No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
“An Experiment in Optimism Was Coming to an End”: Gift Exchange and Giftedness in Two Novels of the Occupy Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2021
Abstract
This article examines the role of “gifts” and “giftedness” in two recent novels about Occupy Wall Street, Barbara Browning's The Gift and Caleb Crain's Overthrow. Together these novels explore how projects designed to offset the effects of neoliberal individualism very often end up replicating, rather than disrupting, aspects of capitalist exchange: the authors temper their own utopian impulses by interrogating the factors which prevent systemic change, such as individual complacency and governmental intervention. The article considers the cycle of gift giving launched by Browning's narrator, a project which falters because her understanding of economization is inadequate, and because she refuses to take account of her own class position. Crain's group of young Brooklynites believe that mind reading draws people together and prevents social isolation. While the vagueness of their aims can be taken as an implied narrative criticism of their impractical plans, the reason they abandon the project is because it encroaches on the government's surveillance programme, which identifies them as security threats.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
References
1 Browning, Barbara, The Gift (Minneapolis and Brooklyn: Coffee House Press, 2017), 32Google Scholar.
2 Gitlin, Todd, Occupy Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 21Google Scholar.
3 See, for example, Graeber's chapter “Marcel Mauss Revisited” in Graeber, David, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (New York: Palgrave, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his article “On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations: A Maussian Approach,” Journal of Classic Sociology, 14, 1 (2014), 65–77.
4 Browning, 83; Hyde, Lewis, The Gift (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), 69Google Scholar.
5 Graeber, David, The Democracy Project (London: Penguin, 2013), 233Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., 43.
7 Appel, Hannah, “Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology, 29, (2014), 602–25, 603CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Ibid., 615.
9 Browning, 5, 4–5.
10 Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Ibid., 43, 41.
12 Browning, 5, 33–34; Brown, 31. Of course this runs very close to Sara Ahmed's discussion of “happy objects”: she describes how “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods. Such objects accumulate positive affective value as they are passed around.” Ahmed, Sara, “Happy Objects,” in Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory J., eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29–51, 29Google Scholar. But there is an important distinction to be made between Ahmed's “sticky” objects and the gifts Barbara hands out. Ahmed, 35, writes, “Objects are sticky because they are already attributed as being good or bad, as being the cause of happiness or unhappiness.” “It is not that we just find happy objects anywhere,” she explains; they have been settled on as generators of happiness: “Groups cohere around a shared orientation toward some things as being good, treating some things and not others as the cause of delight.” Ibid., 35. But in Barbara's case the objects (or “gifts”) themselves are actually irrelevant: this is why she does not give much thought to what she gives away, because what matters is that something – anything – has been handed over, and that a connection between the two parties has been established. And the gift itself, already of little consequence, tends to disappear quickly from view.
13 Hyde, 68, 58, 82–83.
14 Ibid, 86.
15 For Deleuze and Guattari the “rhizome” is a “map and not a tracing”: it is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.” Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, Brian (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 12Google Scholar, original emphasis. As a nonhierarchical network which connects people and ideas in unexpected and endlessly proliferating ways, the rhizome it is a useful way of thinking about Zuccotti Park, where multiple chance encounters between strangers sparked new ideas about how society might be organized.
16 Browning, 164.
17 Ibid., 6.
18 Brown, 35, 39.
19 Browning, 13; Hyde, 4, original emphasis.
20 Hyde, 196, original emphasis.
21 Browning, 7, original emphasis.
22 Ibid., 7.
23 Ibid., 125.
24 Ibid., 15.
25 Ibid., 69, 55, 55, 55.
26 Ibid., 23, 68.
27 Ibid., 48.
28 Ibid., 122.
29 Ibid., 179, 179–80.
30 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Cunnison, Ian (London: Cohen & West Ltd, 1970; first published 1925), 10Google Scholar.
31 Browning, The Gift, 165, 169, 181.
32 Ibid., 159, 162.
33 Ibid., 172.
34 Ibid., 172.
35 Graeber, “On the Moral Grounds,” 69.
36 Ibid., 68.
37 Ibid., 70.
38 Browning, 181.
39 Graeber, “On the Moral Grounds,” 70; Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 219, 160; David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (London and New York: Melville House Publishing, 2014), 117.
40 Hyde, The Gift, 58; Browning, 24, 24.
41 Browning, 24.
42 Hyde, 69.
43 Browning, 5, 138–39.
44 Taussig, Michael, “I'm So Angry I Made a Sign,” in Mitchell, W. J. T., Harcourt, Bernard E., and Taussig, Michael, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3–43, 17Google Scholar.
45 Browning, 10.
46 Rehn, Alf, “Gifts, Gifting and Gift Economies,” in Parker, Martin, Cheney, George, Fournier, Valérie, and Land, Chris, eds., The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014), 195–209, 199Google Scholar.
47 Browning, 172. Alf Rehn even suggests that capitalism has successfully coopted gift exchange, which is now regarded as a legimitate business model, with consumers now “accustomed to receiving things for free and getting to try-before-you-buy” – examples include the “classic capitalist paradox of ‘free gift with purchase’,” and software companies giving away a “free-to-download demo” of a new game “to entice gamers to buy the full version.” Business strategists, Rehn explains, now feel that “the market economy has evolved to a point where the giving away of products and services would represent ‘business as usual’, and thus, in extension, that a kind of gift or attention economy would be on its way to becoming integrated into the market economy.” Rehn, 205.
48 Gitlin, Occupy Nation, 65.
49 Browning, 191.
50 Hyde, 278.
51 Browning, 9.
52 Ibid., 30.
53 Ibid., 30.
54 Ibid., 113.
55 Ibid., 205.
56 Graeber, The Democracy Project, 72.
57 Browning, 113.
58 Appel, “Occupy Wall Street,” 603.
59 Wright, Erik Olin, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010), 367Google Scholar, original emphasis. I was directed to this section of Wright's argument by Appel's article, which includes a quotation from the same passage.
60 Hyde, The Gift, 279.
61 Browning, 30.
62 Ibid., 118.
63 Ibid., 30.
64 Hyde, 194, 147, 194.
65 Ibid., 276.
66 Browning, 205, 207, 205.
67 Ibid., 204.
68 Ibid., 11, 112.
69 Crain, Caleb, Overthrow (New York: Viking, 2019), 18, 16, 16Google Scholar.
70 Ibid., 321–22.
71 Ibid., 28, 42, 10, 97.
72 Ibid., 28, 59, original emphasis; Browning, 169.
73 Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 400Google Scholar.
74 Crain, 60.
75 Ibid., 11, 10.
76 Ibid., 39.
77 Ibid., 73.
78 Ibid., 60. In this oblique reference to Lauren Berlant, Crain suggests that the Occupy movement (itself a furious response to the “impasse of the historical present” and “the fraying of the fantasy of ‘the good life’”) has become yet another instance of “cruel optimism,” as Leif's attachment to its “cluster of promises” finally collapses into despair. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 259, 19, 1, 23.
79 Crain, 310, 58.
80 Hegel, 400.
81 Ibid., 407; Crain, 276.
82 Crain, 271, 221.
83 Ibid., 20.
84 Ibid., 241.
85 Hyde, The Gift, 50, 148.
86 Ibid., 153.
87 Crain, 140.
88 Ibid., 314.
89 Ibid., 307.
90 Ibid., 70.
91 Bolton, Matthew and Measles, Victoria, “Barricades Dot Net: Post-Fordist Policing in Occupied New York City,” in Welty, Emily, Bolton, Matthew, Nayak, Meghana, and Malone, Christopher, eds., Occupying Political Science (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 163–90, 170Google Scholar.
92 Crain, 386.
93 Ibid., 386, 387.
94 Ibid., 172, 387, 387, 386, 386, 387.
95 Ibid., 386.
96 Ibid., 388, 389. This is the “content–envelope distinction.” Daniel J. Solove explains that the Supreme Court has ruled that “a list of the phone numbers a person dials (envelope information) isn't protected by the Fourth Amendment,” whereas “[w]hat's said during the call (content information) … is protected.” Solove, Daniel J., Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 157Google Scholar. This means that while it is reasonably straightforward for the government to be granted court permission to obtain a list of phone numbers dialled and received, a much higher bar is set for obtaining a warrant to intercept conversations.
97 Tim Shorrock, “Put the Spies Back under One Roof,” New York Times, 18 June 2013, 25.
98 Ibid.
99 Crain, 17, 17–18.
100 Ibid., 18.
101 The New York Times knew about this story for a year before they printed it: towards the end of 2004 the article was almost ready to be published but the government stepped in, convincing the newspaper not to publish the story by claiming that “the program was saving lives and assuring them the Justice Department had no doubt it was legal.” Savage, Charlie, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 196Google Scholar. The Pulitzer-winning story, written by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, was eventually published on 16 December 2005 under the title “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without Courts.”
102 Savage, Power Wars, 165.
103 Crain, 389.
104 Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019)Google Scholar.
105 Crain, 69.
106 Ibid., 15, 330, 52.
107 Ibid., 330, 96.
108 Ibid., 170.
109 Ibid., 314–15.
110 Ibid., 396–97.
111 Ibid., 384.