In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.
Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace.
These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm.
After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #70). I wanted to see how his and my perspectives of gift economies and commons may have evolved over the years, and what topics may be in his field of vision today. (One is AI.)
We also spoke about his classic 2010 book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, which explores how creativity and culture have always functioned as commons. The US Founding Fathers recognized the importance of freely available knowledge and creative works in the late 1700s, for example. Hyde spent an entire chapter in the book describing how Benjamin Franklin – otherwise celebrated as a commercially minded individualist and entrepreneur -- is more accurately called a “founding pirate” for insisting that the free flow of ideas and inventions should override expansive patents and copyrights.
Since writing The Gift as a young man, Hyde has gone on to become one of the most distinctive voices in American letters: a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic, poet, and MacArthur Fellow. He taught for many years at Kenyon College, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
We could have enjoyably discussed a wide variety of topics on the podcast. Hyde has written about such diverse topics as the mythic tradition of trickster, Henry David Thoreau’s essays, the “oxherding series” of medieval Chinese poems and drawings about Buddhist practice, and the art of forgetting as a path to peace and rebirth, among other topics.
But in our conversation, we focused on his writings about the commons, especially The Gift and Common as Air. Both books avoid the stylized, often-clotted discourses of academia, dealing with their topics with the expressive wisdom of a poet, sage, and engaged citizen, but also with the rigor of a scholar and historian.
The Gift was illuminating for me in showing how circuits of gift-exchange operate with very different social logics and values than capitalist culture. Hyde is quick to note that his book “was not necessarily an attack on capitalism or on the market economy, but in fact, a simple act of differentiation. It was saying, These two things [capitalist culture and gift-exchange] are really different in kind, seriously so.”
This theme was an urgent personal concern for Hyde when he wrote the book as a struggling poet his late twenties. The Gift was a way of making sense of the tensions of trying to be an artist in a capitalist society that reflexively commodifies everything. In our podcast, Hyde told me that the book was a way of explaining, “If what you do as a poet doesn't fit into the commercial economy, that's not a problem.”
For me, I now realize in hindsight, The Gift was equally an early meditation on the inner dimensions of commoning. While the commons in the 1970s and beyond were largely treated as an economic topic – how can people collectively managed shared resources? – Hyde showed how gift-exchange is a deeply relational phenomenon that is central to the human condition.
Lewis and I had crossed paths in the early 2000s when both of us, from different angles, became concerned with copyright law as serious obstruction of creative and cultural freedom. My interests resulted in my co-founding Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group on Internet and copyright issues. Lewis, working with the Berkman Center at Harvard University, wanted to explore the historical realities of creativity as a commons. The result was Common as Air.
As early Internet culture was exploding, the music, film, and publishing industries were panicking at the prospect of nonmarket online sharing obliterating their markets. They largely succeeded in expanding the scope and enforcement penalties of copyright law – the very tensions between commercialism and creativity that Hyde had explored, in a different context, in The Gift. But that time also saw the significant emergence of the Creative Commons licenses, which copyright holders can use to authorize the sharing and reuse of their works.
Hyde recalls, “I began then to think, in a way naively, that if people only knew the history of this [creativity and intellectual property law], they would not pass a law” that squashed creative innovation and sharing. “I was wrong about that,” he concedes.
Nonetheless, Hyde brilliantly excavates from history many stories of invention (Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod and wood stove), intergenerational borrowing (Bob Dylan of Woody Guthrie’s folk music), and scientific research (the Human Genome Project’s attempt to keep genome sequences in the public domain), all of which expose capitalist mythologies about individual genius and creativity at the expense of collective influences.
In Common as Air, Hyde takes these themes to a deeper level, exploring the very idea of the fixed, individual “self” that intellectual property implies. He cites a letter by the poet Rimbaud who once wrote, “I is someone else.” Bob Dylan, similarly, once wrote, “That day I listened all afternoon to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system, feeling more like myself than ever before.” A voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’” The best artists discover that creativity is a co-mingling of souls.
You can listen to my interview with Lewis Hyde here.
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