Copyleft authenticity

[imomus]

I want to draft this idea as clearly and concisely as I would a patent application. My idea is to apply the Copyleft idea to authenticity as it plays out, for instance, in popular music. Copyleft, simply stated, is the idea that we make our intellectual products open-source and communal. Anyone can have free access to them and change them, on condition that the changed version itself stays open source; that it, in turn, can be modified by anyone and remains free to all. You can't take code from a copyleft program free and then make something with it which you charge money for.

Now, let's apply this principle to authenticity. Let's say I'm a middle-class Jewish student from Minneapolis. I become fascinated by Woody Guthrie, mainly because of his authenticity. Now, it's fine for me to become a sort of fake Woody Guthrie, to copy Woody Guthrie, make changes to his style, go electric, whatever. But I mustn't then make my actions the basis for a new claim to authenticity (by, for instance, publishing an autobiography that portrays me as some sort of wandering visionary hobo who never quite mastered conventional English prose style). Just as copyleft asks me to keep my coding activity always in the realm of the non-commercial, so copyleft authenticity demands that I keep my musical activity always in the realm of the fake. And just as copyleft demands that software remain open to all programmers, so copyleft authenticity demands that anyone can become a fake version of me the same way I became a fake version of someone else. I cannot kick away the ladder of fakery. I cannot disapprove of fakery, having used it to climb to where I am today. I cannot close the gate and make this space private property.

There are two problems with the copyleft model of authenticity, though. The first involves "the dark star phenomenon". (I came up with this idea during a conversation with Stephin Merrit.) "The dark star phenomenon" states that authenticity is relative. It's possible that for every star we believe to be the epitome of authenticity there's a hidden model, a "dark star", who served as his inspiration. Woody Guthrie himself, for instance, "just ripped off Dark Star X". All Woody's authenticity cred then rushes, like matter into a black hole, towards the "dark star". But then some music snob tells us that Dark Star X ripped everything off from Dark Star Z. And so on.

The second problem is that authenticity claims may not be what they seem. They may in fact be the best way of establishing one's fakeness. Like Sherlock Holmes in one of his infernal disguises, the best faker is one who can pass as the real thing. The artist most dedicated to inauthenticity is not the one claiming to be fake, but the one claiming to be real. No wonder Bob Dylan's songs are full of card sharps and poker faces.

"Hello, Patent Office? I want to register an authentic new idea. Oh, wait, never mind..."

Comments

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Would academic study be an original copyleft idea? As in, you must a) cite the sources I base work on, not mis-represent those sources, and give due credit to the authors / creators, and b) any work that you produce is placed in public and is for the benefit of the rest of the academic community to work on as they choose, so long as a0 and b) are followed.

[fufurasu.livejournal.com]

The second problem is that authenticity claims may not be what they seem. They may in fact be the best way of establishing one's fakeness. Like Sherlock Holmes in one of his infernal disguises, the best faker is one who can pass as the real thing.

Uncharacteristically too much attention given to "authenticity" for the pomo context of the rest of Click Opera. :) Besides, we all know only Coca-Cola® is the real thing™.

I think that the trick is to understand that there is value in the appropriation and the modification of something existing. The person who appropriates and modifies creates entirely new semantic content merely by selecting what to appropriate and in what context (think Duchamp). So while credit might be due to the designer of the original urinal, there should be no doubt that the modified work is entirely different, special, and valuable. An intellectual property system must therefore not only allow derivative works, but recognise the value in them.

I am a fan of Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), as are increasingly more recording artists. Using CC you can specify whether the creation of derivative works is allowed, whether crediting the original is required, whether commercial exploitation of the derivative work is kosher, and whether it is a required that the derivative work is offered under the same license as the original. Pick and mix. Both my PhD thesis and my blog are under CC licences.

(Incidentally, standard copyright notices for academic works require the researcher to ask permission from the author of each work he cites, something that is never practical. Using a CC license allows anyone to cite you as long as they credit you. Simple.)

Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

I like this idea, but isn't it one that is already in practice (albeit unofficially), as evidenced by the continued unfolding of human culture? The worlds of art and philosophy act on this principle anyway; what would be great was if commercial and technological people took it up! I'm not sure that I agree with the authenticity thing either. What was Dylan meant to do? I'm not sure of his exact provenance, but are we to expect him to use old Jewish scales and Hassidic poetry as the sources for his music, in a bid to remain "authentic"? In whose eyes, and why should he? He picked up on the American folk tradition (which of course he had every right to do, were that rights required for such things), and the melodies and words came pouring from him. There's that seen in "Don't Look Back" where it cuts from him being a New York hipster in London to some rough footage of him in a field surrounded by what look like black farm workers. He's wearing dungarees and looks like an Okie hick. Perhaps one could take the piss if he didn't pull it off. But of course he does; after singing "Pawn in the Game" he gets an appreciative round of applause; and even though we're not there, we can still feel why. And what does the performance amount to? A bravura show of genuine folk singing, rounded of with some authentic middle class Jewish social concern. Later of course, he was to mix French symbolist and beat poetry to powerful effect. Did he have more "right" to the beat poetry? Or is that different because poetry's a "higher form" than folk music? Authenticity isn't the issue; it's capability, here and now.

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

Scene rather.

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

And "off", of course.

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

Christ, I really ought to proof read. The last sentence should read something like "If not, is it because poetry's a higher art form?"

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was ok as it was. What was I going on about? Call me the tautologist!

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

I think you are imposing limits to the range of authenticity that weren't in Momus' piece. Your point about capability is well taken, but I didn't get a sense that human or artistic inspiration is supposed to come from one source and follow that source with dedication throughout one's life. Dylan's capability as you accurately note, allows him to explore his inauthenticity in a myriad of genres or cultural traditions.

If the inspiration that caused us to imitate were limited to our specific background, we'd A) be an entirely boring lot and B) the unique varations we created in our revision or imitation of established works would drastically decrease. I think it is through the pulling together of our varied influences that we make the leaps in knowledge or science or technology...however inauthentic they may be.

I think part of the problem of swallowing the idea of inauthentic is that we have always interpreted the term as something negative. But Momus' broader definition seems to embrace the notion of collective history. My only concern is, in its most idealistic form, could it survive in a capitalistic society.

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

I meant to end that with a ? not a .

Re: Black Hands Clapping

[jackjellicoe.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps my reaction was a little knee-jerky, but it stems ultimately from the feeling that notions of authenticity and fakery are fundamentally nothing more than verbal play - finally, I would say, the proof is in the pudding (once we stand in front of the singer, the poet or the painting, the dichotomy will melt according to our judgment). Momus celebrates fakery and so he might, having assumed various guises and assimilated different influences. I wouldn't call him a faker, but if that's how he sees it, fine. I think the range of authenticity (within his model) has limits explicitly imposed in Momus' short piece: he definitely seems to see Dylan as inauthentic for assuming the role of "pseudo-Guthrie visionary hobo" or whatever. I wouldn't accept this view for a number of reasons - the one that comes to mind most forcibly is that the artist's inner world is his own, and questions of sincerity or authenticity are answered in the perusal of his externally expressed work. I apparently judge differently to Momus. I agree with you wholeheartedly when you say that we should freely draw from all wells, but the notion of inauthenticity that Momus suggests is inherent in so doing is not one I buy.

Not playing with the full deck

[(Anonymous)]

The notion of a copy implies the existence of an 'original', and even implies that if the 'copy' is 100% accurate it would still be inferior to the model, as it lacks the model's 'freshness' - its 'originality' in fact. Say we debunk originality as a relative quality (there's always a president on some plane), the next step could be to remove 'comparison' (too twentieth century), and look for a different way of looking at difference itself. Say we percieve everything (a cat) as a co-existence of the 'real' and a set of virtual ideas (intuition, knowledge, memory of cats and how they behave), to the point where the word 'cat' doesn't even need to conjur an image in our heads. The original cat exists in the virtual, which if removed would give the real cat more freedom. Seperating might disappoint, a 'cat' is not a 'rocket' and our real cat will behave pretty much as cats do. So the real and virtual have to co-exist. The answer lies, somewhere, in taking the planes and rearranging them, including, importantly, 'us' as perceiver. The sequence of planes of meaning (like a pack of cards filed in order) can be shuffled, but only if our own deck goes with it ('originals' can often simply be the people who put something onto a new medium first, when our deck was shuffled too) with the intention of not using one card/plane to lead the sequence through all others. Memories may be there partly to arrest the freedom to disappoint, but a successor to 'comparison' is surely due.

[d-g-m.livejournal.com]

Ha. Your a Pisces right?
Total absorption of ideas with no use for consistency or organisation.
Are you being critical of this process?
Just the other day you wrote -what I took as- a positive review how the Japanese are ahead in the Postmodern.
Isn't your theory here just a poorly thought out paraphrased, "Copyleft", construction of Postmodernism?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I wish the accusations of unclear thinking and writing I get could at least be as clear as my "unclear" original post.

Your a Pisces right?

I'm an Aquarius. But if you think astrology has more explanatory value than postmodernism, we don't have much more to discuss.

I don't see anything "inconsistent" in what I'm saying here, or anything "poorly thought out". My position is that fakeness is freedom. Anyone can be fake. In that sense it's like open source. Authenticity, however, is a closed system, like private property. There are various barriers, hurdles, padlocks, ladders to authenticity. Just as you have to pay for a piece of private property (which then restricts access to all but you), you have to "pay your dues" to attain authenticity. It's paid for usually by suffering. Those of us who buy into this mythology (and I don't) disdain arrivistes, upstarts, montebanks, impostors with as much vehemence as a property-owner disdains an intruder on his land. Copyleft is a part of postmodernism's egalitarian and flattening tendencies. It's part of the ongoing de-hierarchicalisation of original and copy, surface and depth, high and low, etc.

So yes, my theory here is a copyleft construction of postmodernism. And because I'm an Aquarius, I phrased it as elegantly as I could. We're communicators, you know. Air sign.

(i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

But out of curiosity; you're talking about a shift in attitude primarily, towards fakery or inauthenticity? I personally don't find anything wrong with it, and it's really kind of inevitable...

Re: (i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What I had in mind was the formulation of a moral precept that would say it's fine to be fake, but not to use one's fakeness as a new claim to authenticity. I could have used a metaphor about kicking away ladders, or a metaphor about throwing stones in glass houses. Instead, I used the metaphor of copyleft. Copyleft fitted my idea because it contains this idea "don't take into the private domain what you find in the public domain". Real / fake and private / public map quite well to each other, metaphorically.

Re: (i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

Well put; I think it's interesting, too, sort of, that when you take something out of the domain of "authenticity," (especially 'charges of inauthenticity') it takes on less of a fuming-moral-wrath sort of tone and becomes something valuable, even. If I take some idea of yours and do something with it and call it "development," it's worthy; if someone else watches and calls it a pose, it's awful....

Re: (i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(stirs tea in corner, glances about anxiously, takes a sudden interest in nearby curios)

Re: (i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Take Whimsy, for example. He's a mountebank, an impostor. But I don't mind! It's okay! Americans can be aristocrats too! Why ever not? We're great friends!

Re: (i hope this doesnt look accusatory)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Guilty as charged, I'm afraid--although I'd say that I'm more of a chutney-bottomed ninnyroger or finical dapperling. It's curious how, over time, a playful jibe of a nickname can become a personal constellation.

Do you take sugar?

W

PS: My congratulations on your new art venue, Nick. I'm sure you're thrilled.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

you have to "pay your dues" to attain authenticity

And I guess it's true you can't just proclaim yourself authentic, you have to be accepted as authentic by others, critics, other "authentics". Fake until proven authentic.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Deep enough to be shallow, authentic enough to be fake and Aquarius enough to realize that there are more flaming chunks of gas in the universe than the sun.

[odyshape.livejournal.com]

This is my new sig.

[dorontheos.livejournal.com]

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Cimer Theosdoron. Ai'j un peu betomb reuseamour de toi... (http://mn3monic.free.fr/photography/novembre2003/00h00/05.jpg)

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/userpic/28324221/1898080
This latest userpic of yours is great. When our college professor used to talk about the gnu-people (open source community), this is what I'd imagine one of them would look like...or one of those scientists in the first Half-life game ("Go away, Gordon. We can talk after the experiment.")...or Bruno S. (in the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)...
This is the second best pic, the best being the one where you're walking around with a cock in tow. (I see you've removed that one)

Hmm

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I first heard of "copyleft" idea this week. Is it more like it can only work for the greater good at certain media around?

I mean, the sony walkman cassettes was sort of copyleft. No patent. And it was back in the 70ths!

So, if a person don't get patent for an idea or a machine. Is it counted as "copyleft"?

Should Copyleft and copyright be two different poles or would a fusion be a good answer?

Who can tell?

[ex-mimic736.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you also discussed the particular darkness of the stars in question, but Stephin contributed this thought to a few million disposable paper cups via this Starbucks initiative (http://www.starbucks.com/retail/thewayiseeit_default.asp):

Music is categorized mostly according to the ethnicity of its performers: folk, rock and church music performed by African-Americans are called blues, rhythm & blues and gospel. If books were sold that way, the shops would be picketed.

?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Does your question mark imply you think that's a strange statement? I think Stephin is calling attention to a kind category apartheid which exists in record stores. I completely agree with him that it's absurd. Record shops should be alphabetical. No categories at all.

Fischerspooner revisited

[instant-c.livejournal.com]

The artist most dedicated to inauthenticity is not the one claiming to be fake, but the one claiming to be real. No wonder Bob Dylan's songs are full of card sharps and poker faces.

Funny how Dylan wasn't even the first middle class Jewish kid to rip Guthrie, in fact he learned how to be Guthrie from Elliott Eidnepose (Ramblin' Jack Elliott), Guthrie's only protege.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Do you see Copyleft as a convenient analogy only, or is there also something to the idea that the profit motive affects our ideas of the real? What I'm thinking is that marketability is not a measure of authenticity, but it isn't an indicator of unabashed fakery either. It's about capturing the heart/mind of the consumer in a "just like the real thing, but also new, improved, with better sugar substitute" kind of way. A delicate, manipulative balance of classic ideals and edible pomo packaging.

Also isn't there always going to have to be a degree of sincerity, on some level, for a work of art to be effective? Even if that sincerity comes from total devotion to inauthenticity, or emotional communism or what-have-you, it's still a plumb line that anchors the figure to the ground.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

There are those ultimate dark stars of the West, the Silent Jay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwist) and Homer. After them, you're belated.

copyleft

[(Anonymous)]

This isn't really relevent, but I once tried putting drums and bass onto a song by Mr Svenson, just to hear what it might sound like (I was intrigued by the couple of seconds of drums at the start of the album, and disappointed when they stopped). The problem of selling it wouldn't arise, as it sounds awful - there is no way you can keep in time with him. (I quite like the original, though.)

I agree completely!

[mongoltrophies.livejournal.com]

Authenticity is a moot question in light of eaffective results. And, I'm reminded of the other day (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/97804.html?thread=2539276#t2539276).

[(Anonymous)]

Nick,
One way of doing what you are suggesting already exists! You just have to run out right now and learn how to program in SuperCollider3
Best,
Robert
http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com/

Copyleft

[(Anonymous)]

I like the concept here, but there's a minor point that confuses me, and that is the term "open source" in this context. "Open source" is a term to describe a certain method of development that allows for public viewing and participation, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee any rights or freedom of use.
Creative Commons licenses allow the consumer of a work varying degrees of freedom -- depending on the specific license -- to duplicate, alter, rearrange, recreate, etc. that work; but they don't dictate the method of production.
An example might better illustrate the difference: if I were to open source a book, it would involve keeping the drafts, notes, research, etc. in a publicly viewable repository; allowing members of the project to contribute sentences, paragraphs, or entire chapters, subject to peer review; creating builds and 'milestones' every time a chapter or page were completed. And though my project would be open source, I could decide to publish the finished product under a license that isn't quite so "viral," such as the BSD license, which would allow others to make commercial versions of my work.
However, if I published a book under a Creative Commons license, the public might never view my early drafts or research; the book could appear in finished form. And I could decide to publish it with a license that allows others to incorporate portions of my novel in their own creative works, provided that they're not commercial.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

All Woody's authenticity cred then rushes, like matter into a black hole, towards the "dark star". But then some music snob tells us that Dark Star X ripped everything off from Dark Star Z. And so on.

Eventually, we will discover God, sitting in some garage in Glasgow, playing a steady beat on the top of a cardboard box in the dimness, and being completely satisfied with nothing but that.

regarding authenticity: or, hilarious yet sad at its core

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

http://www.darkonthemovie.com/