The People's Platform by Astra Taylor

Author:Astra Taylor [Taylor, Astra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36036-6
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

5

THE DOUBLE ANCHOR

Not long after the premiere of my documentary Examined Life, a film made up of a series of walks with contemporary philosophers, I found the entire thing online, ninety minutes posted in full or cut into random snippets spread across the Internet. I had expected such a thing to happen and had planned my response: a pleasant note that began in a tone of gratitude, thanking the various uploaders for their enthusiasm and support of the project. Then I told them that the movie had been quite costly to produce and we were about to release it in theaters and to home viewers. I’d like a few months, I went on, to try to recover some of the film’s expenses by charging people to see it, in part to encourage future investment in similarly offbeat work. After this window I was prepared for people to post the film. Would they mind, I wondered, removing the clips in the interim?

Of the four or five people I wrote to, only two bothered to reply. One remarked that since my film was about philosophy and since philosophy, in a moral and historical sense, belongs to everyone in the world, my film does, too. It also should to be accessible to people in the developing world, this person added. The other respondent essentially took the same view while adding a few expletives, telling me that philosophy is free.

The movie clips remained online and I gave up on writing strangers. I had naively dipped my toe into an angry debate about the future of media, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, computing capacity and software design, the history of intellectual property, theoretical questions about cultural value and ownership, utopian visions of open access to art and ideas, and quotidian considerations about the ability of creative types to make a living from their work. I had stumbled into the copyright wars.

My first documentary was about a Lacanian Marxist cultural theorist, so perhaps I’m more inclined to agree with the unrepentant uploaders than most filmmakers. Philosophy does indeed belong to everyone; knowledge cannot be owned and we have a responsibility to share it. Isn’t that what the Enlightenment was all about? I also believe we makers of art and culture do not, in a strict sense, possess the work we make, at least not in the way I own the mug I’m drinking from or the socks I’m wearing. Like most cultural producers, I create to affect other people, which means, in a sense, that I want the audience to take ownership of the work, to incorporate it, to make it part of themselves.

As a documentarian it’s particularly difficult to delude myself into thinking I’m somehow the sole proprietor of my productions; I didn’t invent the reality I film or dream up my subjects or script what they say. The work is made from the world and is part of it; in a fundamental way, it is part of what people now call the cultural

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