three components. The humans, articulated as a multitude of networked individuals, convene in the practices of rhetorical constitution; the immersive resources, or digital stuff that connect them, are incorporated in networked interaction and governance; and the networks of governance supply the infrastructure for productivity. Second, analyzing the digital commons with reference to the natural and cultural commons brings to light certain qualities of the aggregate that demand scholarly attention, specifically from rhetoricians. These qualities include situated experience in particular sites, the importance of inventive knowledge and lived experience in social relationships, and the boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Third, rhetorical scholars, who have long studied commonplace argumentation and networked persuasion, have much to gain by deploying the commons as a critical concept for productive sociality. Doing so allows us to complement more familiar terms, such as public and audience. This opportunity is essential for scholars of digital rhetoric and also potentially useful and significant for others.
THE GIFT
Gifts are messages. That is to say, gifting is a rhetorical practice. It is an engagement between a giver-rhetor and a recipient-audience, mediated by a third substance. The gift-message may be as petty as “I did not forget to bring a gift” (see, for example, all birthday parties for children under five years old) or as vital as organ donation. In each case, the gift communicates. In this section I introduce five prominent thinkers who have responded to either the question “What is a gift?” or the slightly different “What functions does a gift serve?” In chronological order I highlight recurring themes in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Hyde, and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers’ commitments lie in the interstices of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, art, and economics. And insofar as they have shaped the very concept of the gift as we know it, one cannot write about gifting without giving due space and attention to each of their perspectives. I survey them here in order to identify certain insights that inform my rhetorical position on gifting. It is thus important that I begin with a declaration of my own assumption: gifts are messages. As I explain in the next section, which deals directly with the gifting logos, my concern is with the rhetoricity of gifting and with the presence of gifting rhetoric in activities that are typically thought of as unrelated to gifts. Operating from this position, I am relieved of the burden of determining whether there really is such a thing as a gift or whether one can really give or receive a true gift. Because gifts are messages—because gifting is a rhetorical practice—the determination must depend on the event of the message rather than on a transcendent, absolute standard.
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Curse of Wisdom (1883–1885)
In the parable of Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche theorizes the gift in two forms. From Zarathustra himself, who leaves his mountain and “goes under” to impart wisdom to humans, the gift of wisdom is unreceivable.72 Humans do not understand.73 In response to Zarathustra’s unintelligible message, the people laugh; hating him, they treat him like a jester.74 Lamenting this, Zarathustra asks himself, “They receive from me, but do I touch their souls?”75 By definition, Zarathustra’s gift cannot be received. That this is so is reflected in the failure of his project, which ultimately does not generate a cohort of “overhumans.” The humans are unable to receive the gift they really need. They are incapable of grasping Zarathustra’s insight that gifted wisdom cannot be wisdom in any true sense. With reference to the tenth and sixteenth chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, Zarathustra exhorts his followers to “lose me and find yourselves.”76 Nietzsche insists that the gift of wisdom cannot be received when wisdom is understood as a perspective on the folly of the social world.77
Within the social world—this is the second form in which Nietzsche theorizes the gift—gifting is self-interested manipulation, driven by pride and shame. Giving gifts is a selfish drive in pursuit of the “gift-giving virtue” that puts in the eyes of the gifter a “goldlike gleam.”78 That humans stuff themselves (with material or symbolic goods) so that gift-giving love can flow out of them as from a well is deeply selfish.79 To help a person out of pity by bringing her a gift brings her only shame. Such charity turns into a “gnawing worm” of indebtedness.80 In other words, regarding gifts within the social order, Nietzsche aligns with theorists who emphasize the political dictates of gifting. The saint who appears early in the story underscores the sociality of gifting, explaining to Zarathustra that people do not believe that hermits bring gifts since their “steps sound too lonely through the streets.”81 Givers of gifts are not lonely but belong in society. Important to note here, of course, is that to Nietzsche this belonging is deplorable, even nauseating.82 The overman might value friendship, but he does not stomach the collective.83 And the gifts with which humans administer their pity and persuasion are efficacious only there.84
Nietzsche’s theory of the gift in both forms explicated here posits desperation as a motive. Zarathustra’s impulse to give away his wisdom reflects how, as a cup that overflows, he “wants to become empty again,” which is to say that he “wants to become man again.”85 With his gift still intact, he is something other than a man. His gift (of wisdom) is onerous, setting him aside from the humans. He is like a bee burdened with too much honey. The gift is a compulsion, however, and Zarathustra discovers that his wisdom cannot be received. He complains that his “happiness in giving died in giving.”86 The humans’ system of gifts, as demonstrated in Zarathustra’s lectures, is inextricably tied to the meanings of virtue, which entail punishment, justice, and reward—all of which are learned from fools and liars.87 Those who give do so in an effort to control the actions of those whom they pity. Those who receive begin to resent the experience of obligation. Givers and receivers alike, Nietzsche intimates, are drawn to and trapped in sociality. There, humans can actually wield gifts in a symbolically coherent way, in contrast to the wisdom-gift that Zarathustra offers. The trouble is that the ways in which they wield the wisdon gift only recommit them to good and evil.88
Marcel Mauss: In Praise of the Noble Expenditure (1925)
In the most widely cited ethnography of gift exchange in “primitive”/“archaic” cultures, Marcel Mauss identifies the functions of gifting for the social order.89 He examines gifting habits as the “total social phenomena” of the Samoan, Maori, Andaman, and Melanesian peoples, encompassing religious, moral, economic, and legal institutions. To trace the history and cultural force of these social phenomena, he relies on the concept of “prestations,” which indexes a protoeconomic arrangement “between clan and clan in which individuals and groups exchange everything between them.”90 Within prestations, material objects circulate “side by side with the circulation of persons and rights.”91 Geographically distant cultures, Mauss demonstrates, rely on institutions that “reveal the same kind of social and psychological pattern. Food, women, children, possessions, charms, land, labor, services, religious offices, rank—everything is stuff to be given away and repaid.”92 As gifted stuff circulates, power is managed as “property and a possession, a pledge and a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a mandate, a trust; for it [the gift] is given only on condition that it will be used on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person, the remote partner.”93 Gift exchange cultures, according to Mauss, depend on a circulation system that produces social capital.
The social capital generated by gift exchange may be understood in Mauss’s analysis as agglutinating and manipulative. The agglutination happens as prestations form internal and intergroup bonds. In addition, it happens as a function of the symbolic relationship between a gift and a giver, or donor. Mauss notes that in Maori culture, an object that is given away “still forms a part of” the donor, affording him or her “a hold over the recipient.”94 Regarding the Brahminic law of Hindu cultures, Mauss explains, “Nowhere is the connection between the thing given and the donor, or between property and its owner, more clearly apparent than in the rules relating to gifts and cattle.”95
