Wincing at Light

I’ve gotten into the habit of talking about Gatekeepers as a mostly good thing within the context of their function as arbitrators of taste and culture for those of us too lazy to sift through all the dreck). From my perspective, the editors and publishers of the world receive their daily truckloads of creative sewage, paw through it for the best bits and give the rest the burial it (frequently) deserves.

Do things get missed? Sure.
Are mistakes made? Sure.
Do market forces play a role in the decisions Gatekeepers make? Sure.

I’ve never been particularly suspicious of this dynamic. As a writer, I want to get my texts out to the widest possible audience. The editors and publishers want to make money (sometimes for the sole purpose of making money, and sometimes because making money allows them to take chances on excellent literary works for which there’s no pre-defined market niche). To the extent that my goals (broad distribution) and theirs (more readers = more money) coincide, this is a straightforward and honest relationship. Deep down, I tend to believe that people who work with texts and narrative for a living do so because they love good stories.

Market realities mean that sometimes an editor or a publishers takes a pass on an absolutely brilliant, earth-shaking and revolutionary 400,000 word supernovel because they’re suspicious of how the public will receive it and, even if it’s full brilliance is completely realized by adoring critics and it’s ultimately destined to be studied in university literature classes for the next 500 years, whether or not they can make any money off of it. Gatekeepers who take too many chances that don’t work out financially tend to end up losing their Gatekeeper credentials.

I think this way because I’m not an academic with Marxist leanings, and because I choose to believe that most people and/or corporations aren’t secretly nefarious (unless you consider capitalist pigs to be nefarious in principle). I don’t like phrases like chilling effect because on some level, I suspect that the people most worried about having their effects chilled are really raging pussies who just need an excuse for being a pussy. But that’s just me.

(And yes, I promise I’ll give you a more nuanced view than dismissing anti-Gatekeepers as pussies in a bit. I just like calling people pussies.)

Now, the point I’ve been meandering towards is that I’ve just finished reading the interesting essay “Intellectual Property Law, Freedom of Expression and the Web” by University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod from the collection The Politics of Information from Alt-X Books. You can download this collection of academic essays (for FREE, damn it) here. I’m not a quasi-Marxist academic (as previously indicated) and I can honestly say that I’d never heard of Kembrew McLeod prior to reading this essay (though I probably will make an effort to remember his name now, because this dude had the temerity to trademark the phrase “freedom of expression” and convince a lawyer to send out injunctions to folks who dared to use it without his consent. Under normal circumstances, I’d call that behavior obnoxious, absurd and a clear case of outrageous asshattery, but since McLeod did this for the sole purpose of fucking with people under the guise of legitimate social commentary about the privatization of cultural artifacts, I’m just going to sit here and chuckle appreciatively.)

In brief, McLeod’s essay concerns the cultural impact of corporations ass-fucking the fundamental nature of intellectual property, copyright and creative expression to protect their financial interest in creative commodities in cyberspace. At the core, this is about reconstituting intellectual property rights as “Good for the Owner” rather than “Good for Society”. Personally, I think that this is a false dichotomy, but it leads to plenty of fascinating discourse in a hinky academic who-really-gives-a-shit-about-this-minutiae sort of way.

The only thing about the commodification of culture or the fact that corporations are abusing trademark and/or copyright law to squelch criticism of their inferior entertainment products that really concerns me is the extent to which it means more crappy movies, television and books served up on a poo poo platter for us as entertainment consumers to suck up because we don’t know any better. I leave the nefarious angle arguments that these corporations and entertainment consortiums are doing so for the sole purpose of keeping the necks of regular joe’s under their economic bootheels to folks who can get more hysterical about it. I personally tend to find entertainment tagged as Culturally Significant or as Capital-L Literature to be generally pretty snooze-worthy, so if we’re missing more of it because super-powerful media congloms are unfairly controlling the mechanisms of production, I haven’t missed it.

But let’s get back to Mr. McLeod.

I’m going to stipulate right out front that yes, abusing trademarks to squelch whiners and critics is stupid. I’ll also toss in the concession that the courts of late have given waaaaaay too much territory back to people like Disney in terms of providing legal tools to crap on people who stick Little Mermaid pictures on their websites (though I’m also prepared to argue that people who stick Little Mermaid pictures on their websites probably deserve to be crapped on, but you’ve caught me on a good day).

McLeod’s primary concern seems to follow these lines:

As more and more of our interactions are mediated electronically and cultural texts are routinely distributed online, we are increasingly exposed to the policing powers of intellectual property owners. That is, when we often reference existing cultural texts (and engage in everyday interpersonal discussions), we often reference existing cultural texts to convey certain meanings. In doing so, we cannot help but use privately owned signifiers when engaging in cultural production — signifiers that are copyrighted and trademarked by very protective corporate entities who care little for protecting freedom of expression. (Politics of Information, p. 183)

What this inevitably leads to is a collision between how people might want to use “protected” cultural signifiers and how the owners of the rights to those signifiers would ideally like them to be used. With specific reference to trademarks (for which there is no “fair use” provision, like there is with copyright — which, in case you don’t understand “fair use”, is what allows me to quote Mr. McLeod’s work in this context), McLeod raises the point that “Many times corporations that want to eliminate unauthorized uses of their intellectual properties want to control the context in which their copyrights and trademarks are exhibited, particularly when shown in an unfavorable context” (Politics, 187). The reason they do this is because corporations — or, Gatekeepers — are used to relating to their consumers as, well, consumers. They’re not trying to make culture. They’re just trying to sell us something. As court rulings increasingly side with content owners, the result is that in legal terms, the conception of trademarks purely as property should win out over the idea that they are important texts that can be used to engage in discourse about contemporary life”.

Here is where I think McLeod really starts to make some valid points about Gatekeeping functions. At some point, when we start aggressively defending copyright and trademark to the extent that we’re letting the content owners attempt to control the context of discussion, they’ve stopped merely performing merely as arbiters of taste (i.e., dreck filters), and become delimiters of how “acceptable culture” should be defined. The danger of privatizing culture — of placing too much faith in the Gatekeepers solely because we respect their investment in a commodity as a valid indicator of that commodity’s worth — is that eventually we lose touch with what we’re missing. Which is not to say that we should get rid of the Gatekeepers. Only that we should be aware that the Gatekeepers are less interested in showing us what is best and most brilliant about our current cultural production than they are about making money.

Let me put it this way: You can’t read a book you’ve never heard of. And that has the potential to be significant, because that book that you’re not aware of might be the one that could change your life or your way of thinking about life, the universe and everything.

Most compelling to McLeod’s argument, in my opinion, is his conclusion about the perils of increasingly powerful corporate interests acquiring more and more cultural artifacts into fewer hands and doling out the rights to those artifacts at their own discretion. Essentially, he’s making the point that absolute private control of cultural artifacts (texts, movies, symbols, etc.) ultimately influences the form that culture takes. It becomes a question of access. You can’t be influenced by the ideas to which you aren’t exposed. Limited access propagated over a society eventually translates to loss in cultural production. That is, it leads to increasing cultural homogenization, which serves the interest of corporate distributors rather than the recipients of that culture. (What do I mean by that? Let me ask you this: How many Da Vinci Code spin off novels, PBS/Discovery Channel specials, Nicholas Cage movie clones, etc. have you seen in the last year? If you like this, then we’ll give you more of it (and we won’t stop until you puke) is the most obvious form of cultural homogenization.

When the production of cultural artifacts, texts and signifiers becomes all about making money, that which is fringe, different or experimental tends to get squeezed out of the public consciousness, regardless of merit. Small content producers lose market, along with the writers and artists they support. Ultimately, homogenization impedes the sort of stories and narratives that can be told because the non-commercial gets squeezed out of the cultural landscape.

If culture is dialectical in nature, the Hegelian tripod collapses in some cases because the thesis and/or antithesis texts vanish because they didn’t fit an appropriate marketing niche.

These are legitimate concerns, and a reason to be wary of Gatekeepers. (That reason? No matter what they might say to the contrary, they’re trying to sell you something.)

Having said all of that, maybe I’m a bit naive, but I truly believe that at ground level, most Gatekeepers are just saying, “I liked this book. I think you’ll like it, too.” Which is what we want them to do. We want them to start the buzz of word-of-mouth advertising. It’s likely that I feel this way because I’ve worked with small presses, who are taking a considerable personal financial risk to publish any novel. Small presses don’t exist to make money. They exist because the folks running them love books and want to share atypical narratives with people of a like mind.

I’d like to think that this is the way all entertainment gatekeeping is done, but I’ve gotten my share of rejection letters that said simply We loved this book. It’s awesome. But it’s way too long for us to take a chance on it. At some point, there has to be a business model. Better, there has to be a financially responsible business model. And I’m okay with that.

At some point, I’d rather have someone love my work enough to take a risk on it, even if that risk fails, than have a corporate Gatekeeper conclude they can make money on it, even if isn’t particularly good.

D.

Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis Tagged: | blog novels, blooks, cultural gatekeeping, Kembrew McLeod, Politics of Information