It's time for a brief rant; please excuse the soapbox.
I think it was within the last couple of weeks when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to the national press corps, repeatedly confused Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. The Daily Show has already enjoyed the comic potential of this sadly frightening episode - in which one of the most powerful men in the world demonstrated an alarming level of hysteria as well as confusion - but I found it reminding me of a conversation I had a few months ago with a family friend.
She asked me to explain why I felt that President Bush wasn't as dumb as he sometimes seemed to be. Rumseld's frightening gaffe, I think, helps explain my position. Rumseld himself is a veteran of politics in the White House, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated ruthless cleverness. How could he possibly confuse Bin Laden and Hussein? While I enjoy entertaining conspiracy theory - it is possible that this was yet another deliberate effort by the Bush administration to juxtapose two independent concepts (like Saddam Hussein and 9/11) through relentless talking points - his almost manic delivery suggests it was an accident.
I suspect that the tactics deployed by the Bush administration are so compelling that the politicians now believe their own hype. Logical contradictions and contrary facts have no place in this world-view, which is built on a bedrock of unquestioning faith. As the authors of All The President's Spin carefully demonstrate, misdirection is one of the most effective tactics the Bush PR machine uses. As Michael Gazzaniga observes in his discussion of how humanity thinks, we are more susceptible to such techniques than we imagine; he suggests that it's very much a part of how we see the world.
Gazzaniga describes a famous trick ("Out of Your Hat") performed by Harry Blackwell, Sr., in which the magician created the illusion of pulling a full-sized donkey out of his top hat. Magicians "use the simple device of redirecting our attention to make objects that are in our full view, that we know our retina transmitted to our brain, go unnoticed." (The Mind's Past, 1998.) By carefully directing the audience's attention towards a lovely assistant and some elaborate gestures - using speech to focus that attention - the audience completely overlooked another assistant simply walking on stage in full view with the donkey. It was only when Blackwell re-focused his audience's gaze towards the donkey that it "appeared" to them.
Now, imagine a situation in which the trick goes on as planned, but Blackwell has begun believing his own powers of conjuration. Perhaps he startles himself when the donkey appears. This is not unlike the situation we now face with the current administration. Through repetition, constant misdirection, relentless adherence to talking points, and fanatical secrecy, our current leadership has managed to convince itself that the illusion it's been selling to the American public is real.
Rumsfeld and Bush probably don't deserve to be singled out for this; self-delusion is part of how our minds function. Not only do we revise information as it comes in, we constantly re-write our own histories throughout the course of our lives. (Ronald Reagan, for instance, confounded his staff and the press corps with stories from his life that clearly never took place - and no one could ever really tell if Reagan himself was aware of the discrepancies.)
But this is hardly an excuse. Cynically accepting misdirection as a fundamental part of the way we perceive and communicate is insufficient. As I pointed out in my discussion of skaldic poetry (below) this kind of deception is only acceptable when all sides are completely aware of it. There is clearly a large portion of the American public that actively wishes to be deceived - and has little desire to be disabused of their comfortable illusions. Why believe that American forces might be systematically killing more Iraqis than the insurgents themselves? In the case of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal - which shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the documented history of American conduct in Vietnam - the most popular response to the issue, and Bush's rebuttal, was the repeated assertion that, in essence, "Americans don't do such things." It's almost as if we don't need Bush's help to look away from uncomfortable facts, towards attractive illusions of moral superiority.
The problem, however, is that Rumsfeld's conflation (the summation of years of effort to conflate Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the public's imagination) didn't take place during a magic show, and the news from Iraq - while determined by the conventions of narrative - is not a poetic fiction. We are fooling ourselves by our own active misdirection - from the world around us to what we think that world ought to be. Rumsfeld and Bush are not fools; they are devout believers in a lie.
The antidote, I think, is the same as the skaldic poet's, and the magician's - to constantly remind the listeners that they are playing a part in the act. In the case of politics, however, the audience must stop playing a passive role, and realize that it's playing a role in its own deception.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Spinning Stories
At my brother’s suggestion, I recently devoured All The President’s Spin (2004) and enjoyed its rational, careful analysis of how the aesthetics of campaign rhetoric can operate as a form of political power – and how the Bush administration seems to have demonstrated a quantum leap in spin technique. It occurred to me that “spin” was a term that had crept up on me unnoticed; I don’t remember when I first heard it used, I’m not quite sure how long it’s been around, and for several years I’m quite sure I didn’t know what it meant. Now, like many an infectious meme, the concept of “spin” has proved far too useful to shake.
The Wikipedia’s entry on spin argues that the term signifies “a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation” designed to bring the spinner back on top. The label of “spin” implies that a source of information has been “disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative” in using tactics intended “to sway audiences away from widespread (and often commonsense) perceptions.”
The Online Etymology Dictionary (which notes the appearance of “spin doctor” during the Reagan presidency, in 1984) shows that the word comes from the Old English spinnan (twisting fibers into thread) and also implies stretching. Political spin, likewise, involves stretching facts and twisting them around each other to transform the thread of public discourse. Spin first meant “revolving” or “turning rapidly” in the 17th century; political spin certainly involves turning not only the facts around (to make them mean the opposite of what they appear to indicate by shifting their context) and disorienting the press and the public, but also a reversal of fortune in that negative data is re-worked in order to serve the argument that it initially appeared to refute. The goal of spin, after all, is to come out on top, no matter what the available information seems to indicate.
What fascinates me is how this tactic – and I enjoy how the excellent correspondents at Spinsanity manage to consistently treat “spin” as a tactic, not a condition – is often perceived as a state rather than a methodology. The emphasis, in other words, is on the pre-existing “bias” of the spin doctor, rather than on the feats of misdirection and illusionism that are required to make spin happen. (Note that bias, like spin, stems in part from language about the weaving and cutting of fabric – as does the word text, and, of course, fabrication).
But if one accepts bias as a fact of human nature – not insurmountable, of course, but nevertheless a basic tendency to look at the world from one’s own point of view (go figure) – then we can see a certain amount of “spin” in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’ve experienced. In the 12th century, Snorri Sturluson’s retelling of Norse myths preserves and re-uses a tactic favored by the Norse poets: the use of misdirection and deception, both as a plot device and a rhetorical strategy. His concept of poetry was deeply informed by this: poetry is a beautiful deception, a vastly creative construction: a distortion at best, and a fabrication at worst.
How is it that we have become such fundamentalists when it comes to story-telling that we expect reporters to be capable of conveying information without bias? Do we believe that their words can somehow provide an unadulterated access to the truth? Nor do I suggest that the existence of bias invalidates the concept of truth. Aristotle argued when he defended the value of poetry that many imitations of the truth can provide greater access to truth – through their compilation and comparison – than any one “authoritative” account might provide. I mean by all of this to suggest that our culture seems addicted to an almost unquestioned belief in pure information, as if information could exist independent of the story that shapes, conveys, and catalyzes it. David Mindich writes:
“… reporters, despite their claims to be ‘objective,’ did not (and do not) operate in a vacuum. This is what makes the information/story dichotomy so untenable: information cannot be conveyed without an organizing narrative, and stories cannot be told without conveying information.” (Just the Facts, 133).
Poets of other times knew this; the Northern skalds told a story that their audiences knew had been twisted and changed, to suit both the occasion and the audience. They told of how the world was created by ancient gods who could spin the world out of the “deceiving gap” that was before creation. They sang that their own words were borrowed or stolen; that their words, like the words of chieftains and even gods, should never be completely trusted. It was only in full knowledge that they were being, in some part, deceived by the poet that the audience could really play the game of meaning with him – and thereby absorb, with a skeptical ear and eye, the poet’s story in such a way that they could might glean some truth from it.
We, on the other hand, appear to have lost sight of both the unavoidable deception inherent among reporters – who use a ruthlessly minimal form of poetry, but poetry nonetheless – and their willingness, as well as our own, to be blatantly misled. It seems as if many reporters would remain blithely unaware of how their claims to objective transparency deny the power that they exert, particularly in constructing and perpetuating a particular bias.
Ultimately the worst sort of poet, it seems to me, is the one that claims that everyone else is doing the spinning. Such liars are dangerous: from their point of view, the world only revolves around them. We must also recall that no story can ever provide the complete and total truth. (If it could, it wouldn’t be a story – it would be reality itself.) By understanding the mechanisms of storytelling we can better perceive how a story has been spun – because all stories spin. It’s just that some poets are more honest about their alterations than others.
The Wikipedia’s entry on spin argues that the term signifies “a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation” designed to bring the spinner back on top. The label of “spin” implies that a source of information has been “disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative” in using tactics intended “to sway audiences away from widespread (and often commonsense) perceptions.”
The Online Etymology Dictionary (which notes the appearance of “spin doctor” during the Reagan presidency, in 1984) shows that the word comes from the Old English spinnan (twisting fibers into thread) and also implies stretching. Political spin, likewise, involves stretching facts and twisting them around each other to transform the thread of public discourse. Spin first meant “revolving” or “turning rapidly” in the 17th century; political spin certainly involves turning not only the facts around (to make them mean the opposite of what they appear to indicate by shifting their context) and disorienting the press and the public, but also a reversal of fortune in that negative data is re-worked in order to serve the argument that it initially appeared to refute. The goal of spin, after all, is to come out on top, no matter what the available information seems to indicate.
What fascinates me is how this tactic – and I enjoy how the excellent correspondents at Spinsanity manage to consistently treat “spin” as a tactic, not a condition – is often perceived as a state rather than a methodology. The emphasis, in other words, is on the pre-existing “bias” of the spin doctor, rather than on the feats of misdirection and illusionism that are required to make spin happen. (Note that bias, like spin, stems in part from language about the weaving and cutting of fabric – as does the word text, and, of course, fabrication).
But if one accepts bias as a fact of human nature – not insurmountable, of course, but nevertheless a basic tendency to look at the world from one’s own point of view (go figure) – then we can see a certain amount of “spin” in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’ve experienced. In the 12th century, Snorri Sturluson’s retelling of Norse myths preserves and re-uses a tactic favored by the Norse poets: the use of misdirection and deception, both as a plot device and a rhetorical strategy. His concept of poetry was deeply informed by this: poetry is a beautiful deception, a vastly creative construction: a distortion at best, and a fabrication at worst.
How is it that we have become such fundamentalists when it comes to story-telling that we expect reporters to be capable of conveying information without bias? Do we believe that their words can somehow provide an unadulterated access to the truth? Nor do I suggest that the existence of bias invalidates the concept of truth. Aristotle argued when he defended the value of poetry that many imitations of the truth can provide greater access to truth – through their compilation and comparison – than any one “authoritative” account might provide. I mean by all of this to suggest that our culture seems addicted to an almost unquestioned belief in pure information, as if information could exist independent of the story that shapes, conveys, and catalyzes it. David Mindich writes:
“… reporters, despite their claims to be ‘objective,’ did not (and do not) operate in a vacuum. This is what makes the information/story dichotomy so untenable: information cannot be conveyed without an organizing narrative, and stories cannot be told without conveying information.” (Just the Facts, 133).
Poets of other times knew this; the Northern skalds told a story that their audiences knew had been twisted and changed, to suit both the occasion and the audience. They told of how the world was created by ancient gods who could spin the world out of the “deceiving gap” that was before creation. They sang that their own words were borrowed or stolen; that their words, like the words of chieftains and even gods, should never be completely trusted. It was only in full knowledge that they were being, in some part, deceived by the poet that the audience could really play the game of meaning with him – and thereby absorb, with a skeptical ear and eye, the poet’s story in such a way that they could might glean some truth from it.
We, on the other hand, appear to have lost sight of both the unavoidable deception inherent among reporters – who use a ruthlessly minimal form of poetry, but poetry nonetheless – and their willingness, as well as our own, to be blatantly misled. It seems as if many reporters would remain blithely unaware of how their claims to objective transparency deny the power that they exert, particularly in constructing and perpetuating a particular bias.
Ultimately the worst sort of poet, it seems to me, is the one that claims that everyone else is doing the spinning. Such liars are dangerous: from their point of view, the world only revolves around them. We must also recall that no story can ever provide the complete and total truth. (If it could, it wouldn’t be a story – it would be reality itself.) By understanding the mechanisms of storytelling we can better perceive how a story has been spun – because all stories spin. It’s just that some poets are more honest about their alterations than others.
Friday, September 10, 2004
Faking the News
The Daily Show on Comedy Central bills itself – with proud self-mockery – as “just your basic cable fake news show.” It is becoming increasingly recognized, particularly among media critics, as an unexpectedly powerful venue – and a journalistic force to be reckoned with. Congressional guests have remarked often that they hadn’t heard of the show before – and, now that they knew about it, were terrified to appear with Jon Stewart. But the show really isn’t a stealth vehicle for underground investigative journalism, or an entertainment-industry mouthpiece for the left; its only claim is that its purpose is comedy, which is also its only license. This is what gives The Daily Show such efficacy.
Consider the question of journalistic objectivity. To use one popular metaphor, journalists try to open a window on the world; their goal is to be the transparent glass, so that the audience looks through their stories to the events those stories describe. Journalists like to be heeded, but not necessarily looked at (politicians are somewhat similar in this respect). Like a tragedian, a journalist aspires to a clear and direct plot, with compelling emotional force and few distractions, the better to place the content in full relief.
But comedy in general is more about the frame of a window than the glass. The urge incomedy is to be in on the joke; that is, part of that external frame of reference that looks at a thing and finds it funny. Arthur Koestler once suggested that laughter comes from an explosive experience of creativity: suddenly, two otherwise unrelated fields of experience unexpectedly collide – we put the pieces together – and we laugh. Comedy as a form demands an audience's awareness of the joke, that jokes are being made. A comedian needs to be looked at in order to be heeded; the audience must be given permission to laugh, and the comedian must be given license to be funny.
Despite the importance in comedy of identifying with the subject, laughter depends in some part on distance, on stepping back from a moment in a very gripping physical sense (think about it - your body literally stops and has a seizure). “Someday we’ll all look back on this and laugh.” We speak of comedians as providing a means to getting ourselves to look at the world in the proper perspective, and of laughter as medicine.
In an interview with Del Close, one of the authors of Truth in Comedy, the playwright John Guare asked what Close thought the purpose of political satire was. Close didn’t hesitate: “Death,” he replied. The purpose of the satirical comic was to brutally and ruthlessly reveal the truth, Close maintained; “knock ‘em dead” is a goal, not just a metaphor. The truth as revealed in comedy is so toxic – indeed, to the comic perspective, everything and everyone is perfectly defective – that when confronted with it, our bodies have no choice but to respond with laughter. Laughter provides catharsis and relieves the tension that builds as a reaction to unpleasant realities. The comic, Close felt, provides a means of shocking ourselves back to health.
That moment of laughter is a measure of objectivity; in it, we viscerally separate ourselves from our experience. We see the joke; we get it. Sometimes we can even anticipate the punchline – and still the laughter can carry us away. This is because the comic announces herself; she reminds us, “I’m just being funny,” almost as a means of saying, “Hey, I’m just as much a mess as everyone else.” The frame is obvious and available to view – on the Daily Show, there is an almost celebratory shoddiness to their approach. At any rate, they never fail to exaggerate their own failures, or inflate their importance. And while denigrating themselves, they also satirize their models, the journalists. The Daily Show looks at the process of looking through a journalistic window. Journalism is critiqued; but it also must be practiced, or the jokes won’t work – the audience won’t get the joke if the story isn’t told.
I might even go so far as to suggest that “fake” news – if its purpose is satire – bears an even greater burden of truth. Audiences are always tougher on comedy, after all – and they can tell when a performer is faking it.
Consider the question of journalistic objectivity. To use one popular metaphor, journalists try to open a window on the world; their goal is to be the transparent glass, so that the audience looks through their stories to the events those stories describe. Journalists like to be heeded, but not necessarily looked at (politicians are somewhat similar in this respect). Like a tragedian, a journalist aspires to a clear and direct plot, with compelling emotional force and few distractions, the better to place the content in full relief.
But comedy in general is more about the frame of a window than the glass. The urge incomedy is to be in on the joke; that is, part of that external frame of reference that looks at a thing and finds it funny. Arthur Koestler once suggested that laughter comes from an explosive experience of creativity: suddenly, two otherwise unrelated fields of experience unexpectedly collide – we put the pieces together – and we laugh. Comedy as a form demands an audience's awareness of the joke, that jokes are being made. A comedian needs to be looked at in order to be heeded; the audience must be given permission to laugh, and the comedian must be given license to be funny.
Despite the importance in comedy of identifying with the subject, laughter depends in some part on distance, on stepping back from a moment in a very gripping physical sense (think about it - your body literally stops and has a seizure). “Someday we’ll all look back on this and laugh.” We speak of comedians as providing a means to getting ourselves to look at the world in the proper perspective, and of laughter as medicine.
In an interview with Del Close, one of the authors of Truth in Comedy, the playwright John Guare asked what Close thought the purpose of political satire was. Close didn’t hesitate: “Death,” he replied. The purpose of the satirical comic was to brutally and ruthlessly reveal the truth, Close maintained; “knock ‘em dead” is a goal, not just a metaphor. The truth as revealed in comedy is so toxic – indeed, to the comic perspective, everything and everyone is perfectly defective – that when confronted with it, our bodies have no choice but to respond with laughter. Laughter provides catharsis and relieves the tension that builds as a reaction to unpleasant realities. The comic, Close felt, provides a means of shocking ourselves back to health.
That moment of laughter is a measure of objectivity; in it, we viscerally separate ourselves from our experience. We see the joke; we get it. Sometimes we can even anticipate the punchline – and still the laughter can carry us away. This is because the comic announces herself; she reminds us, “I’m just being funny,” almost as a means of saying, “Hey, I’m just as much a mess as everyone else.” The frame is obvious and available to view – on the Daily Show, there is an almost celebratory shoddiness to their approach. At any rate, they never fail to exaggerate their own failures, or inflate their importance. And while denigrating themselves, they also satirize their models, the journalists. The Daily Show looks at the process of looking through a journalistic window. Journalism is critiqued; but it also must be practiced, or the jokes won’t work – the audience won’t get the joke if the story isn’t told.
I might even go so far as to suggest that “fake” news – if its purpose is satire – bears an even greater burden of truth. Audiences are always tougher on comedy, after all – and they can tell when a performer is faking it.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Making the News
Every story is told through transformation; storytelling changes stories. It’s perhaps a truism that stories change people; I often encounter theatre students who tell me of seeing one show that changed their lives forever. People can easily change stories, without even meaning to; anyone who’s ever played “Telephone” understands how quickly and drastically a message can be changed by its repeated transmission. But such changes are not simply interference; the complete process of telling a story involves several steps, each of which requires transformation in order to function.
A storyteller hears or gathers the material for her story; even her imagination is made of memories and familiar patterns. Taking in any information at all requires relating that information to previous experience; because the storyteller’s experience is uniquely her own, she perceives the raw material of her story in an absolutely individual way. Then she shapes the story – perhaps in different ways for different audiences. The story is changed to fit the specific occasion or purpose. And then the story is told – it is fundamentally shaped by the moment of its performance, or in the case of written stories, both the form of its publication and how it is ultimately read.
Telling stories of any kind demands changing the story – even if only changing the teller and the told. Why, then, does modern journalism cling to the notion that a storyteller can and should be passive in relation to the story? It is a peculiar – and perhaps suspicious – medium that tries to render itself completely invisible; it’s odd for a storyteller to exert the power of telling a story, but claim to be passively and dispassionately transmitting reality.
David Mindich notes as much in his book Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (NY: NYU Press, 1998), where he traces the development of current journalistic “objectivity” in the 19th century press. He objects to “the idea that somehow journalism is an ‘objective’ craft and that journalists are engaged in a basically passive endeavor. … journalists, the story goes, are not active constructors of a story. Even when more active verbs are used to describe reportage, as when journalists ‘gather’ the facts or ‘uncover’ the story, they are still basically observers, poking their noses into an area where others have not yet gone. … One of the reasons no one has written a history of ‘objectivity’ is that it’s difficult to discuss an ethic that is defined by its practitioners’ lack of perspective, bias, and even action” (7).
He continues: “But journalists do do things. … To say that journalists make the news does not mean that they fake the news. Nor is it to say, as some sociologists have suggested, that the news never reflects the outside world. It simply means that journalists do and must construct stories, because of their membership in the world of humanity” (8). Mindich certainly doesn’t make the error of presuming that his own perspective, and his own voice, doesn’t exist; the story he tells seems historically accurate, but also quite clearly his own. It seems that an almost Brechtian perspective must be brought to bear in the news: a distinct and critical awareness, in both the audience and the storytellers, that a transformative transaction is taking place through the intoxicating power of narrative.
A storyteller hears or gathers the material for her story; even her imagination is made of memories and familiar patterns. Taking in any information at all requires relating that information to previous experience; because the storyteller’s experience is uniquely her own, she perceives the raw material of her story in an absolutely individual way. Then she shapes the story – perhaps in different ways for different audiences. The story is changed to fit the specific occasion or purpose. And then the story is told – it is fundamentally shaped by the moment of its performance, or in the case of written stories, both the form of its publication and how it is ultimately read.
Telling stories of any kind demands changing the story – even if only changing the teller and the told. Why, then, does modern journalism cling to the notion that a storyteller can and should be passive in relation to the story? It is a peculiar – and perhaps suspicious – medium that tries to render itself completely invisible; it’s odd for a storyteller to exert the power of telling a story, but claim to be passively and dispassionately transmitting reality.
David Mindich notes as much in his book Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (NY: NYU Press, 1998), where he traces the development of current journalistic “objectivity” in the 19th century press. He objects to “the idea that somehow journalism is an ‘objective’ craft and that journalists are engaged in a basically passive endeavor. … journalists, the story goes, are not active constructors of a story. Even when more active verbs are used to describe reportage, as when journalists ‘gather’ the facts or ‘uncover’ the story, they are still basically observers, poking their noses into an area where others have not yet gone. … One of the reasons no one has written a history of ‘objectivity’ is that it’s difficult to discuss an ethic that is defined by its practitioners’ lack of perspective, bias, and even action” (7).
He continues: “But journalists do do things. … To say that journalists make the news does not mean that they fake the news. Nor is it to say, as some sociologists have suggested, that the news never reflects the outside world. It simply means that journalists do and must construct stories, because of their membership in the world of humanity” (8). Mindich certainly doesn’t make the error of presuming that his own perspective, and his own voice, doesn’t exist; the story he tells seems historically accurate, but also quite clearly his own. It seems that an almost Brechtian perspective must be brought to bear in the news: a distinct and critical awareness, in both the audience and the storytellers, that a transformative transaction is taking place through the intoxicating power of narrative.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Poet's Mead is Culture
There are countless issues and examples that Lawrence Lessig raises (see "Capturing Content", below) that deserve broad and open public discussion. I’ll probably hit a few of these in future posts. But for the moment, consider the Norse concept of “content” as articulated in myths about the wisdom of Kvasir and the mead of poetry (described in previous posts).
Like digital content, the mead of poetry is defined as much by what is changed as what is preserved. Scandinavian poets knew that they were clothed in borrowed robes; of course, they were operating in a feudal culture, but even so, the kings and lords who might lay claim to the person of a poet could never claim ownership of a poem. Poems were often dedicated to royalty and chieftains (they still are); but the purpose of such dedications was never to say “this poem belongs to King Harald” but “this poem was devised to honor King Harald,” presumably by ensuring that his memory would be preserved in the transformative matrix of culture that is sometimes called “posterity.”
More to the point, even the gods themselves were said to have stolen poetry (the poet’s mead) and the wisdom it enables (Kvasir’s wisdom, accessed through poetry). Rather than evading the reality that art and culture are always crafted out of what precedes them, and claiming sole ownership of a cultural work, the myth of Kvasir and the metaphor of the poet’s mead declares up front that what the artist creates is borrowed, if not stolen. In fact, by uttering the words of poetry – which, I must point out, was primarily a performed rather than a published medium in the 12th century – the poet was literally spilling his mead out into the listening audience, where they might taste of it themselves … in fact, literally drink it with the poet by internalizing the words, and (like the poet) speaking them aloud as their own.
For a contemporary example, consider your favorite song. Perhaps the lyrics are dear to you, because the song marks a critical time in your life. If you wish to sing the words, are you stealing from the artist? After all, the singer could never have anticipated what those words might mean to you, could she?
And the skaldic poet – who announced that his poetry was itself stolen or borrowed from the gods – literally gave shared ownership of his work to his community, quite literally praying that the audience would take that work and make it their own – that they might all drink deeply of Kvasir’s wisdom together.
Like digital content, the mead of poetry is defined as much by what is changed as what is preserved. Scandinavian poets knew that they were clothed in borrowed robes; of course, they were operating in a feudal culture, but even so, the kings and lords who might lay claim to the person of a poet could never claim ownership of a poem. Poems were often dedicated to royalty and chieftains (they still are); but the purpose of such dedications was never to say “this poem belongs to King Harald” but “this poem was devised to honor King Harald,” presumably by ensuring that his memory would be preserved in the transformative matrix of culture that is sometimes called “posterity.”
More to the point, even the gods themselves were said to have stolen poetry (the poet’s mead) and the wisdom it enables (Kvasir’s wisdom, accessed through poetry). Rather than evading the reality that art and culture are always crafted out of what precedes them, and claiming sole ownership of a cultural work, the myth of Kvasir and the metaphor of the poet’s mead declares up front that what the artist creates is borrowed, if not stolen. In fact, by uttering the words of poetry – which, I must point out, was primarily a performed rather than a published medium in the 12th century – the poet was literally spilling his mead out into the listening audience, where they might taste of it themselves … in fact, literally drink it with the poet by internalizing the words, and (like the poet) speaking them aloud as their own.
For a contemporary example, consider your favorite song. Perhaps the lyrics are dear to you, because the song marks a critical time in your life. If you wish to sing the words, are you stealing from the artist? After all, the singer could never have anticipated what those words might mean to you, could she?
And the skaldic poet – who announced that his poetry was itself stolen or borrowed from the gods – literally gave shared ownership of his work to his community, quite literally praying that the audience would take that work and make it their own – that they might all drink deeply of Kvasir’s wisdom together.
Capturing Content
I agree with Publishers Weekly, who dubbed Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (NY: Penguin Press, 2004) “an important book.” This is one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Lessig clearly articulates the profound issues surrounding the concepts of intellectual property and copyright our global culture currently faces. Here, for instance, are some highlights from one of Lessig's arguments that helps describe the current paradigm shift in how we think about “content”:
"Capturing and sharing content ... is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and sharing through digital technology is different ... [it] promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and broadly shared ... [and has] given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe.
Yet all this is possible only if the action is presumptively legal. In the current regime of legal regulations, it is not. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; site that catalog cartoons from the 1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is presumptively illegal." (184-5, emphasis mine)
"Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the tools of Photoshop, sharing content on the web, must worry all the time. ... There is a free market in pencils; we needn't worry about its effect on creativity. But there is a highly regulated, monopolized market in cultural icons; the right to cultivate and transform them is not similarly free." (186, emphasis mine)
"Capturing and sharing content ... is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and sharing through digital technology is different ... [it] promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and broadly shared ... [and has] given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe.
Yet all this is possible only if the action is presumptively legal. In the current regime of legal regulations, it is not. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; site that catalog cartoons from the 1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is presumptively illegal." (184-5, emphasis mine)
"Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the tools of Photoshop, sharing content on the web, must worry all the time. ... There is a free market in pencils; we needn't worry about its effect on creativity. But there is a highly regulated, monopolized market in cultural icons; the right to cultivate and transform them is not similarly free." (186, emphasis mine)
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Kvasir's Mead is Poetry
Odin is sometimes equated with Jove because (like Jove) he appears in the myths as the “High One,” the lord of his fellow gods. But when the Romans described the gods of the Germanic tribes, they equated Odin/Woden with Mercury, a.k.a. Hermes. Hermes and his Egyptian antecedent, Thoth, are both attributed with the invention of writing. As the maker of runes and the god of poetry and poets, Odin plays a similar role; like the other two, he is also associated with the magical properties of speech and spell-casting.
Poetry, as the shaping of language through memory, imagination, and speech, was regarded as a mystery, a secret craft not unlike magic. Such power required considerable training, which came at a price. Curiously, at every stage in the myths, poetry is considered so powerful that no single individual can be said to contain or own it. The tales of how Odin claimed power over poets are full of duplicity, theft, and lying, but poetry itself escapes any attempt to utterly control it. It seems entirely appropriate that a common kenning for poetry was mead – for example, “Kvasir’s mead” or “the dwarfs’ mead”. In this tradition, one can be said to literally become drunk with poetry.
~ Kvasir was one of the wisest of the gods, and traveled the world teaching everyone he met. Two dwarves, named Fjalar and Galar, thought to profit by Kvasir’s death; they killed him and reduced his remains in a pot called Odrerir, where they mixed Kvasir’s blood with honey to create a powerful mead. Anyone who drank this mead would gain access to Kvasir’s wisdom: the mead, itself, was poetry.
~ Suttung the giant had a different axe to grind with this murderous pair of dwarves; they had killed his mother. Upon capturing them, he demanded the mead of poetry as a ransom for their lives. Hoping to keep its power to himself, he kept the mead in a deep cave, guarded by his daughter, Gunnlod. Everyone coveted the mead – particularly Odin, who was known to steal that which caught his eye.
~ Through a series of disguises and schemes, Odin managed to break into the cave and seduce the giant’s daughter. For three nights, he drank the mead; on the third night, he changed into an eagle in order to escape. Suttung discovered the theft, and changed into an eagle as well to give chase. Some of the mead escaped Odin’s mouth as he flew; some he allowed to drop, in order to distract the giant close behind him. When he finally made it over the walls of Asgard, he spat out the bulk of the mead into vessels the gods had prepared, making his plan complete.
But as the story ends, the gods themselves cannot claim all of the precious mead for themselves. Both deliberately and by accident, some of the mead fell on the earth, where it touched some of the living; those whom the spilled mead have touched become poets. While a somewhat visceral and queasy metaphor for divine inspiration, it is an important point that in this metaphor,
Poetry, as the shaping of language through memory, imagination, and speech, was regarded as a mystery, a secret craft not unlike magic. Such power required considerable training, which came at a price. Curiously, at every stage in the myths, poetry is considered so powerful that no single individual can be said to contain or own it. The tales of how Odin claimed power over poets are full of duplicity, theft, and lying, but poetry itself escapes any attempt to utterly control it. It seems entirely appropriate that a common kenning for poetry was mead – for example, “Kvasir’s mead” or “the dwarfs’ mead”. In this tradition, one can be said to literally become drunk with poetry.
~ Kvasir was one of the wisest of the gods, and traveled the world teaching everyone he met. Two dwarves, named Fjalar and Galar, thought to profit by Kvasir’s death; they killed him and reduced his remains in a pot called Odrerir, where they mixed Kvasir’s blood with honey to create a powerful mead. Anyone who drank this mead would gain access to Kvasir’s wisdom: the mead, itself, was poetry.
~ Suttung the giant had a different axe to grind with this murderous pair of dwarves; they had killed his mother. Upon capturing them, he demanded the mead of poetry as a ransom for their lives. Hoping to keep its power to himself, he kept the mead in a deep cave, guarded by his daughter, Gunnlod. Everyone coveted the mead – particularly Odin, who was known to steal that which caught his eye.
~ Through a series of disguises and schemes, Odin managed to break into the cave and seduce the giant’s daughter. For three nights, he drank the mead; on the third night, he changed into an eagle in order to escape. Suttung discovered the theft, and changed into an eagle as well to give chase. Some of the mead escaped Odin’s mouth as he flew; some he allowed to drop, in order to distract the giant close behind him. When he finally made it over the walls of Asgard, he spat out the bulk of the mead into vessels the gods had prepared, making his plan complete.
But as the story ends, the gods themselves cannot claim all of the precious mead for themselves. Both deliberately and by accident, some of the mead fell on the earth, where it touched some of the living; those whom the spilled mead have touched become poets. While a somewhat visceral and queasy metaphor for divine inspiration, it is an important point that in this metaphor,
- poetry is regurgitated and re-consumed. It travels through many stages and transformations (like mead); it does not belong to any one individual.
- It is likewise an important point that poetry – the distillation of the mind of the wisest of gods, and providing access to that knowledge – is constantly shadowed by deception and distortion.
- Finally, the poets themselves are the media (the vessels, the transformers) of poetry. In Norse tradition, poets are powerful, but one should never entirely trust them – no more than one should ever entirely trust Odin.
And for the poets themselves – and their audience – the myth suggests that while it is best shared liberally, one must try never to take in too much poetry at once.
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