MOAK47 : New Directions in Independent Cultural Production

We should also look at how the economics of being an author have changed throughout history and the effects it has on our conceptions of authorship. Included in this discussion is a look toward the social relations that produce cultural texts: the interchange between the different parts of the publishing apparatus that Jerome McGann calls "the social nexus" that produces authorship. This economic history of the author would naturally take up the question of labor within the cultural realm. The labor practices that bring about cultural artifacts are processes which have changed in the past two centuries and the roles played by authors, publishers, and audience have changed accordingly. Since the notion of copyright is intimately tied to what it means to be an author with all the rights of ownership that it entails, we should also understand the past and current notions regarding intellectual property and copyright among cultural producers.

Authorship's Early History

One of the major changes to take place in the history of cultural creation was copyright. To get an idea of the significance of this event, or series of events, it is important to have an idea of what culture looked like before the licensing Act of 1662 and the Statute of Anne of 1710. Around this time, a deep change in the conception of authorship occurred; one that marked a wholesale acceptance of a certain theory of art. This new concept of the author was, according to Martha Woodmansee, a "rather recent remapping of human activities"(13). During the period surrounding the 1662 act, the fine arts were distinguished from the mechanical arts and sciences. Fine arts would now deal with nature either by imitating it directly or indirectly through "purely internal relationships (of harmony, symmetry, and the like) established among its component parts" (17). Woodmansee describes the work of a cultural worker before this split:

[The "author"] was first and foremost a craftsman; that is, he was master of a body of rules, or techniques, preserved and handed down in rhetoric and poetics, for manipulating traditional materials in order to achieve the effects prescribed by the cultivated audience of the court to which he owed both his livelihood and social status. (36)

She argues elsewhere that writing was "the product of idle hours," not something one produced for an existing market, but "strictly for domestic use: the authorÕs own and that of her close acquaintances" (106). Of course, these "idle hours" were the domain of a certain class, the people of the court that could afford idleness. William Charvat explains that even later in the United States,

writers were thinking of the social status of literature and authorship in terms of British aristocratic tradition which was partly myth. In that tradition, imaginative literature was a class commodity, produced and consumed by the elite and by those on lower social levels who identified themselves with the elite and depended on them for support. Literature, furthermore, was a by-product of learning or study, which presupposed leisure. The gentleman might take pride in his by-product, but he considered it as only one of many accomplishments in an active life. He never wrote for money, never put his name on what he wrote, and rarely even condescended to put what he wrote in print. His work was addressed to s small group of equals. (6)

This conception of the writer as gentleman craftsman cohabitated for a time with the view that the artist was "inspiredÑby some muse, or even by God" (Woodmansee 36). In the eighteenth century, theorists minimized the role of the "craftsman" element, and favored the idea that artists were inspired, choosing to rework "inspiration" as coming from within the artist herself and not from external sources. Artists and writers thus had a certain claim to the "original" work they created. Copyright and the notion of intellectual property that developed in the 20^th century are founded in part on this claim of original inspiration.

The mid-18th century to the mid-19th century was a time of transition from a patronage-based system of cultural production to market-based production. Of great importance during this period was the emerging middle class with its myriad readers supporting the arts. The very basis of authorship, a product of "eighteenth century writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writings" was given life by this great expansion of consumption in the cultural arena. Though the book market was strong, authors were still faced with a social system that did not have the infrastructure to support their labor. They used their writing to "establish the economic viability of living by the pen" and in doing so "redefin[ed] the nature of writing [and] played a critical role in shaping the modern concept of authorship in its modern form"(Woodmansee 36). The conception of the writer that came out of this cultural effort was different from a craftsman. The writer became an individual stripped of artistic precedence, an author, "a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product" (38).

This is not to say that all writers were happy with the coming wave of a market-based cultural system. In fact, it is WoodmanseeÕs point that "Art" as we know "was invented to stem the commercialization of literature" (4). Evidence of this is the growth of cultural critics aiming to steer the growing bourgeois readership away from "light," commercially produced literature. The artistic world was seen as divided between what Karl Phillip Morritz described in 1785 as "the thousands who have no eye for the beautiful," i.e. public writers who produce exclusively for material gain and the "'men of taste' who make it their chief occupation in life to love and serve art...without any hope of private gain" (21). This conception of the gentleman aristocratic writer was not a value mirrored in the market. No one was buying their writing, which made it necessary to invent the idea that "real art" existed independent of the market. It was also necessary re-direct capital towards the "men of taste." The desire to make money from artistic work conflicted with the (patronage-inspired) view of the disinterested artist, thus the practice of "honorarium" was initiated. The modern method of payment to the author in the form of royalties is based on honorarium, which was an "acknowledgment or reward ... not in proportion to or equivalent to the services performed" (41). In the beginning, the honorarium was a flat sum, and was recognition of an author's work. It was likewise recognition that "the writer forfeited his rights to any profits his work might bring. That is, his work became the property of the publisher to realize as much profit from as he could"(44). As Woodmansee notes, "the relationship between writers and publishers in the first half of the eighteenth century still bore a striking resemblance to that which had existed between the poet and his patron" (43). As artists demanded a more just compensation for their labor, this system eventually gave way to a fluctuating honorarium based on sales, which is very similar to our current practice of (percentage-based) royalties.

The real impetus toward creating a legal framework to handle intellectual property was the need for publishers to safeguard their industry. As Copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig relates, it was a necessity which grew out an insecure book market where

there was growing competition from foreign publishers. The Scottish, in particular, were increasingly publishing and exporting books to England. That competition reduced the profits of the Conger, which reacted by demanding that Parliament pass a law to again give them exclusive control over publishing. That demand ultimately resulted in the Statute of Anne. (47)

What the Statute of Anne brought into being was a legal recognition of the need to create temporary monopolies for the sake of good business. This theme of government safeguarding the business of culture continued to influence copyright law long after.

Piracy had become widespread due to the easier access to the printing press and a lack of legal precedent in relation to ownership over cultural goods. The book industry requesting to be protected would not have been possible without previous work by theorists and cultural critics (Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others) inculcating this particular view of cultural private property. During the renaissance and even up to the mid-1700's, the reigning view was that artists worked with commonly held property (views, opinions, themes, attitudes) and elevated them, molding them through artistic work. The idea that the artist was doing something unique or original was not taken into consideration to the extent that it was later on. That "copyright infringements" (in both the artistic borrowing and piracy sense) were so common before the eighteenth century shows the radically different sense of intellectual property writers, artists, publishers, and patrons had of cultural transmission. Indeed, as Woodmansee points out, "the practice of reprinting books without the permission of their original publishersÑa practice that would eventually be impugned as "piracy"Ñhad existed since the late fifteenth century" and only in the eighteenth century "grew to epidemic proportions" (45).

The widening of the book market, the subsequent demands by a pre-professional class of writers seeking to live by their writing in that marketplace, widespread piracy and its backlash of government protectionism, and acts of parliament; all lead to the creation of multiple copyright laws that would form the basis of the current intellectual property regime. In Lessig's discussion of the Statute of Anne, it becomes apparent that contrary to the wishes of the publishers of the era, copyright was a right that was limited by time. The first in a series of copyright laws that would eventually extend copyright ever longer, the Statute states that "all published works would get a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable once if the author was alive" (46)

One argument current then (and one that is renewed even now) is perpetual copyright. A defense of an extended and unlimited term of copyright is found in William Wordsworth, who in his writings pushed for perpetual copyright during copyrightÕs early period. WordsworthÕs argument is based on a difference between writers who were writing for the markets and writers, like himself, who believed they were writing for posterity. According to Woodmansee, it was WordsworthÕs feeling that "only writers who cater to popular taste can be certain of realizing a profit from their investment within twenty-eight years [one of the proposals at the time]" (145). For an author who wrote serious literature, the quick-paced logic of the market is at odds with their interests. Lessig maintains that the duration of a cultural artifact in the current market is only two to five years, which is one reason why unlimited extension is unjustified. At this point in copyright history, when copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years, there are few (but sometimes powerful) Wordsworths wishing that one day there would be a copyright regime strong enough to eternally secure the rights to your art. A virtual eternal monopoly has been granted through longer and longer term limits. Plus, as Lawrence Lessig says,

In the last three hundred years, we have come to apply the concept of "copyright" ever more broadly .... In 1710, the "copy-right" was a right to use a particular machine to replicate a particular work .... today the right includes a large collection of restrictions on the freedom of others: It grants the author the exclusive right to copy, the exclusive right to distribute, the exclusive right to perform, and so on" (46).

Jerome McGann and the Problems of Locating Authorship

Contrary to the idea of original authorship contained in copyright, Jerome McGann presents a thesis that the author exists within a social network that constructs authorship. Lord Byron was edited most profoundly by Mary Shelly, but in ways that went beyond eschewing "accidentals" and into the realm of collaboration. As McGann notes, "the changes she introduced ... were both substantive and accidental, and in the end many of them appeared in the original editions" (52). McGann cites examples of works written in strict collaboration, like A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbery and James Schuyler, as well as the concept of ghostwriting as in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley. We could certainly add "The Waste Land," written by T.S. Eliot with the help of Ezra Pound. This is only to mention the most visible questions of literary authority. Collaboration also occurs between various representatives of the publishing institution and the writer. When we notice that texts go through revisions, are handled by compositors, printers, editors etc., all of whom potentially introduce new substance to the text, we get a sense of the social network involved in constructing authorship. What McGann sees in these relationships is the process of the creation of literary authority that, in the end, is never attributable to one person: "all the historical evidence suggests that this is the structure which normally prevails between authors and the literary institutions within which they operate .... authors and their literary agents (or employers) have collaborated to varying degrees in the transmission of literary works" (53). Cultural authority then, is something that is directly connected to the institution involved in the specific cultural production. As McGann says elsewhere, "literary authority is a social nexus, not a personal possession" (48). Kembrew McLeod, in his book Owning Cultural, also stresses this difference between originality and the reality of cultural transmission. He says, "The idea that artistic works are the product of an original authorial genius flies in the face of the way cultural texts have always been produced, even during the time this discourse was developed" (23). For examples of where this fixation on "originality" leads, we could cite the "Anxiety of Influence" debate initiated by Harold Bloom. A quest for "originality" exists within a cultural reality that eschews originality. All writers have genealogies, all are thieves to a greater or lesser extent, and cultural reality that adheres to a theory of thermal-dynamics that says it cannot be created or destroyed, only reconfigured.

William Blake went beyond the nuisance of a publishing house and became (in great "Do It Yourself" spirit) a one-person publishing machine. McGann says that

when Blake assumed the roles of author, editor, illustrator, publisher, printer, and distributor, he was plainly aspiring to become a literary institution unto himself. Unfortunately, he could not also assume the role of one crucial component of that institution as it existed in his period: the reviewer. As a consequence, his work reached only a small circle of his contemporaries. Also, his productive processes were such that he could not mass produce his works, so that his fame, his full appreciation and influence, had to wait upon his death, and the intervention of a number of important persons who never even knew him. The mechanical reproduction of his rare original works was a final, splendid insult to the equally splendid principles of a genius.

This was at a time in England when professionalism in literary works was gaining ground, when it was expected that writers would not be involved in the publishing process. Blake tried to enact cultural transmission without the support or intervention of a publishing industry. What makes Blake an interesting case is in the impossibility of a single author of resisting the social project of the publishing industry. McGann states that "Blake's decision to seek complete freedom from that institution, though futile, is nonetheless an important limiting case, for it sharply underscores the determining authority of the institution" (53). Insomuch as it was "the division of labor against which Blake had been so vigorously revolting" his cultural labor eventually became assumed within the institution of cultural production (60)

What McGannÕs treatment of Blake also makes apparent is that there is often a lack of consideration and attention to the way in which distribution determines authorship. Blake was able to write, edit, produce and sell his art as he saw fit. What he didn't have, and what the publishing companies had in abundance, were the means of mass production, distribution, and reception to make that art known to the world. If "authority is a social nexus," it is a social nexus that has varying levels that for McGann, always remain within the scope of an institutionalized system of industrial publishing. In another sense, one McGann did not envision, is that Blake (or the mythic status of the author) is such that it allows publishing companies to collaboratively sell the work of an "author-individual." Part of the mystique of Blake is that he created art outside the publishing complex, a point that was neatly used by subsequent publishing companies to sell his works. A secondary effect is that it provided (and provides still) support for the promotion of the individualized, original author, even if it is based on a incorrect vision of the BlakeÕs own publishing history.

As we can see, McGannÕs vision of a social nexus or social project is supported by a concurrent ideology of individualism that is historically determined. Contextualizing the individuality engrained in copyright, M. Rose says "copyright is not a transcendent moral idea, but a specifically modern formation produced by printing technology, marketplace economics, and the classical liberal cultural of possessive individualism" (Rose qtd in McLeod 25). It is this ideology of individualism, promoted by the very institutions that work in collaboration to produce the actual product that in the end makes copyright and cultural property possible.

Barthes and FoucaultÑAuthorship and Individuality

Roland Barthes as well believes the concept of "the author" to be a relatively recent phenomenon. He says, "The author is a modern figure, a product, of our society insofar as ... it discovered the prestige of the individual É. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the "person" of the author" ("Death of the Author" 221) Even Foucault cites "the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences" ("What is an Author" 225). It seems strange, then, that Barthes should write so confidently on the assured death of the author, while at the same time understanding its dependence upon, and its deep roots in a structure, capitalism, that was still very alive. As Barthes himself noted that, "certain writers have long since attempted to loosen [the sway of the Author]" it unfortunately "remains powerful." For Barthes, it gives him reason to have hope in an eventual (messianic) coming of the "reader" and a language-based, not author-based text. "It is language that speaks, not the author," he says.

For Foucault, while it is true that "today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression, referring only to itself," he believes there are certain concepts like the "author's work" and the "author's name" that "are intended to replace the privileged position of the author [and] actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance." Foucault concludes, "the author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning". So for Foucault, the level at which we feel the presence of "the author" is the level at which we can discern this need to control meaning. He is also confident in the eventual disappearance of the author's role as "regulator of the fictive," as an expression of "our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property". Where both these studies on authorship fail is in their inability to recognize that authorship is not the work of a single individual. While they are intent on seeing authorship as relying on individualism, they cannot see how authorship is more than individual expression; that it is the complex of the various forces of textual production. Just as capitalism still exists after Barthes and Foucault, the productive processes relating to the text (of which the individual writer is only a small part), "authorship," so conceived is (and was at the time of their writing) as strong as ever.

Whereas the role of the author as it works within the work may be (if we believe Barthes and Foucault) diminishing or extinct, there is a world outside the work that remains unchanged. The authoritarian sway of the writer-turned-author is also as viable as ever. In the real world, writers are not aware of the liberation the "death of the Author" would mean for them. Writers even now tend to want control over the meaning and substance of "their" text (as if it only belonged to them) or "their" style (method, means, vantage point, etc.) in opposition to others. It is that world that Bourdieu takes on in his work "The Field of Cultural Production." Bordieu calls this field "the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer." This struggle is between cultural workers who have varying levels of access to capital and the "cultural capital" granted in and through certain institutions. In Bordieu, the (capital "A") Author becomes the "writer," and a cultural laborer who is in constant battle over the definition of what that labor is and does. As publishers are seen as a social project of many social actors, the act of masquerading as an organization that publishers works of original authors becomes more evident. The role this social nexus plays in constructing the authorship is rarely acknowledged by publishers or authors and is a view is supported by a mythical undercurrent that sees "the individual" and "the author" as uniquely responsible for the creation of culture. This focus on original authorship finds its legal expression in copyright or in a series of rights (trademarks, patents, and copyrights) that make up the dubious concept of "intellectual property."

William CharvatÕs 19^th Century

In a sense, the whole of William Charvat's "The Profession of Authorship in America" is a coming-of-age tale of the American author. Charvat works under the assumption (whether reasonable or otherwise) that the end goal of all the writers is to make a livable wage from their cultural exertion. It tells of the hardships encountered during the economic swings and the different publishing relations of the 19th century. The author's relation to the generalized poverty of the time moves closer to center stage, as do the publishing practices of the time. The book traces the changing nature of what a writer does for a living. "Publishing" functioned in multiple different forms in the American 19^th century. At times, it was expected that the author would assume the responsibility of providing the initial capital required for printing and distributing their book. The author in the first half of the 19^th century was essentially a self-publisher who assumed the risk of producing their book. The publishing house was a convenience, providing cheap access to paper, binding, and distribution services. William Charvat, a noted publishing historian, explains that this effectively "describes the commercial status of almost all American literary works produced before 1820. Publishers rarely took the risk of manufacturing costs; the author paid, and the publisher served as his distributor on a commission basis. The author was thus literally in the publishing business." Charvat states elsewhere that "Irving was his own publisher, invested and risked his own money, had all the work managed (by proxy), which a skilled publisher could have handled better"(33). Although this might seem to alter or undercut this idea of publishing as a social nexus, it shows the ever-changing nature of the social nexus and the variable position the writer plays within that nexus. It also demonstrates the different publishing relations between the U.S. and England at that time, and our own time. The publishers in the U.S. had yet to develop the stability that would typify the industry in later years. As Charvat relates, "It was one of the discouraging facts about American authorship that few of our writers before 1850 escaped loss through the bankruptcy of a publisher. Contrary to an idea of artistic self-liberation, Charvat sees the author involved in the actual publishing as an obstacle to the professionalized writer. The sphere of professional authorship sees writers, artists, and musicians in the strictly-defined role of suppliers of content. Charvat helps us track the solidification of this cultural situation. Today the business of "publishing," or making that work visible to the public, is likewise the defined role of the publishing organization. Although there is still some overlap in author-editors or author-publishers, the idea of producing oneself or collectivizing cultural labor is one that comes outside of professional publishing, where previously it was one of many strategies of cultural production in the U.S. As Charvat makes clear, writers have faced a long struggle toward sustainability and professionalism. They have however, forfeited their role in the production of the physical objects of culture. Any author could tell you that a published and distributed book is worth more than a manuscript, but few could explain how it is to publish and distribute a book without the aid of a publisher. So in gaining the independence to earn a living exclusively by writing, writers have closed off opportunities they once were expected to fulfill which are perhaps more lucrative, even if time-consuming.

In the early days of publishing, publishers used a system of subscriptions that could cover a large portion of the book's first edition in order to reduce the risk associated with producing it. It was a something of a precursor to the Book of the Month clubs and Columbia House subscription services of today. As Charvat says, "almost all literary works before 1800 were published by subscription, that is, by promises to buy...obtained from friends, friends of friends, public dignitaries known to be patrons of the arts, and booksellers willing to serve as agents. Subscription was another inheritance from England and an outgrowth of aristocratic patronage." This system was, according to Charvt "moribund by 1783" and "got its death blow in 1820" and was never really effective (9). He concludes that "it had never been very profitable, and because subscription-hunters were considered nuisances, it contributed to the degradation of the author's status"(8-9). Woodmansee describes Friedrich Gottlob KlopstockÕs 1772 attempt at using subscriptions to radically change the way books made their way to readers.

He tried to use the subscription system to benefit writers collectively. This interesting proposal was an "experiment in collective patronage," whereby authors would bring writing (via subscriptions) to the public as a group, effectively circumventing publishers (Wookmansee 48). This system eventually proved inefficient, since finding subscriptions demanded time and resources writers did not have.

As we have noticed from Woodmansee's discussion of the patronage, the earlier conception of the author was as gentleman sharing letters within small groups. What Charvat adds to this discussion are portraits of American authors struggling to earn a living by the pen, writing for an American audience under a publishing industry that had not reached maturity. He says that whereas "in England authorship had become a profession earlier,"

The profession of authorship in the United States began in the 1820's when [writers] discovered that they could turn out regularly books which readers were willing to buy regularly. (29)

What should be clear here is the place of the artist within a network of relations that relies upon the mass production, distribution, and consumption of books. As Woodmansee shows in her examples of England and Germany, professionalized authorship and copyright laws to protect this cultural property began after an explosion of middle class readers with money to spend on culture. The implication is that the "artist" or "author" is just as much an economic category as it is a cultural one. Further, it is an economic category that is dependent on everyone else involved in the social network (printers, editors, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, distribution firms, even readers) to make it all possible.

The next stage that Charvat discusses is the depression of 1837, because it gave rise to the transcendental movement and the literature of Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, and others. "Economic distress seemed to nourish it," he says (50). Lest we think that transcendental writers were similar to William Ellery Channing, who "was one of the few literary men of the day who were deeply troubled by [poverty]" (55), it is evident in the essays and letters that the writers of new England "refused to be disturbed by talk of bread-lines" because of the general stability of the region during the depression (60). In fact, Charvat believes that these writers "were not conscious of a great gap between their standards of living and that of the worker. The real difference, they thought, was in the mind, not in material comforts" (61).

Foregrounding American authorsÕ economic level and their relation to the poverty of the day is important to Charvat, since for him "a real relationship frequently exists between a writer's comfort and his sensitivity to social catastrophe" (57). Charvat describes Longfellow, the United States' first "public poet," as a "complacent patrician" who "was safely established on the Harvard faculty" (57, 64). Longfellow's relation to Harvard was always a point he tried to diminish in importance. As Charvat says, "it is significant that in his last autobiographic prose work Kavanagh, he appears as "schoolmaster" to small children, a role that could set up no social barrier between him and the common reader" (129).

One of the aspirations of a writer in the nineteenth century was to be a public poet. As Charvat explains, "All American poets before Longfellow were public poets in method and intention, but none had succeeded in finding security in society as poet." What makes Longfellow a particularly shining example is his perceived connection to the common worker. Charvat suggests that "with no expectation of inheriting family wealth, Longfellow learned that his place was among the vast majority of the human race who must make their own livings.... [he] knew the salaried worker's frustrations and dissatisfactions" (116-117). And much of this sentiment followed the writer into his writing, Charvat suggests, with the "emotional weights in his vocabulary" (133). However, we may not be dissuaded from viewing Longfellow as simply a well-meaning bourgeois artist. The idea that his verse generates and promotes "the value and satisfaction inherent in work" (139) should leave us slightly suspicious of Longfellow as a model artist with his mind in tune with the true interests of "the common man". Although Poe acts as a counterexample to the public aspirations of Longfellow, with his various "gentleman idler" poses, the view of the "common author of great dimensions" is a commonplace within U.S. cultural production similar to the "rags to riches" myth. It is one that attaches itself to some authors better than others, but it remains a fantasy nonetheless.

Authorship in the 20th Century

As publishing houses grew more stable, the role of cultural workers moved away from a self-publishing model that saw the authors as distinctly operating in the publication of their book. A convenient division of labor took hold during the 20^th century, one that sees the publisher as responsible for book production and the writer the production of content. The system we have today, where publishing houses are self-sufficient publishers and marketers of books, was initiated during the late nineteenth century and early 1900s. The social nexus of publishing has since expanded enormously. Publishers take raw material in the form of manuscripts and through various stages of production (editing, contracts with printers, advertising agencies, freelance proofreaders, bookstores, etc.) produce and distribute the book we read.

The growth and expansion of the publishing industry to fill all market niches is also a recent event as is the rise of the non-profit press to sustain those sectors of the market that are poorly served (poetry, experimental fiction, political essays, religious works). Marketing as well is a recent development. As Charvat explained, "of advertising and "promotion"Ñone of the chief functions of the modern publisherÑthere was very little. In 1820 publicity was a primitive gesture rather than an art" (39-40).

This expansion of the book market and the increased importance of media in the lives of U.S. citizens have been noticed by many cultural critics. Many studies within the past twenty years have been published that attack the dominance of large, multi-faceted media companies. Media scholar Robert W. McChesney has recently published The Problem of the Media, which touches on the commercialization of the media and the problems with an "oligarchic" media market. Douglas Gomery confirms this view of the oligarchic nature of the publishing environment. Although he believes that book publishing is "not as concentrated as other mass media industries. Still there is a "Big 10."É. Only in the distribution stage of book publishing are there pronounced economies of sale of operation" (Gomery 80). Contrary to popular belief that market forces are the best way of regulating the media, McChesney explains, "this is no "natural" market. It is a market created and shaped by the government" (37). One main reason media companies have been able to increase their power in the twentieth century is through public subsidies. Book publishing in particular shows the very visible hand of the government in shaping the current media climate. As he explains, "aggressive purchasing by the federal government of nonfiction books for its overseas libraries subsidized a veritable golden age of book publishing" (37).

As McChesney notes, "today the United States has a media system dominated by a small number of very large vertically integrated corporations" (21). From films to TV and from radio to paper publishing; each sector of the media economy has its own political agenda, sustained by the federal government and paid for via lobbyists and an institutionalized system of favors for favors. He makes it clear when he highlights "The value of monopoly licenses to scarce broadcast channels, monopoly cable TV franchises, and copyright protectionÑall granted and enforced by the government, all provided at no charge to commercial interestsÑruns into the hundreds of billions of dollars" (37). McChesney recounts the story of corporate radioÕs interaction with the FCC, when upon the reform of media rules in that sector, "officials had held seventy-one closed-door, off-the-record meetings with corporate media CEOs and their lobbyists, but only five such meetings with public interest groups." It was also evident that "corporate interests had lavished $2.8 million on FCC members for junkets over the previous eight years" (282). As we can see, the resources, scope, and power of the "social nexus" of Byron's day existed in miniature compared with the media environment of today. In the world of printed text, there is the added factor that "noncommercial" writing institutions also play a role in deciding what authors and themes are available for consideration. For Example, Jed Rasula documents the importance of an "inhouse corporate publication" like the AWP, "the "corporation" being the amalgam of some three hundred affiliates of the Associated Writing Programs" (417). It is the one institution most responsible for aiding "the astonishing proliferation of poetry in the United States since the 1960s". In RasulaÕs opinion

What needs to be considered are the material consequences for poetry caught up in the ratios of "career productivity" and corporate "performance." The truly astonishing fact is that, of all things, poetry has successfully been quantified and integrated into the marketplaceÑand the vast domain of the writing programs indubitably constitutes a market. (419)

Rasula, like McChesney, links this fusing of media and money with the shrinking of the public sphere. Whereas McChesney and others look at the way the sense of a public forum has been eroded by privatized media, which Rasula doesnÕt dispute, he looks at the way the private has become a source of public attention. Rasula repudiates what Adrienne Rich calls "emotional tourism" of American letters where the private is valued over themes that take social elements into consideration. Rasula notes that "the writing programs have nurtured the rise of the new Professional Managerial Class" a social group involved in "the reproduction of capitalist culture." As he states at one point, "we need to rethink the social role of creative writing" (424).

The relationship between author and publisher is such that authors rarely succeed in living by their practice on par with other professions. As McChesney reports, "book publishing for years lived by the "80-20 rule," whereby "80 percent of the revenues are earned by 20 percent of the authors"" (Tim Burt and Carlos Grande qtd in McChesney 192). As McLeod also says, copyright serves first and foremost corporate entities:

Authorship is typically granted on behalf of publishers rather than writers.... capital investing corporations are able to stand in as an "author" through the fiction of the "corporate individual" in which corporations have been recognized as legally protected entities" (McLeod 26).

There are those who consider "copyright to be an artists' right and concern," but there is more weight to the position of Vaidhyanathan that "consider[s] the chief player in the copyright system to be the corporation"(63). Vaidhyanathan confirms the sentiment of McLeod by saying that "[c]ontrary to popular belief (and European principles) copyright is not primarily meant to grant control and benefits to authors and artists. Historically it's a publisher's law more than an author's" (93). For all the talk of Ôoriginal authorshipÕ and copyright in interest of writers, it is for the most part the authorÕs companies, not the artists themselves (via unions or writer-advocacy groups) calling for more pervasive copyright.

Where copyright was initially designed as a pact between people (via congress) and publishers and authors, recent history has shown it to have other, more important effects, that conflict with this agreement. Vaidhyanathan suggests it is "all about return on investment" for those in control of vast amounts of copyrighted content. It is a way in which companies can maintain their ability to be the sole provider of cultural products. As Vaidhyanathan says, "if someone photocopies my book, I still have my book. The fundamental purpose of intellectual property law is to create artificial scarcity" (87). It is this creation of scarcity that Vaidhyanathan believes runs counter to the existence of a healthy culture. As he says elsewhere: "The content industries have an interest in creating artificial scarcity by whatever legal and technological means they have at their disposal. Conversely, citizens and consumers have an interest in abundant information" (125).

McChesney is most concerned about the ability of citizens to effectively participate in government when the means to knowledge are so tied up in non-public, for-profit, and very political entities (of the status quo type). A secondary concern, which shows itself more prominently in the writing of Lawrence Lessig and Siva Viadhyanathan, is the effect of intellectual property legislation. On that subject, McChesney says that "the balance between copyright and the public domain began to change dramatically in the twentieth century with the rise of the corporate media system" (233). Before, tracking down copyright violations was limited by multiple conditions, like geography, the medium, and funds available to engage in trials, etc. With the rise of large corporations, these considerations are much less substantial and the interest in protecting their property is considered important enough to track down even the least threatening violations.

One critical point when studying these kind of copyright violations is that often copyright is used as an instrument or tool to silence dissent. As McLeod says, it is a distinct form of "policing of what meanings a cultural text has for people." He goes on:

an example of these ideological contestations comes from the self-publishing world of zines (short for "fan magazines"). Hey There, Barbie Girl!, a photocopied black-and-white sixteen-page zine, used the Barbie doll as the object of discourse around which creative critiques of gender and sexuality took the form of poetry, satirical advertisements and a forum for readers in the "letters to the editor" section.

[....]

Mattel did not appreciate these critiques and after the publication of the second issue titled "Our Barbies, Ourselves," the company sent the zine a letter threatening legal action, citing copyright and trademark violations. (McLeod 10)

Contestations that copyright serves writers should be put in the context of the social practices for which copyright is used. Copyright is less for artists claiming fair compensation and more a way to retain the rights of large, profitable entities. As the above example suggests, it is also a political tool, silencing even the smallest voices contrary to a businesses official public message or (in the case of a book like The Wind Done Gone) silencing the meanings in which a cultural text is allowed to participate.

Ian MacKaye and the Value of Artistic Labor

To clearly access the significance of copyright, it is enough to ask the question: what is ownership in the cultural realm? Who owns culture? Corporations? Artists? The Culture itself? McLeodÕs example of AOL/TimeWarner owning and strictly enforcing their copyright of such a common song like "Happy Birthday" should make us understand what kind of strange situation copyright or "intellectual property" really has become. Can we, as RedPaper.com has recently done, quantify the market value of a poem or song? Poems usually sell for around eleven cents on the RedPaper site. Apple iTunes and other MP3 downloading sites have set a market price on songs at seventy to ninety-nine cents. According to Downhill Battle, a pro-filesharing organization, "major label artists will end up with only 8 to 14 cents per song, depending on their contract. Many of them will never even see this paltry share because they have to pay for producers and recording costs, both of which can be enormous." Although we are nowhere near trading poem futures on Wall Street, it does raise important questions about what it means to produce, reproduce, and distribute culture in the late 20^th century.

In fact questioning the industrialized transmission of culture is not new. In the 1930Õs Walter Benjamin said, "In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production"). For starters, it is this mechanized diffusion and transmission of culture that allows us to associate "culture" with a marketable product and not imagine a world in which culture flows freely through a community. It is a question of verisimilitude by diffusion. Products of culture have become more diffuse than the songs sung around campfires and the stories told to children. Culture has never been measured by record or book sales, not by quantifiable measures, but questions of quality, what it means on a human level. Ian MacKaye, member of the band Fugazi and Dischord Records founder says, "The industry has done their best to claim ownership of music but they don'tÑthey only own the things that they sell." In fact, his claim is that culture cannot be sold at all. He continues,

Now if I make a record, if I make a CD of that song, that's property because I paid to make it. And if I sell that property, the money that comes back is my money É But this is my position: you can sell CDs, you can sell records and tapes Éand you can sell mp3s and digital downloads, you can sell all of these things, but you can't sell music because music is free. I'm serious about that. I really believe that. Music is like air, you can't sell it.

The most salient argument for the current copyright law is that without it, artists (all artists) would have no incentive to create. A cursory glance at the whole of human history would suggest that people have been creating works of art with or without monetary compensation long before property models were so deeply entrenched. Cultural production is likely to continue with or without copyright controls at any level of severity. "It can't be stopped," as MacKaye claims, "it will always happen, people will always make music, and regardless of whether or not there's money to be made form it or not, it's still going to happen." This feeling is expressed in Lawrence LessigÕs book, Free Culture, when he says "The exceptions to free use are ideas and expressions within the reach of the law of patent and copyrightÉ. Here the law says you canÕt take my idea or expression without my permission. The law turns the intangible into property" (45) Companies do not own the sources of property; they only own the means of its transmission. This is an important distinction for two reasons: one, it addresses a question of labor in the cultural realm. As MacKaye states, "If people lose their incentive to make music because they're not making money, they're not musicians. They're business people." When artists, musicians and writers create, it is a different kind of labor than creating a definable, marketable, and physical product. They are creating culture, not widgets. That does not imply that writers should not seek other means of wealth, even within the world of culture. The second reason transmission of culture needs to be differentiated from creation of culture is that it could encourage cultural workers to become more involved in the independent production and distribution of cultural products, and re-envisioning a cultural space closer to the campfire ideal, where culture is spread on local levels between social equals.

What is Theft?

Movements toward alternative views of copyright have touched upon and re-invigorated a very old thesis proposed by anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhod, that property is theft. This thinking is the basis of an extreme, fully anti-copyright strain within an alternative copyright movement. It is supported by the vision that cultural property is the sequestering of a cultural space that should be open for all. It is stolen from the community and resold to them, profiting the few at the expense of the many. To his credit, Siva Vaidhyanathan provides a decent account of the recent anarchist history. Most cultural critics like Lessig continue to write as if it doesnÕt exist and has no relevance to the debate on authorship or copyright. For current examples of active anarchism or anarchist-leaning groups, Vaidhyanathan cites youth culture, the radical ecology movement, the anarcho-syndicalists, and the Zapatista movement. Throughout the book, however, he seems to mix two different conceptions of anarchism, that which sees anarchism as chaos, and that which sees it as a progressive, "non-hierarchical, radically democratic" social vision (3). Although he says that "mature, articulated anarchist thought has been an important undercurrent in the political history over the past three hundred years," he concludes that anarchists are "unable to articulate their visions and views beyond the distorting lenses of dominant political ideologies" (5). As for their role in the discussion of copyright, anarchists are shown as developing structures (Freeweb, filesharing, and the internet itself) for the evasion of copyright, but not for imagining a civic dialogue with "the oligarchists" as he calls the pro-property crowd. Although we might get the idea that Vaidhyanathan might actually engage with anarchism, his discourse often resolves into driving a wedge between a perceived "us" (as if a book with the title The Anarchist in the Library would not be read by anarchists) and the chaotic, surly anarchists who prefer action and discuss nothing. He says, "The anarchists might seem to be our allies. But they are better at uncivil disobedience than civic discussion. We would be better off with less disobedience and more deliberation" (192).

Contrary to Vaidhyanathan's description of anarchism as street-battle, the most important efforts of anarchist practice in the past century has been in community organizing; creating autonomous space and information exchange; prison and poverty issues; and the like. These examples are hardly those of throwing bricks and smashing windows. Even if earlier he notes anarchism's preference for consensus decision making, the longest and sometimes most torturous form of decision-making, in the end he falls into the common arguments discounting anarchism, concluding that "revolution is not enough. Anarchy is not sufficient for building a life or a society" (183).

Although he does not want to be accused of "mushy liberalism," it is a little ridiculous to expect civic, deliberated discussion when as a basis of discussion, consensus presupposes that a consensus can be reached. In this case, the discussion is between people who uphold property and the market that supposedly regulates it, and others who wish to abolish property and the hierarchy it imposes. Vaidhyanathan explains that "for a brief period in late nineteenth-century American history anarchism seemed to matter, but as something to fear or oppose rather than a source of potential source of political change." Vaidhyanathan forgets to mention Benjamin Tucker, an "individualist" anarchist thinker who (apart from translating ProudhodÕs texts) developed a critique of labor and a solution that was based in mutual aid. In particular, his idea of copyright is rather interesting, though neither Vaidhyanathan nor Lessig mention it:

The patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services,Ñin other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines (13).

His comment on capitalist definitions of piracy is especially current and important to the discussions on the widespread practice of filesharing. He also questions "another absurdity of property in ideas.... We pay heavily to see Niagara Falls because we cannot reproduce Niagara Falls within walking distance of our homes. But is the fact that we must pay more for things we cannot duplicate a good reason for paying more for things that can be duplicated?" (172).

One enlightening debate in VaidhyanathanÕs book is with Randy Cohen and takes up the question of the artistÕs and writerÕs role in the area of intellectual property. Cohen says that "The history of popular culture is a continuous struggle on the artists' part not to get robbed ... it seems to be that what MP3 does is democratize the ability to rip off an artist" (Qtd in Vaidhyanathan 63). Vaidhyanathan rightly points out that it is the corporation, not the artist that is at the center of the copyright debate. What his point leaves out however, is this idea that cultural property, even before it is in the hands of the audience, constitutes theft from the artist. In this view the artist is consistently "ripped off" by the nature of the content industry that notoriously extracts profit from artists on a regular basis. What is more, as the current Apple's iTunes MP3 payment scheme suggests, musicians will be stolen from to even greater extents in the future. By concentrating on piracy as the only form of "cultural theft," both Lessig and Vaidhyanathan leave out the everyday sort of theft of artists, writers, and musicians by the cultural industry.

Differentiating Labor of Creator, Producer, Distributor, User

Vaidhyanathan verges on documenting the possibility of independent, DIY production and distribution. This idea, like the Diggers of the 1960's who "ran a "free store" that offered "liberated" goods at no cost," has the opportunity to "create the condition that it describes" (10). After telling a story of how cultural ministers from African countries wanted to get "in touch with leaders from the American music industry" to discuss distribution of African artists in digital form, Vaidhyanathan responded: "Why do they need record companies? The artists can do it all themselves for less than $10,000" (103). Before the MP3, Internet texts, and file sharing, the roles of Creator, Producer, and Distributor were contained within one or a few companies. The consumer or "user labor" consisted of going to the store, choosing, making a monetary transaction, opening a package at home and consuming. Like eating a hamburger at a drive-thru McDonalds, it required no effort. Insert product in mouth. Now in some cases, roles of creator, producer, and distributor have been mixed. When someone creates an MP3 through software, this is labor. Downloading means waiting patiently and sometimes researching for possible sources, so there is expenditures of time involved. If one categorizes products and in some way prepare them for re-sharing, they've added their labor to that "product" which has become "raw material." It even requires labor to pirate music or software or texts, and as Vaidhyanathan shows, many impoverished nations would not have access to software and content otherwise. If we want to reward labor, we should at least be serious about the sources of labor. The only argument currently used (that producers in the large monopoly sense require compensation) is based on an outdated conception of the producer/consumer dynamic. In some cases, like file sharing, the consumer is now taking part in the productive process. Some new technologies have made possible open, collaborative platforms like the Wiki that put forth the idea that ownership is in fact the ability to labor on a cultural object. In the next chapter, I will discuss these examples of new media that call into question both the ownership of culture and what it means to labor in culture.

CHAPTER I