I’m discovering that the ProQuest thesis and dissertation database is full of surprises. Like my dissertation.
As a doctoral student, I had never consulted my alma mater‘s graduate student calendar copyright policy. While it states that the student is the copyright holder of the thesis or dissertation, it also stipulates, “as a condition of engaging in graduate study in the university, [that] the author of a thesis grants certain licences and waivers with respect to the circulation and copying of the thesis.” These licenses are for the university library, naturally, but there’s also one for Library & Archives Canada (LAC), to which the dissertation author grants “a licence to microfilm the thesis under carefully specified conditions” (7).
I didn’t read the fine print of the university’s copyright policy for graduate students, but before I defended, my supervisor made a point of advising me to treat and protect the work as my scholarly capital. And it was in this work that I began researching copyright. So I think I would remember if I was ever briefed on the “carefully specified conditions” of the LAC’s license. I wasn’t.
Canada's Fortress of Knowledgtude. LAC photo CC-licensed from Padraic Ryan.
The LAC cover on my dissertation in the ProQuest database informs me, however, that I (“the author”) have
granted a non-exclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats.
The cover also assures me that – while LAC has just said it can basically do whatever it wants with the work – “the author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis.”
Now, most of this I don’t object to, in principle. I’m fully on board with archiving and preserving. I support LAC as a vital institution serving Canadians’ public interest. And I’m all for open access – not that the ProQuest database itself is open access (though it does make more research more accessible). But I do object to the LAC’s unclearly-got license to sell my work internationally and distribute it “for commercial purposes” – like, say, to this ProQuest database, whose own bottom line the dissertation now gets to gild, with neither my informed consent nor share in any profits.
Not that I would expect the work to yield much of anything in that way. It’s a dissertation, after all – it’s not even a book. (Which suggests an implication for graduates who, unlike Yours Truly, might want to turn their dissertations into books: does ProQuest database availability compromise publish-ability?)
What I object to is the commercial latitude of the LAC’s license, and the opacity of the university policy about this license. None of the protocols of depositing the dissertation with the university involved any “careful specification” of the license I apparently gave to Library & Archives Canada to sell my work.
SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.
Of course, we already knew before yesterday that the ███████ bill won’t even work. As has been widely reported, opensource developers have already created and distributed apps and plug-ins that pre-emptively subvert SOPA: “Internet circumvents anti-circumvention bill before it even passes.”
But as expert commentators like Trosow and Michael Geist point out, SOPA is just one of many legislative and trade-based manoeuvres being pursued around the world, manoeuvres like ACTA, CETA, and TPP that target “piracy” with reckless indifference to the vast collateral damage they will wreak on civil liberties and even human rights.
In this version of the world, the USA is a bloated tick and the rest of the world, save western Europe, barely exists. The nervous system of this tick is Big Content: the entertainment and music conglomerates that tirelessly come up with new ways to make censorship, kill switches, and mass criminalization seem like common sense instead of straight-up evil greed (hey, BoingBoing said it). And all the while, Big Content still enjoys substantial, sometimes record profits.
While there are many reasons for Big Content’s continued profitability (amidst a horde of conflicting studies, independent and interested, that leave its purported demise a claim greatly exaggerated), let me get all “Universal soldier” for a minute and suggest the fault’s partly our own, as buyers of albums, DVDs, and movie tickets. If the Internet really wants to put the hurt on this torrent of bad ideas – drawn up in secret, promoted disingenuously, and possessing all the precision and finesse of a point-blank blunderbuss – maybe it’s time to #BBC: Boycott Big Content. I don’t know about you, but music seems to be getting along fine without big labels, self-publishing’s on an upswing, and Youtube’s as much fun as the silver screen. Quality UGC now comes in all shapes, sizes, and persuasions (like The Oatmeal, which was perhaps the blackout’s popular favourite statement). So maybe I don’t get out much – and maybe an old-timey boycott has its share of problems as an effective tactic – but Boycotting Big Content might be something to consider, the better to strike at the roots of the evil that is today’s out-of-control copyright regime.
UPDATES: 1. I just learned BBC means something other than British Broadcasting Corp. Makes the tag even better. (That said, public media like the BBC and the CBC provide vital public-interest service, unlike private conglomerates. They’re in a different, more respectable league of Big Media.) 2. A boycott’s one idea; the hacktivist group Anonymous is taking a more direct approach against Big Content, making DDoS attacks on not just state agencies but companies like Sony; check out the statement the group has issued.
Michael Geist advises Canadians to participate in the public consultation on a possible trade deal with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which could mean a longer copyright term, stronger digital lock protections, and ISP notice-and-takedown – measures that would toughen copyright beyond international requirements, stifle innovation and education, and undo some of the provisions in C-11 – a bill the government hasn’t even passed yet.
Given what the government’s considering signing away with CETA (you know, just water and health care and such), I dread what else the government may be considering by joining the TPP.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing, in response to the invitation for public comments on the TPP talks, to state that I object to copyright being part of these talks.
In particular, provisions being considered that would extend copyright term, strengthen digital locks, and introduce notice-and-takedown requirements for ISPs are provisions that would harm Canadian business, education, and culture. They would also run counter to many points in the new copyright legislation, Bill C-11. Some legal criticisms suggest the digital lock provisions in C-11 are themselves unconstitutional, and international criticisms of notice-and-takedown measures point out their inefficacy and flouting of due legal process. For the government to consider copyright changes under TPP that would require either revision or replacement of C-11 is a questionable use of government resources, a detriment to Canadian industry and innovation, and an unacceptable imposition on Canadians’ access to and use of information.
A review of Exit Through the Gift Shop (with some kicks at Richard Dawkins’ deserving balls along the way)
Watching Exit over the holiday was more or less my introduction to Banksy and his art. The film is a glinting glass onion of layered ironies; the scene it sketches, the stories it tells, and the style with which it is executed all declare that the reports of postmodernism’s death are greatly exaggerated.
First, a backgrounder on these reports (to which a still-going concern like the editors of Postmodern Culture and other scholars of postmodernism might rightly object). It was maybe the Sokal affair that rang the first death knell of postmodernism, virtually in the teeth of its pop-culture arrival: in Simpsons references, raves, Tarantino movies, Kathy Acker’s last works, and so on. The short version is that one Dr Sokal submitted a hoax “postmodernist” paper to a prominent refereed journal, which accepted it for publication. Designed to lampoon the perceived excesses and inutility of postmodern theory, the affair ended up making peer review look bad as well. For some reason, Richard Dawkins joined the ensuing pile-on; he published an unprovoked and ill-informed rant against postmodernism as a review of Sokal’s work in 1998. It might have been suitably lost to public memory, except that he exhumed this baffling bit of “blind and dumb criticism” to post it online in 2007, at which time it mostly just made Dawkins seem like the drunk and belligerent crasher of a party that most people had already left. (It’s also rather unseemly for a knighted scientist to pick a turf war with a Humanities specialization; aren’t the Humanities being bullied enough by the government of the 1%, without a fellow scholar bustling in for a cheap kick to the ribs while they’re down?) At a conference I attended, around 2003, my alma mater’s own expert on postmodernism remarked that it seemed just as the idea was getting some public traction, everybody started talking about globalization instead. Most recently, the Guardian ran a column last year about how postmodernism was a premillennial flash in the pop-culture pan, and had been replaced – not by globalization this time – but by the Internet: “Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet.”
Banksy, Commissioned mural. New York, 2008. Photo CC-licensed from SteveR-.
Enter Exit, and Banksy’s work more broadly: playful with pastiche and parody, replete with détourned ready-mades and quoted references, at once street-wise and Sotheby’s-worthy, distinctly stylized in its stark imagery and sardonic tone, sublimely ambiguous in its uncertain attribution, its oscillation between presence and disappearance. It’s consistently preoccupied with the problematic status of art as commodity, and placed to interrogate the roles of artist and audience, and the social function of art itself, everywhere it appears. And it’s all wickedly, infinitely ironic. Banksy’s aesthetic is almost textbook postmodernism – given the logic of his work, it might not be a stretch to suggest his whole oeuvre represents a postmodern parody of postmodernism itself.
Banksy, Original Thought. New York, 2010.
I did say “almost.” How Banksy’s work departs from textbook postmodernism is in its plain-spoken populism and its open public access. The jokes are almost never in-jokes, the ironies are immediately grasped, the images are iconic, the themes and statements are clearly political – addressing controverial issues and matters of public interest – and the language is both direct and fiercely witty. Dawkins would be hard pressed to find in Banksy’s version of postmodernism the perceived obscurity, uselessness, and social detachment at which his “blind and dumb” criticism takes such gender-coded and ambiently xenophobic umbrage. (The artist himself might object to having his work described as “postmodernist.” But it’s not the artist’s job to interpret one’s own work for the public. That’s tacky.)
And yet at the same time, Dawkins would also look simply ludicrous to denounce Banksy for postmodernism’s perceived sins of fakery and dissimulation – er, better make that more ludicrous than he already looks for missing entirely the meaning and materiality of fakery and dissimulation for the culture of late capital. (Okay, that’s enough about Sir Dick; his problem is more with postmodernist scholarship, not art.) As with quintessentially postmodern productions like Videodrome, Philip K. Dick stories, and the surgical body art of Orlan and Nina Arsenault, Banksy’s work messes specifically with perceptions and assumptions about what’s real or authentic, and what isn’t, in its use of trompe l’oeil tactics and, moreover, in the uncertainty his work leaves in its wake: “is it a Banksy?”
its neither real or a hoax. its a banksy
- this guy I know
What the film does, then, is amplify this almost-textbook postmodern aesthetic – it creates more ambiguity and play in the very gesture of posing and purporting to answer questions. It turns the documentary form on itself and so turns the screw, to collapse the form’s defining premise in truth-value and the real into a hyperreal hall of mirrors, a procession of footage, interviews, narration, and montage that leave it impossible to distinguish what is simulation and what is too weird to make up.
Exit is a documentary about a would-be documentarist documenting an eminently postmodern scene of cultural production. Compounding this recursive premise is the story it tells, which fast becomes either stranger than fiction or a fantastic farce. Or both. The most absorbing facet of the film is how it both supports and subverts the post-Romantic ideology of artistic authenticity and originality.
In the first place, the proffered genealogy of “street art” is highly selective and dehistoricized, a speciously sketched “birth of a movement” that, as public art of social revolt, ultimately differs more in degree than in kind from its venerable predecessors in wildstyle graffiti, Dada, and Don Juan.
Moreover, the basis of Banksy’s and Fairey’s work in ready-mades and various types of appropriation, of devices and spaces as well as images, renders their protests over Guetta’s perceived artistic inauthenticity at once undeservingly harsh, more paradoxically post-Romantic than postmodern, and absurdly ironic. The documentary narrative, to its credit, situates Guetta in the tradition of Duchamps, Warhol, Koons, Kostabi, and Hirst. This is also equally the tradition to which Banksy belongs (at least as much as he belongs to that of Bronx wildstyle and Basquiat), however much he and Fairey disavow it, however truly or feignedly Banksy appears discomfited by critical and commercial success in the high art world of millionaires’ trophy cases.
Ultimately, though, the film succeeds not despite but because of these ambiguities. It is a film thoroughly consistent with Banksy’s paint and sculptural work, a varition on its major themes (the critique of the art commodity, the interrogation of the author function and its inordinate cultural capital), a bracing rejuvenation of the postmodern sublime, and a persuasive realization of postmodernism’s political potential.
How it realizes this potential is perhaps best illustrated in the Disneyland sequence.
The Thunder Mountain Gitmo detainee installation is pointedly political in its imagery, placement, and public visibility; however the viewer interprets it must deal with the disconcerting juxtaposition of leisure capital and neo-imperial torture.
Accordingly, the piece demonstrates the real limits on and risks to genuine freedom of radical expression, not just in its reference points but in its placement and in the documentation that shows the stick it throws in the spokes of an average day at the “happiest place on Earth.” The film’s use of the piece footage is itself as astonishing and political as the piece itself, given Disney’s notoriously tight and litigiously guarded control over its public image (discussed in another fine documentary, The Mickey Mouse Monopoly). The very use of this footage in the film tests credibility, as a provocation to the corporation that has become emblematic of copyright extremism and hypersensitive perception management.
Exit‘s Disney footage also engages a postmodern politics of historical memory – it captures and commemorates a moment of daring guerilla art that tests believability, but for its corroboration by archival period reports in news media. If “the events of 11 September signalled the death of postmodernism,” as the Guardian has it, this piece and its documentation signal postmodernism’s return with a vengeance, expressed with reference to September 11 itself (the catalyst for those Guantanamo detainments).
The copyright and legal questions prompted by this and related scenes of subversive appropriation (like the anecdote about the counterfeit pounds) put the film’s ambiguities and ironies to perhaps their toughest test. After months of speculation and dispute over the film’s veracity (including the intriguing suggestion that the film’s main subject, the French documentarist Guetta, was played by Banksy himself), reports emerged a year ago that Guetta was being sued for copyright infringement. A legal proceeding like this still doesn’t necessarily prove anything about Guetta or the film, but it does provide some compelling evidence towards resolving the film’s ambiguities (and spoiling some of its fun, as copyright law all too regularly does). A ruse that involves sworn oaths and lawyers’ fees seems a colossal project for even an artist of considerable patience, tenacity, and resources like Banksy.
In any case, Exit is perhaps best understood paradoxically, as the cinematic equivalent of Banksy’s counterfeit Princess Di pound note: turns out you can spend it anyway. That’s the cultural logic of late capitalism at work.
A couple of years ago, I saw a news item on a sports-health expert who had turned an office (it was probably in California) into a workout workstation, by replacing the workers’ chairs with treadmills. “I spend my workday at 5 kilometres an hour,” the expert said. Since then, the 5kmph office has become a science fiction dream of Yours Truly, as someone who works at home.
Happily, the dream is gradually becoming a reality (thanks to some overextended credit). I’ve seen a few different adaptations of this general idea; the prototype I’m working on is, so far, relatively simple (although admittedly resource-intensive).
This prototype suspends an iPad in a portfolio case over the treadmill console, on which sits the wireless keyboard.
I’m actually writing this post while walking right now, as an experiment. Two details will need fine-tuning. First, the keyboard is not in an ergonomically correct position: I need to bend my wrists up as I type, and that’s a recipe for RSI; I also have to lean slightly forward, a recipe for back and posture problems. Second, because the iPad is suspended, it sways whenever I use the touchscreen controls. Fine-tuning this prototype, then, might begin by determining what kind of work can sustainably be done while walking. Maybe reading an e-book or scanning e-mail will better suit the walk-stationary workstation.
This is more or less all we’ve been watching this week so I thought I’d deck the blog with it.
The Cadger Dubstep Christmas House – First Of The Year (Equinox) by Skrillex
In passing, I will note the fair use angle: Over a million views on Youtube, likely no public performance rights, yet evidence of musician endorsement, at this story about the spectacle (which may or may not be the creator’s own story):
I’ve written a review essay on a recent Afro-Futurism anthology, Afro-Future Females, in the current issue of Extrapolation.
“Debating the histories and futures of black science fiction.” Review of Barr, Marlene S., ed. Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (Ohio State University Press, 2008). Extrapolation 52.2 (2011): 246-68.
Barr’s edited collection is worth a look, as one
whose aims in reading black women’s sf are to re-imagine sf, to advance anti-racist critique, and to reckon with slavery’s legacies.
And it invites teaching uses by taking creative liberties with the edited collection format,
gathering fiction and interviews together with research and criticism … the collection’s dialogic mix invites the reader to a seat at the table where the histories and futures of black sf are being intensely discussed and debated.
But it’s also a book to argue with.
To claim—and I quote—that “Bill Cosby is the father of black science fiction” (18) is to do a gross disservice not just to Delany but to Sun Ra, to Lee Perry, to George Clinton … [and] is symptomatic of the book’s need to engage more closely with the extant literature on Afro-Futurism.
Either way, there’s lots of productive reading here. Find out more in the full version, or check out the book itself.
The current University Affairs has a thought-provoking article about the adoption of creative writing modes in Humanities scholarship, the possibilities they afford research, and the different perceptions and receptions of this practice.
A piece of lyric scholarship might juxtapose excerpts from other scholarly works without accompanying exhaustive analysis. It might borrow elements of poetry, such as rhythm, image and metaphor – the very elements scholarship usually studies rather than employs.
I’m all for experimenting with methodology, and I think this development of “lyric scholarship” is intriguing and has productive potential. But I also take issue with the notion that is implied in the article, which is that traditional scholarship is not, itself, a mode of creative writing.
@AUGSA I may have to reply to that UA article; I take issue with the commonplace that critical and scholarly writing isn't already creative.— Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) December 05, 2011
I’m not suggesting that research publications necessarily deserve attention for prose style – tropes, rhythm, rhyme, allusions, etc. – although there are certainly stellar stylists doing scholarly work (as the article showcases; and an earlier precedent would be Marshall McLuhan’s work, representative of “lyric scholarship” in its reliance on aphorism and allusion). Then again, there are as many if not more examples of the contrary, too: the irremediably dull, sloppily written, and barely proofread pieces, like those criticized in Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” – the kind of stuff that feeds popular anti-intellectualism. What I’m suggesting is that well-written scholarship embodies attentive use of language, extensive research, and thoughtful argument, and that this intellectual labour is worth considering in terms of creativity.
To suggest this is also to deliberately try to blur the distinctions institutionalized between creative work, traditionally conceived as a “primary” literature, and critical work as as a “secondary” literature. Michael Foucault identifies this hierarchical distinction as one important “order of discourse” in the organization of modern western knowledge and culture.
Writing instruments
There are worthwhile reasons for challenging this distinction. Left unproblematized, the distinction denies creative work any critical agency, which it wields in force, of course. Consider the credit given Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for catalyzing the Civil War. Or – on the topic of this very post – consider this passage from Ronald Wright’s novel A Scientific Romance – it’s one of the finest (and funniest) critical assessments of Theory that I’ve yet read:
The French themselves realize that Parisian theory is an art form; the Americans, poor lambs, take it seriously. (9)
Conversely, the distinction denies criticism is creative labour and positions it as a kind of parasite discourse, thus perpetuating the illusion that “creative” work is generated ex nihilo, an illusion that mostly serves the increasingly oppressive copyright regime that relies on ideologies of originality and creativity to protect its interests.
And there are other reasons to critique this order of discourse that relate to copyright. While it is more standard for literary journals to leave copyright with creative authors, it is fairly standard for academic journals to request scholarly authors to surrender copyright. Admittedly, there are very different labour economies in which these different standards are involved. Creative writers who aren’t also teachers or scholars depend more materially on copyright revenues. Copyright-brokering intermediaries like Access Copyright have not hesitated to exploit these ideological and economic differences, pitting “creators” against “educators” to advance their own bottom-line interests.
Another copyright-related question concerns the extent to which secondary literature can or should quote from primary works under fair dealing “purposes of criticism or research,” or without otherwise infringing copyright. The norms and standards for quoting from other works in scholarship can vary, but tend on the whole to be very conservative, with guidelines for word limits and reliably outrageous fees for licensing poem lines or song lyrics. An interesting development on this front, this week, arose amidst the Supreme Court’s deliberations over five copyright cases now before it. On the question of whether derivative or remix works – not critical works specifically, but secondary works composed of other extant works – can be considered creative in their own right, Michael Geist reports:
One of the most interesting exchanges occurred late in the day, as Chief Justice McLachlin discussed the creative process and noted that works often involve bringing together several other works into a new whole. When counsel responded that this was a compilation, the Chief Justice replied that it might actually be an entirely new work, bringing the issue of remix and transformative works to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The decisions that could come of such discussion may well have substantial implications for how we conceive of the creative, the critical, and the powers served by their hierarchical division.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse” (1970). Rpt. in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 48-78.
Wright, Ronald. A Scientific Romance. Toronto: Vintage, 1998.
(I’d also like to acknowledge the mentorship of several professors at the University of Guelph for informing my thinking on the critical-creative distinction during my doctoral studies.)
I test-drove Scrivener during last year’s National Novel Writing Month; discovering this app was the best thing about NaNoWriMo 2010 (which I otherwise torpedoed). Anyway, I liked enough of what I saw in that test drive (on an XP PC) to have forked out since for the total experience (on Mac).
Scrivener is an app for writing long documents, like books. It works like a virtual binder where you keep all the different parts, like chapters, in different folders. But you can also park research documents and media here, and leave notes and tags on anything and everything. You can compare different versions of a draft, take periodic snapshots of the whole thing to revisit prior versions after drastic edits, and keep the big picture always in view. This big-picture background feature of the app’s design is helpful for organizing and re-organizing a big writing project. I sometimes treat essay composition like Lego, moving pieces of analysis around to fit in different places for an argument, and the Scrivener interface has helped me scale up that approach for longer work.
The other functions I find especially useful are screen splitting and quick-reference boxes (which I didn’t discover during the test drive). This screenshot shows the editing screen split horizontally, with two quick-reference boxes that I’ve set to “float” – to stay on top of the editing window.
In the top editing window, I’m compiling the master bibliography from references as I proofread the draft in the bottom window, chapter by chapter. The quick-reference box at left shows a previous Word draft of the bibliography, for copying any existing reference entries from it. The quick-reference box at bottom right is a PDF of the specific “Harvard” citation style guide I’m using; since this format is new to me, I keep it here for consulting as needed. Scrivener has reference and notation affordances if I want them, but just being able to keep all these text windows open and active simultaneously made for pretty light work of the biblio as it was. (I’m also partial to handcrafted bibliography.)
So as far as I’m concerned, Scrivener is already proving itself a good investment. My main reservation is that the actual word-processing functions of the text editor – line spacing, margins, and so on – are weirdly both rudimentary and not entirely intuitive. Scrivener is quite up-front about not being a full-featured word processor like Word, but more of a composition engine. (Like every writing app these days, it has a “distraction-free” mode.) So it relegates a lot of the formatting distractions business to the Export function, which turns all or part of a project into a document an actual word processor can read. But the text editing interface looks and feels enough like Word that I’m maybe having trouble getting past the bias that years of sustained exposure to Microsoft has installed in my head.
I’m not normally about product reviews, but this is an app worth trying out if you’re writing a long document, like a thesis, a novel, a script, or a monograph. Be advised, though, it won’t write the thing for you.
It's a scholarly blog by Mark McCutcheon, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Athabasca U, mostly about copyright, new media, postcolonialism, and Romanticism.
