THE GIFT

Although Barbara, in Browning's novel, is not part of the encampment, the fermentation of ideas she encounters during her visits encourages her to come up with her own plan to address some of the inequalities and unhappiness accentuated by the 2008 crash: the “recent implosion of the global financial system made it evident that we needed to try something else,” she explains, and “maybe if I began (or, to be honest, continued) super-producing both asked-for and unasked-for recordings of my uke covers as gifts, I could possibly help jumpstart a creative gift economy that would spill over into the larger world of exchange.”Footnote ⁹ This “creative gift economy” (a term coined by Marcel Mauss) would, Barbara hopes, be a stay on the individualism and competition she regards as endemic to American society. Wendy Brown's 2015 book Undoing the Demos defines neoliberalism as a “governing rationality” that “extend[s] a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.”Footnote ¹⁰ In this seemingly inescapable contemporary mode, “economic parameters become the only parameters for all conduct and concern,” with the individual configured as “a unit of entrepreneurial and self-investing capital.”Footnote ¹¹ Barbara's proposed “something else” is a system where the “market model of self-interest” is simply not relevant: tired of behaving as “market actors” competing for the best return on their investment, her putative gift givers pursue instead an affective reward that comes from acts of spontaneous generosity.Footnote ¹² This resembles the argument put forward by Hyde in The Gift, which Barbara is reading while Occupy is taking place. Central to Hyde's thesis is that while purely economic transactions fail to create any type of connection, a gift establishes “emotional ties between the parties in the exchange,” a “feeling-bond,” and as gifts are passed around they can “produce and maintain a coherent community” based on gratitude and sociability.Footnote ¹³ Gifts thus function as “anarchist property,” in that the “connections, the ‘contracts,’ established by their circulation differ in kind from the ties that bind in groups organized through central power and top-down authority.”Footnote ¹⁴ As a mode of exchange which strengthens human relationships and aims to build a rhizomatic community, gift exchange has an obvious appeal for those sympathetic to the Occupy cause.Footnote ¹⁵ And Barbara is already an enthusiastic gift giver, handing them out “randomly, all the time”; these often take the form of ukulele covers (and occasionally films of herself dancing), which she e-mails to friends, acquaintances, and even total strangers.Footnote ¹⁶ She does not expect anything in return for these recordings, but hopes they might generate a relationship between her and the recipient – the songs tend to be love songs, often sentimental, and she imagines they will offer a shortcut to a type of “erotic investment.”Footnote ¹⁷ If successful, this would effectively reverse (in however small-scale a way) the neoliberal “vanquishing” of a “demos … the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership.”Footnote ¹⁸ Barbara envisions an expanding community built on goodwill and emotional interchange, and is adamant that her covers should be “available for regifting” to anyone who wants them, and thereafter circulate freely – just as Hyde suggested that “the gift must always move.”Footnote ¹⁹

In the second half of his book Hyde made an explicit connection between gift giving and artistic creativity, or “giftedness.” He suggested that as with material gifts, the work of art accrues social value when widely shared – and in optimal circumstances the creative energy or imagination of the audience is also stirred: “Reading the work, we feel gifted for a while, and to the degree that we are able, we respond by creating new work (not art, perhaps, but with the artist's work at hand we suddenly find we can make sense of our own experience).”Footnote ²⁰ Barbara similarly hopes that her ukulele covers will provoke a creative response in others: her thoughts seem to merge with Hyde's as she explains that “in the best of all possible worlds, the recipient feels compelled to do something with the gift – mine (although my musical gifts, in both senses of the term, are pretty negligible) or the true musical gift at the origin of the song.”Footnote ²¹ When she receives a generic spam e-mail from a weight loss doctor based in Illinois, she writes back to him with a cover of “I Wish You Love,” imagining it might prompt him to “sit down and noodle around on his Korg,” or perhaps even “record his own cover tune and embed it in the next batch of weight loss spam he sent out into the ether.”Footnote ²² And ahead of a workshop she is due to give in Chicago, she sets the participants an assignment which she pictures setting off a chain of “weird art,” an endless diffusion of creative energy: “The idea was for each person to make something – a dirty haiku, a voice-mail apology, a videotape of him- or herself dancing around … People would send these to me, and then I would respond, and maybe it would keep going.”Footnote ²³

Barbara's gift giving reaches a pitch of intensity during her relationship with Sami, a talented musician living in Cologne with whom she strikes up an online correspondence. Having found some of his “astonishing” ukulele videos on YouTube, she sends a message offering to choreograph a dance for his recital of a Paganini caprice, and he seems receptive to the idea; soon she is e-mailing him poems and ukulele covers, while he reciprocates with some of his own compositions.Footnote ²⁴ These musical exchanges push them both to create more experimental art: she sends over videos of herself dancing naked to his “mostly phatic” voice messages, and after he reads her novel he composes “an entire jazz suite” in a “twenty-four-hour frenzy,” “each section titled after a small detail – an image from my narrator's dream, the name of a hotel where she'd stayed, something funny she'd said.”Footnote ²⁵ While these artistic exchanges foster a relationship of mutual creativity (as per Hyde's hypothesis), their messages to each other also arrive as a type of accelerated intimacy: after Sami explains that he has Asperger's and suffers periods of extreme anxiety, Barbara offers to become a regular point of contact for him, and despite being told that “he found emotions confusing,” she repeatedly tells him she loves him, even sending over an intimate video of a “hand dance” – presumably of herself masturbating – which she coyly suggests we (the reader) cannot be shown.Footnote ²⁶ When he describes to her “the technique of bowing sul tasto” and “of playing the ‘sweet spot’,” she regards it as “one of the dirtiest messages anybody had ever written me,” although “strictly speaking, it was all about the placement of the bow over the violin strings.”Footnote ²⁷

Despite Sami's reservations, Barbara continues to send videos of herself dancing naked, while subtly pressing him for personal revelations. And she dismisses his obvious unease when he attempts to stop her from sending over a package of gifts: he admits to “paranoia and social phobia” and explains that giving anyone his address “always sent him into a panic,” yet she insists on having that information.Footnote ²⁸ The parcel apparently having been lost in the post, Barbara then plans a trip over to Cologne, and gathers more gifts to give him in person. But when she appears to be nearing his (fake) home address, he begs her not to visit, even threatening to kill himself if she arrives with the gifts. This brings into focus the central drawback of gift exchange: generally speaking, gifts must be reciprocated by offering something of roughly equal value; otherwise one is left feeling ungenerous, and indebted, and the relationship turns unequal. When Barbara arrives back in New York, Sami explains to her that “objects, physical objects, often frightened him,” and he “preferred weightless gifts, the songs and dances we'd exchanged. Objects frightened him because in the past his father had used them to control him … Sami was afraid of feeling indebted – it was irrational, but it was how he felt.”Footnote ²⁹ In Mauss's anthropological essay The Gift he wrote at length about the “obligation to repay gifts received,” and the sanctions (social, spiritual, and economic) if that generosity is not returned.Footnote ³⁰ What Barbara fails to understand is that, for Sami, accepting her “ridiculous bag of treats” would force him into a position of obligation, burdened by the need to reciprocate, but (given that material objects have posed a threat to him in the past) unwilling and afraid to do so; her rather simplistic claim – “I wanted to give you something beautiful” – suggests that she is oblivious (or in denial) about the rules of gift exchange, an assumption which is borne out by her later naive remark: “Gifts never make me feel obligated, though they make me feel inspired, so I make something in response but never out of a sense of debt.”Footnote ³¹ Her visit to Cologne is a disproportionate act of generosity which diminishes Sami's standing, leaving him weakened and upset – unable to return the favor, he has become the lesser partner in the relationship. This botched attempt to visit him also uncovers a steeliness in Barbara's character: she admits, “I'd probably overdone it with the treats, oops,” and while that “oops” implies that this was a simple misjudgment which has just occurred to her, her insistence about visiting him starts to feel like an act of violence: she warns him, “I'm starting to feel a little obstinate. I think I'm just going to do it,” as she maps out her route to his address.Footnote ³² Only when she arrives back at Cologne airport, following her disastrous attempt to visit Sami, does she realize the magnitude of her error. There she notices, on a sign indicating which items are prohibited on a flight, “a picture of a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it, and next to it was the German word: Gift.”Footnote ³³ The word Gift in German means “poison,” and this forces her to reconsider her behavior, which “had all started as a kind of joke,” but now feels ruinous: “it was so devastating to think that my gifts, maybe even the beautiful ones, maybe even this novel, might be also poisonous for him … the Germans were trying to tell me the dangerous thing was the gift itself.”Footnote ³⁴

The misunderstanding between Sami and Barbara has arisen because she assumes that their relationship operates according to the logic of “baseline communism,” an open-ended structure of obligations where favors and courtesies (and even gifts) are freely given out in order to maintain a level of sociability.Footnote ³⁵ Graeber believes that this operates within most societies, capitalist or otherwise: “Anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to respect the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities …’ at least to some extent: for example, if you need to figure out how to get somewhere, and they can give you directions, they will.”Footnote ³⁶ The same principle works among close friends and family, where “relations are assumed to be eternal” and therefore “taking accounts [would be] considered morally offensive or just bizarre.”Footnote ³⁷ Because Barbara's inclination is to assume a close relationship with everyone she meets, she imagines that she and Sami have this type of bond – hence her belief that it is possible for them to avoid acting “out of a sense of debt” to each other.Footnote ³⁸ But hers and Sami's friendship does not operate on these familial terms, as he alone recognizes; their dynamic is one of “exchange,” a “fundamentally different sort of moral logic,” where the relationship is of “balanced reciprocity” between equals, but can quickly become “agonistic”: in particular, issues tend to arise when “two parties are acting like equals, trading gifts, or blows, or commodities, or anything else, but one of them does something that completely flips the scale.”Footnote ³⁹ Sami's sense of beleaguerment is triggered by Barbara's confounding generosity, and by refusing the gifts and (temporarily) cutting off contact, he hopes to walk away before the situation spirals further out of control.

This brings us back to the Occupy movement: one of the main targets of the occupiers’ fury was the level of debt with which millions of Americans were struggling, whether from student loan fees, mortgage payments, healthcare costs, or more mundane fees such as late fines on a credit card. After listening approvingly to some of the anticapitalist debates in Zuccotti Park, Barbara has managed to come up with a plan which actually re-creates some of neoliberalism's most deleterious effects, particularly indebtedness and its resultant power imbalances. But Sami's rejection of Barbara's gifts goes beyond simply a fear of debt, because the particular burden he is trying to forestall is less economic than emotional: he could probably afford to reciprocate in material terms, but he recognizes that the point of her gifts is to introduce a “feeling-bond” between them, and it is this keystone of her plan that he particularly wishes to avoid, since he struggles with social contact, preferring interactions that are more “rational” and “logical” than sentimental.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet Barbara is unable to accept that Sami might prefer to remain autonomous and unencumbered; she regards his apparent isolation (which he never in fact admits to) as a negative effect of global capitalism (with its relentless endorsement of individualism and self-interest), which she must alleviate by forging a connection through those forced gifts. Sami would rather keep his distance, finding impersonal modes of interaction much easier to handle because they do not require him to confront the “irrationality” of other people's emotions.Footnote ⁴¹ This is why he rejects Barbara's gifts, and the hold over him they threaten to install: instead of seizing on her offer of an emotional bond to mitigate his supposed loneliness, he actually prefers the relative simplicity and anonymity of purely transactional relations (which market exchange operates on), where both parties are free to walk away after the trade has been completed.

FROM GIFT GIVING TO GIFTEDNESS

The sense of obligation that is intrinsic to gift exchange represents a major stumbling block in Barbara's plans for a “gift economy.” And though her scheme has the potential to introduce a more personal, emotional element into the exchange of goods – Hyde describes this as “the bonding power of gifts” – this rarely seems to work out the way she expects.Footnote ⁴² The Illinois weight loss doctor stops replying when she sends him one of her ukulele recordings, and when she e-mails one to David Graeber (who makes a cameo appearance in the novel), he flings back a one-line response which precludes further discussion. And her venture is further undermined by the significant economic advantages she enjoys personally: her sizeable apartment and well-paid job as a university professor suggest that she profits from the “larger world of exchange” she hopes to reshape through gift giving – even if she prefers to characterize her relation to money as “a little mystical,” as though existing apart from the capitalist marketplace.Footnote ⁴³ Michael Taussig reminds us that “Manhattan has become unlivable for most people,” but Barbara lives in Greenwich Village, a notoriously expensive neighborhood, in an apartment large enough to divide into two, with her son living in the other half.Footnote ⁴⁴ Meanwhile, at a conceptual dance performance by her friend Tye, she miscalculates the actual value of her free ticket, and while she admits that $500 for a single performance would have been “pretty steep,” it was “worth it,” and she could have easily stumped up that amount.Footnote ⁴⁵ Barbara's rather breezy cataloguing of her various expenditures implies that a narrative judgment is being made about her level of commitment; the fact that this is a work of autofiction suggests that this criticism is also being extended to the author herself, in a subtle moment of self-implication. Certainly Barbara's interest in offsetting some of the alienation created by global capitalism is tempered by the fact that the structures of neoliberalism have generally worked to her advantage, and her efforts to bring others on board often feel desultory, as though she has no real desire to take it beyond the realms of a hobby. The clear limitations of her conceptual vision are underscored when she refers to her proposal as a “gift economy,” because that term is not strictly accurate; Alf Rehn defines a gift economy as “a form of economic organization … in which gift exchanges function as the central framework of economic activity.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Barbara's plan to “produce a ridiculous surplus of unoriginal gifts of purely sentimental value” is a rather less ambitious proposal which poses no threat to capitalism's dominance.Footnote ⁴⁷ Her superficial commitment to formulating an alternative is in stark contrast to the full-time members of the occupation (those who camped out in Zuccotti Park), many of whom were precariously employed and heavily indebted to the financial institutions based just a few blocks away on Wall Street. Their sense of frustration at having the odds stacked so much against them lent their protesting a feeling of urgency: alongside the dancing, drum circle, and witty signs, the camp became a “sort of subculture of seriousness in a sea of snark,” the discussions earnest “because of what was at stake, which was no laughing matter.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Barbara, largely unaffected by these issues, regards it as a pleasant diversion: when no one shows up for her first Free University workshop she remains unperturbed, happily using the time to read, while at the second workshop her claims for the “gift economy” seem flimsy and ill-considered – easily picked apart by one of her only two participants:

While Barbara vacillates in her attitude towards a “gift economy,” shifting between vehemence and apathy while remaining vague about what she hopes to achieve, her friend Tye, a ballet dancer and performance artist, offers a much more nuanced understanding of how economization shapes his creative projects. His regular appearances in the novel redirect the focus from gift giving to giftedness, as he sets out to answer the question posed by Lewis Hyde towards the end of his book: “How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market?”Footnote ⁵⁰ At the first of Tye's conceptual performances described in the novel, only four audience members are allowed in, and he even sends away a journalist from (fictional journal) Art & America, suggesting she might “try her luck again” at a later date.Footnote ⁵¹ But this opening impression of Tye as lacking in savvy (or perhaps indifferent to the commercial side of his work) is inverted once he escorts the small group into the theater and explains in detail how the show is being financed; running through these “economic terms” is a hallmark of his work, as he lays bare how the creative process is subject to market forces.Footnote ⁵² During another performance he tells the audience how much he is being paid (three hundred dollars), before subtracting the cost of materials for the staging, the fifteen dollars an hour to pay his friend “to help schlep,” and the same hourly rate he is paying himself for the carpentry – the calculation revealing him to be “in the hole” to the tune of $766.56.Footnote ⁵³ And at a performance at Judson Church, he asks a volunteer to help him build a wall out of plywood, before proceeding to give him a hand job, and then exchanging money for services rendered: “I think it went on for about three minutes,” Barbara observes, “and evidently at least Tye was satisfied, because at the end of that, he stood, counted out some cash, and gave it to the guy. Tye later explained to me that the guy paid him two hundred dollars for the hand job, and Tye paid him a fifty-dollar performance fee.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Tye's candor about his relation to commerce (and the implication that his art is a form of prostitution) offers a stark contrast to Barbara, who imagines that her creative endeavors can circulate freely, uncorrupted by capitalist principles (but also, crucially, not corruptive of them either) – just as her own wealth has an apparently numinous quality, spontaneous and unanchored.

Most of Tye's performanceare paid for (however modestly) by major arts institutions, including the Whitney and Bard College, and during the shows he often makes explicit that economic relationship. But despite their financial backing, Tye is not afraid to upset any of his benefactors: Tye insists that his performance at Bard be scheduled for after the museum has closed, meaning that visitors will miss the free bus back to New York; meanwhile the museum has to hire extra security staff, who are given torches to guide the spectators into the space, since the building's lights have already been turned off. Barbara notes that “this whole arrangement was a pain in everybody's ass, and if you were to ask Tye if any of that were intentional, as I did, he would smile slightly to indicate that, indeed, the pain-in-the-ass aspect was part of his conception of the piece.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In The Gift Hyde regards the creation of art (or “giftedness”) as incompatible with market logic: instead of focussing on commercial value, the gifted artist's priority is to dedicate himself to producing work which will inspire others – just as Barbara and Sami initially forged that mutually creative relationship. Tye represents the dilemma faced by artists without private means: he relies on the patronage of wealthy institutions, but he still offers a pragmatic response, deliberately inconveniencing Bard staff and visitors as a means of proving that his creative vision will not be constrained by his patrons. Tye has vast student loan debts from his MFA, and works multiple jobs on precarious contracts (in bars and restaurants, babysitting, even sex work). This puts him in the same category as many of the Occupy protesters, stymied both by the commodification of higher education, the cost of which “has been growing at a rate that outstrips any other commodity in U.S. history,” and by the collapse of the job market following the crash.Footnote ⁵⁶ But Tye is more interested in exposing “the kinds of economic transactions that make art possible or impossible” than in looking for alternatives to the status quo.Footnote ⁵⁷ Like Barbara, whose supposedly radical scheme in fact coexists with (and even emulates some of the effects of) free-market capitalism, Tye is resigned to working within the system as it currently operates.

In Hannah Appel's article on alt-banking, she explains that several of its participants were former bankers, finally disillusioned and radicalized by the reckless dishonesty of their Wall Street colleagues, and keen to apply their own skills and experience to imagining ethical alternatives. Appel's point is that “the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of imaginative work” exist “in the dense and seemingly definitive spaces of financial expertise.”Footnote ⁵⁸ To put this a little differently: there might be some benefits to working with like-minded financiers (and former financiers) to discover viable ways of making the system fairer. After all, capitalism can and does operate alongside other systems: Appel points to prominent anticapitalism theorists such as Graeber and Erik Olin Wright, the latter reminding us that “Economic structures are always hybrids,” and, “While it is useful for analytical purposes to define ‘capitalism,’ ‘statism,’ and ‘socialism’ as three qualitatively distinct forms of economic structure … no concrete economic system is ever purely one or another of these forms,” but are “complex configurations of capitalist, statist, and socialist forms.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Tye's artistic career is an example of how economic hybridity might operate at an individual level: accepting funding from wealthy institutions temporarily releases him from having to think in market-oriented terms – he is not required to reflect on whether his performances generate any type of profit, giving him license to create highly conceptual pieces which are unlikely to draw in large crowds. And yet his benefactors’ largesse is only possible because of their capitalist enterprises – as Hyde notes,

Tye is content with finding pockets of imaginative freedom within the current economic model, rather than joining Occupy protesters in debating a radical alternative. His deliberate pragmatism is evident in other, highly charged, contexts: when he openly criticizes the magazine Women & Performance during a commission paid for by them, suggesting it be renamed Women & Transpeople & Performance (Tye is a trans man), he also jokes that “his critique of the name of the journal, which was sponsoring the event, was something like going to a dinner party and complaining about the meatloaf because you're a vegetarian.”Footnote ⁶¹

As well as highlighting the way his performances are funded, Tye foregrounds the physical labor that goes into his art – audience members might walk in to find him sweeping the performance space, building a wall out of plywood, or using a power drill to construct the dance platform. After watching one performance, where Tye dragged a woman across the stage, Barbara observes, “He's strong, but that's a lot of weight to bear, and he was sweating a lot and breathing heavily by the time he'd finished that segment of the performance.”Footnote ⁶² And elsewhere she explains, “He was into endurance, which should guarantee an ending when the artist can't take it anymore, except that he had an unusual tolerance – and appetite – for pain.”Footnote ⁶³ This visible effort is another aspect of his “giftedness” – for Hyde “the ability to do the labor” is essential: “All artists work to acquire and perfect the tools of their craft” in order to create something “higher than what [they have] been given.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Only when considerable labor has gone into the work might it be regarded as “the realization of the artist's gift,” and the audience be able to “feel the gift it carries.”Footnote ⁶⁵ After Barbara returns from her twelve-hour round trip to see Tye's Bard piece, she reflects, “The pilgrimage was really necessary,” because the whole thing “of waiting, killing time, wandering around, feeling hungry, wondering what you were doing” created the right conditions for reflecting on the “difficult situations that Tye sets up for himself on a regular basis,” and that inform his artistic vision.Footnote ⁶⁶ And her visceral response to the performance suggests that she has absorbed something of his “gifted state”: she writes to him, “when first one and then a second enormous man came in, that's when tears started streaming down my face … oh, I forgot to mention that during the fog part, I was standing on my tiptoes to see, and my legs were shaking and cramping.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Tye's performances generally elicit this type of response: when Barbara strikes up a conversation with a fellow audience member after a different piece she notices that he seemed “a little stunned,” and at Judson Church there is “gasping and nervous laughter” as people stand on their chairs to get a better view.Footnote ⁶⁸ Tye's creative gift inspires because of the work that has gone into it – a telling contrast with Barbara, who describes her ukulele covers as mere “noodling,” and whose recipients (beyond Sami) tend to be either baffled or underwhelmed.

OVERTHROW

In Caleb Crain's Overthrow, the characters are also forced to balance their creative ambitions with the need to make money. Like Tye, most of Crain's protagonists are in their twenties, college-educated, and now precariously employed in jobs unrelated to their interests: Leif cannot support himself through his poetry, so he works in a coffee shop; Chris works for a removal company shifting furniture. They live in parts of Brooklyn where the rent is still cheap: Elspeth and Leif's apartment is slightly too large to have been bought and renovated by gentrifiers. Matthew, Leif's lover and a newcomer to the group, is a PhD student who can afford to live alone, but his apartment is small enough that he needs to fold up his futon every morning.

Unsurprisingly, given these characters’ circumstances and their leftist views, Occupy plays a prominent role in this novel. Leif was part of the encampment until he got sick, and he and his friends are regular visitors to Zuccotti Park, where they help out at the People's Kitchen. Matthew is less enthusiastic than his new friends: though his political leanings broadly align with those of Occupy, he has a “history of not joining things,” and struggles with a “lack of curiosity”; mainly he would prefer not to be distracted from his dissertation, and, he feels, “To give even a little of oneself to a cause so undefined would bring too many questions too close to the surface.”Footnote ⁶⁹

But his new friends’ involvement in Occupy extends much further than occasionally helping out with meal preparation; they are founding members of the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings, or WGFRPF – the name a conscious parody of the countless number of specialized working groups formed during Occupy. Like Barbara in The Gift, the aim of this working group is to create a more connected and empathetic society, better attuned to recognizing how others are feeling; in place of Barbara's gift exchange, their approach is to use mind reading (which Leif and Elspeth appear to have some talent for) in order to encourage people to admit the commonality of their feelings. By “reading” other people's minds, and sharing with them their own fears about the crises facing the world, the group imagines they might help people feel less alone: as Elspeth explains to a journalist, “The part where we said everyone probably knows more about what each other are feeling than we usually let on, and if we let ourselves know that we know, the world would probably be a better place – that was literal.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Leif is the most sensitive of the working group, and its de facto leader: his telepathic powers are repeatedly referred to as a “gift,” and he is variously described as a “swami” and a “shaman,” capable of performing a type of magic which operates as a closed system: “If it hadn't been given to you, the most you could feel was envy, and it would be a strange kind of envy, since it would be of something you couldn't even honestly say you believed in. A kind of longing.”Footnote ⁷¹ The haziness with which Leif's power is described seems deliberate: Matthew, the most cynical of the group, marvels at Leif's “strange gift,” which seems to him “as fluid as the congregation in the park around them. A potential rather than a quantity,” and even Leif declares simply, “We're going to save the world by being beautiful together … Beautiful in our souls” – a phrase which compares with Barbara's fixation on “beautiful things,” while exposing the limitations of Leif's purely meditative approach.Footnote ⁷² Hegel looked derisively on the “beautiful soul” who, “in order to preserve the purity of its heart … flees from contact with the actual world”; Crain's deliberate allusion to Hegel implies his ironic judgment of Leif's refusal to come up with realistic strategies for social change, as he substitutes contemplation for necessary action.Footnote ⁷³ For instance, when Elspeth asks Leif, “Don't we save the world?” he responds in typical fashion, “It might be a matter of helping people become able to talk about the ending.”Footnote ⁷⁴

To outsiders the group's telepathy seems to be entirely trivial, as quirky as Barbara's ukulele covers, and no more dangerous than a parlor game: when Elspeth performs a tarot reading on Matthew, she admits that she uses the cards in a “made-up way” because the “instructions that came with the deck are in French.”Footnote ⁷⁵ And Julia, whom they first meet when she visits their stand in Zuccotti Park, is baffled by the whole premise of their working group, joking nervously, “It almost sounds like the sort of thing my therapist would be happy to hear I had joined.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet in contrast to The Gift, where Barbara's proposed remediation of neoliberal individualism never passes beyond the realms of a hobby, the working group's scheme has real-world consequences: when Leif appears to guess the computer password of Joseph P. Bresser, a private security contractor hired to carry out government surveillance, he and three of his friends are arrested within hours, and handed a series of trumped-up charges which could land them years in prison. Chris had some intimation of the threat Leif posed to the authorities when, during an encounter several days earlier, he witnessed him unnerve Bresser by again seeming to guess his password; a few minutes later, Chris and Raleigh were arrested for obstruction of traffic: “It had worked … A few hours ago, just before he was arrested, he had been able to see fear in a security official's eyes. Elspeth had seen it, too; Chris had shared a look with her when it had happened. Leif had done it.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But Leif's own faith in his telepathic gift seems to weaken after Zuccotti Park is cleared by police in a nighttime raid on 15 November. Matthew wonders whether an “experiment in optimism was coming to an end” as Leif asks the group blankly, “What's my gift?” before telling them, “I guess things … I'm just making things up. I can't do anything about anything.”Footnote ⁷⁸ And later, after he and the others have been released on bail, he wonders aloud whether he was simply the “most suggestible member” of their group, fooled into believing he had these “great powers.”Footnote ⁷⁹ For Hegel the beautiful soul eventually becomes a lost, “unhappy” figure: having failed to “transform its thought into being” it is “filled with a sense of emptiness” and “its light dies away within it.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Leif increasingly feels like Hegel's “disordered” soul: after learning that Bresser's server was rigged to allow them access, and he did not therefore “read” the password, he attempts suicide; listless and under heavy sedation in a treatment facility, he doubts that he and Elspeth ever possessed a gift for reading minds: “That's my hobby now: trying to figure out if it was mania or an epileptic aura or did we just have very delicate mechanisms … Of course it might have been just nothing at all.”Footnote ⁸¹ He explains to Matthew, “if it's not what I thought it was, then I don't know what it is” – the perceptiveness he had previously accredited to telepathy seems to have curdled into something more sinister as he admits to hearing voices, and though he knows these are not real, they still have the power to disturb: “If you mean, Is it alarming to sometimes hear these voices talking almost as though they were talking to one personally, then the answer is yes.”Footnote ⁸² At the start of their relationship Matthew had felt exposed in front of Leif, conscious that he might “read” his thoughts, and Leif had even warned him, half-jokingly, “you're fairly transparent to me right now.”Footnote ⁸³ But after the arrest they struggle to communicate: Matthew storms out of Leif's café after a terse argument during which Leif admits, “It's hard for me to find out how I am, right now … What I'm feeling.”Footnote ⁸⁴

To understand the deterioration of Leif's emotional acuity it is constructive to return briefly to Lewis Hyde's description of giftedness: he explained, “Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return,” but it becomes “a kind of poison” if it is not used.Footnote ⁸⁵ The group's mind reading functions in much the same way as a creative gift: they dedicate themselves to refining their skills, using the tarot cards on each other as a form of training exercise. Hyde wrote that the “embodied gift – the work” is able to “reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it,” and Chris in particular is thrilled after witnessing Leif's effect on Bresser, and throws himself into mastering the technique.Footnote ⁸⁶ But for Leif his gift feels increasingly like an affliction, particularly when he starts hearing voices, and he is guilt-ridden – “synoptically sorry” – about the arrest of his friends.Footnote ⁸⁷ When he stops attending to his gift, even casting doubt on its existence, he becomes awkward and withdrawn, unable to maintain even long-standing relationships. He and Elspeth had been “witchy together” since college, able to communicate on an intuitive, unspoken level.Footnote ⁸⁸ But Leif's disenchantment with his apparent gift leaves him enervated, and Elspeth finds herself cast adrift, unable to “find him in her mind,” and finds that her own faith in the working group's potential is also shaken.Footnote ⁸⁹

Given the friends’ vagueness about what they hope their gift might achieve (beyond talking about their feelings, and encouraging others to do the same), the police crackdown on their activities seems entirely immoderate. Leif in particular hardly represents a threat to state security: after the occupiers are evicted from the site by police, he halfheartedly suggests that the group might perform an “Occupy action” (“Chain ourselves to something. Hold a public séance”), but again like Hegel's figure he wonders idly whether it is “a philosophical problem,” and quickly drops the idea.Footnote ⁹⁰ Both The Gift and Overthrow feature protagonists who register their desire to build a more empathetic society, but are reluctant to sketch out anything in detail. This seems appropriate given that Occupy famously refused to make specific demands, fearing that this would delimit the scope of their movement and force them to negotiate with a state they regarded as illegitimate and corrupt, and entirely incompatible with their progressive politics. Crain's emphasis on Leif's frail grasp of practicality might be seen as an implied narrative criticism regarding the loftiness of the group's aims, but in fact the novel as a whole is deliberately imprecise: New York is never named, and nor are any other places around the city, as though Crain knows that the ideas he is exploring will simply fracture (or perhaps evaporate) when placed in contact with reality. And he reserves his main ire for the overreaching of federal authority, because despite committing no crime, Leif and his friends have been under government surveillance for quite some time. In their article on the policing of Occupy, political scientists Matthew Bolton and Victoria Measles found that since 2007 security in Lower and Midtown Manhattan has been governed by an agreement between the NYPD and firms including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, who cover most of the cost for thousands of CCTV cameras covering the entire area, which are watched by “representatives” from both the “public and private sector.”Footnote ⁹¹ Surveillance was further stepped up in response to Occupy, with private agents milling around the park to keep a covert eye on the protesters. In the novel, Bresser, a private security contractor working closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is often at the site in order to keep track of Chris, Leif, and their fellow members of the WGFRPF, whom he regards as security threats. He has been leaked a piece of intelligence gathered by federal analysts which reveals that an individual had been “approaching hackers on chat channels … to ask how much better than random a wholly new kind of guessing algorithm would have to be in order to be valuable.”Footnote ⁹² This person “had been vague about what he had, but he had let drop that he had something to do with Occupy,” and Bresser swiftly “geofenced Occupy” and used an ISMI-catcher to gather call data, eventually identifying the friends as being behind these claims.Footnote ⁹³ But Bresser is intent on tracking (and charging) the “Telepathy Four” not because of their vague anticapitalist motives or their presence at Occupy, but because he is anxious to protect his own business model: he has recently developed a piece of software which “coordinated sets of data about surveilled individuals” in order to tie them to other persons of interest, “mapping the patterns of interaction within each set against one another,” and this potentially lucrative tool is currently being pitched to government agencies and the private sector; when he hears the group “talking cryptically about a new kind of decryption” he assumes that their “algorithm” must be a sophisticated new piece of software – “some kind of bioinformatics,” he imagines – which might compete with his own product and scare off potential stakeholders.Footnote ⁹⁴

The joke here is that the group's apparent “algorithm” is of course ESP – hence their reference to its being “analog,” and having “a somewhat jerky variance in its margin of error.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Nevertheless Leif and his friends are caught up in the very system they were there to protest. A central plank of the Occupy agenda was to draw attention to the cozy alliance between the government and the corporate sector: political campaigns run on big donations, and those wealthy donors then have leverage over government policy, which ensures that their interests are protected. This pact between Wall Street and the government was plain in the aggressive way Occupy was policed – by funneling money directly into the NYPD's coffers, billion-dollar financial institutions could exercise authority over how the area was patrolled, and law enforcement officers made it a priority to protect those institutions from property damage and ensure that employees could get to work safely; control tactics included steel barriers, riot gear, pepper spray, batons, and even horses. Bresser in the novel is another example of federal law enforcement working closely with private-sector partners, and he highlights (just as the 2008 crash had highlighted) the potential for wrongdoing when corporate practices are not fully scrutinized. Federal agents are not permitted to listen in to calls and texts, but only “to track who called whom, from where, and for how long,” yet Bresser is not a government employee, and takes advantage of that “legal ambiguity” to go after the material he wants.Footnote ⁹⁶ In a 2013 New York Times article Tim Shorrock reported, “Seventy percent of America's intelligence budget now flows to private contractors,” making “private intelligence a $56 billion-a-year industry.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This is a cause for serious concern, Shorrock suggested, not least because “it is dangerous to have half a million people – the number of private contractors holding top-secret security clearances – peering into the lives of their fellow citizens,” particularly since they “aren't subject to Congressional oversight,” or indeed any oversight at all beyond their company's shareholders.Footnote ⁹⁸ By paying these companies huge sums to gather intelligence, while exercising little to no control over how that information is used, the government is giving agents like Bresser free rein to monitor ordinary citizens without just cause.

When Matthew wanders around the park waiting for Leif he quickly grasps the scale of that surveillance operation: suspended from a crane he sees “a white metal observation cabin, which had the gleam of a new device,” and he assumes that this was bought “with the city's share of anti-terrorism money.”Footnote ⁹⁹ He instinctively understands that CCTV cameras will have identified him immediately, but tries to shrug this off: “Well, so [he] would show up in a database. To mind too much about the surveillance would be a form of surrender to it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Since the passing of the Patriot Act and other legislation, US citizens have been subject to a mass surveillance operation under the guise of counterterrorism. The full extent of this programme became publicly known in December 2005 when a New York Times article revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap the international phone calls and e-mails of thousands of Americans without first seeking a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, as had been required since FISA was passed in 1978.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But the government's surveillance operation actually went much further than these initial revelations suggested: the NSA was also operating a systematic “dragnet collection” of all domestic metadata (phone, Internet, and e-mail), and then “using the data as an alert system, telling analysts whenever someone using a phone number they were interested in placed or received a call.”Footnote ¹⁰² Bresser is mindful of the government's tendency to reinterpret FISA Court rules, and predicts that once the benefits of his surveillance software are understood, the DHS is bound to seek changes to the law which allow them to adopt it:

This steady erosion of citizens’ privacy has become a highly lucrative enterprise: “surveillance capitalism,” as Shoshana Zuboff has described, refers to the harnessing of data about an individual's preferences, information which is then sold to large corporations so that they might customize their advertising in order to target users more effectively, whether for political or consumerist purposes.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We can see this as the logical next step for neoliberalism, in that one's private and even unconscious desires are converted into data sets which are then analysed and exploited to increase a company's market share. Leif fears that his telepathic gift, if placed in the wrong hands, might be used for a similar purpose: whether or not he can read minds, he is sufficiently perspicacious to understand the inherent dangers of having access to other people's secrets: “If feelings could be made generally audible, was anyone safe? There were cruel people in the world, after all; in a state of perfect knowledge, not everyone would forbear to take advantage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But though the WGFRPF appear to be working along similar lines to Bresser in gaining access to “a living person's secret thoughts,” they pitch their scheme as having a benevolent purpose: the group's “whole philosophy” is that they can only find out information “that it's morally right for us to know.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The friends present a “new moral understanding” which guarantees that their gift – the “reading” of other people – will never be used for personal gain: “the capacity that interested them [the WGFRPF] either was, or was inextricable from, a supersensitive variety of tact, and couldn't be used to open any door that it wouldn't be appropriate to open”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This seems a rather weak defense, since the hacking of Bresser's computer system might reasonably be regarded as an improper use of their powers. Yet the door was deliberately left open for them to walk through, and once they logged in, they found folders of surveillance on each of them, including illegal recordings of their phone conversations, which Bresser had passed on to the DOJ to build its prosecution case against the group.