in Aristotle’s words, may be defined as discerning the available means of persuasion in any given situation. With this tacit acknowledgment of preexisting conditions in which events take place (or time—remember, “Rain rains”), rhetoricians are scholars of the gift, albeit implicitly. Moving toward a more explicit model, I submit that by rendering insights from the five thinkers discussed here, it is possible to build a specifically rhetorical theory of gifting. What I am interested in is the question, What happens rhetorically when a cultural practice is constructed by participants through the motifs of gifting? When rhetorical agents refer to something that they have or something that they are making as a gift, what does this mean? What about when they describe sharing their experiences as gifting, or when they talk about knowledge as a gift? This line of inquiry, as the reader will discover, runs through the three case studies of this book. Before proceeding to the section on the gifting logos and to the case studies themselves, however, I address directly two scholars whose works make the concept of the gift viable in rhetorical scholarship: Michael J. Hyde and Mari Lee Mifsud.
Rhetorician and bioethicist Michael J. Hyde offers an interpretation of acknowledgment as a life-giving gift that bestows upon another a dwelling place of ontological significance. Acknowledgment, Hyde writes, is “a form of consciousness that transforms time and space,” creating “a moral place of being-with-and-for-others.”159 In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Hyde traces the Judeo-Christian creation story alongside the scientific theory of a “big bang” explosion, claiming that both events extend a kind of “acknowledgment to Being.”160 The first phase of the gift of acknowledgment, then, is to make room. From this initial moment, all subsequent, smaller-scale acknowledgments are possible. On this point—the idea that originary acknowledgment (from a divine or cosmic power) enables acknowledgment as gift giving among human beings (in the context of Dasein)—Hyde gets more compelling fodder from the Bible than from scientists. He references the creative function of language, noting that God “called us into being with a ‘Word’ [Logos] of acknowledgement that brought forth the truth of all that is. By way of this most glorious gift, God created the place wherein all other such gifts could be given by creatures with the capacity to do so.”161 This inaugural giving returns in chapter 4 in my analysis of how the Pirate Party, emerging in view of the commons, gives a political construct. The original gift of acknowledgment, according to which subsequent ones are modeled, begins with making.162
The notion of the gift, as Hyde explains, reveals how “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
