Gift and Market Relations: A Personalist Approach

Carlos Hoevel Universidad Católica Argentina

carlos_hoevel@uca.edu.ar

“We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something nonsensical and implausible about it [. . .]

[Today] even the private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the

prescribed budget, skeptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the

receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one's way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just

this hardly anyone is now able to do. At best they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decay

of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give

because one really does not want to.”

Theodor Adorno,

Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life (1991, [1944], p. 42) Introduction: economism, structuralism, deconstructivism Much of the economic literature currently in circulation recognizes the existence of

gift-relations intermingled with the commodity-exchange patterns typical of the conventional understanding of market relations. However, at the same time, this same literature frequently interprets gift-relations in such a way that is difficult to differentiate them from these commodity-exchange patterns. This is the case, for example, of some contemporary expansions of the neoclassical model in economics that see gift-relations just as another kind of commodity-exchange relations with the only difference that they are not ruled by money prices but by “shadow” prices or “psychic” costs, losses and gains (Becker, 1991; Offer, 1997). Another example are the structuralist or functionalist models sometimes used by anthropologists and sociologists (Mauss, Bourdieu)that interpret gift-relations reduced to exchanges eventually ruled by obligation, power or “cautious” reciprocity.

Beside these two positions there is a third view that comes from the philosophical field that tends to interpret gift-relations as paradoxical phenomena. One of the best known supporters of this position has been, in the last years, Derrida (1991) who argues that although it is possible to argue in terms of gifts and gift-giving, these are, at the same time, what he calls “impossible” and “mad” phenomena. Derrida presents his arguments about gift-giving through a sophisticated critique of Mauss’ famous essay on the gift. He tries to show that beyond all the empirical data presented by Mauss to demonstrate the factual existence of gift-giving in archaic societies, this same argument necessarily leads to reduce

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gift-giving to a kind of natural and economic circle of gifts and recompenses which ends in the denial of the very possibility of gifts.

However, according to Derrida, this contradiction, far from impeding an understanding of gifts, helps to shed light on the very nature of the gift-event or phenomenon which would be a kind of “possible impossibility”. Derrida’s proposal ends in a deconstructive understanding not only of gifts but also of their seemingly opposite, economic transactions of equivalent goods and services. At the end of the day gifts become possible only when they lose every kind of relation with a predesigned order formed by a giver and a receiver, an order that, as Mauss demonstrates, is not very different from the economic order. But although the elimination of this order frees gifts from the confusion with economic relations, this very elimination deletes at the same time the referential points that permit their mutual distinction. In this way, Derrida’s approach ends with a kind of factual affirmation of a difference between gifts and exchange relations based on a previous deconstructive denial of its “logical” possibility.

In this paper I will present a critique of what I think is the philosophical basis of these different approaches and give an alternative hermeneutical and ontological proposal to interpret gift-relations in market-relations contexts based on some arguments, principles and views offered by the personalist philosophical tradition that goes from Antonio Rosmini and Husserl to Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. I will try to show that the personalist conception can overcome both the circular trap of the do ut des scheme typical of economicist or anthropological-structuralist perspectives and also the paradoxical or deconstructive proposals to interpret gift-giving.

The Naturalist and ObjectivisticWeltanschauung Beyond their different intellectual origins, economism’s, structuralism’s and

deconstructivism’s conception of gift have, in my opinion, a common ground of philosophical assumptions. These common assumptions go far beyond economics or anthropology and find their roots in a shared Weltanschauung described by the late Husserl’s critique contained in works such as The Crisis of European Sciences (1970 [1935]). This Weltanschauung has its first antecedents in Greek cosmological philosophy, continues with the modern scientific image of the world and ends with the great philosophical systems of modernity starting from Cartesianism, Kantianism and absolute idealism. Some of the main assumptions contained in this common Weltanschauung -that affect directly the conception of gift in contemporary sciences- would be the following:

a) The exchange and equivalence principle as the universal rule of social and

human relations: according to the naturalist and objectivist Weltanschauung, the world is seen as a closed totality formed by a natural order ruled by necessary laws that can never be overcome. Whether this order is understood as a natural law intrinsic to the nature of things, as a law of thought originated in the human mind or as a cultural structure, the consequence is always the impossibility of transcending what could be called the “economic” order of the word. According to this view, there is nothing new under the sun. Every apparent novelty is previously contained in the immanent order. What seems to be new is actually an exchange in positions, but never a real novelty, never an unexpected plus. The symbol of this kind of order is the wheel or the circle. Its epistemological ideal is

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the mathematical equation. Therefore, in a world like this, where there is no place for novelty, there is neither place for giveness understood as something not previously thought, not previously expected, not previously found. A gift would be ontologically unconceivable –or as Derrida puts it- it would be unthinkable, “impossible’’1. The gift would break the economic order of the world which prescribes that everything given implies something taken, everything that goes out implies something that comes in. There is no way out from the iron law of general interchangeability.

b) The relativization of the novelty that could represent individual human

beings: individuals are seen as part of the species, of the law of large numbers. Even when accused of being individualist – a typical case is neoclassical economics- many of the modern scientific theories in fact reduce flesh and blood concrete individuals to an abstraction. In this sense, the particular circumstances and events that surround the emergence of an individual identity are not taken into account and reduced to the expected processes that lead to an average individual. According to this, individual identity is objectified, becomes an object that can be analyzed as a result of a context, of an a priori function or structure. The unexpected novelties that a real individual life could bring, his or her own identity, is predesigned. The self is thus not seen as something new received as a gift but as one more exemplar previously contained in the species and therefore potentially reproducible following some prescribed genetically or behavioral laws that can be found in the species, in the community, or in culture.

c) Human behavior is understood as ruled by pre-designed functions or

structures that individuals cannot modify: freedom, understood as the capacity of overcoming the general deterministic order of the world is also unconceivable. Human behavior is essentially repetition. It is impossible to give more or something different than what is received (rational choice theories). In this aspect, for example, psychoanalysis is an example of a patron that starts in ancient mythology: the fatum of repetition of one’s own original history but also of the history of one´s parents and even ancestors. In the psychoanalytic deterministic impossibility for change, it is also reproduced the economic design that forbids any novelty and therefore any real gift. This is even truer in structuralist anthropologies that reduce every so-called new event, to the routine of the repetition of the same.

d) Closeness to otherness: there is no openness to the novelty not only of one’s

own self but neither of the others’ self who are seen as mere functions of one’s own self, which in turn, is in function of the common species, cultural matrix, etc. As it has been pointed out by many different contemporary thinkers, especially French postmodern ones (Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida) the problem with modern thought in general is the lack of sense of what they call “la difference”. There is a general tendency to the reduction of the different to the same, of the other to the identical. In this regard, the other becomes an object and not a subject. He or she is a variable of my utility function. In the same way that the individual of the modern scientifical view of the world never reaches him or herself, he

1 “A gift would be posible, there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle would have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant. What is more, this instant of effraction (of the temporal circle) must no longer be part of time”.

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or she never reaches the other who remains, at most, as a mirror of one’s own needs, desires or projects. Evidently, without an “other” there is no possibility of giving and receiving in any sense and surely no possibility of gift. Both in the structuralist and the neoclassical models the other is seen as part of my own self, never as someone really different.

e) Opacity of things: this Weltanschauung affects not only people but also things,

actions and practices that end to be considered merely as anonymous events, opaque objects and commodities to be used and exchanged within a framework of impersonal agents. This is well shown by Max Weber’s famous description of the world’s disenchantment. In a naturalistic conception, the material world becomes mere stuff, loses its variety, because it is not related to a “someone” to whom it can have a particular meaning. In a naturalistic world everything means just what it appears to be: a thing identical to itself. In this way goods or services given by someone are considered only in their literal materiality because there is no relation or deepness in them through which they can become vehicles of interpersonal communication.

f) Finally, the dominant characteristic of this world described by the naturalistic and

objectivistic Weltanschauung is quantitativization. Objectivity is understood as measurability. In a world formed only by things where there are no really “me” and “you”, the only possible perspective is the material comparison among things. Material comparison is always quantitative, never qualitative. Exchange of things and services among people is always held on the basis of a quantitative comparison of the value of each commodity exchanged. The efficiency principle that will rule exchanges -even the so-called gift-relations- will be therefore the principle of quantitative equality. Thus, people will always tend to spend the least possible quantity of money, time or commitment in order to equalize what they “give” in strict proportion to what they expect to receive from the others.

Therefore, if we want to think about the gift in modern science –be this economics, anthropology or sociology- we have firstly to take seriously into account at least these six assumptions that modern sciences implicitly hold. Besides, in the second place, I believe that it is also important to see that, apart from this naturalistic objectivism, during the XXth century there has also been at least another Weltanschauung from which it would be possible to essay a new understanding of sciences and therefore of the problem of gift seen from a scientific perspective. This “other” Weltanschauung –that we could call “personalist”- started in great extent by Husserl himself, but also by other important thinkers like Kierkegaard, Rosmini, Maine De Biran, Buber or Rozensweig, has been continued in the last years by thinkers like Levinas, Ricoeur or Marion who, beyond challenging naturalistic objectivism in general, has also given an alternative to the reductionist hermeneutics of the gift presented by neoclassical economics, structuralism and deconstructivism.

Some Personalist Arguments for a New Hermeneutics of the Gift a) The face as saturated phenomenon and gift: a first, very famous but also very

strong argument that I think breaks with a very efficacious stroke the closed and seemingly indestructible net formed by the naturalistic approach is the argument of the irruption of the

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“face” given by Emmanuel Levinas. Following the Jewish tradition and its philosophical-mystical revival by Martin Buber, Levinas argues that before a human face, specially if it is a suffering human face, we assist to what, following Jean-Luc Marion, could be called a “saturated phenomenon”(Marion, 2004). In opposition or, better, going beyond Kant and Husserl, Levinas describes the suffering human face as a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to an object to be analyzed, a variable to be calculated or a phenomenon to be interpreted under the light of the a priori intellectual of an abstract subjectivity or the linguistic categories of culture. The face is something “given” –not “represented” as we do with objects- ; it is the other offered to us as gift. In this point Levinas is surely more incisive and radical than many other anti-naturalistic thinkers like Heidegger himself. In fact, as Karl Lowith has argued, while in Heidegger the Dasein still works as a trascendental subject that process every experience within itself, the levinasian face is experienced as the radical other. In fact, Levinas’ interpretation of the irruption of the other’s face is even more radical than Martin Buber’s I- You relationship. While in the latter still works the principle of reciprocity between the I and the you, in Levinas the other presents himself as an incomparable and incomeasurable infinity.2

However, contrarily to Derrida, in Levinas, “the gift does not exclude economy, but rather presupposes it as the material basis of giving”. Although, according to Levinas, the face commands us to leave what he calls our “economy of dwelling” and to give ourselves to the other –in other words it requires a certain kind of dispossession- 3 there is no essential opposition between having and giving. In fact, the human being’s original situation as a being-in-the world before his discovery of the otherness and of the command of giving, is not of abandonment and existential scarcity –as it happens for example with Heidegger’s Dasein- but of ontological abundance. Thus, giving is not an interruption of a supposedly circular, closed and scarce world but a continuation of the current of giving that starts in the natural world itself. In a clear connection with Judeo-Christian creationism,4 according to Levinas, giving does not mean to surmount a river’s current going against the world’s trend, but to continue the current of creation. As Jean Luc Marion argues (Being Given, 2002 quoted by Lisa Guenther, 2006, 57): “The acceptance of the gift does not consist in ratifying it by sending it back upstream (toward the giver), but in repeating it by sending it downstream (towards a givee yet to come)”.

b) Freedom as the novelty of action and source of giveness: a second group of

arguments in favor of the gift can be found in Paul Ricoeur’s rich dialogue with psychoanalysis, structuralism, and analytical philosophy. I believe that these arguments can be perfectly applied to the problem of the gift in the economy. Ricoeur criticizes, for example, Freud’s “economic” model as being a kind of “mental hydraulics” (Ricoeur, 1969, 146) in which culture is seen as the product of an endless “archaic repetition”. But this “archeology of the subject”, in which it is clear the impossibility of real giving

2 The presence of a principle of infinity in the human being is also supported by another great personalist thinker like Antonio Rosmini through his idea of being (idea dell’essere) as the intellectual light of the human person. 3 “But in order that I be able to free myself from the very possession that the welcome of the Home establishes, in order that I be able to see things in themselves, [. . .] I must know how to give what I possess”. (Levinas, 1969, 170-171). 4 Levinas is clear in this: “Creation ex nihilo breaks with system, posits a being outside of every system, that is where freedom is posible”. (Levinas, 1969, 104)

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understood as novelty different from one’s past, has to be necessarily completed, according to Ricoeur, with what he calls the “teleology of the subject” and even with an “hermeneutics of the sacred” in which the origin of meaning is moved from “the back to the front of the subject” (Ricoeur, 1969, 25) and where the possibility of real giving takes place:

“. . . en se comprenant lui-même dans et par les signes du sacré, l’homme opère le

plus radical dessaisissement de lui-même qu’il est possible de concevoir. . .” (Ricoeur, 1969, 26)

In a similar way, Ricoeur also challenges structuralism’s affirmation of the priority

of structures, functions and roles over the genetic, historic and subjective dimension of culture. Ricoeur presents numerous arguments to demonstrate that linguistic structures (la lange in Saussure’s terminology) become incomprehensible without “the word” (la parole) pronounced by the subject. The structure of language is therefore open by the novelty of the word given by the subject as his most original gift. Besides, although many seemingly new events can be reduced in some cultures to repetitive and a-historical structures–like gift giving in the primitive totemic cultures studied by some structural anthropologies- in many other cultures –like the Judeo-Christian one that is mainly a historical culture- novelty and gifts are more the rule than the exception (Ricoeur, 1969).

In his Oneself as the other he completes these arguments criticizing the analytical philosophers’ attempt to build a semantics of action disregarding the need of a personal free agent and reducing action to an anonymous and predictable event. In Ricoeur’s opinion, human actions are ultimately incomprehensible if they are thought just as forming part of an homogeneous chain of causes and effects described and explained “objectively” through an analytical approach. On the contrary, following Kant’s arguments of the second Critique, Ricoeur stresses the necessity of a free agency understood as a “new start” not reducible to the chain of predictable events. Thus, and through an hermeneutical approach that Ricoeur calls a “narrative identity”, he believes it is possible to “think the initiative” and we would add, to think the gift as a radical kind of initiative.

c) Things as gifts: finally, a third group of arguments, can be found in Husserl, the

intellectual father of Levinas, Ricoeur and Marion. The last Husserl of the Crisis tries a final attempt to overcome the positivist vision of an objectivistic world-view and opens the way for a new relation of people to things –natural and artificial things-or, better, of people through things. Indeed, in addition to his previous phenomenological reduction of things to the intentional world of conscience, Husserl introduces in his last work a new radical reduction of things to what he calls –following Dilthey- the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). The world of things becomes after this, no more the cold and impersonal world of mere objects, matter or stuff, but a world penetrated from every side and angle by the intentions, desires and projects of the people that live within it. Things are no more just “closed things”, identical to themselves, but always new, open to infinite possibilities of perspectives from the world of life in which they are used, enjoyed and exchanged (Husserl, 1970, 123).

But there is even more in the late Husserl. Things not only become “personalized” but also “interpersonalized”. Indeed, in Husserl’s last work appears with great force the idea of “intersubjectivity” that will be so important during the rest of the 20th century until

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now. Things are no more objective but trans-subjective, they are not so much in themselves but the place of the encounter between persons, the vehicle for their communication. Although Husserl did not arrive to the end of his intellectual trip, he evidently put the bases for what today is called the relationality of goods, and through this also to the possibility of conceiving things as gifts.

Reconciling the gift and the market: the case of services and design goods To conclude this paper I will like two make a reference to two areas of the market

economy in which the possibility of introducing the gift-relations’ perspective is clearly conditioned by the difference between the above shown naturalist-objectivistic and the personalist approaches. The first case is the theoretical debate that is taking place among the specialists on the service industry. According to Mari Sako, 5 the supporters of the traditional approach to services assimilate the delivery of services to the production of manufactures of the industrial economy. Thus, the service industry would not need the introduction of extra human capacities or relations but only of a more intensive standardization, integration and control of processes than traditional manufacture production. On the contrary, in Sako’s opinion, to achieve a real quantitative and qualitative growth of the service sector it is necessary to adopt a completely different epistemological paradigm. This would include to understand services in what he denominates a “personalized way”. Indeed, according to him, services cannot be produced unilaterally by their providers just following standardized frameworks but need to be co-produced trough a very dynamic and complex process by both the provider and the user, including many professional, technical and personal capacities and also an accurate linguistic and human communication.

It seems to me that this latter argument does not only take into account very important facts of the contemporary economy such as the new problems of asymmetrical information and the growing importance of tacit knowledge, but it also implicitly admits the possibility of gift-relations in a market environment. Indeed, in a certain way, according to this approach, the delivery of services implies in the first place, the acceptance of what French philosophy calls “la difference”. The client or user of the service has to be recognized as an “other” (Levinas’s face) not reducible to the objectification or the identification with the a priori plans of the provider. This necessarily leads to a rich interpersonal exchange that includes a vital and sympathetic moment (Lebenswelt) that goes far beyond the final exchange of service and payment. In this way, although a service’s delivery is formally an exchange of two equivalents ruled by contract, actually the process is in many cases so intermingled with personal exchanges –think about medical, educational or even tourist services- that it is extremely difficult and maybe impossible to measure the equivalence of what is given and received by each of the contractual parts. In some way, it seems that in order to understand the contemporary delivery of services, it is becoming necessary to go back to the original meaning of the word service with its very close connections to the idea of gift.

5 Mari Sako, “Grand Challenges in Services”, GCS Workshop, Said Business School, Oxford, 19 May 2006.

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A second example I want to refer to comes from the world of the design industry. Following Theodor Adorno’s critique of gift-articles, the design specialist Clive Dilnot argues that in the same way that gift-articles have become “a kind of mirror to the alienating product” that in general characterizes many industrial products, the “quantum of joy lying in the gift relation is there to be potentially opened in any everyday relation between a product and a user” (Dilnot, 1993, 53). In fact, argues Dilnot

Why do we make things for another’s use at all? Is there not, at the core of our impulse to

make things, something closer to the ideal gift relationship? To put it another way, is not the work of the designer, at its best, nearer to the impulse that motivates the gift giver who gives out of love than to the huckster who provides the market with another “substitute” object? (Dilnot, 1993, 55.)

To ground this strong assertion Dilnot brings up a series of arguments that, in my

opinion, overcome the naturalist approach and can be perfectly ascribed to a personalist one. In the first place, he stresses the importance of the dialogical nature of objects which become means to establish concrete relations among people, not opposed but different from their capability to be possessed. In the second place, he also argues that we make things not only to meet material needs and to produce goods to exchange for a profit, but also having the purpose of transforming the external world in a more human world through which we feel recognized in our needs and aspirations (cfr. Ricoeur, 2002) and that can be offered to ourselves and to others. In the third place, well designed objects need the introduction by designers of a “moment of gift” which implies a deep process of empathy with an imaginary other in order to obtain a configurational and psychological fit of the thing to the concrete person who will make use of that thing.

In a word, these two cases show, in my opinion, that a personalist approach opens the door to a new understanding of production, consumption and exchange activities that can overcome the naturalist and objectivist approach usually held in economics that leads to a reduction of gift-relations to commodity exchange relations. Besides, this approach can also avoid the temptation of relegating gift-relations to the sphere of plausible but almost irrational phenomena. References

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Solow, J. L., “Is it really the thought that counts-toward a rational theory of Christmas”, Rationality & Society, 5 (1993), pp. 506-17. Tournier, Paul, The Meaning of Gifts, trans. John S.Gilmour, Richmond, VA, John Knox, 1963. Wallendorf, Melanie and Eric Arnould (1988), "'My Favorite Things': A Cross-cultural Inquiry into Object Attachment, Possessiveness, and Social Linkage," Journal of Consumer Research, 14 (March), 531-547. Weiner, Annette B., Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping- While-Giving, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992. Wojtyla, Karol, Persona y acción, Madrid, BAC, 1983. Zamagni, S., ed., The Economics of Altruism, Aldershot, 1995.

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