Gift economies and alternating hierarchies (machines of change)

One of Deleuze and Guattari’s favorite techniques is to turn conceive of something that is the sum of its parts that are not usually thought together. (See, especially, Deleuze, Gilles, and Fâelix Guattari. Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990 [1983].)

So, we get words like ‘heterogenous assemblages,’ which attempts to point out the connectedness that exists between two different entities. The important thing for D&G is to understand that in these cases, the connection is made possible by the difference between the two: the difference makes the difference.

They use a lot of fancy and perhaps unnecessary verbiage to get this across – certainly the style could be clarified – but their approach to language does manage to get across precisely the indeterminacy of the questions at stake, and the impossibility of finding an originary position without falling into a solipsistic model of thought and practice that renders us socially impotent. And it’s largely a welcome move, since it theorizes in physical terms (the most famous metaphor D&G use is the “Body without Organs – BwO) things like society, which have often been figured as bodies anyway.

Seeing a society as a body, composed of multiple separate entities all of which are required is normal, but like the heterogenous assemblages, the difference internal to the relationships between sub-entities is both necessary and hierarchical. For most of us, I imagine, the head is more important than the individual feet, which is more important than the appendix; The standard Khmer physiology claims that the liver is the seat of human power, etc. Such analogies of society to a single body have often been criticized as an authoritarian representation.

There are lots of examples of this: the rulers are equated to the head, the soldiers to the arms, and the people to the feet, thus implying that what’s good for the head is good for the feet, and when not, the head is allowed to make the decision, since who wants feet deciding whether to walk or not? Precisely this analogy is cited in the history of a Roman-era rebellion. An ambassador is sent to the plebes, who have abandoned their task of producing wealth for their patrons for the mountains. The ambassador tells a story in which all the organs must agree and help each other in order for the body to work. Of course, this metaphor, by presupposing the application of the body metaphor to social interaction, allows for a necessary hierarchy based on difference. (See Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the construction of society : comparative studies of myth, ritual, and classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 145 ff.)

Deleuze and Guattari’s second move is often to conceive of this new thing, this “Body without Organs” (of BwO) as a machine. This often encounters much more resistance than the first move. We are inclined to consider social order as a matter of the body, which should normally work harmoniously (even though physiologists know all too well the body’s natural capacity to go to war with itself, and the capacity of some antagonistic systems to produce a different level of both order and disorder). We are less inclined to imagine social order as a machine which can be constructed, taken apart, broken and fixed. It’s a profound statement of their essential anti-humanism that they are willing to desentimentalize a view of social order, and it is a testament to their vision of a constructivist view of politics and practice that they put the machine potentially within the purview of the people produced within it.

At the same time, radical anthropologists working on gift theory have been attempting to develop Mauss’s insights into the originary nature of the gift economy (even if they would usually ignore that aspect of Mauss’ evolutionary argument in favor of one which morally prioritizes it). Mauss saw Gift economies as a war of status waged through the self-alienation of material wealth to another, or to destruction. So, in Potlatch, great chiefs would give away massive amounts of wealth, or even destroy it, in an act that creates status by moving wealth.

Within that set of anthropologists, there are two sub-strains that I think I detect. One comes from more within the anthropological mainstream, and focuses on the role of gift economies in regulating social order through exchange. Such thinkers are often well within the confines of a functionalist or pseudo-functionalist stance. The other strain is more concerned with the effects of these regulations of social order. This can be assimilated to a tendency, like that of D&G, to attempt to think the social without reifying it. Thinkers such as Bataille, Clastres, and even, to a surprising extent, Derrida (included since he attempts to think the moral from outside its sphere of rules), focus often on the role of the gift in death, destruction, and transgression.  Both strains have real value, but perhaps we can say that they complement each other better than either one works on its own.

This is because the metaphor of the social as body is profoundly effective and compelling to people who are found in social situations which seem to mirror it quite closely. Hierarchies and command or respect-relationships are extremely effective in social life, and to the extent that we do not rebel when we are effectively ordered around on such a basis, we accept the greater good of the body as a claim over our own entitlement to a personal good. To the extent that we enjoy effective command or respect, we often congratulate ourselves on the hard work and justification for such a position. (This is the basis of the need to examine the ingrained and effective social differences which animate society by disguising them as background, such as the privileges granted by the status of whiteness, maleness, or the possession of a degree).

There is a way in which we act as if (there’s the marker of the functionalist argument right there – “we act as if”) we were part of a body. To attempt to think beyond the body means to deny the naturalness of the body’s internal relations, not necessarily to deny the efficacy of the utility of effective command that comes from such a relationship-by-hierarchical-difference.
By themselves, these two strains do not work. The body-metaphor crowd reifies the positions of individuals and institutions within the body, and prevents a physiological (idiological or etiological) understanding of change.

The anti-body-metaphor crowd, which sees the constant antagonism of the body’s parts as creative of an effective body, fails to allow for those moments when people do act as if they accepted the body metaphor, without assuming that they are thereby miscognizing their situation, and are victims of a dominant ideology.

But put together, we can see a fuller picture, I think. And this, happily enough, is being expressed in anthropological terms in a book by Charles Piot, Remotely global: village modernities in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. In a chapter entitled “Exchange: Hierarchies of value in an economy of desire,” he talks not about how gift exchanges create flows on which a system of inequality is set up, though this is not denied either. What he talks about is how exchange works, machine-like, without excepting desire from the equation. Exchange in the Kabre village (Togo) in which he does fieldwork takes place as a “refusal to commodify relationship” (Piot, p. 59) that “centers on persons and qualities rather than things and quantities” and simultaneously “aims to create difference rather than overcome it.” (Piot, p. 65)

“Gifts,” Piot tells us, following Mauss and Gregory, “obligate and indebt, and in so doing they render the receiver subservient.” ( Piot, p. 54)
In this expression of agency, the gift economy creates effective differences: the person who gives, or gives more, intensifies the relationship, but also commands respect as a result of the debt. This is a description of a gift economy we natives of capitalism can understand: people give because it helps them get something! Rational Actor Theory! Indeed, there is the smell of this around Piot’s argument: he spends a strange amount of time comparing the attitudes of two of his Kabre friends, one who is seemingly indifferent to personal advancement and one who greedily accepts any form of material wealth. But Piot finds a way out of this, and his argument too, can be helpful.

What Piot focuses on is not the ‘final’ or ‘natural’ shape of the social body (Piot does not even deal with the metaphor), nor with the relationship between a gift economy and reproducible social power in society (permanent relationships of command), but with the dyadic, alternating, hierarchical pattern…common to exchange wherever it is found in Kabre society. (Piot, p. 62, emphasis mine)

It is the alternating aspect that for Piot makes society hold together – they are the tendons and ligaments in the body, holding piece to piece. The current possessor of the debt deserves a measure of respect for having ‘saved’ the debtor, in Kabre society, though this does not necessarily translate to a command relationship. But the relationship must alternate – a permanent state of debt on the part of one of the dyad’s members would not result in a permanent relationship of command hierarchy, but in the dissolution of the relationship itself: the relationship exists, like the power that emerges from a machine or an engine, from the alternation of the relationship’s two poles. Once the charge stops moving back and forth between the two poles, and hence, once the gifts stopped being constantly reciprocated, the relationship simply dies.

On the other hand, this alternation of the dominant charge in the relationship allows for a temporary flow of hierarchy and effective unity without allowing it to reify into a permanent relationship of command or control. It seems to me that there is a happy resemblance between the machines of D&G’s thought and this alternating dyad of hierarchy which constitutes the gift economy for Piot’s village: the engine of desire in the social.

And it seems that perhaps such a model offers possibilities for corrrecting the ‘excesses’ of Bataille’s often illuminating analyses. Perhaps destruction of gifts is not merely a radical leveling of real wealth by transforming it directly into unexchanged status, but the attempt to freeze a relationship in its current configuration of hierarchy, for one ‘pole’ to insist on retaining its charge, rather than returning it. It is a movement that is willing to sacrifice the body social if it means death for all of the body’s parts, rather than permit the ongoing dyadism of an established relationship.