The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
he characterizes this dichotomy along the distinct lines of eros and logos; the former is “unanalytical and undialectical,” whereas the latter is predicated on value assessment.136 Logos is “the money of the mind [that] destroys the gift.”137 Using Mauss’s notion of gifting in a circular exchange but rejecting the value management of its economic logic in a way that foreshadows Derrida (see next section), Hyde writes, “The gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ within the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part.”138 The moment when an artist reflects cerebrally on a work of art in progress, the gifted materia is jeopardized, just as a gift loses its giftedness in the moment when market value is estimated. Awareness of the gift in art forecloses the possibility of both art and gift. In critical response to Hyde, my contention about the gifting logos is that it is possible to define logos as a “principle of differentiation,” as he does, but, instead of rejecting it, I insist on a connection between logos and gifting. Doing so enables an investigation on how symbolic differentiation brings together rhetorical invention and gifting.
Jacques Derrida: Always Already Annulled (1992)
To study the gift, if such a thing there be, Jacques Derrida deals in absolutes, wholly rejecting what most of us would call a gift. He offers an account that, perhaps consistent with Derridean deconstruction, contains much more information on what gifting is not than it does on what the true gift is. Most emphatically he argues that “gifts” in ordinary life are trapped by “common language and logic” in a structure of three: “A gives B to C.”139 This structure, Derrida announces, is what produces “the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift.”140 As soon as something is identifiable as a gift, the “giftedness” of that thing is destroyed.141 In that moment, debt dominates the exchange and the relationship of the parties. Expectations and norms of reciprocity creep in and destroy the purity of the potential gift. Writes Derrida: “From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense, and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt.”142 The circle symbolizing the economics of the gift is anathema to Derrida’s gift, which must be understood as “aneconomic.”143 Put another way, Derrida understands the gift as invaluable: infinitely precious but beyond evaluation. This makes his theory of gifting open to alternative definitions of value, which becomes useful in my later chapters.
In his essays on the gift, Derrida responds directly to Mauss, whom he accuses of “speak[ing] blithely” about gifts in a circle of exchange.144 Mauss, he claims, “never asks the question as to whether gifts can remain gifts once they are exchanged; [nor] does [he] worry enough about this incompatibility between gift and exchange or about the fact that an exchanged gift is only a tit for tat, that is, an annulment of the gift.”145 In Derrida’s view, all of Mauss’s ideas are complicit in the annulment of the gift: the potlatch, the transgressions, and the surpluses that manage the social hierarchies of “prestations.”146 Derrida first addresses the complications of syntax and then the moment when Mauss “excuses” himself, which Derrida uses to pivot the argument to “the triple and indissociable question of the gift, of forgiveness, and of the excuse.”147 With reference to syntax, Derrida asks, simply put, how a single word (such as “give” or “gift”) could mean so many different things.148 Giving one’s word in the form of a promise, he suggests, cannot reasonably be grouped with other symbolic acts like giving a ring.149 Relatedly, Derrida questions the extent to which the verb of giving actually couples with the noun gift in an intelligible way.150 Finally, deconstructing the premises of Mauss’s project and targeting the argument that “evolved” societies ought to return to the gifting ethics of archaic societies, Derrida aptly characterizes Mauss’s agenda as a “Rousseauist schema.”151
The gift, a Derridean impossibility, takes place only on the condition of the exchange circle’s interruption.152 Derrida writes, “A gift could be possible, there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle will have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant.”153 In this interruption, the madness of the gift sends nomos and logos into “crisis.”154 Logic and reason, norms and culture, are infinitely exceeded when a gift is given that does not forge a structure of expectation and debt. With the notions of effraction and interruption, Derrida pursues something other than simple humility or altruism. He notes, “If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given the gift as a given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor).”155 Derrida considers the possibility of a gift wherein giver and receiver are radically remote, separated from one another in anonymity. The gift is not recognized as such by either participant, and both forget the whole thing as soon as it happens.156 Such a gift is not only boundless and immeasurable but impossible and untheorizable.157 With the help of Heidegger, Derrida presents the gift as a giving event that overtakes all.158 Doing so, he discounts those human practices in which participants interpret what they are doing as gifting, disallowing those practices as not-quite-good-enough-to-be-gifting, or worse, as delusional simulations. Nevertheless, his conclusions leave open the possibility that a gift could be a submission without expectation and without gratitude, rhetorically constituting a social form.
The Gift in Rhetorical Studies
The notion of a gift has long been subtly present in rhetorical studies, not only because gifts are messages, as I have noted, or because some rhetors are described as especially gifted, but because rhetoric, in Aristotle’s words, may be defined as discerning the available means of persuasion in any given situation. With this tacit acknowledgment of preexisting conditions in which events take place (or time—remember, “Rain rains”), rhetoricians are scholars of the gift, albeit implicitly. Moving toward a more explicit model, I submit that by rendering insights from the five thinkers discussed here, it is possible to build a specifically rhetorical theory of gifting. What I am interested in is the question, What happens rhetorically when a cultural practice is constructed by participants through the motifs of gifting? When rhetorical agents refer to something that they have or something that they are making as a gift, what does this mean? What about when they describe sharing their experiences as gifting, or when they talk about knowledge as a gift? This line of inquiry, as the reader will discover, runs through the three case studies of this book. Before proceeding to the section on the gifting logos and to the case studies themselves, however, I address directly two scholars whose works make the concept of the gift viable in rhetorical scholarship: Michael J. Hyde and Mari Lee Mifsud.
Rhetorician and bioethicist Michael J. Hyde offers an interpretation of acknowledgment as a life-giving gift that bestows upon another a dwelling place of ontological significance. Acknowledgment, Hyde writes, is “a form of consciousness that transforms time and space,” creating “a moral place of being-with-and-for-others.”159 In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Hyde traces the Judeo-Christian creation story alongside the scientific theory of a “big bang” explosion, claiming that both events extend a kind of “acknowledgment to Being.”160 The first phase of the gift of acknowledgment, then, is to make room. From this initial moment, all subsequent, smaller-scale acknowledgments are possible. On this point—the idea that originary acknowledgment (from a divine or cosmic power) enables acknowledgment as gift giving among human beings (in the context of Dasein)—Hyde gets more compelling fodder from the Bible than from scientists. He references the creative function of language, noting that God “called us into being with a ‘Word’ [Logos] of acknowledgement that brought forth the truth of all that is. By way of this most glorious gift, God created the place wherein all other such gifts could be given by creatures with the capacity to do so.”161 This inaugural giving returns in chapter 4 in my analysis of how the Pirate Party, emerging in view of the commons, gives a political construct. The original gift of acknowledgment, according to which