Session/culture

Arts and Culture on a Public Good Internet

We don't yet have a coherent way to frame this discussion, so - lacking this - let's start with an incoherent set.

• Is culture a public good?
• What does it mean when cultural artifacts cost nothing to copy?
• Is remixing art?
• How does mega-publishing of content change the idea of derivative works?
• Does the Net mean that we will all return to being active co-creators of culture?
• How does a culture change when a majority of its participants gain access to broadcast media?
• When does 'noise' on the Net enhance meaning?

Lewis - can you add in your thoughts?

A note on tricksters as creators of culture.

-- Lewis Hyde

Almost every world mythology contains a trickster figure, a shameless fellow who lies, cheats, and steals with charming and divine aplomb. The Greek Hermes rustles the cattle of the gods; the North American Coyote tries to sleep with his daughter; the Norse Loki gives his fellow gods gray hair by stealing the Apples of Immortality. In West Africa, a trickster named Eshu got the creator drunk at the beginning of time, which is one reason this world is not such an ideal place (and why my book about these things is called Trickster Makes This World; other gods tried to perfect things, but trickster messed them up, and this is the world we have).

Since the beginning of time these cosmic mischief-makers have been a great bother to have around, but that is not the end of it: tricksters turn out to be indispensable culture heroes as well. Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing, and shoot arrows. Eshu taught men and women a way to know what the gods are thinking.

As for art and culture, our word "art" comes from an ancient root that means "to join" and "to make." Many other modern words come from the same root, all of them having to do with joints in one sense or another. "Arthritis" is a disease of the joints; an "arthropod" is an insect with jointed legs. "Articulate" usually denotes clarity of speech, but one can also "articulate" a skeleton, which is to say, assemble it joint by joint.

Even when used to describe speech, "articulate" can mean "jointed": ancient script used to be written in one long line of letters; when writers began to break it into words, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth, they were "articulating" it, marking the logical joints in the flow of letters. In the same way we can speak of society as being "well articulated" when its joints are clear to everyone, which is to say, when everyone knows his or her place, and where the limits lie.

Tricksters are usually thought of as boundary crossers, characters who find the limits and violate them, or keep them lively. I have ended up reimagining this function, saying that tricksters are "joint-workers." They seek out the joints of this world--sometimes to disrupt them, sometimes to move them, and sometimes just to keep them limber.

There is a trickster figure from the mountains of southern Russia, for example, who is known for having reversed the fortunes of the Sun God by attacking his knee joints. "If you want to wound an immortal, go for the joints," is the lesson, and all tricksters know it. Frederick Douglass knew it; his first book attacked the "joints" by which plantation culture articulated itself--especially the "joint" between black and white--and in so doing helped bring an end to the planters' world.

Most tricksters are less direct than that; they like to toy with the joints of creation, and shift them around. A modern artist like Marcel Duchamp is a clear heir to this tradition. He liked best to settle, smiling, into the cracks of the art world's self-image. When that world was in love with oil paint, he made his art from sheets of glass and ideas; when it sought to distinguish art work from manufactured goods, he pronounced the latter "readymade" art, and got some of it into museums; when it insisted that great art was an expression of an artist's high intentions, he courted chance and self-forgetfulness.

Tricksters sometimes attack the joints of creation, and sometimes simply oil the joints with humor, keeping them flexible. All those who do so are artists in the most ancient sense, and their creations, no matter how unsettling, are the works of art that make this world what it is.

How might all this apply to the internet? A trickster reading of the internet would ask questions about the boundaries, the joints. There might be two approaches:

• What old boundaries have been disrupted, altered, moved, or destroyed by the rise of the internet?

• What new boundaries have been created?

In either case, trickster's actions always call out the moralists: are these things good or bad? More profoundly, have the changing boundaries also altered our sense of these categories too--are there things that used to be bad that now seem good? Vice versa?