Miss Manners and Me

Judith Martin, AKA Miss Manners, delighted me on Christmas Day, even beyond her wonderful response to the reader who ignored his mis-set dessert spoon and scandalized his dinner party’s hostess by sipping his soup from the bowl (“It sounds to Miss Manners like a successful dinner party,” she wrote, since “It is so hard to shock people nowadays”). Ms. Martin, in fact, offered me a reason for happily deleting my Amazon wish list, the act of which I’ll do my best here to extend into a theoretical rationale concerning commodities and value.

Do you remember that Onion story about the guy with “Tuesdays with Morrie” on his wishlist, and how people kept buying him copies of it even though its placement on his wishlist was an act of consumptive identity-creation? I’ve lately run into a similar difficulty with someone new to the internets who seemed to think that the goal was to be the person who made sure the most wishlist items got bought. While I’m grateful for the gifts, I’ll here risk the appearance of ingratitude by proposing that such reactions destroy the crafted persona-construction of the wishlist, which in odd ways combines a deferral of desire with a statement about self-identity. When you obliterate someone’s wishlist through expenditures of cash, you’re in some ways also obliterating that person’s representation of self, and on the internets, the consumptive self is a rhetorical construct.

Miss Manners proposes that “By coming up with the cash gift, the gift certificate and the gift registry, […] [a]ll the work of giving was eliminated, leaving only the expense,” which is sort of what UC Irvine anthropologist Bill Maurer is getting at in his essay “Uncanny Exchanges” (Society and Space 21) when he asks, “Does the ability of money to render the qualitative into the quantitative flatten social relations” (317)? Cash makes immaterial — it abstracts — concrete and experiential relations between people. If the gift is a social and immediate act of knowing another person, the Amazon wishlist negotiates that knowledge in sometimes vexed or uncanny ways: as characterized above, it can be an aspect of rhetorical self-representation, but to those who already know you, it can also short-circuit the affective weight of the social bonds that the gift is ordinarily supposed to reinforce. Miss Manners makes an essential point:

there can be a deeper joy in receiving than in just getting the goods. That is where thought comes in. Sure, it is great to receive something you have always wanted. But to receive something that someone guessed that you always wanted is a double thrill. Knowing that someone has studied you carefully enough to know what will please you is a priceless present in itself. Even the near guesses and wrong guesses are endearing if they show thought. Thought doesn’t just count — it is the point of the custom.

So what does all this have to do with teaching writing? Well, not so much, unless we think about the value of writing (and how we value the labor that produces that writing) in ways that go beyond the mere exchange value of a grade or the bluntly instrumental value of intellectual work (“It’ll help you do better in other classes” and/or “It’ll help you get a better job”). Writing exists to be read, and as such is always inherently social — which, of course, is completely obvious, but when I think about Steven Gudeman’s assertion in Postmodern Gifts that “making a gift secures, probes, and expands the borders of a group” (3), something clicks there for me.

Under market-based commodity capitalism, cash sometimes takes the place of human interaction. But in the economy of acknowledgement that is an integral part of the FLOSS Movement and that I want to adapt to the composition classroom, embodied and material human relationships operate concretely, without the short-circuiting abstraction of cash or the short-cut of the wishlist. Sure, it’s more work, and as such, it’s difficult — but, y’know, I’m a big fan of the value of difficulty.