For Operation Black March: 31 entertainment ideas without Big Content

Operation Black March is Anonymous’ campaign to boycott Big Content, as punishment for the entertainment lobby’s unrelenting sponsorship of new “copyright” bills and deals that censor the Internet and kill civil liberties. Hence #OpBlackMarch: no buying – or downloading – movies, TV, music, or games, during March 2012.

Boycotting Big Content for a month poses a quintessential #FirstWorldProblem: it seems absurd that you couldn’t easily go without entertainment products for a month; but could you actually go without them for a month? If it seems like a challenge, then it’s also an opportunity: to rediscover the diversity of leisure; to redefine “entertainment”; and maybe to reassess how we, in the overdeveloped first world, spend our downtime. We’ll get through this. And if enough of us commit, we’ll let Big Content know they’re not the last word in entertainment, so quit it with the endless torrent of digital doomsday plans.

Here you go, then: in no particular order, thirty-one entertainments that don’t profit Big Content. Something to occupy a free hour (or two or three), every day in March. If you’ve got another good idea, leave a comment below. These ones weren’t hard to come up with, and they’re all pretty low-effort, low-impact (no home reno projects, no GTD). The point is basically to use your imagination – I know you’ve got one. Imagine the message we could send by boycotting Big Content for just a month…or maybe longer…

#3. The mild winter makes for good walking, even if you're not in Stanley Park.

1. Read this post and plan your month.
2. Bake cookies.
3. Go for a walk. Yes, outside.
4. Read a book you’ve been meaning to start – or to finish.
5. Make a home video and post it to Youtube. (Come on, you know this project could take a few nights, if you put in some effort.)
6. Make the business! (You know what I mean. This could also take a few nights, if you put in some effort.)
7. The public library is your friend: sign out a new book, or a not-so-new book, or an old movie, or a foreign movie.
8. Open Culture is your friend, too. Check out this site’s extensive curation of open-access and public-domain movies, music, and more.
9. Call your mother.

#10. Culture jamming for beginners.

10. Get out there and culture jam! If you’re a beginner, see the picture at left. Advanced culture jammers might consider upping the ante. For instance:

“At Lake Worth they got a traffic ticket for using the horn and Gnossos took up an hour collecting as many stubs as he could find on the windshields of other cars. He mailed them all to the local fuzz, in a large manila envelope with no return address.” ¹

11. Yoga. No, really.
12. Make a mix CD – okay, an iPod playlist – for a special occasion – or a special person. Presto, you’re fifteen again! Or an amateur DJ! Woo!
13. Play a board game or a card game.
14. “Would you like to own at once the smallest and most disturbing book in the world? Have the stamps from your love letters bound up and weep – in spite of everything, there is good reason to do so.”²
15. Go to a local cafe or bar, for some random peoplewatching. Or try this: “What a wonderful pursuit: go into a cafe and ask for sugar, again for sugar, three or four times for sugar, continue with great concentration constructing a mountain of sugar, center of the table, while indignation swells along the counters and beneath the white aprons, and then spit, softly, right in the middle of the mountain, and watch the descent of the small glacier of saliva, hear the roar of broken rocks which accompanies it, arising from the contracted throats of five local customers and the boss, an honest man when he feels like it.”³

#16. I'z not nappin I'z transcendentralizin

16. Meditate.
17. Go out dancing.
18. Walk or drive out to where you can see the stars, and make up some new constellations.
19. Get fit: sign out an exercise video from the library (it’s your friend, remember) or search up a Youtube exercise video, and try working out instead of vegging out.
20. If you have a social app account, browse through past posts to catch up on links or videos you meant to check out but didn’t have time for at the time. If you don’t have a social app account, try one out – see who’s out there.
21. Pyjama dance party!
22. Re-read a book you only read once, and not recently. You’ll be amazed.
23. KARAOKE. You can’t even say it without agreeing to it: OK!
24. Go to the theatre. Whenever you mention this, be sure to pronounce it “thea-TAH.”
25. Origami: it can be frustrating at first, but then it gets really contemplative. (FYI, it may get frustrating again if you actually try to make a thousand cranes.)

#25. Origami (not for beginners).

26. Somewhere nearby, someone is bound to be playing music for no cover charge. Go find them and dig on that scene.
27. Youtube party!
28. With a partner and/or friends, read a classic play or story, each of you taking on a certain character’s role and voice. (I know somebody whose family does this with Dickens’ Christmas Carol over the holidays. I can only assume copious amounts of heavily spiked eggnog are involved.)
29. Fancy supper party: candlelight, wine, vaguely porny background music; you know the drill.
30. Find a really old album or forgotten mixtape that you haven’t listened to in years. Play it start to finish, perhaps with a drink in hand.
31. Invite friends over and talk about how you’ve spent your month. You 1, Big Content 0.

Notes
1. Fariña, Richard. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966). New York: Penguin, 1996. 279-80
2. Breton, André and Paul Éluard. “The Original Judgement.” The Immaculate Conception (1930). Trans. Jon Graham. London: Atlas P, 1990. 118.
3. Cortázar, Julio. Cronopios and Famas (1962). Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: New Directions, 1999. 59

Thirteen ways of looking at Surrealism

Not a manifesto, more like a mosaic of notes for praxis…a praxicento?

1. Form your eyes by closing them.
Give to the dreams you have forgotten the value of what you do not know.

2. Surrealism is the living negation of the commodity society and its culture. When dream and waking life are no longer at war, poetry and imagination become visible, and everyday life is lived under the sign of mad and reciprocal love, the generous beauty of play, and the always new adventure of chance, beyond linear time and administered space.

3. Dear dreams,
You are the only thing that matters. You are my hope and I live for you and in you. You are rawness and wildness, the colours, the scents, passion, events appearing. You are the things I live for. Please take me over.
Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness …
Once we have gotten a glimpse of the vision world, we must be careful not to think the vision world is us. We must go farther and become crazier.

4. To articulate a dream in conscious mode, describing it not just to others but to yourself, is a second-order remaking of the dream, a confabulation that distorts the dream by forcing it into a linear mode alien to its nature. It is as if a time-wind blows out of our eyes and into the dream, displacing the fragile relations of dream components as a gust of autumn wind disturbs the fallen leaves.

5. You didn’t sleep last night.
No, I couldn’t. I tried and tried, but I felt … I don’t know, locked out of it.
Yes, that was me.
What do you mean?
I slept your sleep last night.
You needn’t look so smug about it.
Don’t be so protective. I think you’ll like what I’ve done with it.

6. The surrealists were launched on a much more adventurous investigation than Freud; theirs was not an observation or interpretation of the subconscious world but a colonization.

7. Sometimes on a stormy night while legions of winged squids (at a distance resembling crows) float above the clouds and scud stiffly towards the cities of the humans, their mission to warn men to change their ways – the gloomy-eyed pebble perceives amid flashes of lightning two beings pass by, one behind the other, and, wiping away a furtive tear of compassion that trickles from its frozen eye, cries: “Certainly he deserves it; it’s only justice.” Having spoken thus it reverts to its timid pose and trembling nervously, continues to watch the manhunt and the vast lips of the vagina of darkness whence flow incessantly, like a river, immense shadowy spermatozoa that take flight into the dismal æther, the vast spread of their bats wings obscuring the whole of nature and the lonely legions of squids – grown downcast viewing these ineffable and muffled fulgurations.

8. One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, transgressive murmurs still and always will cross the spheres into broad daylight. The surrealist horizon, in the eyes of the spawn of Maldoror, is there for the taking.

9. Punish the eyes looking at that which passes in the sky and cunningly accept that its name is cloud, its answer catalogued in the mind. Don’t believe that the telephone is going to give you the numbers you try to call, why should it? The only thing that will come is what you have already prepared and decided, the gloomy reflection of your expectations, that monkey, who scratches himself on the table and trembles with cold. Break that monkey’s head, take a run from the middle of the room to the wall and break through it. Oh, how they sing upstairs!

10. The idea of evil, in certain cases, exerts a strong attraction on me: above all, in the case of evil striking at the authors of evil – i.e., the architects of imperialist politics and their hirelings. In this case I nurture even sadistic dreams, but they remain dreams.

11. “Doctor, please let me know when you’re done fucking my wife!” For me, that utterance, which in a split second annihilated the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left me with something like a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence in any situation I happen to be in.

12. To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution – this is the project about which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises. … The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention the most terrible drug – ourselves – which we take in solitude.

13. … & crash
through painted arcadias,
fragments of bliss & roses
decorating your fists.

References
1. Breton, André and Paul Éluard. The Immaculate Conception (1930). Trans. Jon Graham. London: Atlas P, 1990.
2. Rosemont, Penelope. “Response to ‘Inquiry: Surrealist Subversion in Everyday Life’.” Surrealism in the USA. Spec. issue of Race Traitor 13-14 (2001): 211-12. 211.
3. Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove P, 1989. 36-37.
4. Dewdney, Christopher. The Secular Grail: Paradigms of Perception. Toronto: Somerville House, 1993. 78.
5. Glennon, Paul. How Did You Sleep? Erin: Porcupine’s Quill, 2000. 25.
6. Balakian, Anna. Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 76.
7. Lautréamont, Comte de [Isidore Ducasse]. Maldoror. Trans. Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994. 101-2.
8. Romano. “Response to ‘Inquiry: Surrealist Subversion in Everyday Life’.” Surrealism in the USA. Spec. issue of Race Traitor 13-14 (2001): 208.
9. Cortázar, Julio. “The Instruction Manual.” Cronopios and Famas (1962). Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: New Directions, 1999. 3-5.
10. Marcuse, Herbert. “Interview with the Surrealist Journal ‘L’Archibras’” (1966). Surrealism in the USA. Spec. issue of Race Traitor 13-14 (2001): 149-50. 150.
11. Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye (1928). San Francisco: City Lights, 1987. 95.
12. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB, 1979. 225-39. 236-37.
13. Thesen, Sharon. “Praxis.” Canadian Poetry Now. Ed. Ken Norris. Toronto: Anansi, 1984. 252.

All images: details from Bosch, Hieronymus. The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1500).

Operation Black March: Boycott Big Content

In which Anonymous acts on Public Enemy’s culture industry thesis

A couple of weeks after I blogged about boycotting Big Content to protest copyright-censorship bills like SOPA, Anonymous has launched “Operation Black March” – precisely such a boycott – via a Youtube video that is viralizing nicely. As the video explains:

March 2012 is the end of the 1st quarter in economic reports worldwide.
Do not buy a single record. Do not download a single song, legally or illegally. Do not go to see a single film in cinemas, or download a copy, Do not buy a DVD in the stores. Do not buy a videogame. Do not buy a single book or magazine.
Wait the 4 weeks to buy them in April: see the film later, etc. Holding out for just 4 weeks, maximum, will leave a gaping hole in media and entertainment companies’ profits for the 1st quarter, an economic hit which will in turn be observed by governments worldwide…

I’m not claiming any credit; I’m just digging the coincidence. If we want to give credit where credit is due for a Big Content boycott (never mind one dubbed “Black March”), we should take a fresh listen to Public Enemy’s scathing critique of the culture industry: “Burn Hollywood burn,” from their 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet.

UofT, Western deal with AccessCopyright threatens #CdnPSE: costs students; surveils teachers; harms academic freedom

@cfsfcee @CAUT UT & UWO deal with AccessCopyright inflates student fees, surveils teachers, threatens academic freedom. samtrosow.ca/content/view/1…—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) February 01, 2012

This tweet captures the core of the crisis now facing #CdnPSE in the aftermath of this treacherous turn in the ongoing drama between Canadian universities and the agency that collects blanket fees for photocopying (and hopes to monetize Internet linking, arguing that linking is “publication” – counter to the Supreme Court’s decision that linking is reference). Even if linking isn’t (yet) subjected to fees, these universities’ agreement to let AC monitor instructor email and require instructors to document all Internet linking (in email and in teaching generally) will mean a hugely inordinate amount of work for already overburdened sessionals and faculty.

@UWOFA @UWOGTAUnionPASJ UWO deal with AccessCopyright lets AC monitor instructor email, require reporting of linking. samtrosow.ca/content/view/1…—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) February 01, 2012

As Howard Knopf puts it, “tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars per year are now at stake if these agreements become the new normal in Canada.”

@OpirgToronto @UTSU98 @TheVarsity U of T's deal with AccessCopyright raises $3.50 annual student fee to $27.50. See samtrosow.ca/content/view/1…—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) February 01, 2012

I wonder if it’s a subject of discussion for today’s CFS National Day of Action? An extra $27 per year per student isn’t much relative to tuition, but it’s an 800% inflation over the existing fee – a gratuitous insult added to student debt injury.
Canada’s other universities must do everything they can not to let these “voluntary licenses” become any kind of “new normal.”

For more detailed expert analysis of the U of T and Western agreements, see:
Knopf, Howard. “U of T and Western capitulate to Access Copyright.” Excess Copyright 31 Jan. 2012.
Trosow, Sam. “Toronto and Western sign licensing agreement with Access Copyright.” SamTrosow.com 31 Jan. 2012

Writing to the government against smuggling SOPA into C-11

... Again! Only in Canada this time, eh! (Image CC-licensed from DonkeyHotey)

I’ve sent the following letter to Heritage Minister Moore and Industry Minister Paradis, with CC to my MP and to NDP digital critic Charlie Angus.

In the process, I’ve learned: that personal letters are more effective than click-and-send form letters; that shorter letters are more effective than longer (e.g. one page maximum); and that typed letters are more effective than handwritten (I forget where I’d picked up the contrary notion, but I appreciate type’s easier on MP staff’s eyes).

Anyway, if you don’t think SOPA has any more of a place in Canada than it did in the USA, tell your MP so, and do it soon.

I am writing to register my objection to the digital lock provisions in Bill C-11, and to strenuously oppose any new “enabler” provisions, based on the disastrously designed SOPA legislation that failed (justly) in the USA, but which entertainment lobbies are now pushing here in Canada.
Aside from the digital lock provisions, Bill C-11 stands to benefit Canadians; however, SOPA-style enabler provisions threaten the very structure of the Internet itself, and would grievously jeopardize Canadian business, national security, and citizens’ rights and freedoms. You have previously committed to passing C-11 unchanged; I urge you to maintain that commitment and refuse any changes to C-11 that would either introduce enabler provisions or further tighten digital lock provisions. Such changes would turn the bill’s existing compromise of the public interest into a downright public menace.
Thank you for considering these concerns.

For more reading on the threat of SOPA in Canada:

“Dear They.” “A Copyright Quickie: Canada is about to pass SOPA’s evil little brother. Politely.” 26 Jan. 2012.

—. “C-11 Form Letter.” 2012.

Geist, Michael. “The Behind-the-Scenes campaign to Bring SOPA to Canada.” 23 Jan. 2012.  

 

When did I license Library & Archives Canada to sell my dissertation?

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.

Work Cited
Graduate Student Calendar. U of Guelph, 2012.

Protest works. SOPA won’t. Next: boycott Big Content?

CC-licensed from Aaron Escobar

By most accounts, yesterday’s #OpBlackout Internet strike made the right kind of noise. Copyright law scholar Sam Trosow calls them “an event of potentially historical magnitude.” Activist organizations like Avaaz, DemandProgress, the EFF, and FightForTheFuture developed an arsenal of different protest tools. Today, reports show much more Congressional opposition to SOPA.
The Pirate Bay posted a feisty, combative press release:

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.

And yet the same small pool of usual suspects are behind most of these widely cast driftnets of regulation. Lawrence Lessig calls them Big Content: Hollywood and the Big Four Music labels. Massively concentrated, multinational, conglomerate corporations, these are vampire overlords of cultural production thatclearly show they don’t understand and actively hate the Internet, and yet whose productions command massive global popularity – and profits. I’ve previously blogged about an informative map that shows what the world looks like according to royalty exports. Let’s look at that map again.

CC-licensed from Worldmapper.org

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.

MT #OpMegaupload Anonymous attacks several major websites [MPAA, RIAA, FBI] lougleme.blogspot.com/2012/01/opmega… #whoa—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) January 20, 2012

████ SOPA

Open letter opposing TPP talks over copyright

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 participate is as easy as sending an e-mail to consultations@international.gc.ca. Here’s the one I wrote.

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.

Sincerely,

If Canada were a hentai movie, copyright "reforms" would be the tentacles. wp.me/poR4A-t2 #cdnpoli #ceta #tpp #BillC11 #acta—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) January 09, 2012

Banksy and the persistence of postmodernism

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.

Works Cited
Banksy. Banksy.co.uk.
Bonner, Sean. “Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash sued for copyright infringement over Run DMC image.” BoingBoing 26 Jan. 2011.
Dawkins, Richard. “Postmodernism disrobed.” Richard Dawkins Foundation, 31 Mar. 2007.
Exit Through the Gift Shop. Dir. Banksy. Paranoid Pictures, 2010.
Kunzru, Hari. “Postmodernism: From the cutting edge to the museum.” The Guardian 15 Sept. 2011.