Giving without expecting return

Anthropology has taught us to be wary of the gift, which it always describes as caught up in an obligation of return. There is, however, another form of giving, one that unfolds over time without depending on that return, that benefits first the one who gives, and that we find in certain human bonds as well as in digital commons. I call it the gift without expectation.

Giving according to Marcel Mauss

In his Essay on the Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss puts forward a thesis that has become classic. In every human society he studied, the gift is never free. It is caught up in a triple obligation: that of giving, that of receiving, that of returning. The one who gives implicitly expects a return, the one who receives is obliged to accept, the one who has received must give back. The gift circulates, and this circulation is what binds persons and groups together. Mauss concludes that the apparently free gift is only so on the surface, and that beneath the surface it is the instrument of an economy of debt and honour.

Mauss’s analysis has had considerable posterity, in that it founded a large part of economic anthropology, but also a certain suspicion of the gift that runs through contemporary critical thought. When we offer something, the argument goes, following Mauss, we always expect something in return ; the gift is a strategy disguised as generosity, the giver buys himself a position of power over the receiver.

This suspicion is not absurd, and it accurately describes a large part of gift-giving behaviour in human societies, including those that present themselves as disinterested. It does not, however, suffice to account for an experience that many people know and that deserves a concept of its own, that of the gift one makes without expecting, without calculating, because the act does us good in ourselves, regardless of what the other will do with it.

The pure gift according to Derrida

In Given Time (1991), Jacques Derrida takes up the question where Mauss had left it, and shows that the pure gift is, at the limit, impossible. As soon as it is recognised as a gift, it enters a symbolic economy that cancels its purity. If I give with the intention of giving, I already enter the logic of recognition ; if I give while hiding the fact that I am giving, I deprive myself of the satisfaction of giving ; if I am thanked, the gift circulates as debt. The pure gift, which would belong to no economy, could only exist in a moment so fleeting that it would escape even the giver’s own awareness.

The analysis seems to me to miss something, in that it thinks the gift from the angle of the isolated event, the dated gesture, the transaction. The experience I would like to describe is different, in that it unfolds as a lasting posture, as a way of being in relation that consists in giving regularly without keeping count. This posture does not eliminate the question of recognition, it shifts it. It does not demand that recognition come, it accepts that recognition may come or not, and it continues.

A parent, a friend, a developer

Take first the case of a parent whose adult child no longer gives news, in the wake of a conflict or a choice of loyalty toward the other parent. This parent may continue to send regular messages, signs of attention on birthdays, news of the family, without the child ever responding. Popular psychology usually describes this practice as a lack of self-respect, an emotional dependency, sometimes even harassment. For those who practise it, however, it is a discipline of love that consists in keeping the bond open for the day when it might resume, even if that day never comes.

Another example, that of a friend who writes regularly to an acquaintance going through a difficult time, without receiving any reply, because that person no longer has the strength to reply. The messages are not lost, they hold something, they signal that someone is there. The giver does not know whether they are received, and continues.

A last example, that of a developer who contributes to free software. He writes code, publishes it under an open licence, maintains it for years without financial compensation and without any recognition other than that of an often silent community. Millions of people use his code without knowing it. He expects neither gratitude, nor payment, nor fame ; he does what he does because it seems right to him.

These three situations, which appear disparate, share the same structure. They describe a gift that unfolds over time, that does not depend on the return, and that remains coherent even when no return ever comes. This is what I would like to call the gift without expectation.

Giving for oneself

An objection arises at once. If I give without expecting anything from the other, perhaps I am expecting something from myself. I give for the satisfaction of having given, for the image I form of myself, for the moral posture this affords me. The gift without expectation would then be a narcissistic gift in disguise, draped in a noble ethic.

The objection is partly right. The gift without expectation does include a dimension of benefit to the giver, and that dimension is precisely what makes it sustainable over time. A purely sacrificial gift, one that would bring nothing to the giver, could not maintain itself, for the giver would exhaust himself, become bitter, and end up demanding a return. The gift without expectation holds because it is, in itself, a source of well-being for the one who practises it. Giving does good to the one who gives, regardless of reception.

This internal circulation, in which the good circulates between the giver and himself through the very act of giving, is not of the same nature as the external circulation Mauss describes. It creates no debt for the receiver, it does not ask him to give back, and may even at times not require him explicitly to accept the gift.

Tim Berners-Lee gives away the Web

This structure is found at large scale in the phenomenon of digital commons. Tim Berners-Lee, in 1990-1991, designs HTTP and HTML, the two protocols that make the World Wide Web possible. He could have patented them, made a fortune from them, controlled their evolution. He chose to make them public, free and open, and that decision allowed the internet to become what it is. Thirty-five years later, billions of people use these protocols without knowing that they were given by a man who expected nothing in return.

Richard Stallman, in the 1980s, founded the free software movement around four freedoms, those of using, studying, modifying and redistributing. The GPL licence he drafted makes possible the existence of software that can never be privatised. Linus Torvalds, in 1991, released the Linux kernel under that licence, which led to an operating system used today on the vast majority of the world’s servers, without any company owning it.

The Markdown format, created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004, follows the same logic, with a simple, public standard that hundreds of tools can implement without asking permission. It is the format that generative artificial intelligences use today to structure their replies, with no one collecting royalties.

In The Wealth of Networks (2006), Yochai Benkler theorises these phenomena under the name of commons-based peer production. These forms of production escape both the logic of the market and that of the State, because they rest on voluntary unpaid contributions, driven by impulses other than monetary interest or hierarchical constraint.

In Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (2012), Chris Anderson shows how this logic extends to material industry, with the sharing of plans for 3D printing, computer-numerical-control machines, fab labs. Plans circulate freely, objects are manufactured locally by each. Anderson sees in this the beginning of a productive revolution comparable to the one the internet brought about for information.

An economy that is not the economy

All these practices have in common the production of value without making it a commodity. HTML has immense value for contemporary civilisation, and no one owns it. The Linux kernel has economic value estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars if measured in equivalent development cost, and no one charges for it. Wikipedia is one of the most consulted sources of information in the world, and no one earns money as a contributor.

This phenomenon has long been described as marginal, as a residue, as an exception to the general economic logic. It now appears, on the contrary, more and more clearly as one of the most powerful forms of value production of our time, and a considerable share of the global digital economy rests on commons that no one has privatised.

In this economy that is not the economy, the gift without expectation operates at large scale. It works because each contributor finds in the act an immediate benefit (learning, satisfaction, recognition by peers, a sense of participating in something larger than oneself), and because the community that forms around the commons constitutes a social space rich in bonds. It is another form of relation to value, one that has nothing to do with sacrifice.

A way of being in relation

I therefore propose to forge the concept of the gift without expectation to designate this posture that consists in giving regularly, over time, without depending on the return, because the act of giving constitutes in itself a good for the one who gives. The concept distinguishes itself from the Maussian gift, caught in the triple cycle of give-receive-return, and from the pure Derridean gift, conceived as impossible event. It designates a posture.

Four properties characterise it. First, it inscribes itself in duration and not in the isolated event, which makes it a way of being in relation rather than a heroic gesture. Then, it remains coherent even when no return comes, when the other does not receive, does not respond, does not acknowledge, and the giver continues nonetheless. It also benefits the giver, without that turning into an interested calculation, because the benefit lies in the act itself and not in the expectation of a return. Finally, it produces commons, whether of human bonds, shared knowledge, software or protocols, goods that are no one’s property and that benefit all.

Human bonds, commons, political thought

The concept of the gift without expectation has practical bearing on several planes.

On the plane of human bonds, it provides a conceptual framework for defending practices that popular psychology disqualifies. Continuing to write to a child who does not reply is not masochism, maintaining a bond without immediate reciprocity is not dependency. These are practices that can be just, that can do good to those who practise them, and that can sometimes do good to those who receive them, even when they show no sign of it.

On the plane of value production, the concept invites us to recognise what really happens in digital commons. A considerable share of the infrastructure of our time has been produced by giving without expectation, and that share does not appear in classical economic statistics, because those statistics measure the monetary value exchanged and not the use value produced. If we learn to measure otherwise, we discover an economy that has been operating at large scale for forty years.

On the plane of political thought, finally, the concept invites us to move beyond the tired opposition between the market and the State. A third way of producing and circulating value exists, that of the commons, which is not a utopia but a tested reality, and which has produced some of the most precious infrastructure of our civilisation. To think it philosophically is to give oneself the means to defend it when the established powers seek to privatise it.

The gift without expectation, in this perspective, is the implicit ethics of a mode of production that deserves to be recognised as such.