In the second part of the interview with Stephen David Ross conducted by Rick Visser over at Artrift we have reference to the gift. The first part of the interview is here and my comments are here

The second part of the interview has two parts. One is concerned with the idea of art as a gift and the other with beauty and ugliness. I have dealt wth the (Hegelian) conception of aesthetics as concerned only with the beautiful here by arguing with Adorno that ugliness is a part of the aesthetic. So I want to concentrate on the gift in this post.

The gift involves Bataille and Marcel Mauss. exchange, receiving reciprocity and is a form of human interaction governed by particular norms and obligations.

It is counterposed to utility and the economy. It is a thinking otherwise to an economics based of the efficient allocation of scarce resources rather than the gathering and hoarding necessitated by conventional analyses based on the assumption of scarcity and the desire for gain and profit. It is opens uop a moral economy residing along side the capitalist market.

For Bataille the gift is one of the primary means of expending excess resources or the expenditure of surplus energy. Thus the excess wealth of contemporary capitalism is expended in commodity aesthetics: the excessive packaging on supermarket shelves, or computer software, show rooms for expensive cars and spectacles. This is a vision of cultural surplus rather than of economic scarcity.

The gift is an escape from the circle of economic necessity; of rather it is one of the primary means of the expenditure of that surplus. Bataille in The Accursed Share, (Volume I) then develops this insight by arguing that in the giving of the gift, givers affirms their power as sovereign subjects, the ability to give, to expend in excess, to enjoy in luxury and leisure their wealth. This takes them beyond the domination of rational economic necessity that would make them objects. Subject-hood is lost in an economic system of production and consumption since a market economy does not allow for the kind of expression of personal power and subjecthood found in the gift.

What does subject-hood is lost in an economic system mean?

For Bataille subjecthood being lost is connected to a restrictive economic system that based on scarcity and aquisition and it means servility. In the restrictive economy we labor to earn money so that we can buy goods and consume them. We need these goods for consumption, otherwise we would have no reason to labor for them. So because of scarcity and necessity we, as servile beings, labor for the future. As good little chipmunks we attempt to achieve sovereignty in the later consumption of our wages or earnings, but we are really only consuming to survive to labor more. So even in our consumption we are servile.

In contrast, Bataille�s general economy is based on the idea of consumption of luxurious expenditure. Sovereignty comes by consuming without producing. In human societies, the expenditure of excess energy/surplus is what defines a culture and it is only those individuals who do the expending that are sovereign. As this text makes clear:

"The sovereign individual consumes only, and is not concerned with scarcity, necessity, or utility. He has at his disposal the results of the servile man�s labor, he can consume what he wants, and he is not concerned with profit, for it is his job to waste. The sovereign is completely free of concerns about the future and lives only to consume in the present."

As an example Bataille mentions the tendency for the sovereign to give gifts. In the example of the potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, the gift-giving is entirely wasteful, the giver does not necessarily give to those in need, he gives according to custom. The recipient is then obliged to give a greater gift, continuing the process of useless expenditure.

Does art perform this role in our society? Is it a form of gift giving? The artist as sovereign, who has at their disposal the results of the servile man�s labor, is free of the concerns of the future and lives only to consume in the present? It is a very aristocratic idea based on a rank ordering of society.

But it can also be developed in terms of the moral economy in that the social and ethical complexities of gift-giving challenge the market rhetoric and exchange theory that dominate the social sciences. Gift exchange as a form of intersubjective interaction opens up a way to think how art can continue to have a critical edge after corporate capitalism embraced modernist architectural forms and paintings to line its office walls.

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