as Hyde would have it), the gift is full of potential; the recipient’s task is to manage the proliferation of the gift’s materiality without squelching the animus of excessive generosity with which the gift arrives.
Both Hyde and Mifsud provide ways of understanding the gift as rhetorical; in so doing, their work is indispensable to my project. And yet I am troubled by the way that both scholars isolate the gift from the complications of human conduct. To them, the gift is principally an a priori circumstance, expressed by the grace (or call) of God, Homer, or Aristotle. By extension it may be given among rhetorical agents in particular actions, but only insofar as these agents are capable of something as existentially noble as responding, “Here I am!” Neither Hyde’s nor Mifsud’s insightful work dedicates attention to the human practices that situate gifting inside ordinary experience. My ambition is to present a theory of the gifting logos, relying via Heraclitus on the multilevel meanings of logos to examine not only the noble but the quotidian. Conceptually adding logos to gifting in this way allows me to approach the gift as rhetorical, as integral to symbolic practices. By now I have sufficiently emphasized my assumption that gifts are messages. Specifically, the gifting logos accounts for the production and circulation of epistemic materials in the networked context of the digital commons. By arguing that digital commoners engage with discourses of expertise via the gifting logos, I am grounding Hyde’s and Mifsud’s works in everyday rhetorical life.
A distinctly rhetorical perspective on the gift does not buckle under the weight of romantic idealism. I am convinced that this perspective is valuable insofar as it is more attuned to what people claim to be doing than what they may be said to be doing according to an absolute standard. Most gifting theory is full of absolutes. In Ralph W. Emerson’s poetic imagination, for example, “The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. [. . .] Thou must bleed for me.”182 As beautiful as Emerson’s portrayal is, I am compelled to ask whether the kinds of gifts that he describes are the only ones that count, and if so, why. What insights might be gained by choosing not to disqualify nonbleeding instances of gifting as inadequate? Christina M. Geschwandtner suggests:
While a kenotic and self-sacrificial love, a purely gratuitous and entirely unselfish gift, a devoted and pure appreciation of art, or a profound sense of the utter uniqueness of each historical and cultural event may be the ideals, surely they cannot be the exclusive paradigms for all love, all gifts, all art, all events without thereby implying that all less extreme versions immediately collapse into objectivity and certainty.183
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
