Pirate Aesthetics
Article written for the Magazine of the Steirischer Herbst Festival 2006 at Graz
Pirate Aesthetics
Lawrence Liang
The global movement towards adopting collaborative models of production of culture and knowledge is slowly gaining ground. Starting with the free software movement, and moving towards the domain of art and music, it promises a radical revolution in the ways that we think of authorship and creation. One of the concerns in this article arises form the question of how we think of these developments in the context of a developing country. The adverse impact that strong IP laws have on developing countries has been well documented. While it is true that the world of free software or creative commons license provides a very powerful alternative to the dominant imagination of copyright, the everyday world of digital and electronic cultures seem to have little in connection with the world of free culture. Instead this is a world of quotidian consumption of diverse non legal media or pirated goods.
One could of course argue that these are two completely different domains, and that one deals with the world of cultural production, while the other is a question of political economy. But this simple bifurcation of the two worlds appears to be problematic since it ends up recycling certain dominant stereotypes. The world of free culture and collaboration gets narrated through the tropes of creativity, desire and subjectivity, while the issue of piracy is narrated primarily through the trope of developmentalism and piety. In other words the very categories like the user-producer which are the strength of the free software and free culture movement are completely denied when we look at every piracy in most parts of the world.
I am interested in looking at how we can move beyond the accounts of ‘exclusion from the digital economy’ and the ‘digital divide’ to look at the interesting developments that seem to be opening up within the circulation of on legal media. Rather than looking at the world of digital art and everyday piracy as distinct, I am interested in probing into some of the structural links that might tie them together.
One clue which can help us think through this issue is a statement about the contemporary art scene in China. There is currently a lot of excitement about the Chinese art, and indeed it seems to be the flavor of the month in the global art circles. There are thousands of people who are lining up to join art schools, and one of the Chinese curator’s had this to say “When you can buy Tarkovsky for a dollar, you will obviously produce many more artists”.
One of the significant approaches used by public domain scholars is their emphasis on the ability to create new content building on existing works. They in fact use the metaphor of infrastructure to understand the public domain of ideas. But it often ignores the material linkages between content and infrastructure. The over emphasis on the creation of new content of course raises the question of who uses the new content, and what is the relationship between such content and the question of democratization of infrastructure?
In most cases the reason for the fall in price of electronic goods, computers, great access to material, increase in photocopiers (the infrastructure of information flows) is not caused in any manner through any radical revolution such as free software or open content, but really through the easier availability of standard mainstream commodities like Microsoft and Hollywood. When Stallman and others castigate people for pirating Hollywood, it is only from a position of being able to disavow the global, but for many people the idea of finding their place within the global includes engaging with a world of counterfeit commodities, replicating the global.
We can either play the moral higher ground game, and speak of their real information needs or provide crude theories of how they are trapped by false consciousness. Or we can move away from these judgmental perspectives, and look at other aspects such as the impact of the expansion of the market for these grey market goods has on the general pricing of these goods, the spread of computer/ IT culture, the fall in price of consumables such as blank CD’s, DVD’s, the growing popularity of CD writers etc. I find it a little strange and messianic that people who preach access also preach the kind of access that should be given.
Let me narrate an interesting story, which for me illustrates the gap between ideas of what is good for people, their far more complex subjectivities. An NGO in Bangalore that works in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for development (ICT4D) were conducting a workshop on accessing the internet for the information needs of rural women trainers. The facilitator guided the women through the basics of the internet, on accessing information relevant to their work ranging from rural credit to women’s health. The training was highly appreciated, and all the women volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves fiddling with the computer and exploring the internet. At the end of the training, when the NGO started cleaning up the computers including the history and the cached copies, they were a little aghast to find that most of the women volunteers had been surfing pornography, and a range of pornography at that. So while the trainers were holding forth eloquently about the real information needs of the poor, the poor were quite happy to access their real information needs.
The link between pleasure, desire, aspiration and trespass has always been a complicated one, and the closer that the transgressive act is to the domain of pleasure, the more difficult it seems for it to be redeemed socially. Thus while one find easier justifications for transgression that deal with questions of livelihood and survival, and in the case of intellectual property to free speech and access to information, when the matter involved is about new subjectivities and pleasurable transgressions, it gets very differently framed.
The uncomfortable relationship between public domain scholarship and pirates also partially stems form the fact that we are entering a terrain in which the pirated commodity is a tainted one. While the question of medicine and textbooks are far easier to deal with, movies, music and software get characterised as being outside of the moral economy of development. The demand for low costs entertainment commodities is seen to be one which is normatively more difficult to sustain. Yet at the same time, the sheer proliferation of these practices, both within the elite and also by the traditional ‘subaltern’ classes forces us to question our own assumptions about the terms through which people engage with the global economy of information, and about finding their place in the global. What then are the critical conceptual resources that we can draw on to be able to address this question of pleasurable transgressions and subjectivities that resist easy framing?
Jacques Ranciere in his brilliant rethinking of labour history paves the way for us to start thinking seriously about the hidden domain of aspiration and desire of the subaltern subject, while at the same time thinking about the politics of our own aspirations and desires. Ranciere goes into an unexplored aspect of the labour archive of nineteenth century France, where he starts looking at small obscure and short lived journal brought out by workers, in which they were writing about their own lives. But they were not necessarily writing about their work, and if they were , they were not writing about it in glorified terms but with immense dissatisfaction. Instead they were interested in writing poetry, about philosophy and the other pleasures that non workers or intellectuals were entitled to. At the same time of course, intellectuals have been fascinated with the world of work and the romance of working class identity. Ranciere says “what new forms of misreading will affect this contradiction when the discourse of labourers in love with the intellectual nights of the intellectuals encounters the discourse of intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people”
For those who are less interested in the question of legality v. illegality, and assuming that we don’t have to go through the exercise of detoxifying the usual accounts of piracy, there are wider range of interesting issues and questions that can arise in this other information city from questions around the production networks, the distribution nodes, the question of livelihood, forms of circulation.
As a cinephile, I am particularly fascinated in the changing dynamics of the aesthetics even within the pirate markets, there is an entire world of film for instance that has opened out in Bangalore as a result of the circulation of non Hollywood foreign films, independent films, documentaries, experimental films. I am interested in the question of how in a country like India where censorship still prevails severely for cinema, the grey market emerges as the domain in which free speech can circulate without restriction. Whether or not the grey market does to the Indian art scene what it has allegedly done for Chinese art, is too early to tell but the signs are already there. Some of the biggest clients of the grey market include renowned filmmakers who have started to look beyond Hollywood. Similarly with the fall in prices of video cameras, it is only a matter of time before young people inspired by the new cinema that they see via the grey market fancy taking a shot at becoming the next Jonathan Caouette.
Pirate Aesthetics
Lawrence Liang
The global movement towards adopting collaborative models of production of culture and knowledge is slowly gaining ground. Starting with the free software movement, and moving towards the domain of art and music, it promises a radical revolution in the ways that we think of authorship and creation. One of the concerns in this article arises form the question of how we think of these developments in the context of a developing country. The adverse impact that strong IP laws have on developing countries has been well documented. While it is true that the world of free software or creative commons license provides a very powerful alternative to the dominant imagination of copyright, the everyday world of digital and electronic cultures seem to have little in connection with the world of free culture. Instead this is a world of quotidian consumption of diverse non legal media or pirated goods.
One could of course argue that these are two completely different domains, and that one deals with the world of cultural production, while the other is a question of political economy. But this simple bifurcation of the two worlds appears to be problematic since it ends up recycling certain dominant stereotypes. The world of free culture and collaboration gets narrated through the tropes of creativity, desire and subjectivity, while the issue of piracy is narrated primarily through the trope of developmentalism and piety. In other words the very categories like the user-producer which are the strength of the free software and free culture movement are completely denied when we look at every piracy in most parts of the world.
I am interested in looking at how we can move beyond the accounts of ‘exclusion from the digital economy’ and the ‘digital divide’ to look at the interesting developments that seem to be opening up within the circulation of on legal media. Rather than looking at the world of digital art and everyday piracy as distinct, I am interested in probing into some of the structural links that might tie them together.
One clue which can help us think through this issue is a statement about the contemporary art scene in China. There is currently a lot of excitement about the Chinese art, and indeed it seems to be the flavor of the month in the global art circles. There are thousands of people who are lining up to join art schools, and one of the Chinese curator’s had this to say “When you can buy Tarkovsky for a dollar, you will obviously produce many more artists”.
One of the significant approaches used by public domain scholars is their emphasis on the ability to create new content building on existing works. They in fact use the metaphor of infrastructure to understand the public domain of ideas. But it often ignores the material linkages between content and infrastructure. The over emphasis on the creation of new content of course raises the question of who uses the new content, and what is the relationship between such content and the question of democratization of infrastructure?
In most cases the reason for the fall in price of electronic goods, computers, great access to material, increase in photocopiers (the infrastructure of information flows) is not caused in any manner through any radical revolution such as free software or open content, but really through the easier availability of standard mainstream commodities like Microsoft and Hollywood. When Stallman and others castigate people for pirating Hollywood, it is only from a position of being able to disavow the global, but for many people the idea of finding their place within the global includes engaging with a world of counterfeit commodities, replicating the global.
We can either play the moral higher ground game, and speak of their real information needs or provide crude theories of how they are trapped by false consciousness. Or we can move away from these judgmental perspectives, and look at other aspects such as the impact of the expansion of the market for these grey market goods has on the general pricing of these goods, the spread of computer/ IT culture, the fall in price of consumables such as blank CD’s, DVD’s, the growing popularity of CD writers etc. I find it a little strange and messianic that people who preach access also preach the kind of access that should be given.
Let me narrate an interesting story, which for me illustrates the gap between ideas of what is good for people, their far more complex subjectivities. An NGO in Bangalore that works in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for development (ICT4D) were conducting a workshop on accessing the internet for the information needs of rural women trainers. The facilitator guided the women through the basics of the internet, on accessing information relevant to their work ranging from rural credit to women’s health. The training was highly appreciated, and all the women volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves fiddling with the computer and exploring the internet. At the end of the training, when the NGO started cleaning up the computers including the history and the cached copies, they were a little aghast to find that most of the women volunteers had been surfing pornography, and a range of pornography at that. So while the trainers were holding forth eloquently about the real information needs of the poor, the poor were quite happy to access their real information needs.
The link between pleasure, desire, aspiration and trespass has always been a complicated one, and the closer that the transgressive act is to the domain of pleasure, the more difficult it seems for it to be redeemed socially. Thus while one find easier justifications for transgression that deal with questions of livelihood and survival, and in the case of intellectual property to free speech and access to information, when the matter involved is about new subjectivities and pleasurable transgressions, it gets very differently framed.
The uncomfortable relationship between public domain scholarship and pirates also partially stems form the fact that we are entering a terrain in which the pirated commodity is a tainted one. While the question of medicine and textbooks are far easier to deal with, movies, music and software get characterised as being outside of the moral economy of development. The demand for low costs entertainment commodities is seen to be one which is normatively more difficult to sustain. Yet at the same time, the sheer proliferation of these practices, both within the elite and also by the traditional ‘subaltern’ classes forces us to question our own assumptions about the terms through which people engage with the global economy of information, and about finding their place in the global. What then are the critical conceptual resources that we can draw on to be able to address this question of pleasurable transgressions and subjectivities that resist easy framing?
Jacques Ranciere in his brilliant rethinking of labour history paves the way for us to start thinking seriously about the hidden domain of aspiration and desire of the subaltern subject, while at the same time thinking about the politics of our own aspirations and desires. Ranciere goes into an unexplored aspect of the labour archive of nineteenth century France, where he starts looking at small obscure and short lived journal brought out by workers, in which they were writing about their own lives. But they were not necessarily writing about their work, and if they were , they were not writing about it in glorified terms but with immense dissatisfaction. Instead they were interested in writing poetry, about philosophy and the other pleasures that non workers or intellectuals were entitled to. At the same time of course, intellectuals have been fascinated with the world of work and the romance of working class identity. Ranciere says “what new forms of misreading will affect this contradiction when the discourse of labourers in love with the intellectual nights of the intellectuals encounters the discourse of intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people”
For those who are less interested in the question of legality v. illegality, and assuming that we don’t have to go through the exercise of detoxifying the usual accounts of piracy, there are wider range of interesting issues and questions that can arise in this other information city from questions around the production networks, the distribution nodes, the question of livelihood, forms of circulation.
As a cinephile, I am particularly fascinated in the changing dynamics of the aesthetics even within the pirate markets, there is an entire world of film for instance that has opened out in Bangalore as a result of the circulation of non Hollywood foreign films, independent films, documentaries, experimental films. I am interested in the question of how in a country like India where censorship still prevails severely for cinema, the grey market emerges as the domain in which free speech can circulate without restriction. Whether or not the grey market does to the Indian art scene what it has allegedly done for Chinese art, is too early to tell but the signs are already there. Some of the biggest clients of the grey market include renowned filmmakers who have started to look beyond Hollywood. Similarly with the fall in prices of video cameras, it is only a matter of time before young people inspired by the new cinema that they see via the grey market fancy taking a shot at becoming the next Jonathan Caouette.