I thought we were going to talk about Dean today...so here's my late contribution to that. (I'll post on De Landa separately.)
I've been mentally wrestling with Dean on the ideology front since last class. This is when the rubber is supposed to hit the road, right? We've pulled back the curtain to find the non-wizard, and...well...what? Apparently nothing. No revolution. Nothing. His wizard status remains intact. (Thanks to Niko for telling me about Zizek's analysis of Oz, et al, when I was talking through this on Friday). So what do we do now?
Over the weekend, I managed to stumble across a review for a book titled OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Here is an excerpt:
Harold argues that in order to successfully preserve/produce authentic public culture, what we need is more “control” over cultural output, rather than less.
In her celebration of the open source movement (best exemplified here by Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons project, which advocates an expansion of copy “rights”), it seems that Harold is arguing for a structural shift in the way culture is produced, based on the assumption that a change in structure would result in “better” content. The implication is that saboteurs and pranksters would be better off putting their efforts toward fostering a structure that encourages creative production, rather than just attacking the output of the current system. It’s unclear, however, how the introduction of new copyrights (i.e., intensified regulation of cultural production) results in the positive production of better cultural output. Although it might be argued that the open content logic instantiates an ethos of collective creativity by “creating the conditions for invention” and “offering opportunities for circulation,” it’s difficult to see how an intensification of regulation necessarily encourages diversity or innovation in cultural production.
If nothing else, it's an interesting argument. For me, it conjured Saul Alinsky (60s grassroots organizer). To paraphrase from his Rules for Radicals: "Fine, Oppressors, create all the rules you want, but you have to follow them too." It might be worth a closer to look to see how Harold presents this regulation-as-resistance argument herself.
2 comments:
Thanks for the heads up!
As for the reviewer, I hope that when we get to Lessig, we'll be able to figure out why the following claim comes across as either a gross misunderstanding or a deliberate distortion of the creative commons movement:
It’s unclear, however, how the introduction of new
copyrights (i.e., intensified regulation of cultural production) results in the positive production of better
cultural output.
Well, I checked out the book because it seemed there _had_ to be more to it than what this reviewer had to say. I wasn't willing to take their word for it, anyway.
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