Proposition 18 Give the Gift of Giving

potlatch

Generating the Impossible proposes to activate an art event that metamodels the resonance between the aesthetic and the political through the creation of a qualitative economy of relation. It proposes as a metamodeling tool the concept of the gift. For the gift to function for this project, it must be understood as a force of giving more than as an object of exchange. The event proposes to reappropriate the force of giving as a force of life inven-tive of new forms.

The subtitle of Generating the Impossible is “a potlatch for research- creation.” We take our inspiration here from the practice of potlatch of the First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, a practice that involves a ceremonial period of feasting followed by a lavish giving away, and some- times destruction, of goods and property.43 Following Marcel Mauss’s writings as well as those of Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida, we emphasize that potlatch is a way of modulating the field of relation as a function of its limit. What is shared is not so much wealth as the limit-idea of gathering, in a manner that counteracts the stultifying tendencies of community understood in terms of harmony. This is accomplished through an excess of objects of exchange and their destruction. The excess of gifts creates quasi-chaotic conditions nudging harmony toward polyrhythm. The destruction of the gift leaves nothing but the having-given. It focuses the experience on the event of giving and its iterations and modulations.

Potlatch is a practice for reorienting and remodulating the field of exchangeability. This reorienting, as Mauss points out, involves a giving of “a part of one’s nature” (1966, 10). We take this not to suggest a subject- oriented view of donor and receiver, but as an acknowledgement that what connects the social group is the sharing of the more-than of their individual subjectivities in the context of a ritual technique of hospitality and event-based generosity.

What is given, Mauss adds, is not inert (1966, 9). What is given is the gift of giving itself, replete with resettings of the conditions for emergence of the field of relation. Generosity as ritual technique occurs in a field of relation that cannot be reduced to the giver as individual, or the object as gift, or even the punctual connection between the two in a particular act of giving. Potlatch is a giving for the event by the event. It is the setting into motion of a platform for relation that activates the potential for modes of collaboration, pushing exchangeability to its creative limit. In potlatch, giving reorganizes the event-ecology of co-composition.

The gift of giving touches the limit. The “last” gift is the limit in relation to which to the field of exchangeability maintains its rhythm and intensity. In potlatch, giving reorients the field of relations without forcing a complete undermining of the communities’ modalities of operation. In tribal societies, the gift brings clans together for a celebration. The potlatch wards off war by staging an activity that, like war, is excessive, but unlike war activates the limit of the social field without crossing the threshold into violence and completely unforeseeable consequences. Ritual plays a key role here, creating an experiential space-time that diverges from, while still composing with, everyday experience. Without the metastability of ritual, without the practices that creatively reassess the limit from within the bounds of the event itself, there is always a risk that the threshold will be crossed into a different field of relation entirely. (The destruction of objects of exchange also wards off capitalism by preventing the accumulation of a surplus.) The giving of the event is how this technique of relation activates emergent comings-together and belongings-together, subordinating the categories of donor and receiver to their continued co-involvement in a shared process. A gift economy is not about the object. It is about Klee’s
propositions line: the polyrhythmic force of expression that sustains and modulates living-together, intuitively resisting calculation.

The gift of giving is ineffable, known only in the interruption it stages. What it interrupts are tendencies that might move toward a crossing of a threshold. This realigns the field of relation by repositioning exchange in excess of human-centered reciprocity. The gift of giving belongs to excess, immanent excess: a field of sociality overfull of its own rhythms and rebeginnings, brimming with transindividual concern for the modalities of exchangeability it calls forth.

The giving of giving is a ritual of emergent attunement that is a technique for reorienting the event of coming-together. It alters time. The now of giving is already reorienting in a future- fielding of the moment. Giving sets into motion an anticipation of the limit that futures the present in the making in such a way as to make felt and simultaneously ward off a necessary crossing of a threshold—in a kind of preemptive politics.

To the extent that potlatch wards off the crossing of the threshold, it ensures a conservative function (in the most basic definition of the word, as preserving or sustaining). It has a radicality as well, to the extent that it makes intensively felt, as a creative factor, the same limit whose crossing it preempts. Generating the Impossible means to play the limit of artistic activity, in the context in which we work, making felt the potential crossing of its threshold—but without prescribing whether, when, and in what manner the threshold is to be crossed. The decision to cross into a new relational field—which in this case is not one of violence but is one of struggle—is not the province of the event organizers, or of any individual. It can only be a decision for the event by the event in respect of its processual autonomy.

a community without guarantees

Derrida suggests that the reorienting accomplished by the gift of giving— the fielding of the future in the passing present of giving itself—must entail an active forgetting, a Nietzschean radical undermining of time as memory of a present past (Derrida 1992, 16). As Nietzsche writes, “Forgetting is not simply a kind of inertia, as superficial minds tend to believe, but rather the active faculty to . . . provide some silence . . . to make place for the new . . . those are the uses for what I have called an active forgetting” (1969, 57–58). A gift economy orients time in an active forgetting of the object and exchange as such.

The destruction of the gift in practices of potlatch is often misunderstood as simply the destruction of actual objects. While it is certainly also a destruction of wealth, the potlatch ritual is even more so an active for- getting of the wealth itself through a foregrounding of the event-time of giving. Forgetting activates the field of relation in such a way that the emphasis is based no longer on the subject–object encounter (and all the forms of ressentiment this calls forth) but on the ways in which this singularity of expression activates a new kind of collective futurity. For- getting, as Maurice Blanchot emphasizes, “ushers in a thought, a future, a community without any guarantees.” This ushering is the giving itself— not a gift of the past, but a gift for the future—“a leap into the unknown” (Ramadanovic 2001). In Generating the Impossible, the usher of destruction and forgetting will be the free radical.

If forgetting is the condition of giving, the gift is the sign of the impossible. As such, it cannot be thought in time. It evades the linear time-structure of capitalist economics: the arrow of value-adding and accumulation. Instead, it invents a time of the not-yet that will have been, a future- anterior in and of the relational field of giving. Capitalism, as Joseph Schumpeter famously stated, is also about excess and “creative destruction.” But it practices forgetting as a kind of inertia. It forgets to actively forget, in order always to return to exchange in a way that ostensibly makes it all about the object again. The capitalist economy continually translates excess relational activity into objective surplus. It stockpiles objects and instruments of exchange (material and immaterial) for eventual turnover, as part of its market pricing mechanisms and investment cycles. In order to do this, it is forever requantifying: translating the qualities of life associ- ated with objects of exchange as found in their emergent field of relation into quantitative measures.

As discussed earlier, research-creation participates in both the gift alter- economy and the dominant quantitative economy. The art market is no different than any other. It translates the excess relational activity of research-creation into object-oriented surplus, even finding ways to stockpile and quantitatively value “ephemeral art.” The prevalence of the concern for new modes of documentation and archiving is a sign of the art-economic times. Prestige-value, for its part, is ever renascent. The collective evaluation at the limit in the model of the gift economy is back- grounded, and the vicissitudes of the market itself, its arrow of measurable value adding, are foregrounded.

The shift from a gift economy of excess to a quantitative surplus
propositions economy happens when exchange-as-attunement loses its desirability. The forgetting that tunes to the anticipatory environment of exchange- ability is replaced by the arrow of quantitative value-adding. Reterritorial- ized on the art institution as annexed to the art market. This dampens the potential of artistic activity to create and participate as a force for modulating a relational field as a function of the limit and threshold. The expressive force of art-work is dulled. It is no longer Klee’s line. It is an arrow of objective accumulation: it is less force than form. Art too often surrenders its potential to give time, to activate forgetting, to create conditions for future thinking and doing, becoming.