BOOK CLUB - The Gift Ch 3 & 4

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"Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Probably the most frequent creative / life advice I give out is to get involved in an objective craft or culture of some kind. Become part of the world by immersing yourself in something that is outside of you, something tangible in which you can invest your identity (from which you can pull your identity?)

I am performing a lecture for my biggest audience yet this coming weekend, around 300 people (Vancouver, I am looking forward to Being In You this week) and although it feels good that my performance is novel and original in some way, it feels even better to think of it in the context of stand-up comedy, or to be doing the work of 'scholar-without-institution', like Lewis Hyde was for a time, and Baruch Spinoza for his whole life.

(I learned Spinoza was an independent scholar through Clare Carlisle's book Spinoza's Religion, which I found through John Vervaeke, whom I found through his professional relationship to Jordan Peterson. My ability to describe that chain of thinkers is a evidence of an objective orientation in the world. Not a flex, it just genuinely makes me feel at home in the world, like I am something, someone, somewhere, in culture and history. Part of something.)

I have been toying with the idea of contribution defining membership to a community or culture. This echoes of The Labor of Gratitude's overarching shape. You may first recieve the boons of culture, being enchanted or shaped by it, and then you labor in its service.

To be contributed to and to contribute back is a sign of membership in a culture or community. And what is your social identity if not the cultures and communities you have tied your being up with? Chance makes you a human, generosity makes you a member of society.

Maybe love makes you an individual, or something. Anyways.

FRESH DICHOTOMIES

Returning To The Essence vs. Wandering Forever

We should really differentiate two sorts of death here: one that opens forward into greater life and another—a dead-end death—that leaves a restless soul, unable to reach its home. This is the death we rightly fear. And just as gifts are linked to the death that moves toward new life, so, for those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in another), ideologies of market exchange have become associated with the death that goes nowhere. (45)

No notes.

I am reminded of Byung-Chul Han's Ritual Death vs. Production Death.

Work vs. Labor

Lewis Hyde defines his terms nice and clearly here, but I immediately find this dichotomy a bit problematic, not because Hyde's frame is invalid but because I have so many emotional associations with the words Work and Labour, and how they interact with Play, Sacrifice, Instrumental Value and Intrinsic Value

In speaking of gratitude as a "labor" I mean to distinguish it from "work," and I must digress here to elaborate my distinction. Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it's harder to quantify...Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors. (The Gift, Hyde p. 50)

This kind of insinuates that "work" is instrumental action that we endure only as long as we are required to, while "labor" is more associated with the intrinsically valuable activities in life.

There's also an idea that "We can't predict the fruits of our labor; we can't even know if we'll really go through with it." (51). I don't really understand what he means by the second half of that, even in context, but labour being something with mysterious, uncertain results, seems to seriously exclude a lot of the most valuable activities in my life. Reading on, I think the most useful way for me to conceive of Hyde's "labor" is that of being pregnant and giving birth. Sets its own pace, cannot be forced, must be ridden and adapted to.

He also seems to equate labor with the voice of the muses.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn't do them. Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, "I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them." That is the declaration of a laborer. (50)

I don't mean to harp on this definition of labor, maybe I could be trying harder to accept it in this context as it is, but in a book about art "work" that will shortly launch into Das Kapital Vol. 1 by Karl Marx, it seems like a weird duality to go far out of your way to establish.

I don't mind the daemon/genius/muse talk at all, I think that the intuition and nonlinearity of life, creative and otherwise, is very much worth its due. But the emphasis on labor as so sacred and mysterious and opposed to 'work' gives me this sort of decadently subjective Rick Rubin impression, of the man atop the mountain who indulges in the pure sage-like process of carrying the heavenly realm of individual intuitive beauty down into the mortal realm. It makes beauty the domain of this timeless spirit force without regard to its interactions with social pressures or the material world.

In Art As Experience (the secret meta KTi book club book) John Dewey identifies the exact opposite instrumental vs. intrinsic dichotomy between Work and Labor, describing true Work as an evolved form of play, to be contrasted with "mere" labor, or toil.

For any activity becomes work when it is directed by accomplishment of a definite material result, and it is labor only as the activities are onerous, undergone as mere means by which to secure a result. (Art As Experience, Dewey p. 290)

This framework makes way more intuitive sense to me. Re-dignifying work as the instrumental and intrinsic fused, the creative and the practical, the play and the purpose.

I think of washing dishes and raising a child. Hyde suggests one of these is on the clock, ideally paid "work" and the other is the more on-its-own-rhythm "labor". But I would think of these both requiring immense discipline, attention to material conditions, effort, intentionality, patience, purpose.

Suppose I simply think it a messy dichotomy and definition. Lmk if you gleamed something from it I might be missing.

El Problema es el Capitalismo

"Spacial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts." (57)

I quite like the further instrumental versus intrinsic value splitting that emerges from the Marxist analysis, as market exchange requires comparison, difference, and separation in order to have any meaning. Although I already have a similar (but not as extreme) gripe with the Worth vs. Value dichotomy... -.- when "value" is sitting so close to morality and aesthetic philosophy, what is the point of moving the goalposts to make it 100% market value, while making "worth" exclusively correspondent to use-value, or even like the intrinsic value of a kidney transplant or a family member.

Regardless,

We derive value... from the comparison of one thing with another... Value needs a difference for its expression; when there is no difference we are left with tautology ("a yard of linen is a yard of linen"). (60)

I was always stirred by this opening flourish in Marx's Capital vol 1, as it immediately confronts you with the limitations of such a system that requires all things be cleanly comparable to each other by dollar amount, as well as the problem with capitalism's assumption that human beings "deliberate in this quantitative and comparative manner" as rational individual actors optimizing their lives.

I particularly enjoyed the study of human reasoning re the kidney transplants. The positives of the "decision" were not weighed and found to outnumber the pains. There was no calculation. "the term decision appears to be a misnomer. Insofar as decision-making implies a period of deliberation and conscious choice of one alternative, most individuals do not feel as if they have made a decision." (65)

We do not deal in commodities when we wish to initiate or preserve ties of affection (65)

The Dark Side of Gifts

I also adored the brief dalliance into the dark side of gifts, or the value of refusing them, despite Hyde's introductory assurance that was not the subject of this book. I have seen many a time firsthand that someone's continued acceptance of gifts ties them up with something they do not want to be part of, that drags them down, making them less, or compromised when they do not have to be.

But few seem to have the strength to refuse a gift...... parents, lovers, friends, communities.

It is because gift exchange is an erotic form that so many gifts must be refused. (73)

The principle of eros is the overall macro education I feel I am getting from this book. It seems to tie very powerfully into all my artistic and spiritual philosophy. I have been loosely aware of the logos/eros contrast as a major intellectual idea, but now I feel like I have an in on it.

Also stan the fae morality. The need to discard fairy gifts, less you become bewitched and trapped in fairy world, or the gifts are too powerful for the mortal world.

Folk wisdom... advises silence before evil. Conversation is a commerce, and when we give speech we become a part of what we speak with. (73)

Dope.

Chapters 5 & 6 next week.

Logos & Eros Below