Hi All! Thanks for carrying on last week while I was out! The discussion went very well and I was glad you all engaged with Coombe so deeply. We didn't manage to get too far on her ending chapters on Dialogic Democracy. Let's circle back to that at the beginning of class tomorrow, it will be key especially as Coleman unpacks liberalism in her text.

The following week is proposal research prep. I will get up a guide to the project proposals (under the assignments tab) on the blog before class tomorrow so we can discuss.

Rachel and I are the facilitators for this week’s reading. Since I will be focusing my facilitation on the introduction and Part I of the book, my analysis and discussion questions engage primarily with these sections. I plan on actually using these discussion questions in class, so feel free to comment on or revise them.

In Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2013) E. Gabriella Coleman presents an ethnography of hacking as a community activity and material practice. Based on field work conducted in San Francisco in the early 2000s, Coleman investigates the “material, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of hacking,” particularly how these dimensions relate to issues of intellectual property. Based on her anthropological analysis, she shows how hackers have cultivated a legal consciousness and participated in the negotiation of intellectual property rights. Ultimately she argues that,

Coleman reveals and celebrates F/OSS hacking practices, which in her conclusion she suggests “challenge economic incentive theory” and “work as a form of cultural critique” (p. 200). It seems that her sympathies lie with the commons movement and academics like Lawrence Lessig, who advocate for the easing of intellectual property restrictions to protect the public domain. After reading the more nuanced examinations of IP issues in Boyle and Coombe (who both steered away from making broad claims about whether the IP regulation should be either strengthened or loosened), I find that I am suspicious of Coleman’s assumption that increasing the public domain is automatically and always desireable.

The first section of Coding Freedom seeks to situate the material practice of hacking historically. The first chapter paints a general sociological portrait of the free software hackers Coleman studies firsthand, focusing on the community interaction online and at face-to-face gatherings like the Debian developer conference. The second chapter offers a history of hacking that is drawn from important documents, legal rulings, and the actions of a few key players like Richard Stallman.

While I felt that the second chapter on historical context was an important foundation for Coleman’s later arguments, the first chapter struck me as problematic in its representation of the “typical” hacker. I know that many of you are much more familiar with anthropology than I am, but it seemed to me that despite Coleman’s disclaimers, the first chapter was nothing more than a compendium of popular stereotypes about hackers (see p. 25-27). Hackers are male. Hackers come from wealthy families. Hackers start hacking early in life. Hackers eventually come to believe that “access facilitates production.” While acknowledging that this representation of hackers is a “narrative,” Coleman fails provide a critical reading of or critical distance to that narrative. For instance, her explanation of why she makes the typical hacker in this narrative male consists of a mere few words in parentheses: “and I use ‘he’ because most hackers are male” (p. 26). Her failure to provide an analysis of this narrative leads her representation to perpetuate what Lyotard has called a grand narrative.

 Discussion questions:

1.    Since we are at the point in the semester when we need to start planning our projects and thinking about potential research questions and methodologies, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to “revise” parts of Coleman’s book. So far, it seems to me that this book in its structure and methodology is more similar to what Dr. Christen is looking for in our seminar papers (on a much smaller scale of course). So the question is this: how might you revise Coleman’s ethnographic account of hacking? For instance, how might you represent a sociological portrait of hacking through a series of little narratives rather than a single and uncritical grand narrative?

2.   Coleman, Bolye, and Coombe end up setting together for lunch at a conference and having a conversation about the politics of intellectual property. What would they say to one another? Where would they establish common ground? Where would their views come into conflict?   

I just got back home to Farmington. Imbecile that I am I missed the message about the class being canceled.  Curriculum changes along the lines of slippage between the hybrid metaculture being created in Indian country and the larger white/black/brown Culture of western domination are being instituted in Washington and Idaho schools.  Presenting history and current events through Native perspectives to primary school children  is taking place, but on a limited scale and with questionable results.  I encourage these efforts while at the same time realizing they are woefully inadequate.  The diversity of Indian cultures needs to be emphasized so that the dominant hollywood tropes of Sioux and Apache wars with their stereotypical iconic warriors no longer overwhelm the literature and films "about" Indians.  Crazy Horse Malt Liquor "owner" Stroh issued an apology.  Turning hardened stereotypes on their heads will require us to insist on a completely new paradigm, a sea change in hollywood, and meaningful curriculum changes as Jorge pointed out. Coombe's book has influenced my own authenticity. 

Hi folks, good posts for Coombe. I am home sick with the flu and so we won't hold a physical, f2f class today. Instead, during the class time from 2:50-5:50 please engage with the questions from Tiffany and Somava since they were our facilitators today. I will list each as separate posts below so they don't get unruly as you all start to comment.

Let's try and get as much of a discussion as we can going for each set of questions. Everyone should comment at least once on each question posed by the facilitators, but feel free to double back so we can have a dialogue going. Tiffany and Somava you should jump in first and write a teaser for us to get going.

Also, I'd like everyone to engage with Coombe's notion of an "ethics of contingency" pp. 297-299  (in  the comments section here) following up on where we ended last week when I suggested that we need to think outside legal frameworks when we are attempting to engage with the cultural and social spaces of intellectual property (and associated "rights").

See my post about guidelines for today's discussion online.

1. The section "Postmodernity and the rumor" was fascinating. Coombe states that,
"When the recording of corporate signifiers is articulated in the form of rumor, it may be impossible for a manufacturer to stop alien others from speaking its language with their own voices or colonizing its systems of exchange value with their own experiences and life worlds" (p. 145).

My concern is can we assume that by creating zones of ambiguity indigenes can actively resist postcolonial identity politics. Is it at all possible to question and resist the global power nexus?

2. Coombe's intervention in cultural studies and legal scholarship offers an interesting alternative to critical legal studies that tends to counter two dominant models of legal thought. On one side, it questions the law and economics that is the market concept (the invisible hand) to invoke conservative normative requirements, addressing mainly private law and on the other, it critiques rights and principles, the concept of a moral majority to invoke liberal imperatives that addresses mainly public law. Coombe states quite
clearly, that the flow of capital and imperial biopower cannot only be traced in legal code; codification remains open to interpretation, judicial and otherwise. She therefore calls for an ethics of contingency in IP (p. 299). My question is who again determines what is ethical? Is it again not the dominant western world
that determines what is ethical and thereby serves the interest of the dominant West?

3. Coombe in her discussion of Redskins pointed out,
"Whether these commodity/signs are commodifications of their heritage or stereotypical signs of their many peoples find "their own" representations legally owned by others" (p. 185).

Coombe's articulation reminds me of Said's Orientalism (Said, 1978). Is it even feasible to "interrogate the cultural mimicry of alterity" (p. 207) within a neo capitalistic world?

See my post for guidelines for today's class discussion online.

1. How can we connect Coombe’s ideas about authorship to Boyle? Specifically, are there differences in how they conceive of romantic authorship historically? How does Coombe’s use of ethnography complicate or expand upon the critical theory of culture and law that she discusses?

2. Coombe discusses the conflict behind the methodology of using “proprietary counterclaims” (204) as a way of attaining some form of agency in dealing with the hegemonic Western legal system. Framing these counterclaims as theft of cultural property rather than “assertions of harm” (204) becomes a case of trying to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. Coombe notes Handler as saying that such a strategy of using “a language that power understands” is a necessity in order to gain any political power (or even presence) at all (242). Considering her last discussion of free speech/free expression, is an ethics of contingency feasible?

3. In looking at cases such as the Washington Redskins and others, what is the “usefulness” of counterpublicity as a tactic for transformative social change?

Rosemary Coombe’s The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties is a fascinating examination of the myriad levels at which power is exercised in struggles over signification. Though the book makes weighty theoretical interventions, I found Coombe’s deployment of brief ethnographic narratives as a means to explore broad-based issues of authorship, ownership, and meaning particularly compelling. Though some of these accounts were, in my opinion, more successful than others, together they weave a powerful argument for the necessity of cultural studies of copyright law, demonstrating the varied ways in which colonial-imperial power relations are recycled, retooled, and resisted in struggles of appropriation and commodification.

I wish I had waited to write my previous post on Chief Keef and respectful use until I had finished Coombe’s book, because I think many of the points Coombe makes in the latter half of the book speak very strongly to the issues I raised re: appropriation of African American cultural art forms, particularly the power relations embedded in consumption and production of (‘trap’) hip hop. Though I felt Coombe’s treatment of Troop, Reebok, and Church’s to be slightly problematic at times, the larger points made—connecting legacies of chattel slavery to African American cultural production, community spaces, and white consumption of the black body—are prescient in both my discussion of Chief Keef and Tiffany’s initial post on Sir Mix-a-Lot (Coombe’s arguments shed a whole new light on the politics of white male nerds copping Sir Mix-a-Lot’s lyrics, “gimme a sista, I can’t resist her/red beans and rice didn’t miss her!”).

I also appreciated Coombe’s discussion of appropriation of elements of Native cultures (in her case, names and Indian bodies themselves), though I admit the Redskins problematization is, in my mind, a bit tired (and Coombe acknowledges this in part, including a quote reminding us that a story on mascot controversy will be eagerly recycled nationwide, while other perhaps more dire “Native issues” fall by the wayside in dominant press). I do wish Coombe had devoted more space to an exploration of the ways Native peoples continue to resist offensive mascots—examples include Tsalagi scholar Adrienne K’s popular writings, First Nations powwow step trio A Tribe Called Red’s newest mixtape (which samples the Atlanta Braves’ theme music), and the following shirt (far right; incidentally, the below photo is of A Tribe Called Red):    

All that said, I greatly enjoyed Coombe’s discussion of the appropriation of names—there have been numerous discussions of this issue on NDN tumblr, from which the general conclusions were: “don’t google your tribe—it’s gonna be a bad time.” On a personal note, when you search “Cheyenne” on tumblr, the tag is full of teenage white girls named Cheyenne who feel the need to tag all their personal posts with their first name (also someone who takes screenshots of their Sims character named Cheyenne?).  As Coombe points out, this appropriation of Native names and bodies is situated in a larger landscape of colonial occupation and genocide, which is an excellent example of Coombe’s larger points regarding power relations in what she describes as “struggles to fix social meaning” (26).

Questions:

Coombe’s discussion of appropriation of elements of African American cultural productions and things like the Redskins and Crazy Horse malt liquor both speak to legacies of colonial violence and quite literally bring up issues of ownership of self and the body—how might Coombe’s arguments here be understood from an understanding of imperial biopolitics?

Is it possible to mobilize law regarding intellectual property and copyright towards a more equitable or just understanding of authorship and ownership? If we understand the current structure set in place as defined by axes of (race, class, etc) power, can we also see space in it for restorative justice? What would that radical restructuring look like in the context of ongoing colonial occupation and exploitation of POC? 

    In her 1998 intervention, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Rosemary J. Coombe explores the dialectical dimension of culture and jurisprudence by expanding the intersectionality of cultural studies, socio-legal studies, and post-modernity theory. Framing her analysis as critical cultural legal studies, Rosemary breaks with the-then compartmentalized foci, and instead chooses to interrelate understandings regarding the how everyday social experiences are culturally influenced by law; more specifically, the role that intellectual property rights has had on appropriating and formulating identity. By qualifying the importance of an “ethnographic approach to the social life of intellectual properties” (37), Rosemary breaks from antiquated methodological trajectories rooted in Western epistemological practices of anthropology. Invested in understanding “conditions of production [and] consumption” (17), The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties borrows from cultural studies and post-modernity to present the argument that “intellectual property regimes…play a constitutive role in the creation of contemporary cultures and in the social life of interpretive practice” (6). In short, it seems Rosemary’s project is to locate, qualify, and evidence the role that identity, differences, and cultures relate with one another within the larger landscape of consumerism and the text by which they are protected and perpetuated (27).
    Among the major arguments that Rosemary stresses is of the importance to connect how legal practices have redefined everyday exhibitions of American culture. She adopts cultural studies’ notion of culture to be “neither autonomous nor an externally determined field, but [rather] a site of social differences and struggles” (17). This social contestation, appropriation, and rearticulation are exemplified most notably in her section on the role of trademarks. Suggesting that the signifying importance of trademarks today lies in its influence in creating the “visual culture of the nation”, she historically explains how the law and the rise of “marking” the body resulted in the “standardization of American culture” (173). Doing so, the author problematizes intellectual property discourse and its historical perpetuation of social differences and antagonisms. Ranging in examples from how authenticate local Mexican food customs can be appropriated through fast food corporate monopolies, or how corporate sport entities continue to influence white America’s [false] notions of First Peoples not as savages or even as victims of colonial genocide, but rather, “pay a form of tribute to Native Americans by alluding to their bravery and fighting spirit” (189).
    Like Foucault’s articulation that power is omnipresent, Rosemary elaborates that current intellectual property discourses also provide spaces for resistance and ruptures. For example, in analyzing the contestation of Lakota statesman Crazy Horse by a malt liquor corporation, Rosemary writes that “ironically, the most successful way for indigenous peoples to challenge these stereotypical representations of themselves may be to claim them: to claim the misrecognitions of others as their own proprietary products” (199). In so doing, moments of addressing historical inaccuracies, cultural appropriation, and producing possible non-colonial imaginaries for social relations can come about. Furthermore, by looking at the role of trademarks in social and cultural relations today, we begin to find possible moments of rupture within the historically dominant violent spaces, i.e. legal courtrooms.

Discussion Questions:

1) In the recent 2013 presidential inaugural address, Barack H. Obama historicized the rhetoric of “we the people” to evoke to the U.S. public of the value that American progress continues to hold in securing the promises of liberal individual freedom. Including minorities—women, non-heterosexuals, immigrants—to have a stake in the American Dream, how might we view this as an example of what Rosemary views as authoring alterity?

2) In envisioning her notion of what a dialogical democracy public space might look like in an age of cultural commodification, Rosemary distinguishes between having “equal access to the forums and channels of communication”, by stressing the importance of having “appropriate access” (296). Given that any possibility in the cultivation of this dialogical democracy will require a modification of higher education institutions, is it even possible to not “privilege [this] particular discursive site” (297) since of the importance colleges and universities play in American youth culture today?

Rosemary J. Coombe’s, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, was a very difficult read for me, but it was also very insightful. Coombe finds it necessary to not only identify how we, as subjects are interpellated into Western hegemony, especially in the realm of legal discourse, but in addition reconceptualizes culture as both a production of hegemony and a site for “expressive struggle” (24). I really liked her analysis of these contradictions, especially when thinking about intellectual property within the realm of law, and the ways cultural politics can allow us to complicate the not-so-static relationship between production and consumption.  She says, 

This particular quote is an essential part of her call for a critical cultural legal studies because she reconceptualizes our static perceptions of the law by forcing us to rethink the law as a “historically structured and locally interpreted” process. Not only does she destabilize our assumptions that the law only serves to reinforce hegemony, she also challenges us to find counterhegemonic struggle in the law, since it is culturally explored and lived. Therefore, she declares the law as both a legitimate and a contested production of social hierarchies (26). Therefore, subaltern practices of appropriation represent, in both explicit and implicit ways, the unstable-ness of the law since it is highly influenced by that particular historical moment, which is why counterhegemonic struggle is so prevalent to Coombe’s work, because expressive struggle allows identities to be made over and over again.

In chapter 5, Coombe examines the politics of authenticity and cultural authority. Coombe complicates cultural tradition by addressing the potential dangerous of cultural essentialism since it is often shaped by Eurocentric ideas of culture (214). Our conceptualization of property rights is rooted in a westernized logic that fails to understand other modes of property. For instance, Loretta Todd reveals that First Nations people discuss “property in terms of relationships that are far wider than the exclusivity of possession and rights to alienate that dominate European concepts” (245). Not only is the romantic author narrative ruptured in these discussions of cultural appropriation, but it also exposes the limitations of hegemonic Western conceptions of property.

Questions:

1.    In chapter 5, Coombe demands non-Native people to recognize the limitations of western conceptions of property since they are built by colonial foundations, but in doing so, do we reinforce a type of violence when we try to acknowledge a new reality? The reason I ask this is because the language we have historically created in order to understand the properties of culture(s) is historically contingent upon a Western hegemony. How can non-Native people, in this case, be held accountable when acknowledging other realities?

2.    Can strategic essentialism be a form of counterhegemonic struggle? If so, what are the potential dangerous of this political agenda? 

Rosemary Coombe's book The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties (1998) offers a fascinating journey through consumer culture. Property laws not only aid in organizing the claims of economic life, it also
promotes custody or control of things, and claims to be insured against interference. Coombe's critiques the existing intellectual property policy based on which she states "criminal charges may be laid by state officials whose sense of the public interest seems shaped primarily by profit-oriented actors" (p. 4). She calls for critical cultural studies of intellectual property and invokes the anthropological roots of cultural studies as a means to criticize intellectual property doctrines that rely on a philosophical tradition. Coombe refers to
Foucault, De Certeau, Derrida, Gramsci, Zizek and Jameson in her analysis of the conditions of late capitalism. The core of her work is an anthropological view of intellectual property issues. Coombe examines how "cultural studies dilute anthropology's trademark" (p. 16), which becomes the central issue of her book.
Her analysis is based on the ethnographic paradigm of cultural studies through which she reviews the extant frameworks of intellectual property doctrine. In her critical review of the legal scholarship on intellectual property, Coombe also builds upon cultural theories from Bakhtin, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Habermas and Foucault to study the latest commercial culture. She justifies her theory usage by indicating  "intellectual
  property issues press upon me in the commercial culture I share with my students, but eighteenth-century philosophical frameworks are deemed the appropriate academic vehicles with which to explore the dusty doctrines of copyright" (p. 5). Coombe undertakes "a critical cultural studies of law" in order to analyze how intellectual property law is complicit with some inappropriate cultural conditions that are embedded in the customs, precedents, and rules of the 21st century cultural practices. She points out that throughout the last century, political scientists have been accusing that anthropologists and ethnologists have insufficiently differentiated between power and authority and ignored the informal aspect of social pressure as the
dominant means of social control. Coombe evades this problem by focusing on cultural authorship in a wide sense, with reference to Foucault's discourse and to the arbitrary character of some judicial decisions about intellectual property and social control (p. 100).       
     Coombe's book was a great reader. Her critical ethnographic approach has significant contribution for both cultural and legal theories. While she remains pessimistic about potential reforms of high-tech policy by high theory, she argues that any systematic analysis of knowledge work must address technology and its discursive powers. Her emphasis on the growing importance of an inquiry into the current and coming debates over copyright and authorship generates a different dimension as she values complexity and subtlety over special interests and manages to establish the virtues of theorizing and the importance of its futures. Further, her explanation of dialogic democracy that deftly accommodates articulations of alterity in the political sphere is significant as she combines social theories of identity politics with a much-needed
  rethinking of intellectual property for cultural critique. Finally, I was particularly drawn to her discussion of gender politics and feminism in the "Doing gender" (p. 107) section. She quotes Butler to emphasize Foucault's notion how "systems of power produce the subjects" (p. 108). The section also reminded me of Foucault's conception of "repression" (Foucault, 1978) and his argument regarding the terms of repression, which he indicated were conceived for the utilization of labor capacity. Coombe's concern with feminism and gender politics offers important building blocks for an ethical reinterpretation of the technocratic administration of signs, beyond binary simplifications in the political process.
Questions:       
 1. The section "Postmodernity and the rumor" was fascinating. Coombe states that,

My concern is can we assume that by creating zones of ambiguity indigenes can actively resist postcolonial identity politics. Is it at all possible to question and resist the global power nexus? 

2. Coombe's intervention in cultural studies and legal scholarship offers an interesting alternative to critical legal studies that tends to counter two dominant models of legal thought. On one side, it questions the law and economics that is the market concept (the invisible hand) to invoke conservative normative requirements, addressing mainly private law and on the other, it critiques rights and principles, the concept of a moral majority to invoke liberal imperatives that addresses mainly public law. Coombe states quite
clearly, that the flow of capital and imperial biopower cannot only be traced in legal code; codification remains open to interpretation, judicial and otherwise. She therefore calls for an ethics of contingency in IP (p. 299). My question is who again determines what is ethical? Is it again not the dominant western world
that determines what is ethical and thereby serves the interest of the dominant West?

3. Coombe in her discussion of Redskins pointed out, 

Coombe's articulation reminds me of Said's Orientalism (Said, 1978). Is it even feasible to "interrogate the cultural mimicry of alterity" (p. 207) within a neo capitalistic world?

References
Coombe, R. J. (1998). The cultural life of intellectual properties: Authorship, appropriation, and the law. Duke University Press Books.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vol 1. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

I would like to end with couple of videos that would provide us with "food for thought."