thanksgiving with adorno

Music: Autumn's Grey Solace: Winterrim (2012)

I noticed, across the alley where empty carports with rusted roofs were almost emptied of their escape pods, a dog had his way with a squeaking toy somewhere out of sight. The newspaper next to the tire, slightly deflated, was fat. As the parade rolled down seventh avenue I dumped the paper onto the ottoman and there was no mention---from the screen or the paper---of the scandal surrounding the red puppet, from which came a joyful song, "nothing's going to bring us down" (except, of course, a lawsuit that appears to be motivated less by impropriety than money). The paper itself was thin on content or story, however, there must have been a hundred circulars advertising "door busters" beginning tonight, at 9:00 p.m. The paper, like the parade, is a paean to profit and part of the logic of the gift.

The cooking will commence in an hour, for inwardness.

Long before Halloween, big box doors were selling Christmas trees to prime the confusion of sociality with consumption. The lead story on the front of the paper today announced that "Black Thursday" has now arrived, meaning that many stores are opening today, on Thanksgiving. "Retailers' hours have sparked controversy," Gary Dinges reports, for encroaching on "family time" (Texas retailer H.E.B. gets an implied pat on the back for closing today at 2:00 pm.). Reading this, I was caused to remember my favorite critical curmudgeon Theodor Adorno had said somewhere that we have forgotten how to give gifts. An InterTube search re-membered, it was Minima Moralia, drafted in the 40s but published in 1952:

We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something non¬sensical and implausible about it; here and there even children eye the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them brushes or soap. Instead we have charity, administered beneficence, the planned plastering-over of society's visible sores. In its organ¬ized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short through treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degener¬ated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, skeptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one's way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At the best they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to. This merchandise is unrelated like its buyers. It was a drug in the market, from the first day.

I'm not so sure I agree, at least to the letter. Marcel Mass taught us in 1923 that the gift is never "free," but entails a kind of reciprocity "magic," a compulsory exchange that is the social tie. The gift exchange is fundamentally an expression of love through an economy of obligation, and this is not a bad thing, but rather a necessity: "I thought of you, here is an object of our relation, a piece of me." The gift is at some remove a request for recognition, something we all need to be social, but it is also a two-way street; one does not give selflessly, however, one also recognizes there is more than self and the other deserves recognition too.

Still, Adorno's point is that we are forgetting the point: if the gift concerns the relation, then gifting others what one would wish to gift the self reflects "the isolated cell of pure inwardness" that treats others as "objects." A good example of the deterioration of the social ties of gift giving is reflected in Target's recent commercial campaign (later edit: Target removed their full-length commercial from YouTube; here is a 15 second copy):

The spot is as cynical as it is disgusting, and it is no mistake that the ad browsing "mom" draws hearts on the gifts she wants for herself. Perhaps even worse is the second spot that celebrates the social bonding of shopping while making fun of TeenAge argot: "what if you could shop forever?" In each case, the other for whom the gift is imagined is not, as Adorno would have it, someone for whom one imagines the joy of receipt. Here the joy is in the procuring of booty, in the "bad grace" of buying gifts because they are "deals," of imagining oneself in a kind of consumptive play or television show in which purchasing skill reaps recognition in a unidirectional manner. The gift giving here is no longer a dialogue, but a monologue. It is as if the other is an object or actor in my own reality show in which I am the star: "me me me me me me me me me."

We might think about the logic of consumptive drift---the overtaking of Thanksgiving, fundamentally a celebration of food, friends, and family, by commercial imperatives---as another example of what I have been calling "cultural psychosis," the same logic to which mass shooters succumb. Again, from the Lacanian vantage, psychosis refers to a state in which one has not reckoned with the law as "no," a realization of one's limitations and the necessary dependency on others we share as social creatures. In a psychotic state (by which I do not mean pathology, but the adjectival form), other people are objects, not subjects in themselves deserving of recognition. Hence, giving the perfect gift is couched in metaphors of war:

"Who's your mommy now?" goes the interior monologue of the mom doing battle with the affections of her children. The advertisement reflects Adorno's observation that children eye gift givers with suspicion, even their own mothers. And I do not think it is a mistake that there is no father or second parent in the scene: the absence of the paternal metaphor is a hallmark of psychosis (as so ably demonstrated by, for example, the film Fight Club); the phrase "who's your mommy now?" is, of course, changed from a sports quip, "who's your daddy now?" The joy of the children is secondary to the smug satisfaction of mother. There is no daddy, only the unbridled enjoyment of mother. Hitchcock concocted a feature-length film of this commercial; he titled it Psycho.

The real controversy here is not that stores are opening on Thanksgiving; it's the logic that gift receivers are to be overcome, not with joy, but with gratitude---that love slays, reducing others to their proper roles in my world.