on the giving of gifts

Every year around this time, give or take a week or so, I head out to purchase gifts for Christmas. I try to stay close to home, accomplishing my gift buying on foot on Broadway or throughout Kits if possible. And if not, then within walking distance of my office in Gastown. I try to stay away from malls. They can be an efficient use of your time at certain periods throughout the year, but this is not one of those periods. I don't mind crowds that much, but supporting local businesses that make my neighbourhood so enjoyable during the other 11 non Christmas shopping months of the year seems important to me.


Santa visits OpenRoad

I also sit down and read a brilliant little essay by Clive Dilnot called "The Gift." It's an essay from the book The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. There are many brilliant essays in the collection, but this one and its opening few pages always prepare me for creating my list and heading out into the blustery December weather and the crowds.

Below is the first major passage of the essay.

A paradox of gift giving, often alluded to, is that when conducted as obligation, it is profoundly depressive. There is something wrong here. After all, the act of giving, if we disengage it from Christmas and its horrors, should be a positive thing. The gift ought to be that which, when proffered by the giver, induces a double joy -- that of the receiver in the object, and that of the giver at the receiver's joy. Neither of these joys is inconsiderable. It is worth analyzing them because they tell us something about how things work for us and, therefore, something about the character of design activity.

Ideally the receiver of the gift obtains a double joy. First, and most obviously, there is a joy in the thing itself, the object received. The proper gift gives happiness because it matches perfectly one moment of the receiver's needs and desires. Sometimes it even helps receivers discover and satisfy desires they did not know they had. Second, the gift gives joy because the successful gift affirms a positive relationship between giver and receiver. It is concrete or evident proof that the giver knows, and has understood, recognized, affirmed, and sought to concretely meet the other's most intimate needs and desires. Moreover, the receiver finds additional joy in being the subject of the imaginative work undertaken by the giver in securing and giving this gift. The successful gift proves to us that our relationship to the giver is more than merely formal or nominal.

For the giver, the joy is perhaps more subtle, but nonetheless significant. It is a joy, first and foremost, in pleasing others, in getting to know their tastes, interest, and character, in recognizing and accepting their needs and desires (even if contrary to our own). But it is also a pleasure in successfully finding a material thing that successfully concretizes these desires - that gives receivers "exactly what they wanted."

Note that the gift is not just the thing itself. If the nature of the object or product that we proffer is essential, it is, nonetheless, not all we give. What the giver gives beside the gift-object is recognition -- which both Lacan and Hegel recognized as the fundamental human desire, which we crave above all else.

- from "The Gift" by Clive Dilnot in The Idea of Design, MIT Press, 1996.