the+illusion+of+gifting,+a+sick-end+rant+on+the+static+state+of+ethical+structures

Once upon a time I took a class called the Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics. In the end the class ended up being about “values”. The professor was this guy who wrote this book about “values”—which was required reading for the class, a practice I am far from opposed to—a book that turned out to be more of a workbook for soul searching than anything else. The book had exercises and a guide for thinking about and figuring out your values—what was important to you, the hierarchies of your priorities. The final paper required for the class was an expose on your morals and values, described in detail using life experiences, course material, and some other stuff. This process—the process of acknowledging, reflecting on, and playing with values—is something that I’ve carried with me for years. A monthly, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily practice. I think others should join in--requirements for citizenship (see Ali on benevolent dictatorship). Ethics are a funny thing. This may be a problem that is unique to me since my ethics seem to change on a whim, moment to moment. I don’t believe in right and wrong. Yep, that’s right. But it’s wrong too. It’s both. And neither. And of course that’s the point. The breaking point, shall we say. What is the point? What is the point of ethics? Why do we want them? What are they good for? It’s all about figuring out how to live, the deliberative art of self-conduct (Foucault, 149), which is always dependent upon relations and context. Ethics ethics ethics, one of the great underpinnings—is it //**the**// underpinning?—of human, intelligent, organized existence. What is human? Do animals have ethics? What drives ethics? No, don’t go down there. Seriously though, I’m with the ancients on this one—there is nothing more important than figuring out how to live, ethics. But how do we do it? And not all lame and silly like its being done and has been done and will continue to be done (yes folks, she’s an arrogant one), but in a way that overthrows hegemonies. And I’ll camp out here with this idea today, despite acknowledging that danger, that when you overthrow one form of hegemony, that inevitably makes room for hegemony in a different form. Somewhere this week someone said (and its John Thackara I just can’t find the right paragraph) something along the lines of: we don’t need more information we need more conversation, because conversation has the potential to create new ways of talking about things, different ways of seeing things.

Nancy S-H—love her. Love her to pieces. But we are now in the dead time of the year and so I’m going to cast my lot in this dark space. What is life, and what is living? Because it might very well mean different things to different people: “When concepts such as individual agency and autonomy are involved in defending the “right” to sell an organ, anthropologists might suggest that certain “living” things are not alienable or proper candidates for commodification” (160). This view undoubtedly depends upon some understanding of life and living; a perspective that is assumed, not explained or interrogated. So what is life and living in the context of organ trade? Now, to credit Nancy, it certainly seems, based on her writings, that she’s seen a lot of life and living in the world, and a good deal from marginal, invisible, and oppressed locations. Yet there seems to be something missing from this story, and that is what it means to live, and specifically what makes life worth living. I have previously held the view that life is not worth living and so I often find myself questioning and perplexed by the value placed on living life. We have the “essential democratic and ethical principles that guarantee the equal value of all human lives” and yet we all know that that’s just not real—its symbolic but its never been a practice, and while I’d like to keep it part of the imaginary for present and future use, I’m not a 100% on board with the concept. Not until we talk about what life and living is, and what value it holds for who, when, where, how, and why. And “equal”, well, you just need to step down for a moment because you have been clogging the pipes for a bit too long—although the point is that I don’t want to use these pipes anymore anyways. Agency and autonomy. We know those concepts are just as problematic as "equal". Agency and autonomy are not pure but constituted and interpellated with/in dynamic materials and affects too complex to put us in the humble place in which we belong—at least for now. So for as fucked up as the global traffic in organs may be, I can’t help but respond with, “well, it’s a fucked up world.” And you can describe to me in detail the injustice, horror, and evil of the organ market, but it all sounds very human to me. Trade, survival, suffering, competition, power, all operating within governing structures, whether those of international law, market forces, or professional ethics, or the play on them—is organ trade not a natural progression within the context of 21st century society? I know, I know—I’m starting to sound like one of those soulless bioethicists. But maybe that’s because your understanding of soul is grounded in Western Enlightenment—modernist values defended by people around the world, privileged and oppressed alike. Values that need to be questioned and interrogated, especially since these same values are being employed by all, opposing parties. I suppose this makes it easier to talk about, shared language.

Enter culture:

“The body and its parts remain inalienable from the self because, in the most simple Kantian or Wittgensteinian formulation, the body provides the grounds of certainty for saying that one has a self and an existence at all. Humans both are and have a body. For those who view the body in more collectivist terms as a gift (whether following Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, or animistic beliefs and values), the body cannot be sold, while it can be re-gifted and re-circulated in humanitarian acts of caritas.” (164)

But wait. What's over here:

“Moreover, what the humanities may learn from Darwin is that human products and practices—institutions, languages, knowledges—are never adequate to the real of life and matter, but are always attempts to contain them, slow them down, to place them in a position of retrospective reconstruction in the service of life’s provisional interests. Life yields more complex life; life generates inventions of matter and different rates of variation and transformation. It also yields knowledges, technologies, techniques, and practices that make it both more and less at home in the universe, that make the universe increasingly amendable to its requirements, through the labor of production, but also that make its universe more and more open to interventions that may actively transform its own qualities in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.” (Grosz 42)

“Tied to neither the natural nor the social spheres alone, the concept of life now serves as a bridge, a point of connection and transition between the biological and the cultural, the ways in which matter opens itself up to social transformation, and the ways in which social change works with and through biologically open, individual and collective, bodies.” (Grosz, 37)

And don't you think its mysterious that NSH didn't talk about violence? Maybe we should be asking, or thinking about the violence at work in this piece...