The problem with everyone publishing to the web is that there is now never enough time to get through all the really great writing out there. Case in point: purse lip square jaw the blog of Anne Galloway, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a collector and interpreter of some of the most interesting stories online.
Her latest post to really get me is a pointer to an essay by Felix Stalder, entitled The Stuff of Culture, and it is the best single articulation I've read of the changes currently roiling our culture; why everything seems so influxish and unsettled and insecure. If you're interested in how digital technology changes our world and the sense we can and do make of it, then just go, read it, now.
And the essay is not just for nerdlingers either. It's for anyone who wants to understand how our present fits into a larger historical context of cultural remembrance. We're all part of culture - passive or active, unconscious or conscious.
Historically, there have been two different approaches to culture. One approach to culture would be to characterize it as object-oriented, the other as exchange-oriented. The first treats culture as made out of discrete objects, existing more or less independently from one another, like chairs around a table, or books on a shelf. While such things can be arranged in relation to one another, their meaning and function remains the same regardless. One person can sit on one chair, no matter how many chairs there are in a room, or how they are arranged. The content of a book does not change when re-shelving it. The other view takes culture to be made out of continuous processes, in which one act feeds into the other, in an unbroken chain....
The two perspectives create different sets of concepts for understanding culture: the timeless work of art versus the process of creation, the individual inventor versus the scientific community, the statement versus the conversation, the recording versus the live performance, and so on. These two perspectives, and the practices through which they are expressed, are currently coming into deep conflict with one another, hence the new urgency to the question: what is culture made out of?
Now, I don't agree with everything Stalder says, especially the reductive this (object-oriented) versus that (exchange-oriented) diagram of culture. But I think it provides a very effective frame for a discussion of what kind of culture we want and what kind of interactions we want to have. The essay is long to read online, and some of the concepts aren't as readily apparent as sunshine on first reading, but to work at them is worth it, in this one writer's opinion.
So go, read, then come back, discuss, please.
Posted by James Sherrett at February 2, 2006 05:00 PM"The Stuff of Culture" is an interesting read for sure, but unsatisfying somehow. I looked at it again this morning, and I think the "unsatisfying" part of the reading is that I find myself inclined to argue with the guy throughout most of it. It's not that he's even all that wrong, it just feels incomplete.
A lot of ink has been spilled over open source and its wider implications for intellectual property regimes. But what is often overlooked is that intellectual property law, copyright in particular, is hardly a fixed thing. You can see it as a creation of the corporate sector, etc. But you can also understand copyright as a social accommodation between the private interests of creators and the public interest in unfettered access to and flow of creative or intellectual "products".
Society has an interest in encouraging cultural production and distribution, and this provides part of the rationale for copyright protections. But we all have an interest in unrestricted access and usage of creative or intellectual work as well. These conflicting interests create a dynamic tension that pushes and pulls on intellectual property law and practice, and that shows up in case law, day-to-day practice, and the ever-so-occasional revisions to copyright legislation.
While legislation is slow to evolve, society has shown a great willingness to move past or around IP structures that are too restrictive--this is in itself a compelling illustration of the dynamic tension at the heart of intellectual property protection.
File sharing is an example of this, but a more important one is perhaps the copyleft movement and the devices it has created to provide new accommodations between the contesting public and private spheres.
The other area in which "Stuff" goes off the bean is in its conception of the nature of culture. The article is not really about culture as such, but about a particular type of cultural production. Focused as it is on cultural production, the essay overlooks, or at least appears to underestimate, the power of culture and the degree to which it exists independent of the political or economic structures that try to understand, organize, or exploit it.
In 1994, Geist magazine published an essay on this topic by BC author and publisher Howard White. It remains one of the most persuasive and insightful things I have ever read on the subject. I've never seen it online but here are a couple of excerpts:
"Like many people who work in what is variously called the arts or culture or the cultural industries--I just do it. I did it for years without ever stopping to think what consequences my efforts might have for the nation, the region or the GDP. I did it because I grew up wanting to be a writer, and became a publisher when I found there as no other way to get writing about [the West Coast] into print. It was only after I had been doing what I wanted for my own entirely selfish reasons for a decade or so that I was called upon to justify it in terms other than my own irrational desire to put things down on paper. Probably this objectifying process began with some grant form or other, and I am sure the process of self-examination I went through is similar to what others involved in teh arts have gone through, at some point or other, whether struggling with their own conscience over the purchase of a Joe Fafard print, or struggling with city council over funding for the Fringe Festival. We all agree culture is important on some level, but is it important enough to spend the grocery money on?
...Culture is not the symphony, any more than transportation is a Lear jet. Culture is what is left when countries are bombed into physical and economic oblivion as Japan and Germany were in World War Two, and culture is the spirit that allows such countries to pop back up and reclaim an even bigger place in the world a few brief decades later. Culture seen from this perspective is the ultimate force in a society, the thing that must be there before economic and political strength can be built. Culture is that whole complex of shared history, thoughts and feelings which gives people a sense of distinctive community and provides the impetus for collective activity. Which is a long-winded way of saying it's how we imagine ourselves."
Posted by: Craig at February 3, 2006 09:08 AM