Giving is not a neutral gesture: a gift creates a debt in the person who receives it, and debt installs a hierarchy. When cultural institutions say they give access, open their doors, bring art to people, they place those they address in the position of the obligated. Pupils taken to the theatre without having chosen it thus carry a debt they never contracted, one that nothing can settle, and whose only way out, often, is never to come back.
“To give is to show one’s superiority”
In his The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss showed that in most known human societies, a gift never comes without obligation. Giving, receiving and returning form a threefold obligation that structures the social bond, and I have often drawn on this analysis for its luminous side, the gift as alliance and communion. But the essay has another side, less often quoted, which describes the gift as a fight. In the potlatch of the societies of the American North-West, which serves as the paradigm of the whole book, chiefs compete in generosity, to the point of destroying their own wealth, because the gift there is the weapon of a struggle for prestige. Mauss writes it bluntly: “To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher, magister; to accept without giving back, or without giving back more, is to subordinate oneself, to become a client and a servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).” And he adds that it is through such gifts, between chiefs and vassals, that hierarchy is established. The gift can therefore be a form of domination, perhaps its most elegant form, since it presents itself as its opposite.
David Graeber, an anthropologist and anarchist theorist, took up this question on the scale of history as a whole. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) reconstructs the history of debt from the first agrarian societies to contemporary financial capitalism, and draws from it a definition of great simplicity: a debt is an exchange that has not yet been brought to completion. This definition has a consequence that Graeber never stops exploring. Exchange presupposes that the partners are equals, at least in principle, since returning the equivalent of what one has received closes the relation and restores each person to their independence. Between unequal persons, what circulates does not create debts but statuses. The gift made to the vassal does not call for repayment, it installs a permanent relation, and Graeber notes that a present granted two years in a row becomes, in the third year, an entitlement. Graeber adds an observation that seems to me to shed direct light on the cultural sector: the most durable relations of domination do not rest on direct violence, which breeds resistance, but on obligations of this kind, impossible to refuse without seeming ungrateful, without seeming to deny the generosity of the one who gave.
Touched, sensitised, opened: the giver’s vocabulary
When a cultural institution says that it gives access to what it offers, that it opens its doors to audiences who would not come of their own accord, that it brings art to the residents of working-class neighbourhoods or to young people in schools, it takes up the position of the giver. And this position, however generous its intention, has precise structural effects. It places the recipients in the position of debtors. They have received something, and must therefore show gratitude. Their indifference or their resistance becomes a form of ingratitude, or even of a lack of culture, never a legitimate response to a proposal that perhaps did not concern them.
The sector’s vocabulary carries this logic. We say that young people have been touched by a show, sensitised to artistic practice, opened up to a new form of culture. Each of these words says that something was done to them. The word beneficiaries, ubiquitous in funding applications, goes even further, since it designates people by what they are supposed to have received, before they have received anything at all.
Let me make clear that nobody is lying here, and I have devoted an article, A clear conscience as a system, to this sincerity that accompanies domination. Pierre Bourdieu devoted a late text to the gift, “The twofold truth of the gift”, included in Pascalian Meditations (1997), in which he shows that the giver can sincerely experience their gesture as generous while that gesture operates as a gentle violence, and that it is the collective misrecognition of this twofold truth that makes the mechanism work. The lived generosity is real, and the mechanism operates through it.
Yelled at in the foyer
A school class arrives in the foyer of a theatre. The pupils did not choose to be there, the outing was compulsory, and they are a little noisy, as teenagers are when they arrive as a group in a place they do not know. They get yelled at. Not called to order, yelled at, with that particular vehemence reserved for those who should already be grateful to be there. The scene is commonplace, and to my mind it condenses the whole logic I have just described. Before the show has even begun, before they have received anything at all, these pupils are treated as debtors. The debt is assigned to them at the door, along with the status.
What these pupils undergo there is a form of violence, lived in the body and in the emotions. Some want to be there, receive a great deal from what they see, and that is very good, I do not forget it. But others are deeply bored, facing adults they perceive as pretentious, without being allowed to say a word, locked down in their expression. Or else, if the show includes participatory moments, they are summoned to participate at precise moments, decided by others, and above all not at the other moments, when the same vitality becomes a fault again. They asked for nothing, decided nothing, often received nothing, since one cannot say that a person has received what was imposed on them and bored them. And yet they are considered to have a debt. They are made to feel guilty for not being interested, they are not accompanied, no one respects the fact that they may simply not want this. The shame that takes hold in these situations is something I have described in the article Shame, the invisible emotion of the adolescent spectator; the debt is, to my mind, its institutional face.
This passage from debt to guilt has a philosophical history, which Graeber examines at length in a chapter of Debt devoted to Nietzsche. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche starts from a fact of language: in German, Schuld means both guilt and debt. He argues that the feeling of guilt originates in the relation between creditor and debtor, which he holds to be the most ancient relation between individuals. One may dispute this genealogy, and Graeber himself reads it as the logic of the market pushed to its limit rather than as a truth about origins. But the articulation it names sheds light on the scene in the foyer: making pupils feel guilty for not being interested is turning a debt they never contracted into a fault that belongs to them. The debt came from outside; by becoming guilt, it settles inside people.
The debt of birth
The cultural sector works, moreover, with a debt of a particular kind, the one that cannot be repaid. The art that changed your life, the show that opened you to something essential, the encounter with the work that transformed your gaze, how do you repay that? You cannot. When we say that art transforms lives, we install a gratitude that can never be discharged, and that is what makes it an instrument of durable subordination, for a settled debt closes the relation, while an unpayable debt makes it permanent.
Graeber devotes an entire chapter, “Primordial Debts”, to the vastest version of this idea. Theorists of money, notably Michel Aglietta and André Orléan in La monnaie souveraine (1998), drawing on the work of the Indologist Charles Malamoud on the Vedic texts (“The Theology of Debt in Brahmanism”, 1980), have argued that human beings are born indebted. In the Brahmanas, the human being comes into the world a debtor to the gods, the ancestors and the sages, and spends their life discharging through ritual a debt they never contracted. These authors transpose the schema: the debt to the gods has always been, in reality, a debt to the society that made us what we are, and taxation is its perpetual settlement. Graeber contests this theory vigorously, and his critique is what interests me here: a debt one never contracted, whose terms one never negotiated and which one will never be able to repay is not a debt, he says in substance, it is a declaration of subordination presented in the language of accounting.
The cultural debt assigned to the pupils in the foyer seems to me to be of this kind, a debt of birth on a small scale. They do not owe something to someone, following a transaction that could be examined. They are constituted as debtors, by position, towards the legitimate place of society, the one that culture legitimises and which legitimises itself through culture. This debt corresponds to nothing they have received; it corresponds to the place they are given. And since it has no amount, no gesture, no interest shown, no goodwill will ever be able to settle it.
Never going back
There remains the question of what becomes of these people constituted as debtors in spite of themselves. How does one get out of a debt one cannot pay, contracted in a place one did not choose to enter? The only available way out is to leave the creditor’s territory. Never again entering those places where one is considered indebted is the only way left to them of refusing the position they have been assigned. What the sector then records as audiences drifting away is also, in a proportion that nothing allows us to measure, a refusal of the debt.
For this refusal is never read as such. The people who do not come back become excluded audiences, distant audiences, audiences to be won back, and we thus renew the logic of the gift at the very moment we record its failure, since we go on describing people by what they lack. The exclusion then closes twice over. These young people carry the debt, and they carry in addition the stigma of ingratitude, the assignment to a lack of culture. The mechanism is all the harder to see because it looks like a declined offer rather than an exclusion.
Let me make clear, as I do every time I describe these mechanisms, that naming them is not an argument against public funding for art and culture. It is an argument for this funding to produce something other than debtors.
The logic of the proposal
Ivan Illich distinguished between tools that increase people’s autonomy and tools that create dependency, and this distinction applies to postures as much as to tools. An artist or a mediator can position themselves in two radically different ways:
- In the logic of the gift: I have something you do not have, I give it to you. The direction is one-way, the hierarchy is maintained, even within generosity.
- In the logic of the proposal: here is something I would like to explore with you, and what happens will depend on what the two of us put into it. The direction is open, the hierarchy is suspended, at least provisionally.
A proposal can be declined without the refusal costing anyone anything, and this is what most surely distinguishes it from the gift, whose refusal is always an offence.
This difference shows in concrete arrangements:
- Does what the participants produce belong to them, or does the institution take it back?
- Does the proposal start from what people want to do, or from what the artist has decided they need?
- Is feedback gathered to improve practices, or to build the testimonies of gratitude that will legitimise the next round of funding?
- Can a group of pupils be noisy in a foyer without anyone feeling that a debt has just been flouted?
Everyone joins in, me first
In the workshops I lead, there is a rule I apply to myself before passing it on to the teams I train, as during the days recounted in the article Training a company in participatory mediation: everyone joins in. If the workshop is an open cutting-and-collage workshop, where people come as they wish, I cut, I glue, I enjoy myself. The people who arrive see someone in the middle of making. They see that the door is open, that there is room, that the tools are available, that the results are on display, that there is no hidden protocol. Trying it does not look complicated, and the desire comes of itself.
In this arrangement, nobody gives anything to anybody. We all receive. Each person is in relation with the third object, the cut paper, the film being made, this object that belongs to no one and connects everyone, whose workings I have described in the article The symbolic third, a tool to connect. No one is constituted as anyone’s debtor. And this matters all the more because people distrust those who absolutely want to give them something. It does not attract them, it frightens them, because deep down they know that this kind of generosity is a form of manipulation. This distrust is something I have felt intuitively for a long time, and that is why I have been building, for years, arrangements in which we are all participants, with, for my part, a particular place, that of being able to help others, but in the same way that anyone can help anyone.
The computer is no more important than the pair of scissors
I remember, in Villejuif, a few years ago, a workshop for making cut-paper films. The setup includes a computer connected to a camera and a microphone, which records in a single take the films people make under the camera. A particularly difficult child became interested in the computer and wanted to be its operator. That is the place I usually hold. I let him have it. Others would have positioned themselves as specialists, would have been afraid he might damage something, all the more so if the computer had been their personal machine. But the tools I bring out in workshops are not my personal belongings. They are mediation tools, tested in the field, robust, existing for that purpose only. Their status is that of third objects, which belong to everyone and which everyone can make their own.
This appropriation is prepared. The technical protocols I design, and improve over time, are very simple: one click to start, one click to stop, one click to watch. Before going out to a workshop, the computers are updated, checked, in perfect working order. This invisible preparation is the condition for the tool to pass from hand to hand without worry. And in the end, the sheets of paper, the pairs of scissors, the musical instruments, the camera, the computer all have the same status. The computer is no more important than the pair of scissors, and it belongs no less than the pair of scissors to everyone. If I set things up in this way, it is so that there is no gift, and therefore no indebtedness.
What holds for tools holds for speech. There are people who absolutely insist on the position of the giver. They think themselves generous, they give the right advice, and they are domineering without seeing it. I have observed it very often in theatre workshops, where there is the person who knows, the one who gives the right advice. For my part, I most often ask people to advise one another. I can give advice, of course, but I only do so if I am asked. Every person has skills, and standing in the position of the giver renders the skills of others invisible, and installs a lasting imbalance between the person who gives and the one who receives.
Graeber suggests, at the end of his book, that real freedom is the capacity to make promises between equals, that is, to contract obligations one has chosen and can renegotiate. That is a fairly good definition of what the relation of a cultural institution to the people it addresses could be. The most difficult transformation is not a transformation of values. It is a transformation of one’s relation to position. To stop being the one who gives and become the one who proposes. This shift is small in words and immense in what it requires one to give up.
