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Category Archives: inequality

Limited Common Property, Fandom, and Indigenous Knowledges

Because the tech-support people I need to talk to in order to straighten out a data analysis snafu are in Germany, creating temporal challenges, I’ve been catching up on reading. As a result, I had just read Carol Rose’s 1998 piece The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems when an email came in from SumofUs.org with a petition against Nestlé’s attempt to patent the medicinal use of the fennel flower.

A few days before that, the monthly UC Berkeley newsletter had a story about scientists who were launching a drug company based on producing an antimalarial chemical synthetically in yeast instead of in its plants of origin. I was already familiar with the malaria example because my friend Josh Kellogg, who’s an ethnopharmacologist, was working on malaria treatments from natural sources as his PhD project until the money dried up in favor of synthetics—which, he pointed out to me, ultimately derive from knowledge of plant sources anyway (as in the Berkeley research case).

Perfect storm weeks like this get me thinking and make me want to work through connections, so that’s what I want to do here. I’ve written before about privatizing fandom and enclosing the commons, but Rose’s piece gave me a new angle on the commons that I think is useful for the work I’m doing on fandom in my dissertation—that of capitalist disrespect and appropriation of indigenous intellectual property.

Now, this is mine-filled territory, because it risks evoking the logic of pure, uncorrupted-by-civilization (and thus implicitly uncivilized) indigeneity I critiqued in The Trouble with Tribals.  So, to be clear, the idea of indigenous intellectual property is being used here to think with, to structurally or metaphorically denote a group with a different set of values than the dominant ones of capital and a different set of beliefs about ownership and individual creativity, which are devalued by the dominant both because of these different values and for other reasons (racism in the literal-indigeneity case and sexism/devaluation of emotion in the fan case).

The connection of intellectual property concerns to indigenous people is not novel—Rose herself notes that in the forms of property she discusses “both factors—unconventional communal claims and unrecognized social status—overlap and conspire against property recognition. Historically, this was perhaps most noticeable in European encounters with Native Americans” (p. 141). What I want to do here is work through what this looks like for fandom alongside this Nestlé case to see what this renders visible.

First, what we see in the Nestlé patent of longstanding knowledge and industry efforts to monetize fandom is that things known or produced by certain groups don’t count as owned by them.

On one hand, this is because the claims to property often don’t take recognizable shapes in these cases—as Rose puts it, they “do not look like property at all to us” (p. 140). Rose’s piece traces out a theory of a property format called “limited common property,” which is “property on the outside, commons on the inside” (p. 144). That is, it’s not a pure commons, because not everybody is eligible to exploit it, but those who are on the inside can make use of it as completely as is allowed within the norms of the community.

This, to me, looks a lot like fandom: everybody in the community has shared access to everybody else’s stories, vids, meta, etc., but—in part due to stigma—there’s a protective attitude in relation to outsiders. It’s also like the fennel flower case: “everybody knows” the value of the plant, but that doesn’t make it a free-for-all for capital.

Related to this, which Rose raises but doesn’t really delve into, is “questions of alienability” (p. 140); limited common property isn’t very alienable because, unlike standard property, no one person owns it, such that nobody can really sell it off, and particularly not for individual gain.

This, I think, is part of why “pulling to publish”—the practice of converting fan fiction into novels like 50 Shades of Gray by renaming the characters (and then deleting the original)—is often frowned upon in fan communities. Yes, a person wrote it, but they generally did so in a community. And indefinable but vital contributions arise from interaction with those community members, such that then denying them access is denying recognition for their labor in favor of the single creative figure of the author.

This isn’t necessarily nefarious (although it can be). Mostly I’d attribute it to the fact that “the author principle is easy”: “it is easier to identify a single author (or definite set of authors) than an amorphous group, like a ‘village’; it is easier to identify a sharply unusual intellectual product than one that builds incrementally on the ideas of others, like a folktale; it is easier to mark out a product of sudden innovation than a gradual modification of nature, like a village’s long-cultivated plant product” (Rose p. 152).

This is also what makes Nestlé’s grab make sense (from an intellectual property standpoint, though clearly not a moral one). The SumofUs email noted that “in a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to ‘discover’ what much of the world has known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for ‘nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy’.”

This claim to discovery works because the knowledge is common across “much of the world” and no one really owns it, so Nestlé sees an opening to claim ownership. The problem with this is alienability. “Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission” (SumofUs); nobody owns it, but it’s because everybody owns it.

As Rose notes, “the extension of the author or inventor principle privileges the contributions of the industrialized West over those of non-Western cultures, among other matters by rejecting intellectual property status of folklore or for carefully cultivated plant products from third-world agrarian groups” (p. 151).

In this case, it’s even more absurd than usual, since Nestlé wasn’t even the first to translate this communal knowledge into the language of science—“researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own” (SumofUs). But then, it may well be that those scientists don’t “count” in the same way as a multinational corporation.

This idea of limited common property is useful because it explains how people can seemingly share things freely and at the same time have a right not to have that appropriated by capital. But because these are nonstandard kinds of claims about property, based in nonstandard, more communal and less individualistic value systems, made by less-valued people, running over that right to not be appropriated is startlingly easy.

Mickee Faust and the Trouble with Hyperbole

Dear readers,

After an unreasonably long hiatus, I am now once more able to carve out time for this blog. I hope to never abandon you for so long again. And now, for the latest installment . . .

On Saturday, November 17, while at the National Communication Association conference in Orlando, FL, I attended a performance by Tallahassee-based performance troupe Mickee Faust, and I really liked it. I liked their intentionally bad jokes. I liked their skewering of the bourgeois dessert negotiation. I liked their Alice in Wonderland take on the TEA Party. I was with them the whole way.

I was even with them when they sang a song about abortion and the constitution dressed as Supreme Court justices and then put on Klan hoods. At least at first. Or, it didn’t jolt me out of the space of watching the performance or make me want to walk out or anything. I texted a picture of it to my colleague who studies the rhetoric of race and sexuality in Supreme Court decisions, like “you missed this!”

But afterwards I found myself really wanting to talk about it. I showed my conference roommate the picture. I texted it to my two friend-colleagues with whom I discuss race and sexuality. I didn’t know why, yet. I just needed to tell people.

It wasn’t until one friend wrote back “What?! I do not understand! Why aren’t people objecting? This seems really wrong” that I was able to identify what I was feeling as unsettled. So then, a couple more texts with that friend and the other one who whom I’d sent it, and a phone call, and I figured I needed to blog about it. (As, to be honest, was suggested by the friend quoted above.)

Abortion rights are important. The denial of abortion rights is absolutely a means by which women have it enforced on them that they are second class citizens. (And non-uterus-having humans are also reminded that uterus-havers are inferior and incapable of making their own decisions about said baby-incubating organ.)

This is not the same as a systematic campaign of violence intended to terrorize a population.

There is a case to be made for systematic terror campaigns against abortion doctors—but even then it is nothing like the same scale. This is not a case where every member of a population lives under the constant threat of being identified as a target when visually identified through racist optics.

When you compare everything to the worst-case scenario, the worst-case scenario loses its meaning. As my colleague T.J. Tallie put it in discussing how people have been responding to the recent escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, “can we not directly compare nations to Nazis right now? Not to make Nazis particularly ‘evil’, but it cheapens the historical reality.”

This is also the problem with the “gay rights are like civil rights” discourse. Gay folks—the white, middle class gay folks who tend to want to get married—are not systematically denied access to basic services and rights. They’re denied access to a privileged-person state-sanctioned economic benefit. And yes, it is a helpful thing to have access to because it’s a means by which resources are distributed, but it supports an incredibly unequal system wherein capital can exploit productive wage laborers because those workers are exploiting reproductive laborers. And just throwing around civil rights analogies erases the substantial difference in privilege in the two cases.

Ultimately, these things aren’t comparable. And I’m perhaps most distressed by the fact that the troupe had otherwise progressive politics. They were perhaps a little too self-congratulatory on their inclusion of folks with visible disabilities, but they were clearly thinking in broad terms about society and its ills.

Granted, it was mentioned in the question and answer period that the performance at NCA came from their retrospective showcase and that particular piece was written 25 years ago, which was admittedly an era of less awareness around the issues I’m raising here. But they’re still doing the sketch.

And, just to head this critique off at the pass if anyone from the troupe or who attended the NCA performance should want to make it, the fact that there are people of color in the troupe—and in that sketch, even—does not mean that it is not problematic. The existence of one or some members of a structurally undervalued group who aren’t offended by something doesn’t mean it doesn’t participate in deeply troublesome logics.

In the end, Mickee Faust is an awesome social critique cabaret. I would go see them again. I might even pay for it as opposed to having it be a conference panel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need critiquing. And in this case they clearly do.

In that spirit of friendly critique from someone who shares Mickee Faust’s overall goals and politics, I have deliberately not linked to their website or included any pictures, since I don’t want this to seem like an attack or an invitation to attack them.

The Class Politics of #middleclassbands

Earlier this week, the hashtag #middleclassbands was trending on Twitter, and in that such tags tend to please my love of clever wordplay I clicked over to see. And indeed it was the case that linguistic ingenuity abounded, but what I didn’t expect to find is wild disagreement over what constitutes middle-classness.

Granted, some of this may be contortions produced by the need to be punny, but within the general categories of things middle-class folks are imagined to do and be and buy there were what seemed to me to be downright contradictions.

Tweet-ers identified this group as consuming Applebee’s (which strikes me as lower in the class spectrum), hummus (which seems about right for bourgie foodie types), and foie gras (pretty upper class).

 

 

Middle class folks, the TT contended, drive station wagons and Range Rovers (things which are not like each other). They also shop at IKEA, which I for one know as a place folks go for cheap furniture (sometimes, cheap furniture that looks expensive).

 

 

The middle class can also be identified, according to Twitter-ers, by its correct spelling, linking this class status to education.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Except when it’s pretentious.

 

 

Or pedantic.

 

 

Indeed, the only thing that Twitter seemed to agree on about middle-class folks is that they work in office jobs, which I guess does confirm the death of union-enabled blue collar middle-classness.

What’s interesting about this is not that some of these people are “right” in identifying the middle class and some are “wrong.” It’s that “middle class” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

The hashtag was started by UK-based The Poke, seemingly a humor site. Thus, some of the tweets are likely from Brits, whereas others are from elsewhere (not least because there are no Applebee’s in the UK, according to the company’s site). Indeed, many of them “feel” American to me, though that may be ethnocentrism on my part.

Class varies rather dramatically between nations, to be sure, but also, as my parenthetical notes above were intended to suggest, it also varies within nations. Not sure why I keep using the Applebee’s example, but it may well be solidly middle-class for certain populations within the US even though it strikes me as trashy (which, let there be no mistake, is not a criticism but what I like about it).

This lack of agreement about what it means to be a member of a particular class is especially important in the contemporary moment as class is put back on the table in US politics. In the UK, it was always a term of relevance (and means your class of birth, not your contemporary income status, as I learned while using a demographic sheet designed with American sensibilities to collect data about a Brit), but—likely due to some combination of American individualist ideology and decades of anticommunist hysteria—it has not tended to be used in everyday discourse in my lifetime (though I myself see and use it a lot as a Marxist-flavor academic).

However, with the 2011 rise of Occupy Wall Street and its discourse of the 1% vs. the 99%, and with the Obama campaign’s appeals to improving the lot of the middle class rather than giving tax cuts to the wealthy, people are starting to speak the language of class again. The question is, though, which language is that?

If one’s “middle class” appeals are pitched at the foie gras and Range Rover crowd, the Applebee’s and station wagon folks will be alienated. If you call out folks making over $200,000 a year as wealthy it’ll hold for lots of parts of the country, but not places where the cost of living is sky-high, because there those folks are decidedly middle-class.

There are pitfalls to putting class back into the discussion, then, but that should not be taken to mean we shouldn’t do it. Indeed, these pitfalls are, I think, the result of the fact that class has been off the radar for so long that there has been no opportunity to form a popular consensus about what it means.

It’s this lack of knowledge that enables a state in which, to be flippant, everyone thinks they are middle class and will someday be rich if they work hard enough, and therefore are not only opposed to redistributive policies but tend to vote against their own current economic interests.

So this TT’s motley composition, far from being a sign of lazy tweeting, is actually pretty revealing about how class works in the US in the contemporary moment.

Blogs are going to be a bit patchy for a while. Though there are lots of important and interesting things happening in the world right now, not many are jumping out at me as suitable for this genre. Also I’m going to be traveling for most of July.

Hipster Colonialism and the “Ironic” T-shirt

There’s no love lost between me and hipsterism. Frankly, anybody trying that hard to be cool is, in my book, automatically uncool. Also, we have the technology for gears; why do they insist on riding fixies? However, I’m going to attempt to bracket that annoyance in general in order to examine some particular cultural objects.

Translation: I am a conquistador. Give me your land.

A few weeks ago, I got an email advertisement from a company from which I have purchased t-shirts in the past announcing new designs. Among them was the one to the right.

And I paused on it for a while, and came back to it in my inbox a couple of times. I thought about sending it to my colleague who is a Spaniard, to tease him. Or my colleague who has written about the Myth of Discovery and colonizing the Latina body, to see what she’d make of it.  But ultimately I just deleted the email.

Then, this week, a new email with new designs, and these two:

 

 

And at that point, I knew I had to blog about it. This is not to call out Cotton Factory, who makes all three shirts, as the problem; I like (and own) some of their stuff. They’re a symptom, and I’m sure that there are many other shirts out there that operate in this same orbit. These just happen to be the shirts of which I am aware.

So, hipsters are known for their attachment to doing things ironically. They do things that are uncool on purpose in order to be cool. We can, therefore, reasonably assume that the people making these shirts and those who might purchase them know that if worn seriously these shirts would be awful, and that this is what makes them awesome in the hipster mindset.

There’s an additional layer here, which I realized after being getting this retweet: “As irritating as hipsters may be, prevalence of ‘smart in a hot way’ types in those circles is good for all” (which I’ll keep anonymous to protect the innocent).

Part of what makes these shirts work for hipster purposes, that is, is that they require a certain level of education to understand. You have to have a smattering of Spanish or know a little about the role of smallpox in the colonization of the Americas or have a smidgen of comfort with looking at the bad things white folks have done.  Some of the smug satisfaction a hipster would get from these shirts, then, is how much one has to know to understand them.

But therein lies the problem. The shirts are so troubling because they both congratulate their reader for knowing so much and rely on a fundamental lack of understanding of the severity of the events in question.

Raping and pillaging native peoples is not funny, not matter how “ironic” you think you’re being.

Taking native peoples’ land away is not funny, not matter how “ironic” you think you’re being.

Virtually eradicating the people of a continent with disease, which then facilitates the pillaging and land-taking, is not funny, not matter how “ironic” you think you’re being.

There’s something deeply wrong with reducing these incredible historical injustices and death and mayhem to t-shirt sayings. Indeed, in some sense the hipsters who make and buy these shirts are themselves engaging in a colonialist project through appropriating history as a punchline—now with bonus smug satisfaction at their own intelligence!

Or, perhaps, they’re supporting colonialism by making it a joke, because if it’s just funny we don’t have to deal with it and look hard at how we in the US (and elsewhere, but the buyers and sellers of these shirts are likely primarily United-Statesian) continue to benefit from colonialism, neocolonialism, economic imperialism, etc. down to the present. Making jokes about things imagined to be 500 years in the past seems ok, because it’s bygones and we know better now—but that misses a lot about the basis of the contemporary world.

Perhaps most damningly, the shirts can’t guarantee how they’ll be read. The makers and intended purchasers are doing it with irony, but other people may well take them seriously when they buy them or see them on the street, thus promoting the thing the shirts mean to ever-so-mildly condemn.

Ultimately, then, no matter how you slice it, it’s hipster colonialism, FTL.

Adventures in Stereotyping: People Who Should Know Better Edition

This week, I’ve been provoked into critiquing the casual ease with which people who, by all indications, ought to understand how to avoid stereotyping reproduce the reduction of groups people to the least common stereotype.

Now, I have myself been nailed for this. I wrote in a response paper for my Ethnic Studies 10AC course that “when I think Asian, I don’t think turban” as part of my discussion of the ways Indians get elided. And I was meaning this as a commentary on other people reducing Sikhs to turbans, but that wasn’t clear, and I got a very snarky comment in the margin from my TA. My fault for not being precise. Bad 17 year old me!

I want to distinguish the objects of my ire here from the Unintentionally Hilarious Figure  version of stereotyping, where people had actually found a pattern among groups of people but then just reported it without the necessary commentary or critique:

 

(I’m pretty sure this got from the Atlantic to me via @anetv  but Twitter’s extreme non-searchability precludes verifying. I’ll give her credit anyway.)

Instead, what I’m interested in is the ways that knowledgeable people, generating a name or an image, are using extremely loaded iconography that reproduces stereotypes when they don’t have to. They’re starting from scratch—with the acknowledgement that “scratch” is “the ideas already swirling around in culture around the objects they’re describing”—and yet they deploy these stereotyped ideas, seemingly without sufficient thinking-through.

This first came to my attention when I was forwarded a call for papers: From Veiling to Blogging: Women and Media in the Middle East. This was a goodly while ago now, but it sat there in my inbox until quite recently. The subject is not my area of expertise, so I wasn’t going to submit and should probably have just deleted it. But every time I came to it, I just got mad and tempted to fire off a reply to the listserv about it. I didn’t, because I burn enough bridges on a day-to-day basis without resorting to nuclear tactics, but it was really frustrating.

What was particularly problematic about it was that the people doing the special issue should have known better. The general public discourse around this may well be still about “white people saving brown women from brown men”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak specified men doing the saving in the case of sati, but the way some feminists have picked up the veil and run with it makes it an equal opportunity formula—but academics should really know better, because “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is as old as I am.

And indeed the organizers did, in fact, know better, because the actual text of the CFP started out by framing the special issue as a critique of precisely the way that “Middle Eastern women have traditionally been viewed as weak and submissive, passively accepting male authority and leadership rather than seeking to be a leader in their own right” as well as how “women of the Middle East have been portrayed as helpless creatures who are often hidden behind the veil, quietly waiting to be liberated.”

It’s therefore baffling to me why on earth they’d frame the topic as “from veiling to blogging.” Why imply that’s a chronological shift in “women and media in the Middle East” rather than (as they probably intended) in the thinking on women and media in that region? Why redeploy the veil at all, given the enormous risks of re-instantiating the very discourse they’re attempting to dispute?

The second entry in the “wow, you didn’t think that through” file, and the one that solidified my determination to write this blog post, comes from reading the article Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes, which I got from @mikemonello

So there I am, scrolling down, not finding the geometric shapes particularly illuminating—the black and white X for Nihilism, sure, but many of the other Venn diagram-looking ones didn’t strike me as the “surprisingly simple and accessible package” the article’s introduction had promised—when I get to Hedonism and come to a screeching halt.

 

Really? A pink triangle for Hedonism? What decade is this that we’re still reinforcing the idea that gay sex is about irresponsible pleasure-seeking and gay folks have a worldview in which, as the poster-makers describe Hedonism, “Pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Actions can be evaluated in terms of how much pleasure they produce”?  I mean, yes, clearly that’s the world Rick Santorum and other far-right ideologues live in, but the rest of us get that homos are no more or less irresponsible in their pleasure-seeking than anyone else.

If these are people who have enough grasp on philosophy to make posters summarizing it, they should be no strangers to sophisticated thinking. And they should therefore have enough intelligence and sense of the world to think of something considerably less reductive. Like the veiling example, some people may not know better, but these people should.

And I guess that’s the issue. How will the general public know any better if we who do aren’t more careful in how we communicate, to each other (the CFP) and to people in general (the posters)?