Seven Red

So I saw a good talk today by one of my colleagues (MC), who discussed the teaching of intellectual property and its relationship to writing. This has been, of course, the major (and perhaps dominant) topic in the field of writing studies since the mid-1990′s, as I never tire of noting. MC has designed a graduate course on writing and intellectual property, and is currently working on an edited collection on the same. All good. In any case, his talk today was about the framework he’s trying to establish for an undergraduate course on writing and intellectual property in a “digital age,” so he basically laid out four primary topics that such a course should address. For my money, the suspect category was something like “development of a personal ethic for information production.” As I understood it, he had his graduate students articulate what kinds of licenses they’d prefer for their digital work, which could range from standard copyright, to the various levels of Creative Commons licenses, to pure public domain release. Through this discussion, students would have to better understand the ethical decisions they make when they use others’ works or release their own, etc. It should be said that this development of an ethical relationship, and understanding the emerging ethics of digital production, has been the primary answer that the field of writing studies has offered up in the face of the expanding copyright regime, together with various disputations on fair use doctrine and similar activist related issues. MC, for example, cited the now oft-quoted DeVoss and Porter article (“Why Napster Matters to Writing”), which is all about rethinking the ethics of digital production through the rhetorical canon of delivery, asking students, ultimately, to consider why they are writing/producing/remixing, etc. It’s this seemingly telescoped turn to an ethics that I’d like to discuss a bit here, and I’ll do that by pausing on one of the keywords of MC’s talk, the category of the prosumer.

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So she related my deeply conflicted answer to babygirl’s question “Daddy, what’s police?”I was able to manage only “Er, they’re people who…er…um…help you when you’re in trouble?” I felt like Mr. Rogers. Lying ass Mr. Rogers.

But it’s a good goddamn question, actually. In Virno’s latest book, he sets up the classic formulation from Carl Schmitt: those who oppose the State form believe that human nature is fundamentally “good” (which is to say, it tends toward community and cooperation); those who support the State form, from conservatives, to liberals, to authoritarians, believe that human nature is fundamentally evil (that is, it tends toward conflict that must be resolved at the level of the State). From the former perspective, “police” is an unnecessary appendage that serves to protect a privileged class; from the latter, it is the “thin blue line” that separates us from the bellum omnium contra omnes, or, at the very least, the serial killers and other “predators.” The unmistakable ideological work of all those “detective” shows clearly resides in their characterization of human “evil,” and the “natural” justification of police and the State form. (On a side note, why is it that every murder show involves the line “Even these seasoned detectives were shocked by the grisly scene!” Just once, I want the detectives to say “The scene, while awful, was fairly banal and run-of-the-mill, as far as multiple stabbings deaths go…” And don’t even get me started on the total bullshit that is the “science” of sociopathology, with its laughable “brain scan” evidence that has about as much legitimacy as phrenology, or Lombroso’s taxonomy of the criminl face. In any case…)

One could imagine other relationships between politics and nature: first, support for the State form that begins with an assumption of fundamental good. If cooperation and community inhere in something like a “state of nature,” however, the State form becomes superfluous, like hatching an escape from a prison that you’re not in. This is not to say that something like this isn’t what actually happens: it’s easy enough to imagine a prison and an escape, and that might be precisely what happens. But Virno sets up his question around the last of the possible permutations: can there be an opposition to the State form that begins from the assumption of evil, or an ontology of the human that tends toward what he calls intra-species aggression? To put it another way, must acknowledgement of fundamental conflict end in the establishment of the State and the police. This is, indeed, the question for any serious anarchism (it’s also why “love” is off the table), and it’s actually what never really gets answered in Hardt and Negri’s work, which tends toward a belief in fundamental goodness of “the monstrous flesh” of the Multitude, all creativity and love – if it weren’t for those damn capitalists! If anything, only libertarianism really takes a crack at the problem, however inadequate and incoherent its solution: it retains a sad but productive confusion between conflict and community, and thus imagines a non-state community that must, nevertheless, be mediated through a (fundamentally coherent and efficient) market. Neither position really tackles the problem of conflict without the State.

So, what’s police? It depends. It may have to be invented. In any case, at least part of the very complicated answer that I’ll have to work out with babygirl over the years must involve the images in this video, and not only because I have an almost irrational attraction to the image of a tear gas canister being heaved back at the police line from whence it came, no matter how theoretically or practically “inept” that might be. Two images, then: first, the crowd scattering from a tear gas canister, then its emergence back into the air, smoking; second, the heroic individual standing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. As a figure for something like “resistance,” I’ll take the first over the second every day of the week. They share a lot in common, to be sure (that is, dialectics). But at least the first doesn’t reproduce the individual as the main site of power. Every time I see it, I fall in love. A different kind of love. Plus, I really dig the song.

Just saw the news that Albert Hofmann died. It’s amazing that Hofmann was 32 when he first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide while working for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz, and 37 when he became the first human being to ingest LSD-25. Hofmann had been working with various ergot derivatives when he accidentally synthesized a substance that would change the course of history in the 20th century. If you haven’t read LSD: My Problem Child, you should. It is a document of primary importance for the understanding of 20th century scientific development – the flip side and hidden twin of the Manhattan Project in more ways than one.

Just as a side note, Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc. and really the father of modern conservatism much more than Buckley, took LSD-25 often with his wife, playwright and congressional representative Claire Booth Luce. He even pushed (so to speak) stories on the “miracle drug” on his editors at Time and Life. He also took psilocybin mushrooms with R. Gordon Wasson, who first brought them to the United States after trips (so to speak) to Huautla region of Mexico in the early 1950′s. Wasson was an amateur mycologist and an investment banker at JP Morgan; like Luce, he was a staunch anti-communist.

I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals of smoking.

There’s a whole routine, for example, that goes into “grubbing cigarettes” (which includes calling it “grubbing”). Now, being a good addict with sufficient means, even in this expensive city, I manage my habit well, which means that I never run out of cigarettes. But other people do, and when they do, they will often grub a cigarette from you. Almost invariably, these are younger people and the very poor. Smokers know this, and there seems to be a ritual to handle it. Here’s how it works:

You’re walking down the street smoking a cigarette. A guy comes up to you (it’s always a guy) with a quarter, or two quarters, or a little stack of dimes, or even a dollar, and makes the initial offer: “Hey man. Can I buy a cigarette off you?” The proper response to this offer is the opposite of negotiation. You say “Keep your money,” and reach into your pocket or bag for your pack. They offer again: “No, really…” thrusting change at you. You wave it off, and hand over the cigarette. The whole thing is a feint, of course. You’re not really supposed to take the money in the first place, and the offerer knows that and you know that the offerer knows that. But it’s part of the ritual. You also, of course, offer a light, a counter-offer which, if things are working well, the other party will refuse by displaying his own lighter. One final element to the ritual: everybody looks at the status of your pack when you actually hand out the cigarette. If you pull out your pack, and you appear to be giving out your last cigarette, the offerer will make another fake good-faith gesture, indicating that he cannot take your last cigarette, it being bad form to do so. Once again, you are meant to wave off this gesture, indicating that you have another pack (true, if you’re a good addict), or that you are just then on the way to the store: “No worries. Got another pack, dude.”

The form of this ritual is essentially the same in every city and town I’ve lived in, from NYC, to Chicago, to San Francisco.

Moreover, you can’t say “no” to the offer, as a flat refusal. You have to come up with some lie, the best one being “Sorry, man. This is the last one.” The offerer nods, accepting the lie, though the offerer knows it is a lie and you know that the offerer knows. Another acceptable lie is “I just gave out three,” although this is usually only deployed at a party or in a bar (and not so much either, anymore).

Finally, there are serial violators of this form. First, you have your college-age to mid-20′s “non-smokers,” who only smoke when they drink, etc. These people are not really part of the culture, so they violate the form of this bargain consistently by never making the initial offer. They just ask, and sometimes – and this is the worst, now – they ask for multiple cigarettes during the course of a night. There’s no more distasteful question to a smoker than “Can I have another cigarette.” Even though this is a dazzling breach of etiquette, these people usually get their cigarette, but the giver will mutter some pretty nasty shit about them as they walk away to smoke it. It’s really taking advantage. The smoker must comply with the request. The smoker actually feels guilty when he or she lies about the “last one” or refuses a request. There’s a gift ethic built into the culture of smoking that compels you to hand out cigarettes to all comers. Why?

That brings us to the last group of grubbers and serial violators: teenagers. Luckily, I don’t lead the kind of life that brings me into contact with under-age teens. I don’t remember the last time I was asked for a cigarette by somebody clearly too young to have one. But it is the big ethical moment in the smoker’s life: Do I give this 14 year-old a cigarette? I’ve gotten bourgeois and proper enough to know that the answer is definitively NO, and to do the whole “Don’t start smoking” routine, but there’s still something uncomfortable about it. This goes to the structural root of the whole gift culture of smoking: everybody starts smoking as a grubber. That is, when you start smoking, you are invariably a bad addict who doesn’t manage the addiction very well. You constantly run out of cigarettes (largely because you don’t really believe you are an addict), and you are therefore constantly grubbing. And, for the most part, you get cigarettes from friends and from random adults.

This is why, I think, the whole ritual plays out as it does. Once you come to terms with your habit, and start managing it well, you are essentially indebted to all those people that supported your habit before, and you pay off that debt by handing out cigarettes to all comers. The offered payment, in this sense, is superfluous. But teenagers don’t feel this debt yet, so they don’t work the ritual. You’re supposed to say NO to the teenager, of course, even though the imaginary payment of the debt would require you to say YES, precisely because you would be replicating the conditions under which you assumed the debt in the first place, this time as the lender.

Of course, I’m using debt very loosely here: none of these are really exchange calculations. You’re “paying back” some random Joe Schmoe in Chicago for all those cigarettes Petey the Greek gave you when you were fifteen. What’s curious is that they have to cloak or disguise themselves as exchange relationships through the form of the ritual.

Addendum: Stupid Smoke Grubbing Jokes you Learn When You’re Fifteen

Grubber: Hey, man. Ya got an extra cigarette?
Grubee: Extra? Nah. They only gave me twenty in this pack.

Grubber: Ya got a smoke?
Grubee: Here ya go.
Grubber: Ya got a light, too?
Grubee: Ya want a fuckin’ lung while you’re at it?