(Book Excerpt 1) Discovering the Gift Paradigm by Genevieve Vaughan

Homo Donans: For a Maternal Economy by Genevieve Vaughan

How I got started

The circumstances of my life brought me to begin thinking about communication as based on gift giving as early as the 1970′s but I began thinking about the logic of exchange and the market even earlier. In 1963 as a young woman I married the Italian philosopher, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and moved to Italy from Texas (USA). The following year he was invited by a group of his colleagues to write about language as seen through the lens of Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money in Capital. He developed a theory along those lines, which can be found in his books, especially Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (Language as labor and trade) (1968) and Linguistics and Economics (1974). I was completely fascinated by this project and spent a lot of time throughout those years trying to fit the pieces of the complex puzzle together. For me it was as if language and exchange (trade, the market) were in some ways really the same thing – but some of the pieces just didn’t fit. There was a sense of sharing and cooperation, a kind of life-enhancing creativity in language that was just absent from most commercial relations as I understood them. During those years I gave birth to our three daughters and was taking care of them. Because I had been concentrating on the comparison between language and exchange I could not avoid noticing that they were learning to talk long before they learned about exchange for money and before they were doing anything that might be called work. Maybe, I thought, it is language that comes first individually (and historically) and exchange derives from language. It seemed improbable that exchange could have made the same kind of fundamental contribution to our being human that language made. I knew that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had not had money or markets as such before the European conquest, yet they certainly spoke. Meanwhile I tried not to manipulate my children, or anybody else because that was antithetical to the way I thought human relations should be. The kind of – if you do this, I will do what you want – exchange, seemed to me to be a negative way to behave.

At any rate at the time I would not have thought of looking at communication as gift giving if I had not been trying to distinguish communication from exchange and to find a way to salvage language from the relations of capital and the market and even from work, considered as the production and use of tools. The theory my husband was developing, while fascinating, did not convince me. There was something else. An image came to me. The construction of Marx’s analysis as well as of my husband’s theory had a false floor. Underneath it was another layer where there was a hidden treasure, or perhaps better, a spring that was welling up, the spring of what I later began to call “the gift economy.”

I spent two years in the US in the early 70′s with my children, and used the free time I had there, to write and think about language and communication. From the work I did then I published two essays in semiotics journals and these are now included as the last two chapters of this book. I just want to describe them briefly now to introduce the ideas that developed into a theory of gift giving and language. The first essay is “Communication and exchange” (1980) where I write about communicative need, and describe words as verbal elements people use for communicative need-satisfaction. Money then appears to be a kind of materialized word, used to satisfy the peculiar communicative need that arises from the mutually exclusive relations of private property. The second essay is “Saussure and Vygotsky via Marx” (1981). I had read L.S. Vygotsky (1962 [1934]) and linked his idea of abstract concept formation with Marx’s idea of money as the general equivalent. In Vygotsky’s experiment any item of a set can be taken as the exemplar for a concept of that set, but it has to be held constant or the concept does not develop as such. If the exemplar varies, the abstraction is incomplete and relevant common qualities cannot be separated from irrelevant qualities.[1] I realized that the general equivalent, money, could be understood as the exemplar for the abstraction of the concept of value in the market. Money measures the ‘common quality’ of exchange value in commodities and leaves aside as irrelevant whatever does not have that quality. Whatever is not commodified does not have the quality of exchange value and thus appears to be irrelevant to the market, outside its “concept.”

Although I had read Malinowsky (1922) and Mauss (1925) as a student many years earlier, I did not immediately see the continuity between gift giving and communication, perhaps because the term used to describe the process in indigenous cultures was gift “exchange’” and I had made the distinction between exchange and unilateral need satisfaction. However I remember that by 1978 I had embraced the connection between communication and the gift giving of indigenous peoples. I also realized at the time that market bias was so strong that everyone, including anthropologists, used the term ‘exchange’ without questioning it. There could be a different perspective though, I thought. If communication was based on gift giving, maybe societies that did not have markets used their gift giving for communication. Then exchange and markets could be seen as altered gift giving, altered communication.

In that year also I encountered another important idea, which redirected my thinking. After my divorce from Rossi-Landi, I began going to a feminist consciousness-raising group. There I found out that women’s free work in the home is an enormous unrecognized contribution that women are giving, both to their families and to the economy as a whole. Part of that work of course is childcare, the free services that mothers give to children on a daily basis. Satisfying another’s communicative need is that kind of thing, I realized, a unilateral gift that even without an immediate counterpart, establishes a human relation. Even in dialogue, what is happening is not exchange but turn taking in giving unilateral gifts. I speak and you understand what I say, whether or not you reply.

Ferruccio had talked about a kind of inevitability of understanding the verbal products that come ungarbled to one’s healthy ears and brain, if one knows the language. It seemed clear to me that if it is inevitable that others understand our words, our giving our words to others and their receiving them will not be contingent upon a reply. If there is a reply, it is couched in the same unilateral logic as the previous speaker’s words. Even questions, which are asked in order to receive a reply, are verbal products, which are given and received as such, unconditionally. That is, they are understood anyway even if no answer is actually given. In market exchange instead, one does not give up one’s product except in exchange for money. Both seller and buyer necessarily participate in the do ut des self-reflecting and contingent logic of exchange.

As the years have passed since the 60′s when I first began thinking about all of this, it has become more important than ever to distinguish communication from exchange, and to refuse to see the logic of exchange as the basic human logic. In fact I think that as a society we have believed acritically in the fundamental value of the logic of exchange and we have consequently embraced and nurtured an economic system that is extending itself parasitically over the planet, feeding on the unilateral gifts of all. These are the unilateral gifts of tradition, of culture, of nature, of care and of love as well as the forced or leveraged unilateral gifts imposed by exploitation, the gifts of cheap or free labor. If we look at exchange as the basic human logic, those who do it best will seem to be the most ‘human’. Conversely, those who do not do it well, or do not succeed in the market, will seem to be ‘defective’, less human, and therefore more exploitable. In Capitalism the values of Patriarchy – competition, hierarchy, domination – have been united with the values of the market. In order to understand this merger and justify some startling similarities in what are usually considered widely different areas, we need to look beyond both Capitalism and Patriarchy to the patterns underlying them.

I used my understanding of the similarity between Vygotsky’s concept formation process[2] and Marx’s general equivalent to develop a theory of Patriarchal Capitalism in which neither male dominance nor the market economy is primary. Rather both are caused by epistemological distortions and incarnations of our concept forming processes, distortions that in turn derive from the social imposition of binary gender categories. For this reason the values of Capitalism are similar to those of Patriarchy. In Patriarchy, males vie to dominate, that is, to achieve the general equivalent or exemplar position, which has become not just an element in the distribution of goods on the market or a way of organizing perceptions, but a widespread cultural pattern as well as an individual position of ‘power over’ others. In Capitalism, those who have the most, who have succeeded in dominating economically, are the exemplars of the concept ‘man’ extended to ‘human’. This masculine race to the top position can be seen at other levels as well. For example it can be seen in the way that nations vie with each other for supremacy, to become the ‘exemplar’ nation, which dominates culturally, economically and militarily. Different areas of life, the military, business, religion, even academia, seem to incarnate the concept form as a life agenda for many people when instead it should be functioning merely as a mental process of abstraction. In each area the ‘exemplar’ position is invested with special power or value, and is not seen as just any item that is being used as a point of reference for sorting members of categories.[3] In fact a flow of gifts towards the item in the ‘top’ position is created and justified by the attribution of this special value.

This view of the ‘top’ as the exemplar allows us to see Patriarchy and exchange as embedded not in our brains or chemistry but in our minds and in society, not as something inevitable but as something we can radically change. It allows us to see the problem as deriving from our socialization of boys into the male gender in binary opposition to something else: a gift giving process, which is actually the human way. This socialization varies culturally but the problem has arisen particularly intensely with the Euro-American construction of gender, and the externalization of this construction in the market and Capitalism. Like the male exemplar, which is used in forming the concept of ‘human’, money, as the exemplar of economic value, is an incarnation of the equivalent position in the concept-forming process. This distorted logical structure can extend to all cultures because it is as familiar to them as the way they think. Patriarchy, which puts the father or male leader in the position of exemplar of the human, can infect previously non- or less patriarchal cultures in a similar way.

Notes

[1] The fact that the abstraction is not complete alters but does not halt our understanding. There are various kinds of thought processes that Vygotsky calls ‘complexes’, for example, the ‘family name’ complex or the ‘chain’ complex. If we can stop privileging abstraction perhaps we can re value the complexes. The image of the twisted strands of a rope is shared by Wittgenstein as well as indigenous people talking about human relations (see Jeanette Armstrong). On the other hand, the family name complex seems to me to be similar to the relational pattern of private property.

[2] There are similarities between Vygotsky’s experiment and what is presently called ‘prototype theory’ in cognitive psychology (Rosch1975). In fact Vygotsky could be called a precursor of prototype theory though I have never seen him mentioned in this light. He showed experimentally how categories can be constructed using a prototype (see Part 7 below). On the other hand the stages in the development of Marx’s general equivalent might also be understood as stages in the development of a ‘prototype’ of economic value and its crystallization. For a good description of prototype theory see Patrizia Violi (2001).

[3] I found the work of Jean-Josef Goux to be very useful. His extensions of the general equivalent to explain positions of social power are more psychoanalytically based than mine, which come from cognitive psychology. While I agree with his critique of these positions as phallic I believe they have an epistemological basis stemming from concept formation distorted by socially constructed gender. Also his view of the phallus as general equivalent of body parts works for males but not for females. Then only those having that peculiar psychological construction can become the exemplar of the human.

Meet Mago Contributor, Genevieve Vaughan