“Even artistic experimentation and creation that is not explicitly political can do important political work, sometimes revealing the limits of our imagination and at other times fueling it.” —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Gifts are best described…as anarchist property.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift
I am currently exploring the implications of this as a politico-economic model, hoping that the current recession can give way to new (actually very old) models of exchange, especially in relationship to art.
My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift)
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Timeless advice.
What Is Art For? – Lewis Hyde
Thinker-politicians like Jefferson, Adams and Madison were just as familiar as we are with the metaphor that likens created work to physical property, especially to a landed estate. But they thought of that landed estate in a new way — as the basis of a republic. An American’s land was his own — he owed allegiance to no sovereign — but his ownership imposed on him an almost sacred moral requirement to contribute to the public good. According to Hyde, this ethic of “civic republicanism” was the ideological engine that drove the founders’ conception of intellectual property, and to his mind, it undercuts the ethic of “commercial republicanism” that dominates our current conception of it. Our right to property is not absolute; our possessions are held in trust, as it were. Seen through the prism of early civic Republicanism, Hyde asks, what might the creative self look like? Do we imagine that self as “solitary and self-made”? Or as “collective, common and interdependent”?
