Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 23:21:15 +0100
From: Erik Hoogcarspel <jehms-AT-kabelfoon.nl>
Subject: Re: Virilio and Baudrillard (charity and the symbolic)


Hi Steve,

this is an interesting question, I think. I used to be very critical
about donations, because it has the symbolic value of making the donator
look respectable. I've seen tourists proudly feeding little children,
making them averse to the daily meals their mother cooks them and
stimulating thme to becoma beggars or even worse. They bought themselves
a very cheap Albert Schweizer-feeling.

But also it bereaves the victims of selfrespect, this is a wellknown
effect and allready described in Mauss's  'Essay sur le don'. In the
last half century the donation-industry has been closely tied up with
post-kolonial submission politics. 

So donation can be nothing but a way to change monetray capital into
social capital (Bourdieu). Donation is not giving anymore but has become
a deal.

Still I do give donations, I even worked a very short time as a
volonteer in a third world country. THis is just because I think that it
is possible to do something that benfits others without to much nasty
side effects. 

"steve.devos" wrote:
> 
> Erik, John whoever...
> 
> We all suffer from bad faith, it comes with the intellectual and social territory
> and the only judgment we cannot escape is our own...
> 
> Do you feel (think) that with the loss of meaning of symbolic exchange, (the death
> of the symbolic - unless it is constituted in the frame of consumptive society)
> that acts of charity have lost there meaning? The symbolic act of charity has
> after all been re-constituted as a primary act of consumption (I live in the UK
> and from my interaction with people and friends in the US it is the same there) as
> important as purchasing a car, books, food and so on... At various times
> Baudrillard writes of the relationship between consumption and symbolic exchange,
> to some extent he writes as if he regrets the passing of symbolic exchange as
> something entirely separate from use, exchange and consumption. I suspect that
> what he exposes is the subsuming of the symbolic act into an act of consumption.
> The meaning of the act of charity is a statement of power based on the 'christian
> humanist ideology of the gift. The gift is the source and the essence of power'.
> According to Baudrillard only the counter-gift, the reversibility of symbolic
> exchange abolishes power. Hence incidentally the importance of the 'Big Issue' and
> 'Fair trade products' - the rejection of the gift and charity through the symbolic
> act of consumption and exchange of money... Whereas with 'netaid' nothing but bad
> music and the recognition of economic and symbolic superiority. It is not clear to
> me that Baudrillard has successfully negotiated his way through the Hegalian
> master-slave dialectic in his theorisation of the 'gift', but nor am I sure that
> the rest of us have either...
> 
> This does not mean that one should not participate in the act of charity, I have a
> little sympathy with Peter Singer's  charitable act of donating a percentage of
> his salary to charitable causes, it follows from what I take to be his
> reactionary  and incoherant philosophy. But feel little or no guilt about not
> following his example. Perhaps I am complicating the issue by following
> Baudrillard's differentiation of the gift from symbolic exchange but I do not
> believe so...
> 
> It follows from the above preamble that whilst Baudriallrd is incorrect in his
> oft-stated belief that use/exchange value have caused the death of symbolic
> exchange because it has been subsumed into the relationship (of course thois could
> be typical Baudrillard hyperbole). He is absolutely correct in forcing an
> intellectual understanding, diffentiation between symbolic exchange and the
> gift... The former can lead to subversion and change the latter never.
> 


 erik