I was over at ARCADE reading through comments on a post about something called object-oriented ontology. Timothy Morton, the writer of that post, slipped a reference to Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying, into a comment. The title got my attention, so I zipped over to Amazon.com and read this in the produce description:
In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today.
Wowie Zowie! And it seems Boon somehow bundles this all up with Buddhism.
That we are born copycats is hardly a new idea – remember ‘monkey see, monkey do’? – but I’ve been hearing a lot of this recently. For one thing, I hang out with copyright activists associated with QuestionCopyright.org, and they’re all about copying, copying as an essential facilitating and driving engine of culture. They’ve got Nina Paley on board doing advocacy videos for them, such as this one, “All Creative Work is Derivative.” And Paley, who is a fantastically inventive artist and film-maker, tends to go overboard in downplaying her originality while, at the same time, emphasizing how very much she’s borrowed from others going back, like, zillions of years (see this interview, for example).
The mythology of the individual creative genius is coming under sharpe critique and heavy assault. Here’s cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber blogging about recent articles on creative pairs (e.g. Lennon and McCartney). And, of course, remix culture is all around us on the web, and is proclaiming itself to be so.
I suppose the concept of collective creativity first hit me back in 1987 in the wake of James Lincoln Collier’s biography of Duke Ellington, in which he emphasized the fact that Ellington frequently took ideas from his musicians and incorporated them into his compositions and arrangements. While this was hardly new information to the jazz community, it caused a minor uproar, as though it somehow diminished Ellington’s accomplishment. At the time I told myself that, if we knew as much about Shakespeare’s life and practices as we know about Ellington’s, we’d find that his plays are full of ideas from his actors in addition to all the material he’d taken from the literary tradition. That’s just how creativity works. Lots and lots of borrowing and stealing. Yes, you have to know how to put it all together, but you’ve got to have the source material.
But 1987, that’s a long time ago, practically the Dark Ages. Independently of indigenous intellectual changes in how we think about culture and creativity, other things have changed, too. And these other things are driving the current conversation, hard.
There is, of course, the internet, and all the swapping and sharing and circulating that takes place online. And not only the activity itself, but our awareness of it, down to the level of browser displays that show us all our Facebook friends. We see the connections before our very eyes. Any number of folks are busy visualizing them for us, throwing up pictures of the connectivity. And there’s been years of chatter about ‘six degrees of separation’ and networks.
Networks networks networks.
And, as a direct consequence of all this networking, we’ve got COPYRIGHT issues pushed in everyone’s face, week by week, day by day, and even hour by hour. I don’t need to run the litany of issues and annoyances, you’ve got your own list. The point is simply that they’re out there, and that there’s lots of push and shove on them. And because they’re legal issues, and the law has to justify itself, the intellectual and conceptual foundations of copyright are being dredged up, stirred around, and rethought.
While legal action is very much about POWER, the nature of that action requires that the power be rationalized. The rationalization may be thin and hackneyed, but it still must be there. Of course, Mr. Thin and Ms. Hackneyed are mostly on the side of monopoly restrictions. They aren’t going to think new thoughts. But the folks who’re fighting them, they will think new thoughts. They have to.
Judging from the publisher’s blurb for In Praise of Copying, the driving force of those legal issues has worked its way deep into the fabric of academic discussions. Buddhism? I’m sure Boon makes it make sense. I’m just struck at how far-reaching this discussion has become that Buddhism is being invoked.
Just how deeply are we going to rethink the Western cultural project?
On a more mundane note, I wonder if Harvard is publishing Boon’s book with the standard copyright restrictions or if they’ve decided to copyleft it. Whaddaya think?
In this TED Talk: http://72.3.218.115/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
ReplyDeleteSteven Johnson makes the case that, notwithstanding the myth of the solitary thinker, the greatest number of good ideas arise in environments (such as, e.g., coffee houses) where people freely exchange their thoughts. These "liquid environments" are where "ideas have sex", elaborating into even greater ideas. He isn't talking about copying, per se, but it is implicit.
Now look at Sperber's contention that "... reasoning, typically seen as an activity of the individual thinker, is in fact a social activity aimed at exercising some control on the flow of communicated information by arguing in order to convince others and by examining others' arguments in order to be convinced only when appropriate".
Something like an evolutionary-psychology ecology of thinking (and, I would say, of culture) seems to me to be taking shape.
Here's another version of the Steve Johnson.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's this paragraph from Mark Changizi:
Communities can be creative even when no individual member is a skilled idea-hunter. This is because communities are dynamic evolving environments, and with enough individuals, there will always be people who do in fact generate fantastically successful ideas. There will always be successful idea-hunters within creative communities, even if these individuals are not skilled idea-hunters, i.e., even if they are unlikely to ever achieve the same caliber of idea again.
Going back to the jazz world, another thing about
Ellington is that musicians stayed in his band for a long time, which is unusual. Some of them stuck around for decades or more. He wrote for them, and they gave him ideas. During the middle of his career he had a close collaborator and alter ego in Billy Strayhorn, who wrote the Ellington theme song, "Take the A Train." Other jazz musicians were known for their ability to spot and nurture talent, who then went on to significant careers of their own. Art Blakey and Miles Davis are the most obvious examples of this.
Each of those guys were known as individual creative geniuses, and each of them was an exquisite collaborator. Go figure.