| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Lawrence Liang |
| 00:00:05 | There's a very beautiful story
narrated by the social historian of piracy, |
| 00:00:10 | Peter Linebaugh, in which he speaks of a custom |
| 00:00:13 | if it was imminent that a ship was going to sink
because of very bad weather, |
| 00:00:17 | everyone on the ship would get together and break
the locks that were there on the barrels |
| 00:00:23 | off the caskets of wine or of rum and drink together, |
| 00:00:30 | temporarily suspending relationships of master, owner, |
| 00:00:37 | captain, slave etc because it was imminent
that they were all going to die, |
| 00:00:43 | but what they were suspending really,
was the logic of private property |
| 00:00:47 | right, in this moment where all of a sudden |
| 00:00:50 | there's this carnivalesque celebration just before death |
| 00:00:56 | or what the... decide to be inevitable death |
| 00:00:59 | and he, Peter Linebaugh narrates interesting stories |
| 00:01:03 | of a number of communities who were formed |
| 00:01:05 | by an act of divine intervention where after the celebration |
| 00:01:11 | of this temporary autonomous zone of property, |
| 00:01:15 | the ships actually didn't actually sink.
And they ended up in islands |
| 00:01:21 | or in places where all of a sudden,
you know once you'd already suspended, |
| 00:01:26 | even for a brief moment,
the logic of private property, |
| 00:01:30 | what is the term or what are the terms,
through which you will then create a new community. |
| 00:01:34 | And this is a very interesting metaphor for our contemporary |
| 00:01:38 | because this is the time where all of a sudden
after having survived, |
| 00:01:42 | they clearly couldn't go back to an older logic |
| 00:01:45 | where property determined social relations
and they created for themselves |
| 00:01:49 | temporary communes which celebrated the idea of commoning, |
| 00:01:54 | or returned themselves to a memory of the commons. |
| 00:01:59 | All of which were brutally crushed,
and piracy has its roots in this particular history. |
| 00:02:09 | In the same that if you look in the contemporary |
| 00:02:12 | where the emergence of piracy as a mode of circulation
and distribution of knowledge etc |
| 00:02:21 | it is not so much the fact that the "Phantom Menace"
is downloaded 500 times, |
| 00:02:25 | or 600 times etc, yes of course
there's an imaginary specter of economic loss |
| 00:02:31 | that informs that. But the real battle
or the real threat lies in a shift in the ways that we think |
| 00:02:39 | of the possibilities, we think of the shift
of possibilities, of ourselves as creators, |
| 00:02:45 | and not merely as consumers,
as writers filmmakers, photographers etc, |
| 00:02:50 | and i think that is really where the danger lies |
| 00:02:54 | Because if the imagination of global mass media |
| 00:02:57 | is dependent of a particular kind
of relationship between production, |
| 00:03:02 | circulation and consumption,
now this is where the rules are being changed altogether. |
| 00:03:06 | The fact that the DVD writer is the new
weapon of mass destruction in the world, |
| 00:03:13 | is primarily for the fact that a 50 billion dollar film |
| 00:03:16 | can be reproduced at the cost of
virtually 10 or 15 cents on a DVD. |
| 00:03:23 | Now you have a strange paradox, |
| 00:03:25 | you have a situation, you know,
where in some senses |
| 00:03:29 | the ability to even think of ourselves |
| 00:03:33 | sitting on our computers with a DVD writer,
as competition |
| 00:03:38 | to a 535 billion dollar industry
is not science fiction anymore. |
| 00:03:44 | And it's really the ability to think of the possibilities |
| 00:03:48 | you know that have happened.
Earlier people were happy with reproducing the DVD, |
| 00:03:52 | then people started looking for
their favourite scenes and archiving it, |
| 00:03:57 | then people who were not happy with the scenes
decided they would make parodies. |
| 00:04:02 | and remix some scenes, and then people realized
they had a better film in their head |
| 00:04:07 | they could make and they could of course use some bits of the existing film, |
| 00:04:12 | so that the possibilities really became endless. |
| 00:04:14 | I think the example that highlights
the gap between the possible and the proscribed |
| 00:04:21 | is really in terms of let's see filmmakers who are |
| 00:04:27 | suddenly making films outside of the logic of the studio, |
| 00:04:32 | outside of the logic of industrial mode of production, |
| 00:04:35 | which demands that a film
is a particular kind of cultural commodity that |
| 00:04:40 | is manufactured in a particular kind of manner. |
| 00:04:43 | And an example of this
is a filmmaker called Jonathan Caouette |
| 00:04:47 | who made a film called Tarnation which used home video,
clips from other sources, etc |
| 00:04:54 | and all of this for $280, when the film was sought
to be distributed because it made a splash |
| 00:05:00 | in independent film festivals, and when they tried
to distribute the film and tried to get copyright |
| 00:05:08 | permissions from the different owners of copyright, |
| 00:05:11 | the budget of the film suddenly shot to $800,000. |
| 00:05:15 | And again one cannot speak about the gap
between the possible and proscribed |
| 00:05:21 | with looking at what actually exists between the two. |
| 00:05:24 | And what exists between the two are legal fictions |
| 00:05:28 | backed by extreme capabilities of violence. |
| 00:05:32 | So it's a terrorism of the mind that
actually sustains concepts like intellectual property, |
| 00:05:39 | it's a terrorism that's grounded
on an idea of brutal repression, |
| 00:05:46 | of that which was actually possible. |
| 00:05:50 | What actually lies therefore between the two, |
| 00:05:53 | is in some senses the bare naked idea of sovereignty and |
| 00:05:59 | authority and power, linked to the service of property. |
| 00:06:07 | I think that what we need
to start imagining for the 21st century |
| 00:06:11 | is to create a museum of all the lost objects,
cultures, thoughts, poetry music, |
| 00:06:20 | lost cultures in the sense that the kind of cultural commodities
that could have been created, |
| 00:06:27 | the kind of practices that could have been initiated
had it not been for the law. |
| 00:06:31 | I think it's time to create a similar museum of this sort, |
| 00:06:34 | which memorialises the loss of culture
created by the enforcement of property, |
| 00:06:39 | the loss of cultures created
by the boundaries of the law. |
| 00:06:43 | And this museum would look very interesting
because it would be partly Marquez, |
| 00:06:50 | part Kafka, a bit Borges and a lot of very very grey
murky Proust in between. |
| 00:07:01 | So let's start thinking of ways in which we have lost. |
| 00:07:04 | But the time is not to lament because the 21st century
is marked by the possibility that |
| 00:07:11 | in some senses these museums are also being archived. |
| 00:07:16 | there are these museums that people have secretly created
in their personal space |
| 00:07:23 | and it's just the ability now of
these museums to speak to each other |
| 00:07:27 | and come together in sense in a way that we can retrieve |
| 00:07:30 | these lost cultural commodities or objects, |
| 00:07:34 | where they no longer lost then, but are actually found. |
| 00:07:38 | So I think it's time to find our place of culture
in the 21st century |
| 00:07:42 | and forget our lament for the loss
that took place in the 19th and the 20th century. |
