2.58
We pay (or don’t pay) attention; we’re in constant exchange with the world around us. – There’s a transactional quality in my words.
Mauss initiated a discussion on the gift that was built on by others. The lineage I’m interested in travels through Mauss, Bataille, and Baudrillard. The following quote from Bataille, in the context of discussing and interpreting the northwestern Indigenous potlatch, shows one reading of ‘the gift’:
“[The riches—the gift—are given by someone] to his [sic] rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.”[1]
In this lineage, the gift is a challenge that bestows an obligation to reciprocate (i.e., to offer a counter-gift)after a time interval and with interest. For Baudrillard, what makes the general political economy (the system of value; capitalism) so powerful is that it maintains unilateral control over giving (e.g., the giving of labour, wages, messages in the media, etc.)[2] through prevention of the return of a counter-gift, and thus prevention of an easing of one’s indebtedness: i.e., the general political economy’s condition is the active and ongoing exclusion of symbolic exchange (i.e., the form or logic of the gift).[3]
But, why should we accept the thesis on the gift? These thinkers have found a pervasive subterranean force that can be noticed. Socially and professionally, our lives are structured by how we respond to others, when, with what kind of rhythm, and so on. The one who doesn’t reciprocate, who denies the mounting symbolic pressure, is the miser. When you buy a round of drinks or host a dinner party, you create or maintain reciprocity. Think of the one who won’t allow you to reciprocate – who treats you but won’t allow you to return the favour. Power is expressed not only by taking, but by giving: for it’s a demonstration of excess and superfluity.
So many popular and engaging narratives play with the relations of power inherent in giving: the challenge, the duel, the insult, but also the compliment, the display of affection, the extended hand, the smile, the gift, the present.[4] Responding to the gift appropriately in the right tempo saves face. Gestures demand response, and there are many strategies for dealing with the necessity for response. But, one cannot not respond: this itself is a response, and involves its own stakes.
I claim that the gift-form permeates not only human interaction, but responses of all kinds. Granted, how this plays out with non-human animals is often opaque, but this is true with humans, just to a different degree and in a different way. We respond to beings of all kinds all the time: we cannot help but respond.
Response is wrapped up in the logic of the gift. Ontological attention[5] is a counter-gift, a return of the gift presented by the thing present to us: we stand face-to-face with the thing. We have strategies to deal with how things appear to us and how to respond to them, where slighting is a mode of response as well.
‘But you seem to be ascribing agency to beings of all kinds!’
The point is not that I’m positing some agent in or behind things; I’m claiming that beings demand response, whether they’re conscious or not. I’m proposing a different way of thinking about gift-logic, for we’re always involved with response and responsibility. This is another way of saying that things call to us and we must respond.
We can be better or worse at responding to things. We can maintain or destroy relations through our choice of response, and because we’re made up of our relations (§2.20), how we choose to foster or neglect these speaks to who we are, who we want to be, and how our world is.
— How we are with things reveals our character (§2.9).
[1] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 67–8; Bataille’s emphasis.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (California: Sage Publications Inc., 1995), p. 36–7.
[3] Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 36. For an example, see Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (USA: Telos Press Ltd., 1981), p. 128.
[4] Marcel Mauss, “Gift, Gift,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift, trans. Koen Decoster (New York: Routledge, 1997): p. 28–32, wherein he shows the etymological connection in the word ‘gift’ between ‘present’ and ‘poison.’
[5] Zwicky, W&M, LH52, LH55, LH 57–8, LH100.