Author Archives: Caro

Outside Charlie Hebdo

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I’m really appreciative to all the Francophones on various sites who have taken the time to put Charlie Hebdo’s work in a rich cultural context, opening up the magazine’s visual aesthetic and clarifying their editorial and political vantage point with more nuance than most of our mainstream Anglophone sources. These people’s willingness to do the tedious work of translating image after image, kindly and with probably strained patience, has elevated a very stark conversation into a vastly more nuanced one.

Here we have a convergence of so many issues that compel our culture to debate: free speech, extremism, faith and fascism, violence, humor, bullying, mockery, racism, sexism, and art. And yet so many opinions seem to fall broadly into one of just two camps – the ones that just outright call CH racist, and the ones that cloak it in the venerable mantle of satire.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a long discussion with me on the subject of satire knows that I really just, generally, don’t find any aesthetic pleasure and only very limited intellectual pleasure in satirical work. Even when it’s very well done, it is a mode of discourse that relies on a spectrum ranging from discomfort to derision, and my response is almost always to turn away on purely emotional grounds. I’ve been very open about this opinion; it’s not new this week. It’s made me feel very awkward about adopting the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag, because I wouldn’t have said something like that before last Wednesday’s events. The hashtag makes the magazine a metonym for all the people killed – even the Muslim policeman. I respond strongly and decisively to those who were killed and wounded as people, with voices and rights and subjectivity. But I respond to the magazine and the cartoons with ambivalence – because even though I tend to agree with the politics, the aesthetics are beyond me.

Probably for that reason, my reactions are not substantially mitigated by actually understanding the satire, although it helps. The logic of Charlie Hebdo’s satire is certainly much clearer to me now that so many people have spoken patiently and eloquently to clarify it. In particular, the cover depicting the sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens appears much smarter and more complex when interpreted as “why do you care so much about these threatened and disadvantaged girls, but not about the threatened and disadvantaged girls right on your doorstep?” I am convinced that much of the work is indeed more complicated — and certainly contextually rich – than appears at first glance to readers who do not inhabit the immediate cultural context. These are political cartoons, and politics is always contextual.
 

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But I don’t think there’s any amount of context that will make me find that cartoon less viscerally off-putting. It’s just so ugly to represent those girls that way. The explanation makes sense, but it doesn’t change my aesthetic reaction. It doesn’t feel ok to use their horrifying experiences, even for some noble cause. The complicated reading makes my reactions more complicated too, but it doesn’t make the negative reaction go away.

And even if the explanation did actually make me like that one, not all the cartoons yield to complicated readings. Some of the work really does seem to be simply calling a stupid fig a stupid fig, nothing more than making a wrongheaded idea look sickly and unappealing by shining a puce limelight on it. Basically an intensified form of caricature, It’s a tactic embraced by a lot of contemporary satire. It’s popular – a lot of people really do like it. But I’m not one of them. I’m not sure that type of satire, whether it occurs relatively gently on the Daily Show or with poison incisors at Charlie Hebdo, is anything more than vulgar mockery – even if it’s not racist, sexist, imperialist or otherwise. I’m not convinced it’s a meaningful way to deal with stupidity and wrongheadedness – at least, it doesn’t really seem to be trying to change the wrongheadedness so much as it seems like gallows humor for people who see no possibility of change. It doesn’t recast the stupid thing in a way that raises questions and doubts among the community that believes it or even tolerates it; it doesn’t get inside the heads of the people who think the wrongheaded thing and challenge their motivation or logic; it just puts people on the defensive. The target doesn’t feel outsmarted; they just feel disrespected.

In what way does that serve a positive end or increase our overall intelligence? Doesn’t satire need to be effective at challenging and destabilizing stupid beliefs if it is intended to have political power? If it only reaches people who don’t hold the belief, isn’t it just mockery? Mockery just ends up creating a group identity among the people who collectively believe the stupid thing is stupid. I think that may be why people react so negatively to this kind of imagery – even if it doesn’t actually qualify as racist (and I will refrain from an opinion on that in this particular context that is not my context), it does alienate and separate, working against solidarity rather than increasing it.

So faced with the difficulty of feeling intense compassion and so much horror at Wednesday’s events, yet not quite feeling the identification with Charlie Hebdo that the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag implies, I am left with an intellectual’s inward-looking response, trying to explain to myself why it just doesn’t feel quite honest to use the tag. I know I am not Charlie Hebdo’s target audience. I struggle to appreciate satire even when it’s really obviously well done. I am stopped by the tone and the feel of the work. I cannot spend enough time with it to understand. But that means the nuances of my emotional and aesthetic responses to this kind of work are largely inaccessible to me – I can intellectually see why much of this work is satire, but I can’t experience it as anything other than raw and ugly and mean and sad.

Again, I am indebted to conversations that catch me up in ways I can’t do myself. In response to the original version of this comment on Facebook, a friend made a comment that struck me as important – “who are outsiders to presume to ‘cast doubt’ on someone else’s beliefs?” Outsiders don’t speak from a place of profound understanding. An outsider’s satire doesn’t know; it just knows better. And when I tried to think of satire that I like better than most, I noticed that Stephen Colbert and Jonathan Swift both rely very heavily on the first person, which is a way of “inhabiting” the person and ideas being satirized. I think the first person is a little sop to people like me, who are put off by how much emotional and critical separation is necessary to make satire work.

This is, perhaps, what makes Charlie Hebdo’s Boko Haram “welfare queen” cartoon so particularly hard for me. What am I supposed to do with the empathy and sadness I feel for the kidnapped girls? Just transfer it over to the welfare moms – as if empathy is generic and disconnected from each group of women’s real stories? The pregnant bodies in the cartoon are named as the “sex slaves of Boko Haram,” the cartoon asserts that they are speaking. But it’s not their voice and their story and their point of view – it’s the voice of the “welfare queens.” The reality of those girls being forced into sexual slavery is alluded to through the pregnancy, but it’s sidestepped and displaced into the significantly different resonance that pregnancy carries in discussions of welfare and indigence. Any identification with anybody here is uncomfortable and unsatisfying – to “get the joke”, to see how smart it is, everybody must be kept at emotional arms’ length.

Clearly I’m just not supposed to react to it this way. Is it even possible to simultaneously satirize and empathize? I don’t know that it is – it is certainly easier to avoid satire altogether than to find the hypothetical example that succeeds at this. And first-person does get very complicated very fast when the subject being satirized is “other” from the satirist in some palpable way – like race or ethnicity or religion. You bang quickly up against issues of authenticity.

And yet – I’m not typically much for authenticity so I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either. Surely it cannot be impossible to satirize someone different from you. That’s why I initially went with the “getting inside someone’s head” – surely the greatest satirists understand their subjects in some profoundly incisive way, not just knowing that they are wrong, but comprehending why they believe they are right.

Perhaps in all of this, I am just missing human nature. It is not human nature to inhabit the minds of people whose beliefs are anathema to us. And surely satire cannot be truly politically effective if it discounts human nature. So all this has brought me back to again concluding that I just don’t like satire, or appreciate it, or enjoy it.

I suppose it has to be said, in all of this, that the use of violence against speech is never anything other than brutal totalitarianism, regardless of the speech and regardless of the violence. But I think about mockery and judgment and how destructive and alienating they are. And I want to be able to understand what distinguishes, on one end of a spectrum, the great artistic and political tradition of satire from, on the other end, plain old bullies mocking people and ideas they don’t like because it makes them feel superior. Understanding is not as easy, I think, as I would like. Satire traffics in mockery and judgment, and the world already has too much of those things and too little connection and justice. I cannot be Charlie, because I am an outsider, and I do not understand. But perhaps I can be Charlie, since by their own logic, being an outsider is good enough.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Not the Spokesman You Are Looking For

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A lot of artists I know sang the praises of David Lowery’s recent post in response to NPR blogger Emily White because they agree with what they see as Lowery’s morality – the importance of the idea that creative work is valuable and worthwhile and worth paying for, not just a side product to lure advertisers or some sort of cultural spirit that doesn’t belong to anybody and longs to be free. Lowery’s post was validating, and people felt that he was sticking up for them and speaking out for their interests. A lot of people in the music industry came out against Lowery’s analysis, but there was still a strikingly strong outpouring of support for the simplicity of his argument and his willingness to stick up for a morality in the artists’ interest.

I agree — that morality should be incontrovertible. Cultural creative work is work; it is valuable; it deserves generous compensation and respect. It should not be stolen by consumers and neither artists nor their work should be exploited by other entities in the production and distribution chain. Encouraging people not to steal is a good thing now just like it’s always been a good thing, and firing back sharply at anybody who denigrates creative work is even better.

But the challenges facing artists in the digital economy require extremely informed, eloquent advocates who can go beyond emotional validation and imagine creative new solutions to the complicated new context in which artists work. Lowery is not that advocate. He’s not even a particularly good spokesperson for this constellation of moral ideas, because being a spokesperson for a morality is about convincing people to change. Lowery’s post, and the comments he’s made on this topic previously, are neither persuasive nor effective because the them/us quality to his rhetoric results in a patronizing superiority that’s nothing more than moral shaming. That’s more the language of clashing subcultures, cliquish sectarianism and bad parenting than it is the language of advocacy, moral persuasion, and cultural change. It’s as if Lowery was put-off by the tone of the tech subculture and those damn kids on his lawn, and allowed that feeling to blind him to how much the arts and technology “subcultures” have in common, in general and on these issues in particular.

Strange and Insidious Bedfellows

In the process of rejecting those shared interests with the tech world, Lowery — probably inadvertently — builds common cause with people and individuals (and even nation-states) who advocate different insidious forms of immorality, ones much more harmful to artists in the long term: violations of civil liberties, violations of privacy, and the subjugation of the interests and voices of individuals to the interests and voices of corporations and state power.

This week’s news gives a good example of what happens when artists take the wrong side: last week, the European Parliament rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA, by a decisive vote of 478/39. The United States signed ACTA in October of 2011, and the EU trade representatives supported the agreement as well – but the EU required it be ratified by Parliament, and this week that ratification failed.

Why did it fail? Despite widespread agreement that international action was necessary to combat international criminal piracy and intellectual property fraud and counterfeiting, the bill contained numerous provisions that targeted individuals and technologies, including ISPs, for criminal prosecution and that, perhaps even more importantly, placed restrictions on the use of legitimately obtained material that are much stricter than those in current international law. The EU’s opposition to the agreement was predicated on these specific concerns:

“On individual criminalisation, the definition of ‘commercial-scale’, the role of internet service providers, and the possible interruption of the transit of generic medicines, your rapporteur maintains doubts that the ACTA text is as precise as is necessary,” (Scottish MEP) David Martin, the rapporteur, wrote in his statement to Parliament (PDF) explaining his recommendation to reject the bill. “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties.”

Almost all of the identified threats to civil liberties are provisions that grow out of the American model of digital copyright enforcement, promoted by organizations like the MPAA and RIAA and legislated in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA loosely follows what copyright activists call “copyright maximalism” – when digital distribution upended the theretofore “natural” limitations to copyright infringement by eliminating material scarcity, the response of large corporations and governments was to remove pretty much all the existing limitations on copyright enforcement, including any meaningful application of fair use. Maximal enforcement = “copyright maximalism.” Back in the ’90s, when the DMCA was being formulated, Wired magazine didn’t even try to hide their contempt for the principles:

1. Give copyright owners control over every use of copyrighted works in digital form by interpreting existing law as being violated whenever users make even temporary reproductions of works in the random access memory of their computers;

2. Give copyright owners control over every transmission of works in digital form by amending the copyright statute so that digital transmissions will be regarded as distributions of copies to the public;

3. Eliminate fair-use rights whenever a use might be licensed. (The copyright maximalists assert that there is no piece of a copyrighted work small enough that they are uninterested in charging for its use, and no use private enough that they aren’t willing to track it down and charge for it. In this vision of the future, a user who has copied even a paragraph from an electronic journal to share with a friend will be as much a criminal as the person who tampers with an electrical meter at a friend’s house in order to siphon off free electricity. If a few users have to go to jail for copyright offenses, well, that’s a small price to pay to ensure that the population learns new patterns of behavior in the digital age.);

4. Deprive the public of the “first sale” rights it has long enjoyed in the print world (the rights that permit you to redistribute your own copy of a work after the publisher’s first sale of it to you), because the white paper treats electronic forwarding as a violation of both the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright law;

5. Attach copyright management information to digital copies of a work, ensuring that publishers can track every use made of digital copies and trace where each copy resides on the network and what is being done with it at any time;

6. Protect every digital copy of every work technologically (by encryption, for example) and make illegal any attempt to circumvent that protection;

7. Force online service providers to become copyright police, charged with implementing pay-per-use rules. (These providers will be responsible not only for cutting off service to scofflaws but also for reporting copyright crime to the criminal justice authorities);

8. Teach the new copyright rules of the road to children throughout their years at school.

Now, ACTA isn’t merely about enforcment against individual users. It also addressed serious large-scale counterfeiting, something which global trade agencies need tools to deal with. But because the language in the legislation was so slanted toward copyright maximalism – toward protecting the economic interests of rights holders without thought to the expressive interests of individuals, the legislation was seen as threatening civil liberties and conflicting with international and US law, and it failed to pass Parliament.

In a very real sense, this means the agreement is dead. Six of the 8 original signatories would need to ratify it for it to become international law, and this is extremely unlikely to happen given the loss of European support.

In other words, a desperately needed international trade agreement, that diplomats from all over the world spent over a half-decade drafting and promoting, failed because organizations who purport to represent artists insisted that it include inflexible provisions that threatened civil liberties.

What does it mean when artists, through the actions of their representatives on the global stage, are no longer seen as standing on the side of humanity and freedom of expression against exploitation and oppression, but are seen as against civil liberties themselves? What does it mean when artists like David Lowery make arguments that justify and encourage artists to turn a blind eye to these implications and side, instead, with those representatives, the corporations they represent, and their narrow interests?

Why I think David Lowery’s post did more harm than good

In his response to White, Lowery appeals to some very intuitive pro-musician sensibilities, but in the process of outlining those sensibilities and the priorities and moral actions he thinks they should lead to, he makes those musicians into an interest group like every other interest group. This is especially evident in his presentation to the SF Music Tech convention, held earlier this year. It’s a deeply politicized speech that makes explicit that “cliquish sectarianism” I mentioned earlier — his treatment of the tech community in the final section is strident, vitriolic, and divisive in the worst way. Lowery defines his interest group very narrowly and fans the flames of hostility toward anyone who isn’t 100% part of his group.

Yet there are so many stakeholders in this debate who don’t quite fit Lowery’s interest group: people who make obscure kinds of music that record companies never cared about, artists who have had measurable success with Internet business models, people who make forms of art which have never been well served by the “old boss”, people who make technology, entrepreneurs, and a really large variety and range of consumers and expressive individuals. All of those groups have valuable perspectives, ideas, and influence. Consolidation of that grassroots influence is a viable way of fighting entrenched power structures – as my friend Harold Feld says, “policy is not about getting people to do the right thing for the right reasons, it is about getting them to do the right thing for their own reasons.”

The consolidation of influence from the tech and arts communities motivates technological advances with artistic purposes and artistic uses of technology. It spared us some pretty awful legislation when a coalition of artists and technology people defeated the SOPA and PIPA bills. It was important for convincing stores like Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s that consumers can actually back up and transfer from machine to machine. Finding ways to get artists, the technology sector, and consumers to see each other as compatriots with shared goals is important for making sure everybody’s interests are well served as tech policy around issues important to the arts evolves.

Making musicians into a narrow interest group, oppressed by the “new boss” and at odds with the rest of society (whose world is “made of computers”) is the opposite of the collaborative spirit our current situation calls for. David Lowery is a polemicist, someone who plays to emotions and likes to get people riled up. That’s maybe natural terrain for a songwriter (although not all emotion is polemical), but it’s an abysmal approach for the actual real politics facing artists in the digital economy. His polemic distorts other people’s positions, whether due to passion or ideology, in ways that obscure the full factual landscape, that create rifts between groups who need to be working together and that ossify people’s commitments and vantage points rather than getting everybody informed about the big picture and stimulating imagination across economic sectors. Right now, there’s little more counterproductive than such “partisanship.”

Why I think David Lowery maybe can’t read

Lowery’s response to Emily White emphatically claims a moral high-ground in response to White’s saying she and her generation are unlikely to “ever pay for albums.” Lowery makes an elaborate, and completely accurate, case that stealing music is a bad thing to do, and that all the reasons people usually give to rationalize file sharing are besides the point.

The problem is that almost nothing Lowery says in his incredibly patronizing letter to White has much to do with what White actually said.

Lowery’s letter is a riff. He picks up on that one phrase about not paying for albums — which doesn’t mean won’t pay for music — and improvises for a few dozen measures, making a largely unrelated piece that only vaguely alludes to the original. In jazz, that kid of riffing is how musicians build culture. But in argument, we call it building a strawman. His points are valid on their face, but would have been stronger and more effective – and more ethical – had he cast them in response to examples of people actually saying the things he’s complaining about.

The core issue of White’s post – which was a response to her boss’s post about uploading his entire (legally purchased) record collection into the cloud – was not rationalizing why peer-to-peer file sharing is good or even why it’s ok to get music for free from your friends. White’s point, which almost everybody ignores, is instead that we are in a post-file-sharing world. (Bob Lefsetz describes it by saying that arguing against file sharing is like arguing against a dot matrix printer.)

It’s important that White didn’t file-share to build her collection, and that she didn’t use any of the excuses that Lowery is at pains to debunk in order to defend herself or the ways she did build her collection. She in fact says straight up that both file sharing of copyright material and collecting songs without paying for them are wrong and hurt artists. So in making a strawman out of her, Lowery ends up chastising someone who agrees with him. No good can come of that. People who make strawmen out of other people who already agree with their moral point are not good spokespeople for that moral point.

Why I think David Lowery doesn’t get it

I know a lot of people feel really wronged by the way the digital economy, its stakeholders and its watchdogs, have failed to deal expeditiously and effectively with the very real problems created by changes in manufacturing and distribution structures after widespread digitization, and they want some moral justice as well as real solutions. I understand the desire of artists to emphasize these moral concerns. But Lowery could have written a post focused on morality without also building a strawman, if he were a careful reader interested in a conversation. White’s conclusion isn’t without a moral element — it’s just that the moral element has nothing to do with stealing.

White’s conclusion — her really smart and interesting and provocative conclusion — is basically this: in a post-file-sharing world, large-scale consumer demand for owning media in any form, including CDs, vinyl, paper books, DVDs, even digital files, will be significantly reduced, possibly to the point that demand for owning music or copies of any art no longer exists at all. The collector’s impulse will be transformed (although probably not eradicated) by on-demand delivery and the end of scarcity.

Think about what this means for everybody except the historically minded archivist.

No bins full of CDs or racks of DVDs above the TV.
No overstuffed bookshelves and stacks of books in the corner.
No long boxes.
Not even the massive hard drives full of downloaded songs.

A near-complete dematerialization of reproduced culture.

As the cloud and various on-demand and streaming technologies evolve and mature, White predicts that most people will prefer using them to buying. Her point is basic demand-side economics. Not that people will file-share. Not that some significant percentage of people under, I dunno, 30 years old see nothing wrong with stealing content. But the idea that in the future most people, period, will prefer to buy access to music than the music itself. They will, as with all cloud technologies, begin to consume and interact with art as a service rather than as a product.

It’s provocative, and radical, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for artists: there are predictions that, once a critical mass of media becomes instantly available on-demand, artists will actually make more over a single listener’s lifetime from that listener streaming their albums over and over than they could possibly ever make from that fan buying the album. Lowery could have grappled with this new way of thinking. He could have questioned whether there are inherent and meaningful moral or ethical problems for artists in legitimate cloud-based business models, and he could have asked what potential new illegitimate uses cloud-based models might give rise to. He could have called attention to the ethical and moral dimensions of artists’ standing in the cloud. Writing about those would still have been a riff, but it would have been a vastly a more honest and productive riff than the one he came up with.

However, I don’t think morality is what’s really at stake here. Those issues need to be framed up in detail – that’s one of the potential good outcomes of a large-scale public conversation – but they’re definitely not simplistically moral like consumer theft, or even the more complex terrain of how to ensure our society values creative work both culturally and economically. More important than morality here is politics: who has control of those “universal databases” White calls for? How fair is the competitive landscape? What are the licensing obstacles? Are there tensions between the existing structures of copyright and adequate compensation based on playcounts? Do the models of ownership and rights holding that have evolved for media, and in particular for software, really work ethically and effectively for creative workers? There are lots of questions about digital distribution – what it even means to “own” a copy of an artwork; whether the use of arts should be and can be subject to the kinds of licensure restrictions placed on software use; when and how fair use applies to creative reuse; the extent to which all the various middlemen, technological and creative, are beneficial to the process or are in the way; whether there are meaningful differences between a personal collection in the cloud and the catalogs of streaming services, what those differences are, and whether they make sense and provide value to the consumer given the relative costs of those models.

Too much emphasis on morality in this particular context creates the illusion that people are more immoral and entitled than they actually are. There are plenty of immoral, entitled people, but there are also a lot of people who prefer paying to file-sharing or file-swapping. Lowery’s post suggests a sort of “demand management through ideology”, direct from the artist to the consumer, where moral shaming performs the economic function of interest rate manipulation or a sin tax, with the idea that if artists say enough times that the old model is better for them people will do the right thing and go back to buying CDs and DVDs and never downloading and minimizing their streaming and supporting the old model of advances recouped through sales. But the take-home is that, even if we set aside the old problems with the old models, even if we discount the damage such a trust deficit would do to the market period, that kind of demand management probably just won’t work.

This is because people who use Spotify and other cloud-based streaming services don’t see a moral difference between the subscription fees they pay and buying a CD, or between the advertising on Spotify and that on network TV. They do, however, see the moral problems with the discrepancy between what they pay for a CD and what the artist gets, and with myriad models which primarily enrich a very inefficient infrastructure of middle-men. And they see practical problems with the choice between paying for a CD without instant delivery versus paying for a digital music file that perhaps has a finite lifespan or at least where they’re responsible for backup, especially when cloud-based subscription services offer them instantaneous access to the same music, and much more music, in a model where the restrictions and inconveniences seem better aligned with the cost model.

When physical albums, CDs or vinyl or whatever, were sold as the standard means of buying music, the cost, and value, of the item was based not only on the unique properties of the intellectual, creative content, but also on the physical materials, and most importantly on the control and access that ownership of the physical media gave the purchaser. Owning your own physical copy was the only way to ensure access to what you wanted to listen to, when you wanted to listen to it. A listener without a copy had to wait until the one or two songs that were going to be played on the radio came on, or they had to listen at a friends’ house. If you wanted full access to the content, and full control over when you heard it, you had to buy your own physical copy of the album.

But after digitization, the benefits of owning the physical media largely evaporated, and the exchange telescoped down to focus just on the value of the creative content itself – something which had always been a blurry and opaque percentage of the cost of the material good. In making the physicality of the product obsolete, digitization also made the packaged information vastly more material and tangible.

It’s often pointed out and absolutely true that there’s no material scarcity associated with digital copying – a digital resource is not a limited resource. But material scarcity isn’t as relevant as many people suggest — it’s vastly more relevant that digitization and computing advances made control and access plentiful. This is true for all culture, not just music: I no longer have to watch the Billy Graham Crusade or the Bob Hope Special right along with the rest of America because there are only three channels; I can go to Netflix on Demand and watch a documentary about Africa or a James Coburn movie and if I am the only person in the world interested in that movie at that exact instant, it’s still available to me. There’s no meaningful difference between accessing that material on demand and owning my own copies.

So even though it’s possible to shame people into a better morality, it is not possible to shame people into treating – and paying for – a plentiful commodity as though it is scarce.

This ties into Lowery’s interesting and valid point that we’re more willing to pay for electronic equipment than we are for content. Electronic equipment, though, is still physical, and subject to scarcity. The cost of commodities is a measure not just of their cost of production but also of their exchange value. In situations where the exchange value is insufficient to cover the cost of production, a commodity that it is possible to produce, might not ever actually be produced. You can increase a commodity’s exchange value by increasing people’s willingness to pay for it in some way, but there’s going to be a limit to how much you can talk people into valuing something when they don’t see a direct benefit to them. You can convince people that it’s immoral to not pay anything for music, because you can show them how that affects production. But you can’t convince people that existing, already recorded music is scarce, expensive to produce, and difficult to distribute – because it isn’t.

Why I think David Lowery is dangerous

Lowery’s unwillingness to distinguish between brute file-sharing of copyright material, which is immoral, and paid services like Spotify, which aren’t, obscured the real issues in White’s post and derailed what started out as a really valuable and much-needed public discussion about the impact of streaming and the cloud on the stop-gap download-driven revenue models that have characterized the digital culture economy up to this point. Ignoring that and driving discussion toward the issue of not paying for music, which nobody was arguing against, allowed Lowery to evade the more difficult issues that require greater imagination. He turned a provocative and forward-looking prompt from NPR into an opportunity to push his backward-looking mantra that the digital economy is bad for artists. And the creative sector, emotionally ginned up, kind of let him get away with it.

That’s short sighted. The digital economy isn’t going away just because David Lowery isn’t pleased with it, as both TechDirt’s Mike Masnick and Merlin CEO Charles Caldas point out in their responses to Lowery (linked below). Realistically, artists just have to deal with the digital economy. Fortunately, it’s still evolving enough that there’s time to make sure that the new business model’s not a disaster. But critical energies can’t get distracted — they have to move from primarily talking about fringe models often used for illegal purposes, like the Pirate Bay and Bit Torrent, to serious discussion of legal services like Netflix streaming and Spotify, because those are the models that increasingly will dominate the market. Most people don’t want to steal music. They just want value for their money and convenience.

This conversation is particularly important for books, more so than for music and DVDs, I think, because books do not yet have any kind of viable, widespread subscription or even library-like models. Almost every single book in print was printed from a digital file, yet most books aren’t even available for purchase as ebooks, let alone available to digitally “rent”, borrow, or browse. Google Books has set a dangerous precedent that books online will be free – a precedent that will only be overcome by a viable cloud-based, on-demand model for “print” media. But the publishing industry appears to still be struggling even just with making books available digitally for purchase. This is way behind the curve, and it needs to be pushed into more innovative directions.

Distracting the Internet from a smart discussion about streaming and the cloud by making the conversation about stealing — as Lowery’s response to Emily White does — does absolutely nothing toward resolving those problem; it only creates a false sense of conflict between the tech community and the arts community that is likely to result in reactionary policy that maintains the worst elements of the status quo.

Links

Original post by NPR’s All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen
Blog response by NPR Intern Emily White
Response to Emily White by David Lowery
Response to David Lowery by Gizmodo and the CEO of global rights agency Merlin, which represents 10,000 independent artists
TechDirt’s summary of articles by musicians who disagree with Lowery’s letter to White
Talk by David Lowery at the San Francisco MusicTech Conference in early 2012
Response to David Lowery’s talk at SFMusic by TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick

Freedom is a Strong Seed, Planted in a Great Need

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1963 was an eventful year for the Civil Rights Movement: MLK wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail in April, in the city that erupted in riots a few weeks later following the integration of the University of Alabama. Medgar Evers’ murder occurred in June, the same month President Kennedy delivered a televised speech calling for civil rights reform. King delivered the I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington in August. And in September, Birmingham erupted in riots again after the deaths of four young girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

It’s also the year the state of Maryland passed a bill prohibiting discrimination in public services. Living in Maryland in 2012, in the most affluent predominantly African-American county in the United States, it’s difficult to imagine that less than a decade before I was born, African-Americans in this very county, then much more homogeneously white, were unable to get a haircut at the downtown barbershop or eat at roadside restaurants.

Maryland’s bill wasn’t all that different from other similar ones – except for the involvement of the United States Office of Special Protocol Services, a division of the State Department charged with solving the problems faced by non-white diplomats as a result of systematic race discrimination in the US. The Office got involved in something that on the surface looked like an internal State of Maryland matter because foreign diplomats, particularly African diplomats, driving US Highway 40 between the United Nations in New York and their embassies in DC or the US Federal Government faced discrimination which violated their legitimate expectations as diplomats and generated terrible press in their home countries. By 1963, the State Department saw race discrimination as a threat to their global diplomatic agenda and a liability in positioning American-style democracy as the moral counterweight to Soviet communism.

The Soviets viewed it as an American weakness as well. State radio in the USSR devoted extensive propaganda output to the tumult of the Civil Rights movement. During the Birmingham riots, the USIA reported that the Soviets dedicated 1/5 of their total broadcast time to coverage of events in Alabama. They also continued to use race against the US in narrative propaganda; 1963 marked Soyuzmultfilm’s release of the animated Mister Twister, based on the much-loved poem by Samuel Marshak that tells the story of an American business man who is overwhelmed, angered, and eventually transformed by his experience in a racially integrated society during a visit to Leningrad.

Marshak was an exceptional translator of English-language literature and wrote children’s books in part because they allowed him to avoid the ideological demands and problematic realities of Soviet realpolitik in favor of less ambiguous moral terrain. For reasons I don’t know, Marshak was designated an Enemy of the State during his tenure as head of the Children’s Section of the State Publishing house; apocrypha has it that he escaped the purges only because Stalin himself was so fond of Mister Twister’s story. Doris Lessing wrote about Marshak’s dilemma in her autobiography:

The nicest result of the visit to the Soviet Union was that I became a friend of Samuel Marshak, one of the prominent Soviet writers, a winner of the Stalin Prize for Literature. He was a poet, translated Burns and Shakespeare, wrote children’s stories. At that time writers unable to write what they wanted, because of the persecutions of serious literature, chose to do translating work: this is why the standard of Russian translation was so high…I do not see how any writer could have a worse fate than Samuel Marshak’s. To be a peasant boy with genius – or even talent – at that time was to be seen as the inheritor of a glorious future. To be Gorky’s protégé was to be accepted by the most famous writer in Russia. Gorky steadily fought Lenin over the inhumanity of his policies, procuring the release of hundreds of political prisoners, and then he fought Stalin too: it would have been easy for Marshak to feel allied with the good side of the Revolution, because it was then still possible to think there was one. Slowly he was absorbed into the structure of oppression, but hardly knew it was happening. By the time he knew he was trapped, it was too late. Easy to say, for people who have never lived with the experience of political terror, ‘He should have opted out.” How? He would have been sent to die in the Gulag, like dozens of other writers. ‘I never wrote what I should have written,’ he said.

Although the film of Mister Twister was made in 1963, the poem was written thirty years earlier, in 1933. That same year, one of the earliest uses of moralistic anti-racist ideology in anti-imperialist propaganda, “Black and White”, gave an antebellum flavor to its documentation of Jim Crow racism. The film was directed by perhaps the most important Soviet animator, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, who collaborated with Shostakovich and Stravinsky and who taught at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography from 1939 until his death in 1987.

Ivanov-Vano’s film trafficks in the iconography of racism, the caricatures of Picaninny and Brute, and yet manages to convey great pathos, much more than is generally associated with caricatured representations. There is no comedy here; only the violence of those representations, removed from the historical context that created them and stripped bare of all ambivalence. For Western viewers today, the insistence of the representation’s moral starkness undermines their conventional signification and allows the aesthetic merits of the film to come to the foreground. For Soviet viewers in the 1930s, that moral starkness played directly into the hands of a good/evil propagandistic ideology that obscured as much as it revealed. Although the ending of Black and White is more didactically Communist than Mister Twister, that doubling suggests that the same tension between realpolitik and the morality of Marxist ideology likely informed the creation of this work. Perhaps it inspired Marshak’s poem.

Soviet propaganda targeting American racism was not limited to animation — there were live action movies such as the 1936 film The Circus, about an interracial couple fleeing prejudice, and a great deal of non-fiction and journalistic propaganda as well. The linking of racism with imperialism was immensely effective among non-white groups worldwide, particularly in African nations. At least as early as the Truman administration, US leaders saw policy positions in support of civil rights as a necessary component of efforts to contain the spread of communism. In 1962, the United States Information Agency hired the documentarian George Stevens, Jr. to head its motion picture operations. Stevens hired filmmakers such as Charles Guggenheim, Leo Seltzer and James Blue to create films for the USIA, intended to counterbalance the skilled and artistically powerful Soviet propaganda machine. In 1963-4, Blue directed a behind-the-scenes documentary about the March on Washington, capturing the groundswell of enthusiasm and conviction that animated the event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jidABYf_nLU

The film, which was unavailable for viewing in the United States until 1990, unsurprisingly generated high-level controversy at the time of its release. Although intended to depict the Civil Rights movement as an exemplar of the positive functioning of democracy and the power of the first amendment rights to speech and assembly, diplomats within the USIA worried that it showed too much of the fomenting dissent and actually supported the Communists’ message. A number of Congresspeople objected to the romanticization of the protest (as well as to the depiction of interracial mixing). Eventually an introduction was added to make explicit the film’s message that peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for redress are the mechanisms by which democracy expands freedom. Although emphasizing the message in some ways diminishes the impact resulting from James Blue’s more subtle presentation and makes the film more overtly propagandistic, there is another sense in which it adds a layer to the message: the director of the USIA, Carl Rowan, who presents the introduction, was one of the first African-American officers in the US Navy and was the very first African-American to serve on the National Security Council.

I have mixed feelings about the vaguely Socialist Realist aesthetic of the new Martin Luther King memorial downtown – colossal statues of famous men are broadly associated in my mind with oppressed people tearing those statues down. But I’m going to begin thinking of it as signifying the role that Cold War geopolitics played in bringing about at least one vitally important success of the Civil Rights era. In the same year that James Blue’s film was released to the world, the American Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. There were many people in the American government who supported that legislation because it was the right thing to do, but odds are there were others who supported it for pragmatic reasons of national interest. Thank God that the needs of our foreign policy aligned so well at that critical moment with the needs of our citizens at home.

Happy Belated Birthday, Dr King.

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

–Langston Hughes, “Democracy”

Looks like We’re in for Heavy Concepts

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Franklin’s blog on Friday alerted me to this post by Nathan Schreiber. Schreiber’s point — about the art world being dominated by elites while the book world isn’t (as much) — ties into the conversation Franklin and I were having on Thursday.

But what really struck me about Schreiber’s post is that it was just really nice to hear someone in comics say something really positive and affectionate about fiction, because it just doesn’t happen all that often. Franklin quotes a Facebook post from Schreiber:

My post was really an expression of frustration with comics trying to climb further into the art world. Because I think comics are “stories” and while stories can be art, I think they’re stories first and art second. The art world is full of ambiguities, dominated by concepts over content, and is controlled by elites where the world of stories, well, it just makes more sense. There’s more or less universal recognition of what a good character is, a tight plot, hell, even mood.

Although he’s not necessarily talking about literary fiction (and I haven’t seen this Dash Shaw to know whether I agree with his evaluation), this comment vaguely acknowledges something extremely important that comics (and probably fine art too) should listen to: great fiction writers retain their craft even as they layer in more and more conceptual complexity. Nabokov, Pynchon, Delany, Woolf, Swift, Chaucer — there’s no shortage of concept, but there’s also plenty of craft. The craft enables the concept: the more solid the prose is, the more concept can be layered in. And sometimes the concept also illuminates the craft.

There are worthwhile exceptions, usually experimental ones — nobody’s ever going to claim that Burrough’s The Soft Machine is even a remotely good example of the writerly craft, but it’s an overt experiment, a conscious effort to figure out how to do something new and challenging. But he — and writers like Pynchon who followed him — made a successful effort afterwards to reintegrate craft with the formal and conceptual lessons learned from the experiment.

(It’s possible the caption under this Dash Shaw image in the Schreiber post is sarcastic, but it also doesn’t seem that far-fetched to claim an interest in concept for Shaw.)

There are some really brilliant avant-garde cartoonists who are on really exiting trajectories toward merging experiment and craft, like Jason Overby and Warren Craghead, and I’d like to see more cartoonists follow their lead and incorporate their insights and build on them to make new insights and eventually get to the point that cartoonists are making graphic fiction that’s as strong conceptually as literary fiction.

To do that, though, people have to get past this knee-jerk notion that craft and concept are an either/or choice. A lot of indie/alt cartooning has turned punk and underground ways of seeing the world into a fetish for harsh, angry expression and just plain ugliness, as though ugliness itself is sufficient to make a work edgy — as if ugliness is somehow inherently more meaningful than beauty. Like scatology and mundaneity, ugliness in indie comics is often a shortcut, a way of giving the illusion that something significant is going on when it really isn’t. Comics critics have mostly embraced this extremely facile way of thinking about concept as mere symbolism. In the alt comics subculture at least, I do think some of it comes from the mild contempt for writing that so many people seem to think is necessary in order to appreciate art. Maybe more of it comes from the fine art world as Franklin so often suggests. I’m willing to consider the assertion that in truly non-narrative work, an allusive, symbolic, suggestive use of concept can be successful, but I stick to the opinion that in narrative work, concept needs to be crafted so that it works with the narrative in interesting ways.

Ugly or otherwise, though, a lot of the work — in fine art or comics — that claims to be so “high concept” doesn’t really strike me as actually being all that high concept. It’s more “heavy concept” than “high concept.” Blunt, poorly wrought, overdetermined concepts weigh art down; elegant ones elevate it. I don’t think there’s a forced choice between beauty and concept; there is an aesthetic aspect to the conceptual constructs of an artwork as well (Pale Fire, which really is high-concept, is a great example, as is, say, Grünewald’s Crucifixion). But the artist just has to be willing to spend a lot more conceptual energy than most cartoonists — most artists period — are willing to do.

Postscript (added 1pm ET)

I want to be sure it’s clear that of course there’s a good bit of subjectivity involved in saying that this one thing is ugly and some other thing is not. There’s not an absolute standard. I find Ariel Schrag’s work a little aesthetically harsh, for example; Noah finds it really beautiful.

So I don’t want that pithy encapsulation up there about ugliness as a shortcut to be interpreted as a critique of any particular specific comic. It didn’t arise out of a specific reading — more an overall experience of seeing too much scatology, too much ugliness, too much mundaneity and not enough richness, not enough concen with beauty. Not from any specific cartoonist in any specific instance, but in the aggregate. The collective drive for and commitment to those aesthetics overall within indie comics often seems to be standing in the place of a drive for and commitment to more meaningful conceptual engagement.

In general, it raises the question of whether ugliness and rawness can simply be substituted for beauty and craft without any loss to the artform overall. Can you operate from a belief that ugliness is beautiful without transforming where you end up, collectively, at the end? I don’t really think you can — I think ugliness and rawness have semiotic content; I think they signify in a different way from beauty and craft. And I think their potential as such to hold a richness of meaning is more limited. But I also think — and this is the point of the post — that questions of how ugliness and beauty become meaningful, and what kinds of meaning they make, and what work is necessary to connect form and concept are discussions worth having.

On the 10th day of Christmas…

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Christmas illustrations, like Christmas decorations, careen toward kitsch even when they’re relatively tasteful. Always reminiscent of childhood, the ultimate in nostalgia, the kitschiest ones are a sort of superhero pantheon for the masses – from Santa Claus to Santa Mouse, with some Wise Men and Nutcrackers thrown in for good measure. Even Norman Rockwell, who is rarely incisive but often effective at reflecting early-century American life, collapses into full-on kitsch when Christmas is the theme.

Not so for illustrator Ellen Raskin’s cool, evocative illustrations for the 1954 New Directions edition of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.

Raskin’s Christmas – unlike Thomas’! — is calm and still and festive. Her woodcuts create atmosphere and tone. They attempt no semiotic significance; their effects are independent of their sequence and even of the narrative’s sequence.

They are barely even “illustrative” – only vaguely representative of some key word or phrase on the page where they appear, like cats:

Or mittens:

And yet they influence the story — it is different in other editions, surrounded by different imagery. This edition, beloved, has remained continuously in print since its original publication. Raskin’s eloquent depictions have something to do with this, opening in their gentle abstraction a magical space for the little boys of Thomas’ narrative to throw their snowballs, attack their presents, brandish their candy cigarettes, eat and examine and explore.

Raskin worked as an illustrator from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, and wrote and illustrated her own children’s books beginning in 1966. At the age of 17, while a student at the University of Wisconsin, she visited an exhibition of abstract art at the Art Institute of Chicago and changed her major to fine art. Like many of her contemporaries in mid-century design, she often put elements and techniques from abstraction to work in loosely representative contexts; in her drawings it works consistently to create this evocative and palpable sense of space. Her most famous illustration, for the original cover of A Wrinkle in Time, evokes both the tesseract and the alienation of Camazotz.

In her own picture books, her through-drawn illustrations depict space in a more literal way, place, but setting is still foregrounded (as here, from her first book, Nothing Ever Happens on My Block.)

Likewise in her cover illustrations:

There is a sense of space and body even when the images are less about place:

(A Flickr set of covers is available from the Bennington College library.)

What is so marvelous, I think, about this illustration is that it draws from abstraction a kind of conceptual quality without aiming for narrative or semiotics – an embodied, tactile concept dominated by space and sensation. But never didactic, always suggestive and atmospheric. Even in a more conventionally “cartoony” book like The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, she avoids caricature and thematic reduction and instead offers an embodied concept so compelling to a book-loving child — everything is literally made of words.

Raskin called herself a “bookmaker” rather than an illustrator, and her love of books and writing comes through in her art, even though she doesn’t ask her art to do the work of words. Her description of books reflects her heightened awareness of the vitality of imaginative space: “A book is a wonderful place to be. A book is a package, a gift package, a surprise package — and within the wrappings is a whole new world and beyond.”

Indeed.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est Godard?” Roundtable Index

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Chronological Index of Contributions
 
Jason OVERBY, “Overby vs. Godard”
 
Roundtable Introduction, “Bonne fête, M. Godard!”
 
Robert Stanley MARTIN, N’est-ce pas dégueulasse?: A Reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
 
Thomas THORHAUGE, $%$#^% the Cinema!
 
John CHALMERS with Sandra MARRS, Deepened Absorption – Eloge de l’amour
 
Craig FISCHER, La Chinoise and Marxist Sheep
 
Charles REECE, One Plus One, or the Ruse of Analogy
 
David GEHRIG, A Film Shot in the Back

Charles REECE, Craig FISCHER, Andrei MOLOTIU,, Brecht vs. Godard

Noah BERLATSKY, Images of Asses

Robert Stanley MARTIN, A Dance to the Music of Youth, A Review of Godard’s Band of Outsiders

Noah BERLATSKY, Betatown

Domingos ISABELINHO, Contempt: A Visual Reading and Other Loose Ends

Warren CRAGHEAD, A Bout De Souffle (Breathless)

(This page will be updated throughout the roundtable as contributions are posted.)

Bonne fête, M. Godard!

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Jean-Luc Godard celebrated his 81st birthday on Saturday, December 3. Last year, for his 80th, he got a font. This year, the Internet rather quietly (and capitalistically) observed the occasion: Criterion’s Facebook feed sent me to their summary page. The New York Times reviewed Histoire(s) du Cinema, and alerted me to its US DVD release on this Tuesday (Dec 6). Theaters announced special screenings. Assorted cinephile bloggers wished him well, of course, with the expected “best Godard films” lists and links to clips, my favorite of which was this short film entitled “Meeting Woody Allen”, which I’d not known about previously.

Here at HU, he gets a roundtable. Bon Anniversaire!

Godard is, perhaps more than any other filmmaker besides his contemporary and friend Luis Buñuel, driven by ideas – ideas of what the cinema is and what it is for, ideas about society and subjectivity, ideas about love and art. For many movie lovers, his work is excessively abstract, even opaque; his characters, distant and cold; his dialogue stylized, melodramatic. But to be a fan of Godard is to recognize the idea of humanity in his abstracted depiction of it, and to feel so much passion for the idea that the abstraction can stand in for traditional characterization and plotting without any loss of affect.

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker besides David Lynch, Godard is masterful with metatext, with constructing layers of meaning, with crafting signification from juxtapositions and the interplay of images, themes and words. For me at least, Godard’s own historical moment is always one layer of this metatext – perhaps the most important layer – the ideas in his films are French ideas, ideas fomented in the aftermath of war and occupation and in the tensions of the Cold War and its propagandistic ideological context. The images in his films are refracted through a French glass. “Godard” is a tapestry woven from Sartre and Bazin and Balzac and Buñuel and Lacan and Levi-Strauss and Althusser and Barthes and Langlois and Flaubert and Malraux. Godard, personally reclusive, enigmatic, and even secretive, became in his work a precipitation of the 20th century’s arguably most vibrant intellectual-artistic movement.

More than any other director most people have ever heard of, Godard is himself an idea – an idea of Art, an idea of commitment to Art, an idea of purpose for Art. Like many other French directors, he is in love with the idiosyncratic expression of “l’humanité”, witty and eccentric. Throughout his oeuvre he turned the rabidly individualistic notion of the “auteur” on its head: although his vision is uncompromising and uniquely his, it is impersonal and philosophical, concerned with humanity as a collective, with common humanity, human society, the conflict between man and society — and the necessity of subjective eccentricity, of Art and of desire, as an antidote, a balm, a cry in the wilderness first of post-war existential trauma and then of late Capitalism. Unlike Truffaut or Hitchcock or Scorsese, Godard is neither a personality nor even a body of work; Godard is a figura for art itself.

The title of this roundtable, “Qu’est-ce que c’est Godard?”, is a loose reference to the final line of Godard’s first film, Breathless: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, ‘dégueulasse’?” The quote is always a source of confusion for English translators — there is no English translation that captures the rich ambiguity of the French “dégueulasse.” Translations always end up resolving the multiplicity of meaning in the scene. “Godard”, like “dégueulasse”, is ambiguous and multiple, idiomatic, and somewhat impossible to translate. Each translation says as much about the translator as it does about the original. So will it be with this roundtable. Jouissez sans entraves!

*A couple of people have commented on the use of “Bonne fête” to mean “happy birthday”. It’s apparently Canadian only and doesn’t sound quite right to Continental Francophones. But I’m American — I’m sure my accent is even worse than my word choice!

Roundtable Contributors

Visit the Roundtable Index for a running list as contributions are posted.