The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

"..unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. Furthermore, when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges... I began to realize that a description of gift exchange might offer me the language, the way of speaking, through which I could address the situation of creative artists...

"...to possess is to give....Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow."

"..gift exchange is erotic commerce, opposing eros to logos ..A market economy is an emanation of logos."

"The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled on ahead of time. We can't predict the fruits of our labor; we can't even know if we'll really go through with it. Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted, we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can't be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and de-potentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state."

- Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

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