” A lack of namelessness on my part would destroy the ultimate value of the nice act. Meaning, it would infect the “motivation” for my nice gesture – meaning, in other words, that part of my motivation for it would be, not generosity, but desiring gratitude, affection, and approval towards me to result. Despairingly, this selfish motive would empty the nice gesture of any ultimate vale, and cause me to once again fail in my efforts to be classifiable as a nice or “good” person “
From “The Devil is a Busy Man by ” David Foster Wallace, from ‘”Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” (Abacus, 1999)
The character in David Foster Wallace’s darkly humorous short story perfectly exemplifies the double bind involved in gift. This is the starting point, the lense for my explorations.
Adam Kelly’s essay “David Foster Wallace and The New Sincerity” as well as an analysis of the treatment of sincerity in the work of DFW, also offers a more general historical and critical exploration of ideas of sincerity and generosity, from modernity to postmodernity, which I have found extremely useful ( It can be read and downloaded here http://www.academia.edu/1041012/David_Foster_Walla…)
Here are some of my notes from the essay:
-Sincerity, as defined by Lionel Trilling, in his 1972 study “Sincerity and Authenticity” is the ‘congruence of avowal and actual feeling”.
-Intention is central to the idea of sincerity. Also key is the outward, public nature of sincerity, “inter-subjective truth and communication” ; there has to be a giver and a receiver. Thus, sincerity is a performative act.
-Sincerity and its attendant intentionality were denigrated by literary modernism, when the idea of authenticity (inward looking, truth to self, rather than to others) became privileged.
-Through the rise of postmodernism, and of the discourse of advertising, with its high degree of self-consciousness, culture becomes more knowing, irony has taken precedence, and previously more naive forms of communication are subject to suspicion and ridicule. We become afraid of being or seeming ‘sincere’.
-Postmodernist theory problematizes sincerity: “This characteristic split between inner self and outer performance is further complicated, and even displaced, by the interrogation and re-evaluation of basic concepts of selfhood, intention, and performativity” – so, sincerity assumes a wholeness of the self, against a postmodernist rejection of a unitary self.
-Derrida also wrote on the double bind of gift. Read Given Time, The Gift of Death and On Cosmpolitanism.
Difference between ‘intent’ and ‘motive’. How can we ever, know, if we, or others, have sincere intent? The impossibility of judging the sincere, from the manipulative act.
Trust, belief are required.
These text pieces are a riff, with a nod to Blast, on the above ideas: my attempt to understand, assimilate and explore the complexities of generosity which until recently I did not question.
Now, I’m looking outward, from pages of text, to real life, to engage and involve other folk in participating in my explorations.
