"Lines of Flight," or, The Rhizomatic Connections I Made Across and Among Your Blog Posts

Dear All,

You did some great work on the blog last Thursday, and I saw some very useful conversation threads begin to emerge that I'll draw attention to here, as we reflect on "genre" and "rhetorical velocity" from last week, and as we think about "hypertext" and "metapictures" in the upcoming week. 

Key Critical Questions You Managed to Uncover

I saw several of you uncover one key critical question in Good Copy, Bad Copy: What is it that needs to be "protected"? What spaces are necessary for "new" kinds of creativity?

Since we know the law isn't universal in every country, and since we often think about intellectual property in terms of our own law (originally Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but more recently known as Title 17), it is worthwhile to ask whether the thing that was first thought to need protection still needs the same attention? Several of the video subjects in Johnsen's and Christensen's film remind us that perhaps something else (now) needs to be nurtured -- is it still a kind of creativity, or is it more like delivery, distribution, or market sharing, right to own, right to sell? Your posts took up some discussion of popular notions of "sampling" (e.g., Girl Talk) and "remixing" (e.g., Gnarls Barklay, Technobrega) and reminded us that the film doesn't ultimately promote something as good or bad, in spite of the polysemic title.

Several of your posts reminded me of another key critical question about copyright: Does protection (via copyright) necessarily inspire or hinder creativity? Even people who answered the same way were motivated by different concerns.

Tecno brega concert in Belem, BZ.
Courtesy of The Wire, UK.

Nigerian film market.
Image from Mubi.com, by Kolar.

Mayo Ayilaran (from the Copyright Society of Nigeria) would say that it doesn't do either one, since he argued for "Nollywood" (the Nigerian moviemaking industry) as “culturally emergent” and more “humanistic” because it distills their own unique and peculiar method of making films. The films themselves, and the way they are shared, allows for a stronger human connection. However, Ronaldo Lemos (a Brazilian Law professor) would say that it hinders more than it inspires in cultural settings where the album is technically supposed to just bring people to the physical concert. In other words, Ayilaran says that "Nollywood" is more concerned with cultural emergence, while Lemos says that "Technobrega" is a good example of how the physical record isn't the primary money-making object, but rather the dance concert is where more money gets made. Even producers of "culture for itself in itself" are looking at this as a capital venture.

Finally, some of your posts reminded me of a third critical question motivating the film (and this one won't surprise you): Are we all operating under the same assumptions about who/what is an "artist"?

This question became especially meaningful for me during Lawrence Lessig's interview in the music archive. Lessig reminded us that the Internet doesn't automatically level the playing field. As a result, "open access" doesn't necessarily mean "equal access" or even "equal impact," and this is a nuance that becomes very important in discussions about Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and even Wiki Books. This is also the reason why some people still feel strongly that copyright protects the most interests of the most people by regulating how music gets sold and how artists get paid. GirlTalk made a statement early in the film that if we passed out free paint on the street, more people would probably start painting. However, even people who support open access in principle don't necessarily think this is what will happen in practice -- hence, Creative Commons, which operates as a kind of limited licensing of creative work.

Rhetorical Velocity, or Genre?

In several of your posts, you knocked it out of the park with your discussions of Jim Ridolfo's and Martine Courant Rife's terms, and I remind you that one of the reasons we work so much with terms is because they help us to do three things: (1) stay grounded as we discuss what are often difficult abstractions; (2) avoid lapsing into universalist, essentialist, or relativist assumptions about everything we read; and (3) better notice the relationships between and among the writers we read, since we can't grasp everything on the first try.

You helped me to make the following connections I had not thought to make before:

• R&R's "appropriation" can function like"amplification" in Longinus's The Sublime by drawing attention to differing proofs (Longinus 354)
• R&R's "delivery" doesn't have to rely on "intention" in order to be understood. This is fairly significant because it means that a text's "delivery" is best understood in terms of the outcomes and uses to which it has been put, rather than what we think writers intended to do in creating it. In this way, "delivery" is necessarily complex; it involves more than just two agents.
• R&R's "velocity" includes speed and uptake, but it can't predict either of these things; it can simply help us to understand when they occur (such as in the case of Maggie's picture being appropriated for multiple and ongoing purposes)
• R&R's "recomposition" isn't just a thing or a process; it is actually a condition that describes what can happen automatically upon a text's delivery. 

When I look at this list, I realize that many of these qualities and characteristics are also true of Carolyn Miller's genre. Go figure. Seriously -- go figure!

Good Copy, Bad Copy as Rhizomatic or … (gasp!) as Différance?

Your posts gave me an idea for Tuesday's class, so don't be surprised if I ask you to reflect on this film, as well as on Sharon Daniel's "Public Secrets." While the film isn't necessarily hypertextual in the way that George Landow describes it, I think we can argue that the film is rhizomatic according to some of the ways that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe a "rhizome."

"Euphorbia rhizophora2ies,"
Frank Vincentz. CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

For example, several of your posts pointed out that Johnsen and Christensen don't try to resolve the issue of file sharing (or copyright, for that matter), but rather they help to portray it as a set of "principles of connection and heterogeneity" where "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (Deleuze and Guattari 7). In a way, this rhizomatic approach allows the film's argument to transcend a simple binary and move beyond even the recursive properties of a simple dialectic--just like Carolyn Miller's invented genres! In other words, while there are plenty of ways to read the film, D&G's concept of "rhizome" may help us to understand precisely how the film calls into question whether music has an identifiable “origin” and what new directions musical genres make possible as it continues to recirculate.

Instead of a “root system,” D&G's rhizome offers a map of “external productive outgrowths” (D&G 14). No part of the rhizome can escape its interactions with another unchanged. To call on Jacques Derrida from earlier in the semester, a rhizome is "not an origin but an effect—a movement of unfolding of being" (“Différance” 22). 

Nice work, all!

-Prof. G