The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
Sharing Geschwandtner’s interest in gifts and events beyond the “purely gratuitous and entirely unselfish,” I might add that mundane gifting is not necessarily trivial. Gifting may be, as I suggest, a rhetorical way of making sense of something, a logos. John McAteer, positing a “third kind of gift” in between absolute grace and a stick of gum, proposes that “we think of gift as communion where what is given is the gift of being-with-the-other.”184 This Heideggerian tack has considerable potential, even if McAteer’s Christian ethics are bracketed. From this vantage point, we might see the event of being-together as a given, indeed a condition of what is common.
THE GIFTING LOGOS
The gifting logos is the epistemic rhetoric of the digital commons whereby knowing and making become integrated practices of everyday life, thematized as gifting. The purpose of this book is to present a theory of how this logos functions as expertise. At the beginning of this chapter, I stated that expertise is knowledge living its rhetorical life. In the present historical moment, this life is intensely focused on the production of interpretations of everyday experiences. Expertise is thus the production of digital stuff that captures the lived experiences of networked commoners. The gifting logos affords the commoners a rhetorical activity that configures them as a networked multitude. In a continuous process of invention, the knowledges and experiences of the multitude are digitized, and through the continuous process of circulation, the digitized stuff is constituted as a gift. The making and knowing of the multitude are inextricably linked, and the language of gifting supplies the link. To be clear, the issue at stake in my project is not whether the digital multitude is really giving away knowledge, art, or other materials free of charge, nor is it whether digital commoners are authentically generous or altruistic. Instead, the question is: What are the characteristics and functions of the gifting logos as a rhetorical habit? As a rhetoric of expertise, how does it integrate making, knowing, and gifting? I foreshadow the conclusion chapter by briefly introducing here five prevalent features of the gifting logos; I return to these in more detail following the case studies.
The gifting logos assumes participants’ awareness in order to function.
The gifting logos places significant emphasis on the intentionality of those who engage one another through the message of a gift. Its ordering of knowing-and-making activities in the digital commons becomes most distinct when commoners articulate a kind of informal theory of what they are doing. As is evident in the section on gifting theory, the motives of those who give and receive gift-messages are central not only to their relationship but also to the health of the social system around them. Successful gifting happens in the context of mutual recognition. In rhetoric, the counterpart of intent is agency, a fraught notion that questions how rhetorical agents intervene in particular situations so as to exert influence over the behaviors and beliefs of others. Rhetorical agency and intentionality are recurring points of scholarly contention precisely because they push the question of humans’ impact on their context, indeed their awareness thereof. With respect to this contention, I offer additional nuance to this feature of the gifting logos in chapter 5.
Emphasizing intent, the gifting logos makes entry into the networks of the digital commons a matter of active participation. Moreover, awareness of one’s participation in the gifting logos becomes a strategy for maintaining the integrity of one’s network node with respect to future uncertainty. The productive interactions of the digital commoners are predicated to some degree on the idea that their fully conscious decisions lead to a future for the digital commons that is consistent with individual choices and that those choices may be fixed in digital form. This is not to say that the gifting logos never makes room for those who produce and circulate cultural materials without active use of the gift concept. Circulating material can function as epistemic gift-stuff to some degree even without gifters’ or receivers’ explicit recognition of their materials’ impact. Still, the contours of the gifting logos emerge most visibly as digital commoners construct their knowing and making practices as expertise-as-gift.
The gifting logos derives rhetorical potency from tensions between artifice and nature.
The gifting logos thrives on the tension between, on the one hand, the idea that knowing-making-gifting happens naturally in the commons, and, on the other hand, the idea that commoners must intentionally codify this practice. So it is that the resources of the digital commons, the stuff that the commoners use and invent, are constructed through the gifting logos as both natural and artificial, or, as I demonstrate in chapter 4, as both a matter of access to nature and a state of political governance. Relatedly, in the rhetorical processes of expertise, the natural and artificial are oriented in relation to the familiar and the unfamiliar. Expertise is the making sense of something for others to consider. To make something unnatural seem necessary and natural (such as access to a broadband infrastructure or digitized music) is to make it natural or to rhetorically give it over to an audience in a natural form. To transform something mysterious into something familiar is to make it knowable. Conversely, to make something like silicon and metal wiring into a mystery is a matter of rhetorical epistemology. The gifting logos as expertise thus wields the rhetorical tension between nature and artifice.
The gifting logos is abundant.
The gifting logos as a rhetoric of expertise values quantity and the promiscuous replication of “stuff.” “Lots and lots” is the motif of the gifting logos; to have lots is to know lots, according to the discourses of expertise in the digital commons. The bigger the data, the better the expertise. In the abundant digital networks of the commons, delivery and access are thus fully wedded; any and all things that circulate in the networks to which commoners have access are entirely assessible (access-able) to them. Expertise, measured in bulk, functions such that the more of it that is delivered to nodes in the network, the more of it the nodes can absorb. On this point, the gifting logos aligns with the history of rhetoric in which copia has been associated with expertise and knowledge, specifically how expressions may be multiplied so that a subject may be fully understood. A subject is made knowable through repetition that produces an abundant result. In digital networks, the scale and speed of copia are distinguishable from more traditional forms of repetition. With speed and scope operating in tandem, the abundance of digital “stuff” effectively becomes immersive, a substance mediating between digital commoners.
The gifting logos is time sensitive and progressivist.
Because it is a rhetorical practice, the gifting logos is necessarily time sensitive, attuned to kairotic moments of appropriate intervention. Further, because it is a gifting practice, timing is everything; timing enables a meaningful gift. For example, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, time variously constrains the gifting logos as productive expertise via the structure of copyright, which dictates that the ownership privileges of expertise are contingent on time. The basic tenet of copyright is that those who create materials are entitled to enjoy the benefits of their creation for a limited time. Expertise as content is thus timed. Adding another layer, the gifting logos manages time-as-history, indeed makes time, through the retrieval technology of digital archiving. The Wayback Machine, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, gives the past of the digital commons to the commoners, making digitized history knowable. Finally, the time sensitivity of the giving logos is set to “urgent”; digital commoners are called, for example by the Pirate Party in chapter 4, to act quickly in order to ensure a happy and prosperous future. Via the gifting logos, expertise refers both to making history knowable (accessible via a screen) and to the historical progress of technologies that serve networks of the commons.185
The gifting logos assumes a rhetorically playful posture toward its “others.”
Unlike the serious affect that characterizes traditional expertise, enabling experts to be taken seriously as such, the gifting logos often operates in a playful and irreverent mode. It is a rhetorical epistemic habit that distinguishes itself from other epistemic habits and hierarchies by being un-serious. In so doing, it facilitates critique of these others via comic subversion and parody. Whereas traditional politicians