Communication Gift Code

Teodorescu B.1, Calin R. A.2, Busu O. V.3

1
University of Craiova (ROMANIA)
2
University of Craiova (ROMANIA)
3
University of Craiova (ROMANIA)
biancteodorescu@gmail.com, calinrazvanalexandru@yahoo.com, valentin_busu@yahoo.com

Abstract
This study aims to clarify, from psycho-communicational point of view, what means to give a gift. To
this end it starts from the basic theories and practices of the gift. It evokes the three paradigms of the gift
(individualistic, holistic, contemporary), but also the difference between gift and charity, and between gift and
American-Indian potlach. Then as material of study, the paper takes an accredited, authentic and valid situation
in which a gift is made. This is a historical situation which is presented by Herodotus: during the campaign of
conquest Scythia, King Darius of Persia receives from the Scythians kings, as a gift, a bird, a mouse, a frog, and
five arrows. By applying procedures pertaining to the comparative method, to the semantic method, to the meta-
analytical method and to the logical method, it detaches some characteristic of the gift and of the act of giving a
gift. The main features of the gift are: character of communication phenomenon, intentionality, substitutability
(metaphorical structure, metonymic structure, symbolic structure) and reciprocity. It concludes that the gift is a
likely communicative activity: to give a gift means making explicit or implicit communicational meanings.
Keywords: communication, communicational phenomenon, gift, meanings, message.

Introduction
The gift is a cultural good. Its essence is the non-hereditary information. It is not conceived, it is a
deliberate construction related to the level of education. The gift is not accidental, it is not luck or an unexpected
meeting. It is a voluntary cultural investment that compels. Not including the obligation to return, it would
become charity that is the fruit of moral-christian undertaking and of a sacrifice of the other. The charity
involves no obligations. In the human history, a. Caille speaks about three „paradigmes du don”: individualiste”,
„ramene tout a l’interet”, „holiste”, „ramene tout a une forme on a une autre de l’obligation”, and contemporary
„tiers paradigme”, „des rapports d’echange” [1]. Kind of gift is the american indians’ potlatch, it embodies a
necessary commitment: to redistribute what you receive. The potlatch would be “a gift from the gift.” Returning
to the cognitive scheme of “giving”, it involves three obligations “to give, to receive and to return the gift” [2].
You do not have the right to refuse a gift. “to refuse is to show that you are afraid”, Marcel Mauss asserts [2].

1 Gift and Exchange

The gift, once received, requires an “exchange” [3], [4: 133-155], [5], [6]. It creates the apprehension
that it is necessary to return, the fear that you will be down as long as you have not responded accordingly. “in
reality, you are already down” [2], because acceptance creates the awareness of an obligation. Herodotus tells
that the Persian king Darius made a foray into the land of Scythia north of the Danube: ”Kinds of Scythians had
sent him a herald to bring Darius a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows as gifts. The Persians asked the one with
the gifts what their significance was. The man said he had been instructed only to hand them over and return
afterwards as fast as possible; he asked the Persians to find out themselves what the gifts meant, if they were
perspicacious. Hearing the admonition, the Persians gathered to counsel. Darius’s opinion was that Scythians
worshiped him willingly, them, the earth and water; his interpretation was based on the fact that the mouse lives
underground, feeding on the same fruit as man, that the frog lives in water, the bird especially resembles the
horse, and the arrows meant their power was worshiped to him. This is Darius understood the purpose of the
gifts” Gobryas, one of his advisers, has a contrary interpretation, the gifts spoke thus: “Unless, Persians, ye can
turn into birds and fly up into the sky, or become mice and burrow under the ground, or make yourselves frogs,
and take refuge in the fens, ye will never make escape from this land, but die pierced by our arrows”. Such were
meanings which the Persians assigned to the gifts” [7]. Until he receives the gift, Darius passes from “alarmed”,
to “confusion” and “worries”. By putting Darius in the position of not being able to refuse the gift, because it

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would reveal the real fear, Herodotus exposes implicitly, proto-chronically, a theory of the gift, namely, of the
message as a gift. Even if the king of Persia would not be afraid of the gift, his emotional state of anxiety and
fear would shape the overall vision of the situation. Thus, all at once the gift becomes a burden, an acceptance of
a challenge, which in darius’s case is strengthened by the need to respond to the defiance, launched by the
herald: “If the Persians were wise, he added, they would find out the meaning for themselves”. We know that the
gift, as everything in fact sold, stolen or otherwise alienated, keeps a link with the original owner and with the
producer. During an attack in a war situation (which is a “scam”) the Scythians’ gift had to be refused. But the
need makes Darius to give in to the moral obligation of receiving it: the will to understand and the willingness of
the message. The given situation provokes a danger from accepting the gift, but what message is not in itself a
kind of danger!?
P. Chanial shows that „la norme du reciprocité”, and notes about a kind of danger of gift, „Certes le
danger d’un trop grand don qu’on peut tout demander à celui qui l’a recu” [8]. Not to live all the way till the end
the inferiority caused by the gift to the one receiving the gift, the king of Persia is indulgent. He gives in return,
without specifying discursively, even the herald’s life which endangered it, in addition to his coming as a
messenger, by expressing the doubt on the interlocutor’s intelligence. A lucid warrior, with a clear awareness of
the war-deception, he does not resort to personal messages about the state of belligerency, but actions or in the
worst case scenario, in an interlude of physical and mental regrouping, in order to gain time, he implies that he
would like to talk. Sending a messenger means offensive, receiving uncalled messengers means inferiority, it is a
defensive behavior. For this king Decebalus is illustrative. Roman historian Cassius Dio [9] reports that between
100 and 102 AD, before the first Dacian-Roman War and during it, Decebalus was in touch with the Roman
emperor Trajan through messengers and as his situation got worst the rank of the messengers grew. Decebalus
made up for the numerical inferiority against Trajan's huge army by collecting information by messengers with
increasingly higher information processing capacity. Even when losing, Decebalus takes the initiative. Dio
Cassius states: “Even before being defeated, Decebalus had not sent to Romans comates representatives as
messengers, but leaders of pileati” [9]. As a last resort, the messengers ask Trajan to receive even Decebalus, he
accepts, but Decebalus does not come to the meeting. Decebalus refuses even to meet with Trajan’s delegates.
He implies that he will break. Dio Cassius adds: “Decebalus leaves the impression he is willing to accept any
conditions which would be imposed, not because he intended to obey them, but only so he can breathe, saving
time.” Through messengers, Decebalus obtains peace, but keeps the state of belligerency, trying to kill Trajan:
“he missed by little killing Trajan by cunning and treachery.” Moreover, he invites Longinus, a Roman legion
commander, to a meeting. He did not realize the danger. Decebalus holds him prisoner and the historian asserts,
“he questioned him, in the presence of others, on Trajan's plans.” Subsequently he puts conditions to Trajan for
Longinus’s redemption.
With Darius, this is not the case: he does not fight, he collects information. In fact, he receives it as a
gift. In war, any gift is a “Trojan horse” and that of the Scythians is no exception. Darius first unintentionally
refuses the gift. By the meaning he gives to it, he defends by ignoring reality. At first, Darius does not agree to
inform, then fails, the need occurs by people deeds.
The gift is polysemic [10], [11], [12: 280]. Ambiguity that gives it a strange power is due in some way
to a lack, a deficiency of the objects: instead of retaining us, they let be overcome in an imaginary perspective,
on a dark dimension. The deception is generated by the tension between present and hidden. The objects that
make up the gift-message favor a multiple interpretation (as messages identification in the message). They are
the presence: “Hiding is the other side of a presence” [13]. The power of absence makes the real object to
designate anything else, to hint at something beyond them. Thus objects appear as an obstacle and as an
interposed sign. Hiding fascinates and gives the measure of the proceeded avoidance. Darius knows that objects
present something only to hide something else, but he cannot repress his gesture to cover the message need. By
interpretation, he tries to attract in the semantic act, to trigger a reaction in his compatriots of focusing on the
message. At the same time, he tries to get a confirmation or a denial of his interpretation from the herald, on the
impulse to speak of which it is based on. Objects do not appear as insufficient but only as a response to a
demanding of his eyes [14], [15]. To his desire for clarity an allusive objectual presence responds. He does not
find in the visible objects the use of all his interpretative energies. He goes beyond them and he is lost in an
empty space, to a place of no return. He speaks first and thus he faces the risk that his interpretation would
deceive the compatriots. He could let Gobryas go first, but the situation involves an emergency.
The adviser Gobryas’s opposite interpretation is not sanctioned. The fascination of the objects
ambiguity covers a large processing capacity from the king. He is on top of distraction, amazingly inattentive,
bitter to understand the message, when he should start by feeling. It is a well-known psychological law. ”First
we get emotional and only afterwards we understand (if possible)” [16]: for the message to have a greater effect,
he must begin by exciting. Consequently, the consumer Darius’s reasoning is still affected by the emotion that
also blocks some of the information processing capacity. Darius does not see the world as it is. His inattention
relies on negligence. He is captivated not by objects, but rather, by why he thinks their significant transparency
would be. Therefore, he loses more on the objects promises than on their meanings. He is not aware that no

2
object in its reality can keep hard the promises made directly by its signs [17], [18]. The producer and the
consumer are people: no message can keep all its promises. Darius makes a bankrupt investment in the area of
meaning in a bank of ambiguities. He is, like any interpret, “to a large extent the producer of what he discovers”
[13]. The Scythian kings know that seeing is a dangerous act, one that cannot be denied: acting simultaneously,
instantly, irrepressibly, suddenly. Therefore, the transmitted message relies on visual. Words take time, objects,
just a blink of an eye. The sight is a language issued by the limits of digitization: generalization, acquisition and
processing effort, need of time and irreversibility. The great danger comes from the fact that even “the mere
sight of objects (...) may dictate a decision, a resolution” [19]. We know that information is preliminary to
making a decision. The sight informs. Seeing is informative. There are decisions that can be based only on what
is seen, on what is held. Where is the necessary good verification [20]!?

2 Reality and Role

The speaking scene created by Herodotus is structured as a psycho-therapeutic situation [21]. The
herald, as any analyst, has control over the mechanisms of meanings generating, of strategies of implementing
the discourse and of conceiving the plot. Like an analyst in front of his patient, he dramatizes the Persian
problem; he gives them an encounter with themselves, trying to save them from the falsity of their own
reasoning. His goal is to provide them a different falsity to prime and aggravate the first. “The role of
psychoanalyst, M. Mannoni [22] shows, is to consider the deceiving character in order to help the subject”. The
herald, no way, he considers the insidious feature of the situation. He does not forget the war! Of course he helps
the Persians: the message of those who have sent him and the expressed opinions is an aid in decoding and re-
conceptualization. The herald is the “analyst”: “is there to return as a gift his truth to the subject” [22]. The
herald knows the truth, but he does not approve, does not confirm and validate the Persians but their own truth.
He shows it to them and nothing more. Thus he breaks with a speech that seems false, but he does not isolate
from it. Human impulse to communicate is so urgent that the message is built irrepressibly. The message
emerges irrepressibly.
By his gesture, Darius plays Scythians’ game: he sees too intellectual, too hermeneutic; he lets himself
be driven by the need for a message. Under pressure of interpretation and emotions, the king of Persia loses
contact with its wisdom, with its philosophical foundations. The spirit, anxious and concerned, incapable of
“rational insight”, of “sensing what is present and real”, of rational sight that is reconciliation with reality, gets at
[23], to restrict the access to the philosophical operations that he is usually capable of. The extension of
meanings, the wide area that is the subject of comprehension, requires the leader of Persians the assignation,
from its knowledge, of rich cognitive resources. Knowledge of different areas is required and he even brings
them into the reception instance, approach after which relatively few resources remain for the real processing of
the discourse of objects [24], [25], [26]. Knowledge consists of the facts that support the significances
organization and the meaning attribution. Of course, the kings of the Scythians (the producers) both by the gift-
message, by the message-supplement and the transmission channel want to waste Darius’s time; and, if it had not
been for Gogryas who discomfits by his interpretation the Scythians’ “war deception”, the sensation of patient
time would not prove his evanescence. By giving information that Darius psychologically does not want,
Gobryas “classifies” and disqualifies him. In fact, in every one of these two interpretations, “the producer” is a
winner; Scythian kings dominate: 1. Darius’s interpretation provides a strategic advantage; 2. Gobryas’s brings a
psychological one [27], [28: 113], [29]. In both decodings, the Scythian kings are those who win the war
principles; they defeat their opponents on the deception field. We see here a case that illustrates two principles of
communication. First is the principle of communication failure. S. W. Knowlton & C. R. Berger [30], Scott
Jacobs [31], Noemi Marin [32], M. E. Roloff & C. N. Wright [33] studied “communication failure”,
“communication breakdown”, “non-communication”, and “messages fail” [1], [33: 104]. Specifically, S. Jacobs
shows: „communication breakdowns will occur to the degree that the sender and the receiver fail to share the
same code rules” [31].

3 Conclusion
The two components of the analytical throughput as information gain are represented by information
fusion and information fission. Informational fusion is a procedure of information merging. Fission is first an
embedment into the informational structures of the fusion product, (categories, ideas, nuclear themes, keywords)
and their stimulation with a view o generating additional information. Generally speaking, the pieces of
information, as samples of variability, have both fusion and fission properties.

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