Relations and circulating objects

pp. 110-132

in: Olli Pyyhtinen, Simmel and "the social", Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

We live among things, desire them, feel attached to them, use and attend to them, carry them with us, pass them among us, and throw them away. In this respect, as Heidegger (1962, Section 15, p. 96) notes, the Greeks had a convenient name for "thing": πράγματα, pragmata, "that which one has to do with one's concernful dealings". Things are objects of our concern, and they concern us. It is thus easy to see that things are closely entangled with social relations. Let us think of gifts, for example. The gift is tied so intimately to social relations that it cannot be grasped as something completely in itself without paying attention to the ties that accompany it. To do this would mean to deny the "phenomenon of the gift", as Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé (1998, p. 24) maintain. By imposing obligations, the gift establishes a relation between the donor and the donee. When we receive a gift, we immediately feel obliged: we are supposed to return the gift; not perhaps the exact same object (at least this is usually not the case in our contemporary society), but in any case the gift must somehow come back to the donor, if not as a "countergift" then at least as a symbolic equivalent in the form of a "thank you", for example.