Abstract
This article casts its attention on acts of supplication in institutional settings. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, that is, sites that are designed to provide services to those in need. The article claims that every act of supplication is an act of violence deployed upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor and the institution more broadly. This is not violence of an overt type; it is tacit and subtle and takes root at the very essence of the supplicant, that is, his/her being. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s provocative reading of the impossibility of the gift, an analysis that is indebted to Marcel Mauss’ exposition of the gift as obligatory and, thus, an existential nullity. Drawing upon both theorists, the article theorizes the violence of the gift and proceeds to read the violence in/of care/caring. The article explicates the grounding of this violence and how it is written into each request for care.
Introduction
This article focuses on acts of supplication in institutional settings. An act of supplication can be thought of as an earnest request or an entreaty for something, one most often spawned by dire need. It is, in many ways, a desperate plea for help. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, namely, emergency shelters, sites that are designed to provide services to those in desperate need, often brought on by indigence. In so doing, the article argues that every act of supplication is an act of violence deployed upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor and the institution more broadly. That is, institutionalized settings, which are governed by a particular ethos of care, end up, even if only unwittingly, rendering the very request for help into an act of violence. This is not violence of an overt type; rather, it is tacit and subtle, but nonetheless significant as it is profound, and takes root at the very essence of the supplicant, that is, his/her being.
While the article draws upon fieldwork, 1 the focus is theoretical. The next section briefly explicates how care is conceptualized in the shelter. The remainder and bulk of the article is devoted to theorizing supplication as violence. To this end, the article follows a specific path and examines the essence of a gift (the act of giving) which is juxtaposed to the essence of care (the act of providing) and theoretically situates the two as not merely different, but also in opposition to each other. Such an endeavour permits deeper and broader reflection upon the essence of care. The article draws upon Derrida’s (1992) provocative reading of the impossibility of the gift, essentially negating its existence, an analysis that is indebted to Mauss’ (2000/1925) reading of the gift as obligatory and, thus, and again, an existential nullity. Drawing upon both theorists, the article theorizes the violence of the gift and then proceeds to read the violence in/of care/caring. The act of supplication, the article argues, is violence: to supplicate in an institutional setting is to bring violence upon the very self that speaks. The article explicates the grounding of this violence and how it is written into the (simplest) request for care.
As briefly noted, the gift and the essence of giving are fundamentally different from service and the essence of service provision. As such, it is peculiar and odd to ground a conversation about the violence of care by invoking the concept of the gift. That said, there are some examples of efforts to connect gift theory to charity or aid work (e.g., Silk 2004). Perhaps more relevant to present purposes, there is some evidence of the connection between gift and care in what unfolds in the shelter, namely, in the conceptualization and practise of service and care and how employees, especially frontline workers, believe that the expectations that clients hold about the services they receive grossly surpasses what a shelter can and should provide; as such, these employees believe that clients expect things akin to a gift, that is, without any obligations or duties. This link, however, is not the primary grounds upon which the two, gift and service, are brought into dialogue with each other in this article. Rather, the concept of the gift proves useful to lay the groundwork to think profoundly about the relation between service provision, care ethics and structural violence. In fact, and more broadly, given that, at least according to Derrida’s reading (and certainly Mauss’ as well), the gift grounds, even shapes, social relations, an argument can be – and has been – made, that the concept of the gift is not merely useful but also important to think through other matters of import to life, two examples being justice and responsibility (see, Ungureanu 2013: 400), to which can also be added matters such as freedom and coercion. The article proceeds, then, upon the premise that the concept of the gift illuminates the concept of care (and service provision). That is, if the gift – presupposed as altruistic, free and genuine, at least among laypersons – is not what it is and, more importantly, that it is impossible for it to be so, then, it is worth rethinking the essence of something like service which is, unlike the gift, already premised upon particular conditions, even though it, too, is often thought about, even ‘sold’, as noble, even altruistic (for example, in relation to charity). These conditions, this article argues, are more inimical than generally believed, and the article seeks to bring this to light, especially in the way that its inimical nature is often founded in and grounded upon the mundane and the quotidian, which as a result, might not be given its proper due.
To fully bring this to light, it is worth thinking about the (dis)connection between the gift and service from the lens of the recipient, that is, the one who receives the gift and the client who receives services. In both cases, something is received, be it a gift or a service. The gift is meant to be free, though as will become apparent, it is not, nor can it be. On the face of it, the service received is free in the sense that the client does not pay for lodgings, meals and other things (and these are offset by the funding shelters receive from various levels of government as well as through fundraising activities). That said, for all its pretenses – that shelters warmly receive those in need – the services a client receives are far from free: s/he is, as will become apparent, always obligated not necessarily to the donor, but to the institution. Thus, the juxtaposition of the gift to service from the vantage of the receiver demonstrates an important aspect about care, namely, that if a gift is not (and cannot be) a gift (that is, it is neither free nor altruistic and, in fact, creates obligations), then, something that by its essence is not conceptualized as free (to be freely provided or freely received), will create at least some, even more, obligations, in the ways that would not be necessarily thought about concerning a gift, at least facially. These obligations, this article seeks to show, are premised upon violence.
Perhaps the crucial matter about the juxtaposition of the gift to service is found in the mundane and quotidian aspects about the structure of violence in the shelter and as such acts as a contribution to the literature on emergency shelters, care and structural violence. When shelters or their practises are discussed and conceptualized as violence, they are so done in terms of the significant aspects of violence. These include matters such as discipline, correction or the invasion or evisceration of privacy, for example (see, Loseke 1992; Bridgman 2003; Lyon-Callo 2004). While such matters are undoubtedly of profound import to the organization of the shelter and the wellbeing of the clients, this article claims that structural violence also unfolds – and perhaps in more inconspicuous ways – in the subtle and humdrum (see, Ranasinghe, 2014; 2017). Specifically, the article points to the very request for help or services, that is, the supplication, where violence profoundly unfolds and is deployed against the supplicant. That is, the shelter purports to welcome all and provide help in a manner that is, facially at least, altruistic. However, as this article shows, the very supplication for service is violence to the very being of the supplicant. In other words, it is not even in the service and the requirements that come with it where such violence necessarily unfolds. Rather, it is antecedent to the very request: violence precedes the request and exists ex ante and the supplicant, thus, is a product of this violence because of and through the supplication. Examining the unfolding of the shelter via the juxtaposition of the gift and service helps illuminate how service – which is, theoretically at least, far more invasive than a gift or, to put in a different way, far less free than a gift – profoundly does violence to the supplicant in the most mundane and routine of acts: the very request for help or service. In other words, and put simply, if a gift is and does violence, then, service, which never purports to the ideals of a gift, not merely does violence, but as this article argues, is violence even in the most mundane and humdrum of ways: in the simplest of supplications.
Appropriating care
As alluded to earlier, the shelter’s mandate is premised upon providing care. This mandate, as the employees see it, loosely translates into the provision of help in myriad forms. In explaining the mandate of the shelter, an employee noted, ‘basically, we’re here to help people get back on their feet’, while another went further in claiming that ‘Our first priority is to help people […] and we are here to help the homeless population’. Or, as another employee commented: ‘If we are here to really help […] and we are not helping […] then that kind of defeats our purpose […]’. Thus, the shelter is, as another employee put it, ‘a place where anyone can walk in for help’. This view, about help and helping, somewhat surprisingly, was one shared by all personnel working in the shelter regardless of rank or even the accredited years of working in the system. This congruence is noteworthy for its rarity because the general tenor of the shelter is one of profound disorder, disorganization, acrimony and mistrust around important matters pertaining, among others, to, what care entails and how it ought to be deployed; the meaning and enforcement of rules; how clients are viewed, namely regarding whether they are deserving (worthy) or undeserving (unworthy) of care and whether the shelter system is beneficial to clients or is merely a band-aid, or at worse seriously inimical, to the wellbeing of clients. As such, that fact that every employee wholeheartedly subscribed to the ethic of helping clients is significant.
The concept of help unfolded in the everyday life of the shelter via the provision of services. These services involved – and were only supposed to involve – ‘basic needs’ or the ‘bare essentials’, that is, the minimums, of life. These chiefly involved shelter and food, along with clothing and other necessities.
For present purposes, what is important is how the provision of the essentials of life is viewed and made sense of by employees because such views are paramount to both situating and understanding not just the supplicant, but the very act of supplication itself. Many employees firmly believe that while the shelter is meant to provide the basics, it either provides more than this minimum, a significant issue in its own right, or that there are serious problems in the way these basics are provided. Regardless of what view is subscribed to, most employees (even those more sympathetic and more lenient in bending rules than others) strongly hold to the view that the shelter reproduces an ethic of dependency, and this runs counter to the ethos of an emergency shelter which is tasked with providing basic services on a temporary basis given specific emergencies faced by clients. Thus, these employees claim that more long-lasting effects of dependency take hold of the clients. For example, on the very first day when fieldwork commenced, a supervisor described the shelter system as a ‘crutch’ and said: ‘I am not going to be their crutch […] we can’t be holding their hands. […] They have to be independent’. When the supervisor was interviewed towards the end of the fieldwork, and upon further probing about the concept of the crutch, the supervisor explicated: The shelter has kind of been a crutch, it’s kind of become a crutch where [… the client thinks] “No one is pushing me to really leave, I don’t have to pay any rent, I don’t have to [deal with] some of the stresses that I might have had in my day-to-day life […]. I don’t have to worry about shopping because I get three meals a day […] It’s a free thing”. I think some people […] get so used to staying that they almost start to believe this is […] home. But it’s not […] home; it’s just an emergency shelter.
As the institution of the shelter views it – and despite disagreements among staff, nearly all subscribe to such a view – the shelter system itself was directly responsible for creating a culture of dependency that tended to breed indolence and unproductivity, a criticism, interestingly, that also been levelled against 18th and 19th-century charity work (see Greenhous 1968, Ranasinghe 2010, 2012: 538–543).
To some extent, part of what is of concern, as evident in the supervisor’s comment, is that clients had bought into the view that the care they received was free, almost as if akin to a gift. The issue here is not whether clients believed this or not – in fact, the opposite would be the case – but that the system, as voiced by the employees, propounded such a view, one cemented in the everyday life of the shelter. Thus, many employees spoke of what they called ‘entitlement issues’ that permeated the thinking of clients and pervaded the walls of the shelter. As one employee put it, ‘I can’t stand [… this] sense of entitlement that a lot of clients have. […] I think [… there is] a sense of entitlement because they feel that they deserve it [services] and they should have it’. Such views affect the way service is provided, even impacting the manner in which an employee would listen to and receive a client’s request for service. According to one employee, for example, it is important to ask oneself (rhetorically) whether the client is ‘requesting or demanding?’ and such a distinction is ‘very important to me because we are not here to be abused […] we are supposed to be helping’. Or, as another employee put it, ‘they [the clients] feel that they deserve it and should have it, when it is not a service that we are supposed to deliver’. What the foregoing brings to light is an important matter about the shelter, at least for the employees: clients have translated the right to basic needs – if it even should be conceptualized as a right, rather than, for example, a plea that materializes due to compassion – into a right and then into much more, so that it is not just the expectations around the essentials that become an issue of dependency, but expectations around excesses (above the basics) that exacerbate matters. One employee commented, for example, that ‘Some of these guys really think they are in a hotel [and] We don’t really offer that kind of service here’. The unreasonableness alluded to refers not only to the incessant service requests, but also that the requests themselves, in terms of expectations, are disproportionate and inappropriate to a site grounded upon the provision of basics. Thus, such ways of thinking about clients become crucial to understanding how the supplicant and his supplication are viewed (as explicated in the next sections). That is, any act of supplication is laden with a past that brings forth the very history of shelter and its role. There is – and will be – in other words, a general inclination to view the act of supplication suspiciously simply because it is a supplication.
On giving and providing: Gift versus care
To address a variety of issues of governance – ranging from the provision of care to the conduct of staff and clients, especially concerning the interactions between the two, as well as matters of safety and security of the site – management enacted a robust set of protocols. What is of import for present purposes does not concern the functionality of rules or their effectiveness, for example, but what they symbolize. That is, what is of interest is what can be gleaned about care given that it is – and must be – mediated by such stringent rules.
The very entrance into an emergency shelter already signals something serious, even grave: the entrant is severely in need of the simplest of things such as shelter and/or food. As such, it can be concluded that only those who are truly in need and desperate will enter a shelter. At the moment of entry, the entrant is faced with a panoply of rules. Thus, the care provided is carefully regulated. This would mean, then, that care is not equivalent to a gift, in the sense that a gift is, supposedly, given freely (without obligation) and without expectations (reciprocity). From the outset, then, care lacks any pretense of altruism and as charitable as the provision of service is or seems to be, it is not and can never be disinterested (see, Held 2006: 44–46; Noddings 1984: 9–11; Robinson 2011: 4–5, for a discussion of some of the contours surrounding care). The essence of service provision (under the banner of care), then, must be located differently. It is worthwhile, thus, to examine care vis-à-vis a gift because it helps situate the context of the provision of services (it is important to underline that the point here is not outline a normative agenda for care as gift or to claim that it is regretful that care is unlike a gift. The point, rather, is theoretical: assuming the contours and characteristics of a gift, which is given and received, what can these illuminate about care, which is provided and received?).
A gift is given for its own sake, for the sake of giving. There is no expectation surrounding this form of giving. Thus, if one received a gift for one’s birthday, what is received (money or other tangible items) is for the benefit of the recipient with little to no tangible benefit to the giver (save for the satisfaction that comes with seeing the joy of the recipient, though this is not a tangible benefit). The provision of care, on the other hand, does not – and cannot – operate as such. While a gift is given, care is provided. It would, therefore, be strange, even grammatically awkward (in fact, incorrect) to claim that one provided someone a gift. That is, it is impossible to provide a gift; it is only possible to give one. There is, then, an important difference between giving and providing, even though there is also similarity between the two because it concerns releasing or disinvesting something from one’s possession. Among other meanings, the verb to give refers to something that is freely transferred or handed over to someone. Once something is given as a gift, it cannot be taken back. This is so not merely in terms of propriety but also in terms of the very essence of a gift (if one took back a gift, then, what was given was not a gift; in fact, it raises the question of whether giving took place to begin with). Thus, if a gift is thought of as transferring something that one has to someone else (such as a sum of money), then, once that transfer takes place, that thing (the money), belongs to the recipient so that the giver no longer has any claim, be it moral or legal, to that thing. The thing has been handed over and the right to it now belongs to the recipient to do with as s/he pleases.
Care, as alluded to, is not – and can never be – a gift, and this is important to account for when considering what transpires in the shelter. Care, rather, is a provision of a thing or service. This provision, however, does not refer to any sort of transference or handing over. This point is important in concluding that provision does not – and cannot – amount to a gift. Provision pertains, among others, to making available or supplying for use. This need not be tangible, though even if tangible (such as clothes), the general rule that it is provided, rather than given, still holds. Thus, for example, a common occurrence in the shelter is for clients to request items of clothing, particularly socks. Where a client receives socks, it can be said that the socks were either provided or given by the employee and this would be true to what unfolds both practically and linguistically. However, the truth claim of this statement is only met when also acknowledging that the employee did not – and cannot – give a gift but rather provided a service. Thus, even though the recipient benefits immensely from the socks and they now belong to him to utilize as he sees fit, the recipient did not receive a gift. He was provided a service.
There are at least two important things that differentiate a gift from a provision, as the example of socks illustrate. In the case of a client who needs socks, the socks will only be provided if he requests them (this request, as the tenor of this article has thus far noted and as will be explicated in great detail below, is of profound import to understanding service provision). This is not the case with a gift, where the recipient (generally) does not request or beg for a gift. Thus, the provision of socks to a client is unlike when I, as a father, give my son a toy excavator for his birthday. It is true that he is specifically requesting an excavator, but it is also true that regardless of whether he requested something or not, he would still receive something as a gift. In terms of the client, not only must he explicitly request socks, but, and equally important, there is no guarantee that he will receive anything (if none are available) or even receive some other substitute (and this is so even if his request is deemed deserving). A gift, then, is given and received without an explicit request or exhortation made, while the provision of care necessitates an explicit request for service or help. The very entrance into the shelter, as noted before, is a request, even plea, for service: entrance itself suffices to convey everything that needs to be conveyed and speaks loudly and unequivocally via what Derrida, borrowing from Charles Baudelaire, calls ‘supplicating eyes’ (1992: 32). Second, with or through a gift, the giver, as alluded to above, does not receive a tangible benefit: it is only the recipient who does. In the case of care, however, both the recipient and the provider mutually benefit, and tangibly so. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that the client benefits from receiving socks: something that he needs or wants is now in his possession for him to use as he sees fit, though whether this is truly the case is also unsettled (see below). The same is true for the employee who provides the socks. This is because the employee is, after all, an employee, that is, a paid worker who is paid – arguably poorly – to perform services. These services include, among others, providing socks when there is such a need. Thus, while the employee’s intention is to provide socks and thereby show kindness, this act is not – and cannot be – equal or even comparable to giving a gift, because the relation between the employee and client already governs the relation of exchange in a particular way. The socks the client receives, then, is far from a gift; instead, he has received a service he is entitled to from a provider who is paid and thus obligated to act in a specific manner.
Thus, who I choose to give a gift to – my son, my parents, my friends – is my choice: I can choose or not choose to give and if I choose to give, I can choose what to give, when to give and how to give. When I so do, there are no other obligations that fall upon me (not that there is necessarily an obligation to give, though social obligations may change this): I give a gift and in so doing, this brings an end to my intention which has now materialized. There are, as well, no obligations on the part of the party who receives the gift. Thus, if I give my son a gift, he is no more obligated to me than before. Given that my love for him does not increase or decrease because of the gift, his love for me, as well, does not change because of the gift (what might change is a temporary feeling of affection or joy, but not love, even though as a child, he might mistake such an emotion for love). All this, however, is different with the provision of care. First, there is an obligation to care. While I am not obligated – and certainly not mandated – to give my son a birthday gift, an employee at a shelter is obligated via the legal requirement that befalls him/her to so do
There is another aspect as well that must be considered. If my son receives my gift, he is not obligated to me in any way. This, however, is not the case with a client. The very supplication – and the materialization of the request – puts the client in a state of obligation to the shelter system. Thus, if an employee provides a client a pair of socks because the client requested such, then, it is not that specific employee that the client is obligated to. Rather, the employee is the face of and thus represents the shelter system and it is this system, with everything it represents and stands for, that the client is now obligated to. In other words, when the client enters the shelter system – let alone when socks are accepted – s/he has already obligated him/herself to the system and everything that comes with it (the rules established by the shelter being one example of how this unfolds). Thus, every supplication, both unwittingly and unconsciously, is an obligation to the system. It is this obligation, one constituted by violence, that this article seeks to unpack and explicate. No such obligation, as noted above, exists with a gift. My son is never obligated to me, and if I turn my rearing of him into an obligation that he owes me, then, that makes me a poor (and selfish) father.
There is, as well, an important relational difference between a gift and service, as briefly alluded to before. In terms of a gift given to my son, this is so because of a particular (biological) relationship between us, one premised upon and sustained by love (not, of course, that the gift increases the love either party has for the other, though the gift is given out of love, among others). Thus, it is the relationship I have with my son that leads to the gift. Yet, even without the gift, the relation exists: in other words, whether I give a gift or not, my son will always be my son, and I will always be his father. As well, if a gift is given, nothing changes the relation (because, as noted above, there is no obligation that the recipient owes the giver). In other words, giving my son a gift does not add to this extant relation nor create an additional relation: that is, I am (still) his father and he, my son (not, I am his father who gives him gifts or his father because I give him gifts). The gift, in other words, changes nothing about the relationship. This is fundamentally different with the provision of services of care, where the relation is modified via the provision. Thus, if my son must care for me because of illness, then, he is caring for me as a son largely because he is my son. While he is always my son, illness forces him to care and this caring, which now changes the relation of time vis-à-vis the two of us – a drawn out, longer, process – also fundamentally changes the relation as father and son. ‘[C]aring’, as Held (2006: 89) writes, ‘is an interactive relation […]’ and such interactive ‘practices of care’, according to Robinson (2011: 4), ‘grow out of relations of dependence and vulnerability […] in the context of complex webs of relations of responsibility’ (see also, Noddings 1984: 9; Held 2006: 46–55). In fact, such drawn out care might force a certain obligation and even become oppressive (Robinson 2011: 5). This is precisely what happens with the shelter where services are provided. Thus, the service provider and the client, as alluded to earlier, are brought into a specific and unequivocal relationship, one governed by and premised upon both a moral and legal obligation to care. Thus, the very entrance into the shelter, which presupposes necessity, puts the two parties in an unmistakable relationship: one party provides care, the other receives it. There is, in other words, an interdependent relationship between the parties (see, Held 2006: 13; 46; Clark 1987; Noddings 1984: 8–10; Thomas 1993; Slote 2007). This is not necessarily the case with a gift: while there is a relationship, even one of dependence, as in a son and his father, the gift is temporally ephemeral (even though the gift itself, its memories and nostalgia, will last a long while). In a shelter, care is a product of the continual dependence, so the time in question is far from ephemeral but one that is long, even prolonged. Thus, given the way time interacts in the relation between the two parties in gift giving versus the provision of care or services, it is possible to appreciate that the relation that binds the parties in each situation is fundamentally different. A gift and care, then, as explicated, are not one and the same thing: caring is not the giving of a gift, but the provision of service.
Two related points need attention. Upon receipt of a gift, the receiver, as has been explicated, has the right to do what s/he chooses with the gift. This is more a legal right than a moral one, but certainly the latter is present as well. The same, in many ways, it has been said, is the case with one who receives services, for example, socks. Yet, on a more profound level, the receiver of the gift and the receiver of services are not equally situated to do as each pleases. This is because there is a moral obligation, that emerges from a moralizing discourse, that constitutes the reception of services, one which is absent, at least for the most part, with a gift. Thus, if I give someone a gift, that person may keep it, re-gift it or choose some other option. Given that there is little to no follow up with a gift, any awkwardness associated with having to tell someone that the gift was not useful or not to one’s liking, is all but absent (especially so with gift receipts so common today). This is not the case with the provision of services which, as noted, are imbued with particular (moralized) obligations. Thus, if a client is provided a pair of socks, then, the expectation the shelter has is that the client will use the socks responsibly, even though they are nothing more than socks. If the client loses the socks, for example, s/he is viewed as someone unworthy of further provisions because s/he is deemed irresponsible to handle something as simple as socks. Or, if the client uses the socks irresponsibly and subjects it to ‘unreasonable’ wear and tear, then, s/he is believed, again, to be irresponsible to use basic products of life (see, Ranasinghe, 2011).
Despite the most laudable efforts of the shelter and its staff to be in service to those in need, it is without doubt that a moralizing discourse grounds the everyday operations of the shelter. One need not look any further than the very persons who are tasked with providing services to appreciate this. One employee, for example, commented that ‘You give them one thing, they want more’. Another employee said that ‘people [are] always asking and asking and asking [and] not willing to take a little responsibility, for example, to do their laundry; they prefer to throw their laundry in the garbage and come and ask for [more] things’. The latter comment illustrates that many employees view the clients as irresponsible, untrustworthy even with basic clothing products, as well as inconsiderate because they are unwilling to do some work to keep these products in reasonable shape so that they do not have to request more and thus saddle an already depleted and burdened system. This is perhaps best exemplified in the frustrations of one employee: ‘There are people who are there to abuse [… the system]. They’ll come in and be like, “Yeah, my house burned down.” [But] how many times does someone’s house burn down)’?
Such words and deeds illuminate an important point: even the simplest request for – and reception of – service, such as socks, is imbued with historical and institutional baggage that already deems particular people unworthy of (specific) provisions. This is certainly the case with charity, especially when examined historically, where reformers strongly believed that indiscriminate giving only led to further dependence and bred indolence, even sloth (see, Greenhous 1968; Ranasinghe 2010: 59–61). Such a view is shared by many employees. As such, when a client receives socks, that client is already obligated to the shelter system to use the socks reasonably and responsibly, and it is the shelter that acts as the oracle for what each of these means (see, Wacquant 1987, who speaks of the oracle effect associated with the symbolic violence of delegation). Thus, the moralizing discourse that the client and his every supplication are subjected to, can be read as a form of psychological violence because the client is forced to prove his/her worthiness to have in his possession a simple article such as a pair of socks and this transpires not simply with each and every supplication, but continues throughout the duration of the client’s stay as his/her every move is subjected to a moralizing discourse of responsibility and worthiness. Thus, if the very entry into a shelter signals dire need, then, for the client, that signification also leaves him vulnerable to be moralized. This moral examination concerns the status of his being and his worthiness. As the institution has it, he is only to receive socks and will only do so if he is deemed worthy of them, a test that is met based upon whether he is deemed responsible and reasonable.
The impossible gift? The gift as/is violence
It is useful, then, to return to the distinction carved between a gift (the act of giving) and service or care (the act of providing) and to focus more specifically upon the intellectual and theoretical endeavours to explicate the essence of the gift (beyond the general lay perspective elaborated above). Despite some significant limitations with Derrida’s exposition of the gift (see, O’Neill 1999, 2001; Caillé 2001; Champetier 2001; Millbank 2006), it is still worth examining to situate and ground the foregoing reflections. 2
The very notion of a gift (that is, the essence of a gift), for Derrida, is an impossibility, which he calls ‘the double bind of the gift’ (Derrida 1992: 16). ‘For there to be a gift’, Derrida claims, ‘there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt’ (Derrida 1992: 12). This, Derrida states, is not possible. There are, according to Derrida, myriad conditions that must exist for a gift to be a gift, none of which can ever materialize. Perhaps the best example of this is that there ought to be no subject who receives a gift: ‘As soon as the other accepts, as soon as he or she takes, there is no more a gift’ (Derrida 1992: 14). Thus, Derrida claims that ‘the gift is another name for the impossible […]’ and where the conditions laid out are not met, ‘the gift annuls itself […]’ leading to ‘the destruction of the gift by the gift […]’ (Derrida 1992: 29; 30; emphases added). 3
The foregoing is polemical to say the least and it is impossible to deny that at least some of Derrida’s reflections are stretched, at times even absurd. According to Carroll (2005: 70) – one of Derrida’s students and later friend – Derrida himself believed that no one owed him and that he was simply able to give intellectually in his correspondence with his students and others alike, a point which suggests, contra Derrida’s own claims, the strict possibility of giving without obligation. Perhaps more penetrating criticisms flow from O’Neill (2001: 41) who writes that ‘Derrida is a violent reader/writer’ and further comments, facetiously it should be underlined, that ‘Derrida’s forte is to make difficulties where there are none’ (1999: 134), while Ungureanu (2013: 403) notes that ‘turning [the] gift into a paradox […]’, as Derrida does, ‘is a questionable philosophical move […]’. Others (e.g., Caillé 2001; Laidlaw 2000; Millbank 2006), however, appear more sympathetic to Derrida’s endeavours while nonetheless underlining profound difficulties, even paradoxes, with Derrida’s reflections (that is, paradoxes in Derrida’s paradoxes). One reason for this is that the semantic meaning of the ‘gift’ is rendered null and treated as irrelevant (cf., Champetier 2001: 16). Another reason, and perhaps more important, is that the evidence mustered by Derrida to discursively make the case is, if non-existent, then, at least quite impoverished (for example, that a gift necessitates restitution or that one condition for a gift is that both the giver and recipient must immediately and permanently forget the giving and acceptance of the gift, not to mention the requirement of an absent subject), a product of ‘Derrida blithely set[ting] himself apart from the anthropological tradition on the embedded relations of the gift and economy’ (O’Neill 2001: 42).
Specifically, it is worth recalling that Derrida draws significantly, though not solely, upon Mauss’ (2000/1925) The Gift, which provides an ethnographic account of the way the gift was thought about, made sense of and given in archaic societies (or primitive societies as Mauss also labels them). Part of the problem is that much of what Mauss describes does not relate to contemporary society, which Derrida fails to disclose, perhaps because Derrida ‘indulges in a delirious reading of Mauss’ […]’ text (O’Neill 2001: 47). The major issue, especially concerning what Derrida does not fully explicate, is that not only is the system that Mauss speaks of irrelevant to contemporary society, but it is of a select community with specific values and customs that ground them. That is, Mauss is explicit that his data is drawn from exchange formats that are ‘of an agonistic type’ where there is ‘acute rivalry’ and ‘where those entering into contracts seek to out do one another in their gifts’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 7). In other words, the society Mauss discusses is based upon a duelling code underwritten into the very acts of giving and receiving. Or it could be said that the very nature of this society is underwritten by this giving and receiving system that is premised upon antagonism. This is perhaps why Mauss writes that while ‘In theory these [gifts] are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 3). The system Mauss speaks of – premised upon self-interest and social deceit, as well as dangerous when the gift is not returned in kind – ‘is tantamount to declaring war’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 3; 13). Thus, from the very outset, the system that Mauss describes and the system of present-day gift giving, emblematic in the gift given to my son, are fundamentally different: in the latter, there is no social deceit, declaration of war, pretense of duelling and neither is there an obligation to give nor accept. The two are, then, not comparable and it is possible to imagine, theoretically, a system where a gift is bereft of the conditions of obligation that Mauss speaks of, which is why, to his credit, Derrida is forthright that while Mauss’ text describes many things, it fails to engage with very notion of the gift itself (Derrida 1992: 24).
Derrida’s reading of the gift must be situated within the confines and limits of Mauss’ text which, as alluded to, Derrida does not fully reveal or at times misinterprets (Champetier 2001: 16; O’Neill 1999, 2001; see also, Lee 2020). That said, if it is true, that as Mauss himself admits, that even in the time and system he speaks of, a gift could, theoretically, be voluntary (as also demonstrated above with the example of a birthday gift to one’s child), then, Derrida’s approach to reading the gift should be framed as an attempt to outline, contra Mauss, the theoretical impossibility of the gift. Perhaps further to this point, for Derrida, for there to be a gift, if a gift is to be, then, this being can only be so from its very impossibility of being (hence its paradoxical nature and thus nullity) (see Cheah 2005: 43–45). This is its importance. In other words, and as Caillé (2001: 28) puts it: ‘Derrida thinks not the gift is impossible, but that it is the impossible’ (emphasis in original). Thus, there is something to be said of and gleaned from Derrida’s interesting and bold reading of the gift which this article draws on to further theorize its essence.
Derrida’s reading of the gift has at least two interesting aspects that are worthy of further probing. The first is Derrida’s claim that the gift is an impossibility. Building upon this claim, this article asks: what would this mean given what has already been established concerning the relation between a gift and care for the provision of service? Recall that the previous sections argued that a gift (which is given) and service or care (which is provided) are distinct. As such, if there is something, even polemical, to be extracted from Derrida’s reading of the gift, then, what might this mean for the provision of a care? That is, if a gift is never a gift – and can never be a gift because it can never meet the condition of altruism, as commonly believed, an important condition of a gift or perhaps the condition that makes a gift a gift) – then, surely, based upon such logic, care and service can never be a gift, nor like a gift. The important point here, to underline again, is not that care is unlike a gift or that it should be akin to a gift, but what a gift, not being a gift, that is altruistic, might reveal about what care is (and is not). Thus, if a gift and care are not the same, there are important differences in terms of the implications that emerge. One is that an obligation accrues in a care or service relationship which imposes grave and severe restrictions, via attendant expectations, upon the client, so that care, akin to charity, while not altruistic, is nevertheless problematic because even charity is not charity but something else. This largely pertains to the violence that is imparted upon the very being of the client in each act of care or service that is deployed. That is, while polemical, it is the contention of this article that each act of supplication because it can only garner a provision, not a giving, renders itself to violence when such a supplication is met with a response, whether a negation or an affirmation. Even in an affirmation, violence is performed upon the supplicant because of the relation s/he has to the person providing the service, a relation where s/he is now brought under an obligation given the request for service.
Consider the foregoing from the perspective of the request (that is, the supplication), which, in essence, is a question. For one to request, one must ask, and to ask is to pose a question (as in, ‘May I have some water?’). Yet, as Derrida has cogently demonstrated, even in the very question, in every question, that is, in its form, the answer or response is underwritten ex ante, that is, even prior to the question. Partly, this concerns the relation between the two interlocutors, that each must recognize the other as engaging in a conversation with him or her (Derrida 2007: 443–444). Thus, and what is of import here, developed further below, is Derrida’s (2007: 444) claim that given the framing of the response ex ante, violence already precedes and grounds the very question. At the very moment that one poses a question, that question is one of violence, but not necessarily to the one to whom it is posed, but to the one who poses. The same relation, as will become apparent in the next section, grounds the supplicant who supplicates in the shelter. Prior to probing this, it is worthwhile examining the second and related aspect of Derrida’s exposition of the gift, namely, the way he comes to equate the gift to violence, albeit in passing.
The violence of the gift lies in the annulment of the gift, that is, where the gift destroys itself (Derrida 1992: 29–30). Here, again, Derrida relies on Mauss and explores the way Mauss takes the gift exchange in the potlach (in the American Northwest as well as in Polynesia) as a form of violence (Derrida 1992: 38; Mauss 2000/1925: 33–36). Mauss is explicit that the potlatch is grounded by ‘violence, exaggeration and antagonisms […]’ and is ‘really destructive’ or as he also puts it, is ‘pure destruction’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 35; 37; 41). This, Mauss develops by examining the American Northwest where he says that ‘the notion of credit […]’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 35), that coalesces with the acceptance of the gift, necessitates paying off the obligation. There is, in other words, an obligation that is underwritten into gift giving. What Mauss shows is that not repaying a received gift is tantamount to losing prestige (Mauss speaks of the way clan leaders vie for prestige by always seeking to give better gifts than those received, alluding to a certain competition). Losing prestige is tantamount to losing one’s soul (Mauss 2000/1925: 39). Thus, the gift, which in these cultures has a being of its own, leads to a loss of the soul if the attendant obligation that comes with it is not addressed: ‘to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul’ (Mauss 2000/1925: 12; see also, 39; 66), which means that even in a gift, the very being of the recipient is adulterated. Therefore, repayment is necessary. This is the aspect of violence associated with the gift.
Focusing upon Mauss’ reading of the potlatch, Derrida connects the gift with/to time, claiming that the restitution and reciprocity that the gift necessitates requires time (time, essentially, to complete the circle) (Derrida 1992: 39–40). Derrida writes that ‘The gift gives, demands, and takes time’ (Derrida 1992: 41; emphases added). The demanding and taking referred to are not innocuous nor are they negligible. The taking referenced is a product of a demand. In the demand of the gift – which runs counterintuitively to the very notion of the gift – Derrida sees something problematic with the notion of the gift, and this eventually leads him to the conclusion of its impossibility. In this demand, among others, Derrida locates the violence in/of the gift. Thus, in the traditional sense – for example, a gift a father gives his son – the gift does not lead to any obligation nor is there any need for reciprocity, certainly not restitution. There is nothing, in other words, that is demanded. Yet, for Derrida, the acceptance of the gift creates an obligation, but not an obligation in the traditional sense of the term, but in terms of a trapping, as in the way, for example, prey is trapped, and often violently so. Derrida explicates that ‘as soon as he accepts the gift’, ‘The other is taken, caught in the trap: unable to anticipate, he is delivered over to the mercy […] of the giver; he is taken in, by the trap, overtaken, imprisoned […]’ (Derrida 1992: 147). The violence associated with the gift might only be implied but it is certainly palpable: the recipient of the gift is equated, in some ways at least, to a prisoner who is trapped, but not necessarily trapped in space and time (as in a prison cell) though that certainly may also be so. Rather the recipient is trapped in and because of the very gift he accepts (and it is this gift, rather than, for example, a prison cell, that traps, though perhaps traps more insidiously than a prison cell). If this is akin to saying that if one commits a crime, one accepts (and, thus, commits) a death sentence, then, in some ways, Derrida’s claim can be expanded to say that if and when one accepts a gift, one commits oneself to entrapment, an entrapment that is a product of the gift itself (save here, neither the giver nor recipient might be intending to trap or be trapped). Thus, for Derrida, a gift can never be a gift because a gift is violence. Derrida concludes that ‘Such violence may be considered the very condition of the gift, its constitutive impurity […]’ (Derrida 1992: 147). This is the first time that Derrida explicitly labels the gift as violence, close to 150 pages into the text, but it comes with aplomb. He speaks of ‘the cycle of the gift’ – in relation to the gift and countergift that he borrows from Mauss and which he develops as the circle that is brought to fulfilment, thereby annulling the gift – ‘as violence […]’ (Derrida 1992: 150). The gift, then, for Derrida, is violence and this is why it is not, and cannot be, a gift proper. This is how and why the gift annuls and destroys itself. Accordingly, the gift never is, nor can it be, altruistic.
It is clear, then, that the annulling and destruction of the gift comes from within, and it is this that makes it (and marks its) violence. Prior to explicating what this might reveal about the provision of care, it is worth examining the sort of violence that is suggested in this context (the example of imprisonment, briefly alluded to above, provides one context). To this end, the example of divorce as narrated in the Bible is poignant, and the book of Malachi, in the Old Testament, serves well for this purpose. The prophet Malachi warns the Israelites about numerous concerns about their sinful lives, one being adultery and divorce. This counsel is directed to men. The relevant passage 4 cautions the men of Israel – Judah, specifically – that they ‘ha[ve] been unfaithful’ and that ‘A detestable thing has been committed […]’. Malachi speaks of and expands upon this unfaithfulness, which is first mentioned in the broad sense of an unfaithfulness to God, and then spoken of vis-à-vis the unfaithfulness of husbands to their wives. Malachi warns the men of Israel that they ‘belong’ to God ‘in body and Spirit’ and that God seeks ‘Godly offspring’. ‘So’, Malachi ends this excoriation, ‘be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth’.
It is worth perusing the way unfaithfulness – of husbands to wives and in the broadest sense of the Israelites to God – is imagined as and equated to violence. 5 Malachi continues: ‘“The man who hates and divorces his wife”, says the LORD, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect”, says the LORD Almighty’. The violence alluded to is not, explicitly at least, spelled out. Rather, it is vague and ambiguous, and merely suggests that divorce brought upon because of and by hate – rather than some other reason, such as infidelity – is (akin to) violence. Thus, in such an occurrence of divorce, the husband ‘does violence’ to his wife (or treats her treacherously). That is, a husband does, which is to say performs, violence. What, then, does it mean to do violence in this context? Even a brief and cursory look at the Old Testament reveals what ‘does violence’ might mean, and here, specifically, it refers directly to acts of physical violence and their manifestations: war, killing, maiming, torture, bloodshed and the destruction, pain and suffering etc., that come with it, which are staples throughout the pages of the Old Testament, in regards to the violence endured by the Israelites (think, for example, their captivity in Egypt) or the violence the Israelites administer upon their enemies (think, for example, the entry into the Promise Land). All these episodes of violence, which are sanctioned by God, mean that this violence is administered by Him upon all, Israelites and others alike. Thus, the violence alluded to here is of the physical ilk. The duty of the husband, it is said – and this theme is carried into the New Testament (e.g., Ephesians 5: 21–33; Colossians 3: 19; Matthew 5: 27–30) – is to protect his wife (‘to the one he should protect’) and the failure to so do, divorce being one significant way, is to do violence upon the wife. Such a violence tears her (and him) apart from the ‘one flesh’ through the unity that binds man and woman in marriage (Ephesians, 5: 31; see also, Genesis 2:24, upon which Paul draws from). In other words, divorce eviscerates (the unity of) the body. This is its violence. Thus, when a man divorces his wife, the violence that he does to her (or upon her) is the evisceration of the one flesh. This is how he treats her treacherously.
Divorce does not have traces or manifestations of physical violence. Yet, it is imagined as such and is said to be tantamount to it. Such a way of imagining divorce helps elucidate and situate the gift as violence, that the gift is violence. In the same way that the body is torn by divorce, the gift tears its own being – it destroys itself, it annuls itself, as Derrida says. The example from Malachi is useful because Derrida uses the word annul – at least as the translation into English has it – to speak of the violence of the gift (the gift annuls itself). The word annul – to make void or declare invalid – can also be found in Catholicism, 6 and thus, there is some usefulness in drawing upon the Biblical imaginary. Thus, if the foregoing is a fair reading – that divorce is violence because it tears apart the flesh of the body – then, the word annulment captures the destruction of the gift by the gift as a form of violence. It is, therefore, worth reading the gift of violence through the lens of divorce and the violence it occasions because in similar vein, the gift can be imagined for the violence it occasions on itself. The gift destroys – it eviscerates – its own self, its flesh, so to speak. This is why the gift is an impossibility and this is why it is, simply put, violence.
On care as violence
If the gift can be read as violence, it is also possible to read the provision of care as violence. The process by which such a position is reached, however, is different in the latter than the former. Recall that, for Derrida, the annulment of the gift by itself renders it violence and thus an impossibility. Thus, if it is the gift that annuls and destroys, then, this process takes place from within. However, the destruction of care which renders it (as) violence is from without, not within, and this unfolds as the supplication and the supplicant are assembled into a discourse fitting and worthy of the ethic of the institution. The supplication – be it as innocuous as a request for socks – is processed via institutionalized discourses and rules, and this processing undergoes a filtering to render each request as either legitimate or not, and by extension, as deserving or undeserving. At the moment of supplication, the supplication is annulled and destroyed (to draw on Derridean language). However, this does not occur by the supplication and the supplicant – though certainly because of the supplication and supplicant – but rather by the supplicant’s interlocutor, in this case the service provider, who is (un)willingly and/or (un)wittingly a representation of the institutional ethos which is produced in the employee and which s/he, in turn, reproduces. Thus, for example, when a client requests socks, the purity of the supplication is destroyed and is translated into a moralizing institutional discourse. Recall, as noted in the preceding section, that given that each question already, ex ante, contains the appropriate response, the request, as a question, already has in it the seeds for the appropriate, institutionalized, response that is relayed by the employee. When questions such as ‘May I have some socks’? or ‘Are there any socks available?’ are uttered, the question and accompanying words are processed through an institutional logic that makes sense of them as ‘Is this request for socks legitimate and is this client worthy of socks?’ This is far from abstract theorization and can be seen unfolding daily. For example, an employee commented that ‘A lot of people staying here […] are homeless; some of them, they just want to stay here because they don’t want to be responsible for themselves […]’. Or, as the supervisor who spoke of the system breeding dependency – recall the metaphor of the crutch – put it: ‘It’s human nature […] when some humans experience free food, free clothing, free shelter […] it does not encourage them to want to work’. Thus, in some ways, the request ceases to exist (or even ever existed) and a new iteration of the meaning of what was uttered is born, one where the client is now opened-up to/for a moralizing critique that gauges everything from the validity of the request to his trustworthiness to use the socks responsibly (or whether he will even use the socks or simply trade them or sell them). It is in this sense that the supplication – a genuine request based on need – becomes an act of violence, not simply because of the speaker or his utterances, but because of his interlocutor who simply follows institutionalized protocols. The supplication, then, becomes a forum to critique the supplicant and this takes place by rendering the supplication inexistent. The request for socks is no longer – and perhaps never was – about socks, but about everything that can be assessed about the client to assemble him in a specific, governable, way.
It is possible to appreciate, then, the way that the essence of supplication, need, undergoes an oratorial transference or transformation, from the supplicant to his/her interlocutor via an evisceration of the supplication. Returning to the example of divorce outlined earlier, it is possible to appreciate how divorce tears the flesh of the body (the one, united, body of the husband and wife), so that what is brought under God’s covenant is broken. Each supplication can be thought of in a comparable manner: its essence is torn asunder and custody of it is transferred into the care of another. In other words, the supplication becomes the property of the institution for it to make sense of and address as it sees appropriate. What is of import is not simply that the supplicant’s request might amount to nought and be dismissed (a frequent occurrence) but that, and most importantly, the very need that spawns the supplication is itself moralized as legitimate or not. To put this differently, it is the institution, not the supplicant, who is tasked with speaking for the client about whether he, in fact, is in need. Thus, with every supplication, the wellbeing of the client is nullified (in fact, if the polemic is permitted, with each supplication, the client himself is nullified).
Take as an example a frequently occurring request, where an indigent person, not registered with the shelter for the night, would seek entry after 7 p.m. to drink from the nearby water cooler (the front door to the shelter is locked starting at 7 p.m. to ensure that only those registered with the shelter are permitted entry). Such requests are typically denied. In the case of the request for water, a necessity of life, especially when on the verge of thirst, this need is translated by the employees into anything (or everything) but need. That is, the denied request signifies that the client does not need water because if he was truly in need, then, he would be provided water (he might desire water but that is different from need). The supplicant’s thirst or even mere desire for water is transferred from his ability and right to speak about what he needs to an institutional right to so do. In so doing, the essence of the supplicant (and his supplication) is stripped from him.
As such, it is possible to appreciate how employees frame issues in the shelter and the implications therein. For example, as noted earlier, some employees juxtapose the shelter to a hotel and claim that the two are fundamentally different both in scope and available resources, a claim that is both undoubtedly true and reasonable. Yet, in such a juxtaposition, what transpires – even if unwittingly – is that the request of the client is rendered void or moot by translating needs into different statuses. Thus, if a client requests additional bedding, then, in claiming that the shelter is not a hotel and thus can only provide certain amenities, what has nevertheless taken place is that the need for extras, perhaps to safeguard against the cold, is read as excessive, superfluous and unnecessary. Thus, there is nothing further to provide and certainly no need to do so because there is not an extant need. The very essence of the client’s need – that he might need something – is removed from him (his agency to frame his own needs) and transferred into the hands of the institution, which, given that it is a shelter and not a hotel, means that the client will not be provided additional bedding because he is deemed not to be in need of it.
Conclusion
This article has examined the provision of care in an emergency shelter. In so doing, it has focused upon the act of supplication explicating how the very act of supplication, which conveys (dire) need, is itself an act of violence imparted upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor. This happens, the article claims, because of the institutional protocols that strip authorial power from the supplicant to voice his/her concerns about need – that s/he is, in fact, in need – and, instead, transfers that power to the institution via the interlocutor. Thus, it is the institution that orates on behalf of the supplicant, not the supplicant.
The path to sustain such a position might appear circuitous in following the violence of the gift. That said, by locating the violence in/of the gift via Derrida’s (and Mauss’) polemic, it is also possible to glean the violence associated with the provision of care. In other words, if a gift is violence, then, it is easy to see and appreciate the violence in/of care, especially when considering the social obligations that are explicitly present in care which are absent in a gift.
The implication of all this is sobering: institutions of care are in the business of violence. Such an agonistic statement might seem extreme, but the very logics and logistics associated with the delivery of care mean that this care is violence when acts of supplication are accounted for. Even in the mundane, then, profound violence occasions the client who speaks on his own behalf, or so he thinks, for what he deems he needs, only to have his request translated by another into what is deemed acceptable and appropriate.
