fait social total, or, the good-for-you gift

Music: Vasko: Enough Enough (2011)

The nature boy said that the hardest thing one will ever know is not a singular surrender, but a certain form of exchange. He didn't mean it in the way Mauss described the gift as "total prestation," or representative of a total way of communal being and relations based on a muted demand of reciprocity (he traces this back to agonistic display between tribes and so forth). But nature boy was on to something quite profound nonetheless, for implicated in the love relationship is the whole of the world of social being, a reflection of a certain cultural way of interaction. If one wishes to understand a culture, then one need look no further than the gift which, fundamentally, is a negotiation and gesture of love. Objects of exchange and display are reductions of bodies: family bodies and singular bodies, but bodies nonetheless; in mythic (and lived) schemes, these bodies historically have been those of women ("don't forget to bring your wife," or "who gives this woman?") and children.

A scented candle in a gift bag is nothing so weighty, one thinks. But were that true, Martha Stewart would not have a job.

Many of us have mastered the art of giving, but that is not knowledge (necessarily)---certainly not a consequence of learning, but an (almost) automatic response to the crying. One can give too much, especially of oneself, as in the destructions of hysterical self-effacement, or the faux-effacing sadism of sharing one's private pain (often to as large a receivership as possible).

Too often the gifts of love are offered "for our own good." Learning to accept these gifts, or at least recognize them as intended gestures of affection, is sometimes difficult, and part of that difficulty is Mauss' astute observation that there is no such thing as a free gift (or lunch), that a form of reciprocity is implied with just about any gift, however unwittingly so. Some frequent gift-givers (I do not exempt myself here) would be horrified to realize that their gestures of affection and care were at some level demands (at the very least, for recognition). Perhaps that horror is abated, somewhat, by the realization that this demand is not lodged at the level of the personal (although it may be for some) but at the level of culture. We are just emerging from "the holiday season" and every news story, for months now, has been about the retail purchase and return of "gifts." Presumably our "economy," now synonymous with U.S. culture, sits precariously balanced on the gesture of the gift. In other words, you cannot escape this "social fact": to opt out entails consequences (Grench, Scrooge, etc.) and for many risks the possibility of love.

There are ways to navigate this, and thankfully, we still teach our children that "homemade gifts"---construction paper art, finger paintings, flowering weeds from the side of the road---are "just as good" as an iPad. I saw this message repeatedly in the mass media, and was encouraged. If you cannot opt out, one can at least participate in the cultural exchange and acknowledge the social fact in meaningful ways.

With each year's shedding it has become easier for me to accept tokens of esteem (what another would have you wear, or read, or believe), to see beyond the object of the gift to the person who bears it, to see the gift as a vehicle for something else: a relationship, cultural reproduction, necessary forms of loving.

"Thank you son," my father said when he received his gift from me on Christmas day. "You thought about this, I know you thought about it."

"I know it's not much," I said, "but I hope the fact I puzzled over what I might get you makes up for that."

"It does. Papa used to give me a twenty, and that was that. It's nice to get something you thought about." He said this at least three times during my visit, and it made me feel good.

My father's mention of his own father's gifts was a pregnant moment, to queer a metaphor, because the cross one cannot bear and the bridge one cannot cross often concerns fathers and sons. My relationship with my father is a working-through of a relationship with his father, something I've known at a very young age and, I suspect, something familiar to many of us "sons" out there. Closely related to these complexities---how I'm not quite sure---is my father's passion for guns. I have never understood that passion (I'm scared of most weapons, with perhaps the exception of knives), and I'm always careful when I open a drawer in the house not to explore or fumble with my hands unaided by the reconnaissance of the eye. As much as it troubles me to feed my father's fasciation with things that kill, I gifted my father a weaponry magazine subscription and an encyclopedia of firearms for Christmas. There is, admittedly, a perverse pleasure in knowing this is a gift for which Jesus would not likely approve (unless, of course, it is the Jesus of a certain Georgian culture that I'm quite familiar with, the kind in which the Holy Bible is stored in the armrest of a Ford F150 with "monster" tires and a Confederate flag sunscreen applique right behind the gun rack).

I never knew, by the way, Gram Parsons was serious when he wrote that Jesus was just alright with him. He was a fool, not a grievous angel, not to pursue Emmylou instead of death. But I regress . . . .

There is a tall, non-descript, stone Confederate soldier with a moustache toting a rifle in the middle of the city square in Monroe, Georgia. I spent some time in Monroe over the holiday. I learned the city government gifts the community every year with a "live nativity" at the Walton County courthouse in the middle of the small, downtown area. Monroe is the type of small town that had died and then returned with a struggling but "revitalized" town square. The old hardware store is still in operation and, despite having been closed for two days, the owners left a flank of nice, handmade rocking chairs on the sidewalk. No one would think to take one unless she was visiting from out of town (yes, I thought to take one, although I would never actually do such a thing). The other vibrant business is, apparently, a tattoo parlor, which is in a small flat above what is dubbed a "Family Billiard Hall" (reminiscent of, I think, of stylings Hooters, which my friend Rob humorously describes as a "family titty bar"). I had an inedible salad, which I ate, in a nice restaurant with a best friend near the town square on Christmas Eve, and after we said our goodbyes, I enjoyed a secret cigar as I toured the town square alone. The "nativity" scene on the courtyard stuck me as an odd gift. What odd "prestation" was this?

When I came upon the manger scene, there were no live people animating it; for that I would need to come back in a few hours, after nightfall (and I would have, but most things were closed and there was nothing to do and I didn't bring a book and I am not yet brave enough to get those tattoos I've often fantasized about getting). In their stead were a series of plywood cutouts painted to resemble the New Testament nativity action figures. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus had rosy, pink flesh and wore some fetching pastel garments. The three wise men were deliberately depicted as the raced Other come to honor the white baby Jesus, one of them painted in very dark hues (the African wise man, you know), all dressed in fancy garb. I had seen such a scene thousands of times in my youth, but what puzzled me at the moment was the strange way in which a racial history was negotiated in this holy re-presentation. Rising just twenty feet behind the scene, between the makeshift hay shelter housing the plywood Christ and the steps of the courthouse, stood a thirty-foot monument dedicated to fallen Confederates who gave their lives to protect Monroe city and Walton county from the War of Northern Aggression. It's a common monument to see in the rural-ish south (apparently hundreds of replicas were made and dispersed to widows' groups in the early twentieth cetury). Standing at the corner of the square was the nativity, and rising above it, the stone soldier with rifle, and just above it, the modest edifice of the courthouse erected in 1884.

"Where do I locate the mediation?" I wondered. Is the black wise man mediating the relation between the Confederate monument and Christ? Or, was Plywood Jesus mediating the relation between the wise man and the Confederacy? Given the white Holy Family gathered in the hay to the right of the wise man, one could easily conclude the stiffs were created and painted by a white man (no doubt well intentioned and probably donated as a gift some years ago). It's also true the courtyard scene overdetermined an obvious, intended meaning: through Christ there is racial harmony. One is challenged to call this kind of gift anything other than tough love, since the economy of racial harmony is not one of exchange, but assignation. Oh, and assassination, lest we forget. It's a difficult love to accept and we are right to examine the horse's mouth very closely when the gift is to know our proper place.

Then again, isn't the gift about one's station? Prestation, indeed.

With this familiar, southern scene there is also a widely acknowledged, cultural pedagogy: this child is God's gift to humanity and you should learn to accept it and be grateful. The gift of the nativity scene is a pedagogy of receiving a gift, of knowing how to receive love. And the wise men, of course, brought gifts of their own in a proper reciprocity, following yonder star.

I would have liked to have seen the live nativity. I would have enjoyed observing how visitors reacted, or seeing if the actors moved. Would they have broken into spontaneous song? And what would they sing? And what is the racial diversity of the crowd?

I don't ask these questions cynically. My "reading" of the scene as a gifting-zone and site of social reproduction is clear, I think. But that does not mean folks assembled there would recognize this reading at all; I think, perhaps, they would experience what Mauss said of the exchange of gifts in general, that it is a quasi-spiritual experience in which the community refashions the image of itself.

Watching television with my mother and father during the last night of my visit, my mother, a ridiculously early-riser, dozed off by 7:30 p.m. A story appeared on television about corporate greed, and my father began complaining about the wealthy, corporate jet set (embodied, I think, by Michael Douglas as Gekko in Wall Street). Last week I reviewed an interesting book in which the author made an intriguing (and at times very funny) analogy between the transnational corporation and a cyborg in order to explain how these entities of Capital are structured in such a way as to make individual responsibility impossible to identify. I explained the analogy to my dad, and shared the author's example of the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (it's hard to hold any one person at BP accountable because the spill was a beautiful storm of instrumental reason and hive-like decision making). "That's an interesting way to see it, and it makes a lot of sense," my father said. "But tell me, would you rather not know that you know that? Now that you are an educator, do you ever sometimes think that 'ignorance is bliss?'"

I thought about the fabled role of the Receiver of Memory and how teaching in the humanities has become the realization of Giver. Children's literature is the new pornography, the new threat of the repressed returned. I also thought about where the level of ignorance lodged: that the true state of ignorance was thinking there was someone, or a group of specific someone's, to hold individually responsible. The problem, as the socialist "we" would say, is the system.

"No, I'm glad I know it," I said.

My father responded that the amount of energy it takes to think complexly about "the world" seemed exhausting, and the reward was often depressing. I thought immediately about Adorno and his insights about the culture industry revisited (or as I put it to my students, borrowing an example from my buddy Laura borrowed from The Matrix: "do you want the steak?"). Channeling Adorno in my folks' living room, however, was not a good idea at the moment.

I remembered earlier in the day my father had asked about Socrates, so I went with an example from Plato: "In one of his plays about rhetoric," I said, "Plato has Socrates win an argument with this dude about knowledge. He gets everyone to agree that knowledge is good, and even more astonishingly, that to know the good is to do the good. I don't know about that, since capitalism seems to prove the opposite is true. Anyway, as a side note, Socrates argues that it's better to suffer evil than commit it. Or something like that."

My dad thought the claim was interesting. I said I did not believe a lot of what Plato seemed to believe (though we really don't know), but I agreed with that particular ethical truth. And the observation that evil seems to entail some degree of knowledge, of knowing someone will suffer and doing it anyway.

There's really no moral to these ramblings other than the obvious one: the only true gift is the thoughtful one, and the only bad gift is the one that one gives knowing it's a bad gift. The worst gift is the one that punishes or puts others in their "place," either because it is "good for them" or what you or someone else thinks they "need."