to André Masson. Bataille argues that Masson, as a painter, is a genius insofar as he has the capacity to create ‘an existence different from anything that, until then, had been able to come into the world’, and, immediately, he adds: ‘It is true that nothing new comes into being; nevertheless, the moment arrives when something else [quelque chose de plus] is added to the hitherto isolated elements: an overall movement [movement d’ensemble] brings them together and unifies them; thus a life begins, individual, but made up of elements that were previously dispersed’ (Bataille 1970 [1940], 564). As can be read, with a lexicon that resonates with Belot and Eddington, Bataille establishes a relation of equivalence between ‘existence’, ‘life’, and ‘overall movement’, opposed to the ‘isolated elements’. This general principle also applies to society, conceived as an overall movement that has a vortex form.

In order to grasp this crucial point, we must take a moment to focus on the conferences given for the College of Sociology. In his first conference, that in which he quotes Belot, he proposes ‘some general reflections […] of a metaphysical order, specifically of an ontological order on the nature of society. Is society a being? Is it an organism? Or, is it simply the sum of individuals?’ (Bataille 1988 [1937], 73). His answer is, first of all, classically Durkheimian: society is more than the sum of its parts, individuals. Nevertheless, as Hollier correctly points out, Bataille adds something by saying that the ‘more’ is precisely the movement of society (1988) or, more precisely, society as movement. In other words, Bataille affirms that society is characterised by its overall movement: a communifying movement [mouvement communiel] that imposes on individuals, brings them together and transforms them into social beings (Bataille 1988 [1937]). The movement of the social whole is, thus, governed by its own legality, and cannot be explained by the action of individuals taken in isolation, as it would be in a mechanistic perspective.

The key point is that the movement of the whole that defines society is a circular movement. Society is, for Bataille, an overall movement rotating around what he calls a ‘sacred nucleus’, that is, those areas of society where regulated expenditure practices take place. The overall rotating movement is the result of the feelings of repulsion and, at the same time, attraction that this expenditure nucleus provokes (Bataille 1988 [1938b]; Bataille 1988 [1938c]). There is a balance between attraction and repulsion that recalls the equilibrium between the centrifugal force of gravity and the centripetal forces which maintain cosmic vortexes. However, in the case of the social vortex, this balance is produced as a result of the interaction of a dissipative, expenditure impulse on which an interdiction is imposed:

In the ephemeral Sociéte de psychologie collective,¹⁰ he puts it as follows: ‘it seems that things happen as if the meeting of similar [semblable] elements but with different tensions has the power to trigger explosions [déflagrations]. The lowest possible tension or [...] greatest depression is obviously the fact of death. It should not surprise us if this is so that the representation of death has the power to trigger laughter’ (Bataille 1970 [1938b], 287). As a result of this interplay, each individual subject moves in the ‘orbit of the central nucleus’ (Bataille 1988 [1938b], 107), also called ‘centres of social gravitation’ (Bataille 1988 [1939], 326), which are ‘at the heart of human movements’ (Bataille 1988 [1938b], 106). As can be read, society, for Bataille, is a circular movement similar to that of a whirlwind not only because of its dynamics but also because of its dualistic origin. As in the case of Belot’s whirlwinds – and whirlwinds in general – for Bataille, the overall recursive movement is the effect of the meeting of a flow with a barrier that produces the social vortex by gathering multiple individuals. This metaphor allows Bataille to give intelligibility to his idea of the imperative of expenditure as the foundation of the social: the imperative of expenditure, operating with a limiting barrier, produces the overall movement. This barrier, then, rather than simply limiting, delimits, makes a social being emerge from dissipative impulse.

After the College of Sociology, the social vortex appears more explicitly and goes beyond the description of the social totality: it also reaches human individuals. In the drafts of what was later published as The Accursed Share, which were gathered under the name The Limit of the Useful, he uses the term ‘whirlwind’ to describe social and individual beings. He claims that a ‘social being [...] does not sit easily with the principles that underlie the idea of consciousness as an indivisible moral entity’ because ‘if there is some unity in a being’s presence, it is held in whirling eddies, in circuits that stabilise and tend to close in on them’ (Bataille 2023 [1974], 96–97). We also read: ‘I can regard this life that belongs to me as a relatively stable vortex: this vortex ceaselessly collides with others that resemble it. These others alter its course just as it alters theirs. The movements of force or light going from me to my fellow – or from my fellow to me – matter no less – ultimately, they matter even more – than the interior convulsion of existence’ (Bataille 2023 [1974], 100–101). Finally, In Inner Experience, Bataille claims ‘your life is not limited to that ungraspable inner streaming; it streams to the outside as well and opens itself incessantly to what flows out or surges forth towards it. The lasting vortex which constitutes you runs up against similar vortexes with which it forms a vast figure, animated by a measured agitation’ (Bataille 1988b [1953], 94). According to Bataille’s social ontology, society is a vortex movement composed of smaller vortexes, the particular subjects inscribed in the social becoming. In a word, society is represented as a whirlwind of whirlwinds.

It is worth noting, finally, that individual subjects are not simply passive objects of socio‑vortical becoming since they function as a ‘stopping point favouring repercussion [rejaillissement]’ (Bataille 1988b, 94). To put it in another way, for Bataille, the social vortexes are not imposed mechanically on the subjects because these individuals ‘vortexes reinforce the overall movement. In other words, the movement of the social totality imposes itself on the subjects and is contagious from one to the other (Bataille 1988 [1938b]), in a similar sense to that given by Bohn to the contagion of the movement of the organisms’ particles.

Moreover, the vortex‑like encounter extends to relationships between subjects: the mimetic or communication flow does not merely pass through two bodies, but a small vortex emerges between them, sustaining the peripheral continuity of the social whole. This is because the encounter with others is a contagion and a boundary, not so much in the sense of an attenuating factor, but rather, on the contrary, it is the barrier that the flow needs to reproduce itself as a vortex. This dynamic is captured in Bataille’s remark on ‘secondary circulation’ or peripheral forms of expenditure ‘when men take roundabout ways to laugh together at [sneaky] representations of death or when, erotically, they are thrown toward each other by images that are like wounds open on life’ (Bataille 1988c, 124, my emphasis). This gives us a significant image to understand how the social, for Bataille, has an almost fractal and dynamic character, in which swirling patterns of mimetic interaction at the intersubjective level replicate across scales, contributing directly to the movement of the social whole – a fractal vortex of vortexes. It is notable, in this sense, that Lawtoo (2011) recognised the vortex‑like intersubjective dynamic in Janet, which he identified as a source for Bataille’s conception of social interaction. In this way, the mimetic dimension and the social totality are not separate but mutually constitutive aspects of the same circulatory flow of affects.