The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
“rhetoric and acknowledgement go hand in hand.”163 In the study of public address, audiences are not remote variables of the rhetorical situation but must be “acknowledged, engaged, and called into the space of practical concerns.”164 Hyde’s rhetor offers acknowledgment as a gift that he or she is able to give against the odds of being, which is always already precarious. Hyde writes:
Acknowledgement is a moral action that in its most positive mode is dedicated to making time and space for the disclosing of truth. Appropriateness helps to facilitate this action by lending itself to the rhetorical task of creating dwelling places wherein people can collaborate about and know together matters of importance. Human beings are gifted with the potential for developing the capacity to perform such an artistic and moral feat.165
Here the gift is not just an acknowledgment extended by the rhetor to another person but the potency that the rhetor possesses. Via the notion of a gift, Hyde identifies “rhetorical competence” as “essential for our social well-being.”166
Mari Lee Mifsud in Rhetoric and the Gift likewise interprets the gift as presented by a call from something Other and adds to this the more mundane habits in which gifts are human necessities. Mifsud’s theory of the rhetorical gift, in other words, is dual, at once profoundly excessive and pragmatic. First, rhetoric as a gift that exceeds figuration is “outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures.”167 The call demands a response, which gives rise to figuration and to rhetoric. It is a gift to be called, Mifsud argues, as Aristotle was called by Homer. The former’s works are full of invocations and references to Homeric poetry; these references, cataloged by Mifsud in a sort of re-performance of Homer’s and Aristotle’s gifting, amount to poesis in rhetorike. Second, on the more technical level, the “level of the artful response,” rhetoric concerns itself with gifts more readily understood as cultural inheritance.168 Aristotle’s theory relies substantively and stylistically on such inheritances, as does any ordinary exchange between friends that starts with “Well, you know what they say.” The elegance of Mifsud’s project is how she traces the movement of the gift from the pre-techne call to the “art-full” system of figuration. She is explicitly set on how “the gift we get on the other side of the gift’s having gone through the technical apparatus is something quite different than the gift had been” under circumstances “not amenable to figuration.”169
In Mifsud’s analysis of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory, the deliverer of gifts is Homer, who “gives the sublime to the civic.”170 As a function of his gift giving (i.e., the call from the “imaginative, inventive, and ingenious” muse-cum-patriarch), Aristotle is capable of formulating the precepts that still nourish rhetoricians.171 Further, the Homeric themes of gift giving that structures human relationships and interactions inform Aristotle’s poetic scenes and dramas.172 Homer’s gift is settled into Aristotle’s text topically and metaphorically. Further still, Aristotle’s Homeric references make manifest the givens of the cultural history that unites the two Greeks and the givens of the cultural context to which Aristotle’s audience belongs. As Mifsud explains, “By ‘givens,’ I mean to call attention to the performance of the Homeric gift transformed into the doxa of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The doxa are ‘generally accepted principles’ derived from the beliefs of a people that all or a majority or the wise accept.”173 These principles are taken for granted—a potent phrase in this context—as appropriate and self-evident without further explanation. As gifts, they are, Mifsud argues, haplous, or without the need for qualifying remarks.174 In order to mentally conflate doxastic principles and gifts, readers might think both about whatever “truths we hold to be self-evident” and whatever presents are handed over pro forma at a dinner party (flowers, a bottle of wine, etc.). They are simply that they are; they are a given. Being able to wield them competently, in Mifsud’s words to practice them as a rhetorical art, is a sign of cultural viability.
Within Mifsud’s framework, gifts are both material and “animistic” in a way that obligates recipients to respond.175 To describe gifts as material, Mifsud emphasizes how “aggregation guides relations in the gift economy.”176 Gifts tend toward their own multiplication and reproduction. Mifsud oscillates back and forth across the line that separates one gift from another, or a gifted symbol from a gifted thing, or an initial gift from a reciprocal one, noting “multiple and divergent things can be seen as touching.”177 The “animistic quality,” then, is an indication that the given material that tends toward its own aggregation “is not inactive” but indeed active and effectual.178 The gift, to simplify, must be understood as both tangible stuff and intentional in its own right. Reflecting on this insight, Mifsud’s reader might turn to her conclusions about Aristotle’s relation to Homer, which deploy the aforementioned dual notion of the gift and posit a sacrifice. Aristotle sacrifices Homer, Mifsud argues, insofar as he gives up on gifting ethics in favor of the prudential rhetoric of the polis. As the epic dramas of Homer’s world are translated and condensed for the managerial purposes of everyday life, poesis is dehydrated into civic judgment.179 The polis demands rhetoric as a techne; song has no business in the polis, Mifsud laments. And although Mifsud insists that she is not attempting a corrective on Homer’s behalf, her sanguine gifting theory of rhetoric suggests otherwise. Refusing to sacrifice Homer as though on a patricidal pyre of political necessity, we “need not continue to make the same choices” as Aristotle does in his appropriation of the gift.180 Mifsud promises an alternative, a theory and praxis of the rhetorical gift that supplies “resources for resisting tyranny.”181 More than a call (of conscience, as Hyde would have it), the gift is full of potential; the recipient’s task is to manage the proliferation of the gift’s materiality without squelching the animus of excessive generosity with which the gift arrives.
Both Hyde and Mifsud provide ways of understanding the gift as rhetorical; in so doing, their work is indispensable to my project. And yet I am troubled by the way that both scholars isolate the gift from the complications of human conduct. To them, the gift is principally an a priori circumstance, expressed by the grace (or call) of God, Homer, or Aristotle. By extension it may be given among rhetorical agents in particular actions, but only insofar as these agents are capable of something as existentially noble as responding, “Here I am!” Neither Hyde’s nor Mifsud’s insightful work dedicates attention to the human practices that situate gifting inside ordinary experience. My ambition is to present a theory of the gifting logos, relying via Heraclitus on the multilevel meanings of logos to examine not only the noble but the quotidian. Conceptually adding logos to gifting in this way allows me to approach the gift as rhetorical, as integral to symbolic practices. By now I have sufficiently emphasized my assumption that gifts are messages. Specifically, the gifting logos accounts for the production and circulation of epistemic materials in the networked context of the digital commons. By arguing that digital commoners engage with discourses of expertise via the gifting logos, I am grounding Hyde’s and Mifsud’s works in everyday rhetorical life.
A distinctly rhetorical perspective on the gift does not buckle under the weight of romantic idealism. I am convinced that this perspective is valuable insofar as it is more attuned to what people claim to be doing than what they may be said to be doing according to an absolute standard. Most gifting theory is full of absolutes. In Ralph W. Emerson’s poetic imagination, for example, “The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. [. . .] Thou must bleed for me.”182 As beautiful as Emerson’s portrayal is, I am compelled to ask whether the kinds of gifts that he describes are the only ones that count, and if so, why. What insights might be gained by choosing not to disqualify nonbleeding instances of gifting as inadequate? Christina M. Geschwandtner suggests:
While a kenotic and self-sacrificial love, a purely gratuitous and entirely unselfish gift, a devoted and pure appreciation of art, or a profound sense of the utter uniqueness of each historical and cultural event may be the ideals, surely they cannot be the exclusive paradigms for all love, all gifts, all art, all events without thereby implying that all less extreme versions immediately collapse