The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
and, for lack of a better word, cool. Whereas copyright law is dull and antiquated, the Creative Commons is agile and cutting edge, giving the commons access to information and pop culture. Whereas brick-and-mortar archives and archivists are dusty institutional holdovers from another era, the Wayback Machine is a whimsically named technology for time travel. In each case, the rhetorical posture of not taking oneself too seriously frames expertise, allowing it to function in ways that traditional conditions would preclude. This posture, I argue in the conclusion, disarms two sets of questions that confront expertise in the twenty-first century. First, are the habits that function as expertise in the digital commons recognizable by that term from a traditional perspective on productive epistemology? Are they really expertise? Second, does rhetorically constructing an activity as a gifting activity make it so? Can knowing and making be effectively integrated with gifting, or is the latter a façade for something else entirely? The networked expertise of the digital commons depends on that of the gifting logos’ to critique but also to destabilize traditional expertise and its authority.
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The Infrastructural Commons
While writing this chapter, I took my four-year-old son to see a theater production of the folktale Stone Soup.1 A connoisseur even at his modest age, he loved the play. So the next time we went to the children’s library, I picked out The Real Story of Stone Soup, thinking it would be received with the same enthusiasm.2 I was wrong. The boy who had loved the live performance wholly rejected the book, which prompted a conversation about what “version” means. In the spirit of an educator parent, I tried patiently to explain that a single story can be told in different ways. Some stories, I suggested, may not be owned by anyone in particular, but instead tinkered with and adapted to suit various needs. My son was having none of it. Nevertheless, through our discussions of narrative play and transcultural myth, something emerged: important questions about artistic interpretation, situatedness in particular places and times, ownership of the human drama, the transmission of privileged knowledge, and engagements between community insiders and outsiders.
Although not about fairytales or soup per se, this chapter explores the kind of experiential, inventive, communal practices that the legend’s culinarian stranger enacts, wherein to know is to make and to make is to gift. The man who comes to town possesses the knowledge not only to make soup, but to live a precarious life defined by the making of soup. His expertise is inextricable from his situatedness in the world, a condition that depends on the invention and delivery of a substantive gift; the man’s knowledge and experience—his gift to his ever-changing hosts—are soup. For my purposes, the soup corresponds roughly to what copyright law calls “expressive content”: music, photography, film and video, text, design, and imagery in digital form. This kind of content is the reification of what its producers experience and know within the context of their lives. The expressive content, for the purposes of this chapter, may be thought of as what I define in chapter 1 as “stuff.” As noted there, “stuff” is a handy term for digital cultural content, reflecting both ubiquity and a smudged line between what is material and immaterial. It refers at once to tangible things and symbolic currency. Further, it captures a performative dimension, as in the phrase “to strut one’s stuff.” In the digital commons, stuff is both the products and processes of invention that demand an integration of knowing and/as making and/as gifting.
My study of the gifting logos turns in this chapter to the Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization primarily associated with a suite of licenses that negotiates copyright.3 Challenging the legal and technical mechanisms of copyright, the Creative Commons licenses supply makers of digital artifacts with a structure for distributing their “stuff” beyond the “all rights reserved” default premise. A simple example is a musician who attaches a Creative Commons license to a song, making that song freely accessible to anyone who might want to listen to it, slice it up into beats and riffs, make new music, and license the new music likewise. Another is a graphic designer and software programmer seeking publicity and membership in a professional network that coheres around collaboratively produced content. Of primary interest to my analysis is the question: How is expertise rhetorically managed in this process? How is the interplay of knowledge and experience that happens in the making of cultural artifacts like text, code, and music accounted for by those who participate in the digital commons, specifically via the Creative Commons infrastructure? What is expertise in this infrastructure?
In response to these questions, I offer the notion of the gifting logos as expertise. To demonstrate how the gifting logos functions in the Creative Commons, I analyze a set of discourses: (1) the 2015 Creative Commons memorandum “The State of the Commons,” with appended data sheets; (2) The Power of Open, the Creative Commons’s self-published collection of success stories; (3) the history, vision statement, and general user instructions published on the organization’s website; and (4) three academic articles and two popular books authored by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig during the initiative’s early stages.4 I argue that the production and circulation of cultural “stuff” is framed by the Creative Commons as expertise that subsumes gifting. I argue further that the Creative Commons texts construct an account of what knowing, making, and gifting are as one, and that, in their efforts to challenge traditions of expert ownership, they establish an alternate logic, or logos.
The first section of the chapter is an introduction to copyright history, theory, and policy. It provides a selective rather than chronological account of copyright, directing attention to certain theoretical assumptions and pivotal moments.5 In the analysis that follows, I begin by describing the Creative Commons licenses as the imposition of order on cultural invention and the individuation of creative efforts. Second, I discuss the management of value, a complicated notion in gifting theory, by distinguishing between the declarative and subjective conditions for gifts. Third, the discussion of value is followed by an analysis of how the Creative Commons conceptualizes both itself as a program and its participants’ inventions as gifts. I offer an interpretation of this duality of what gifting means in the Creative Commons infrastructure by analyzing assumptions about intentionality and digital action. Fourth, I examine how gifting and the notion of inheritance together complicate intent. Fifth, I examine how the gifting logos accounts for productive abundance, the massive quantity of digital cultural production. Sixth, I examine how copiousness may be thought of in relation to time and the rhetorical sensitivity to timing marked by the concept of kairos.
COPYRIGHT, “STUFF,” AND STRUCTURES OF CONTROL
Copyright codifies the idea that a person who creates a cultural artifact ought to be allowed to control that artifact’s public life, particularly the making of duplicate copies. The right to exercise such control is grounded either in the creator’s personal connection to the artifact or in the assumption that control, especially over profit, incentivizes creation. Expertise is a dimension of copyright, in other words, either because expertise is what characterizes the expert herself or because it has a certain market value. Since the 1990s the emergence of user-friendly digital technologies and the World Wide Web, enabling the global production, reproduction, and circulation of cultural content, has made copyright exceedingly complicated. These technocultural developments, and their fraught relationship to legal tradition, are duly noted in every treatment of copyright and digital culture. Such notations are merited and important but ought to be qualified with at least two comments. First, technological determinism as a perspective warrants critique, which I offer in chapter 1. Second, and more important as I proceed in this chapter, copyright was always complicated. The notion that a particular symbolic form can belong to a legally empowered individual is on some level preposterous. Hardly anyone would deny that knowledge and art are products of inspiration. As Boon, whom I cite in chapter 1, notes, imitation is integral not only to learning but to being human. How then could a person possibly put particular words or images in her or his pocket and claim to own them? Yet powerful legal institutions and cultural precepts, including labor, capital, originality, and personhood, reinforce copyright. This chapter must be read, in short,