The gift – an intro
I’m still not feeling up to writing much, but this is an explanation of The Gift as simplified by John Caputo:
“What, then, is a gift? Why does Derrida associate it with justice? And what is so “aporetic” about a gift?
To put it very simply: suppose that A gives B to C. What could be more simple than that? If A gives B to C, then C is grateful to A and owes A a debt of gratitude, with the result that C, instead of being given something, is now in debt. On the other hand, A is more or less consciously and explicitly pleased with herself for generosity. This is all the more true if C is ungrateful and refuses to say “thank you,” or if A has remained an anonymous benefactor, so that C does not know whom to thank. For then A may congratulate herself for an even higher generosity which is so unselfish that it does not even require acknowledgment. This is no less true if everything happens unconsciously, for one may certainly contract unconscious debts or unconsciously congratulate oneself for one’s being very wonderful and generous. Thus, the aporetic result of A’s giving B to C is that A, instead of giving something, has received and C, instead of receiving something, is now in debt. The result, in short, is that as soon as a gift is given it begins to annul itself, or that the conditions which make the gift possible also make it impossible.”
-Derrida, Jacques, and John Caputo. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. pg. 141, as copied from http://ddthesis.wordpress.com/category/deconstruction/
This may not seem particularly simplified! My musings on this concept will follow soon.
Gifts
Having been given the book What Would Jesus Deconstruct? as a gift for Christmas, I want to blog about the concept of The Gift (as explored in this book). Unfortunately, I also got a nasty flu virus as a ‘gift’ for Christmas and still don’t feel well enough to blog thoughtfully. Instead I will copy a story about presents from another website, even though it makes quite a different point from the one I am intending to make!
A Buddhist Christmas Story
A Christmas Story from the Lotus SutraOne time a young man inherited 4 farms from his father. He also married his childhood sweetheart. He celebrated his good fortune by building a great house with servants and many rooms.
As the children were born the man bought many toys. He filled the children’s rooms with toys of many colors and sizes. The children loved to play for hours in their nursery.
One day a fire broke our in the house. The father shout, “Run everybody.” Naturally he expected his children to run out of the house with them. But they didn’t follow the mother and father outside to safety. The parents called and called to the children, but they did not want to leave their wonderful toys.
A neighbor who had come to help out with the fire suggested that they lure the children outside with more new toys. “But we don’t have any,” said the father. “We’ll just make them up,” suggested the tear-faced mother as the flames grew hotter and hotter. “Come on out,” shouted the father and mother together. “We have horses, carts, jumping frogs, mechanical dolls, bows and even a monkey.”
The children left the burning house and their beloved toys to see the new ones and thus were saved. When the smoke cleared from their eyes they saw the house destroyed. They also noticed that there were really no new toys to be seen at all. For the first time in their lives they knew what it was to have nothing and be very grateful indeed.
Obvious Research Studies
I studied Psychology at university which I still consider to be a useful and very varied subject. However, media reports of psychological studies have always bugged me because they always seem to pick the ‘common sense’ results studies. This reinforces the popular belief that studying psychology is a waste of time because it is all ‘obvious’. Although this video parody report from the Onion is not psychology related, it made me laugh because it is a good example of this ‘obvious research’ reported in the media.
Facebook is
I have noticed a trend that Facebook seems to be replacing blogging as an online activity. I think this is a real shame as Facebook is much more superficial and less thoughtful than individual’s blogs. I expect the reason for Facebook’s rise in popularity is to do with this though – as you don’t need to spend hours musing over something to write, you just type a one sentence status update to let your friends know what you’re up to:
Sidekick is: sad that no-one is blogging as much
Sidekick is: short of something to blog about herself
Sidekick is: annoyed by facebook
This weekend the Ranter and I joined Facebook, the latest internet networking craze (under our real names for those of you who know these). Having explored it a bit I’m not too sure about it. The advantages are that it’s a fun and easy way to keep up-to-date with what all of your friends are up to. The downside is that it evoked the same mix of emotions in me that Reunion style events stir. I felt nervous about publishing my details and there was that ‘will they think I’m a failure?’ feeling that you get going back to school. I’m surprised really that I feel like this because although I’m not traditionally successful, I like my job (and it’s worthy enough that you get credit for that, to outweigh not having much money) and I’m married before 30 which is another female marker for success. I think that it’s a lot to do with the fact that I’ve married a woman which is what I’m nervous about, especially with past Christian friends who I’ve lost touch with. I’m increasingly surprised at how many small things are affected by this. I would like to be strong enough to think ‘sod them’ but I’m not this strong and don’t feel like I can cope with people from the past reacting by telling me my relationship is wrong, when most people would expect a ‘congratulations’ response. Perhaps I’m misjudging the people I used to know, after all they may mistakenly put me in this category.
Anyway, I got around this issue by putting lots of obviously false information in with bits of truth. Hopefully this will amuse those who really know me and just confuse those who don’t! Another use for facebook (which could be seen as positive or negative depending on your perspective) is that you can be nosy about people without having to communicate with them! Last night I looked up lots of old church contacts and could find out what they’re up to now. I haven’t found anyone who has done anything surprising yet though, or perhaps they’re all too scared to put surprises on facebook!
Too churched to be Christian?
Recently I’ve been pondering the notion that I might be a better ‘Christian’ if I stopped having any church involvement. This has come from thinking about The Ranter’s deconversion (which I don’t share) and a comment from a friend in the pub. The comment was about how they now avoid any church involvement because their past involvement with churches has shown them that all churches did to them was to ‘suck out all their energy’. The Ranter has also made past comments about how the church actually takes from the local community, as opposed to giving to it, because the local people who might be inclined to be actively involved are involved in church paraphrenalia instead.
My idea also comes from the context of having limited energy to do activities outside of work. When you have involvement with churches or Christian groups (which may or may not be defined as ‘church’) there is an expectation of a certain level of commitment, even if this is not explicit. My worst experiences of this were in an Evangelical Charismatic church where the church ended up becoming my whole life. I didn’t really know anyone outside of the church and most evenings were taken up with prayer meetings etc. There was no time or space to have any involvement in anything unrelated to church. An illustration of this is that after the Ranter and I left this church, it was very difficult to meet with people from the church because they were tied up with so many meetings. They were supposedly very ‘concerned’ about the Ranter because going to an Anglican church was seen as losing her faith (at the time this didn’t actually reflect anything about her faith other than that she was pissed off at them and their worldview!) but they couldn’t even keep an invite we had planned around homegroups etc. They were too busy being Christian in a busy way to be Christian in a way that they themselves would see as Christian…
I see much the same thing happening in my present life – even though I have left that lifestyle and my current involvement with my Anglican and alt_worship groups involves a lot less commitment. The Ranter and I have moved to the nice side of a rough area, and our Anglican church is now no longer our local church. The community around here has a very active group to assist regeneration etc but the meetings always seem to clash with my Emmaus homegroup, so I have yet to go. I also feel too tired and busy to commit to any active responsibility in the local area. Is the Christian thing to do to give up church involvement so that I can actually make a difference to my local community?
You may answer that I should join the church that is for my present parish, but the problem with that is it is led by a homophobic vicar who would consider my blessed, permanent, legally binding relationship sinful. I don’t think this would solve the issue!
There could actually be a new Christian Movement to give up Church to be better Christians. We need to stop being too busy ‘doing’ Christian to be Christian!
Post Protected
Apologies to anyone who has checked this blog and not found anything particularly interesting! I wanted to have my own blog to express my views but realise that most of my life is ‘data protected’. I have three part-time jobs all of which I can’t really blog about! This is quite right and proper because in all 3 jobs I work with young disabled people/children. It would obviously be completely inappropriate for me to blog in any detail about what I do during the day, and I don’t do much else (sad I know but quite true)! All I can say is that I work for a charity called Time2Share and a large college in Bristol.
I’m not very impressed with said college – I’ve worked there since 2001 and have gradually got more and more disillusioned with it. The staff I work with are really nice and friendly but we are all over worked and under paid, which I guess is fairly standard in the public sector. The problem is that there is a clash of cultures at work. We all care about our students who we know personally, and end up doing a lot for free. Today I was paid to teach for 5 hours but I got to College at 8:45am and left at 4:30 with no break (7:45 hours) which doesn’t even factor in having to plan beforehand and that I haven’t finishing marking the tests or filled in the paperwork I’m meant to do. This is all well and good but the Principalship seem to live on a completely different planet to the teaching staff. At the end of last term we had a staff engagement day (I think there was feedback that staff were unhappy so they appointed an unpopular member of staff to sort it out!). We were all filed into the refectory to hear the Principalship speak. They thought the way to engage staff was to talk about ‘branding’, competition and general neoliberal claptrap. You can imagine how this went down with a room full of teachers! The worst part was that this was going on in the same time period that many staff had recently been told that they could lose 30-50% of their income with 2 weeks notice, or that their job roles and faculties could change due to the restructuring of the college system and funding cuts!
Anyway, enough on that icky subject. I do like my job roles at Time2Share. In fact, I would like to publicise this charity to anyone reading in Bristol, Bath or North East Somerset. Would you like to volunteer some time to support a disabled child or young person? You can do this through 1:1 volunteer befriending or helping with one of our social groups. See www.time2share.org.uk . We could also do with fundraising for activities, if anyone would like to help with this (at the moment we’re collecting mobile phones to raise money).
Does someone at Googlemail know me?
I have just set up a new Googlemail email account (people who know me please ask for this). I was intrigued the other day when I noticed that all the sidebar adverts were relevant to me! This spooked me out a bit – did Googlemail actually know me? Was someone sitting in the Google office reading my emails so that they could target me specifically?! The sidebar read: ‘Metaphor therapy…’; ‘cultural software: a new theory of cultural evolution explains ideology in terms of memes’; ‘ Forgiveness and acceptance: roles of forgiveness and acceptance in dissolving resentment…’; ‘Emotional literacy thesaurus and vocabulary’.
I was sufficiently freaked out to look this up on the internet. It turns out to be ‘Contextual advertising’:
I decided to test it further by faking an email (to myself) using alt_worship terms. Unfortunately contextual advertising isn’t quite up to this yet, all it gave me was: ‘Quality Celtic shop’, ‘Train wicca – enroll free’; ‘Kit Heath Jewellery’. I was slightly surprised by this because I thought that Christian subculture would have latched onto taking advantage of this device. Of course the other alternative interpretation is that alt_worship has more in common with Wicca than with mainstream Christianity!
Classic facebook anthem (best viewed on facebook of course)
March 7, 2008 at 6:54 pm (cultural comment, superficial)
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