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Interview with Lawrence Liang

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There's a very beautiful story 
narrated by the social historian of piracy,

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Peter Linebaugh, in which he speaks of a custom

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if it was imminent that a ship was going to sink 
because of very bad weather, 

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everyone on the ship would get together and break 
the locks that were there on the barrels 

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off the caskets of wine or of rum and drink together,

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temporarily suspending relationships of master, owner, 

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captain, slave etc because it was imminent 
that they were all going to die,

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but what they were suspending really, 
was the logic of private property

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right, in this moment where all of a sudden 

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there's this carnivalesque celebration just before death 

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or what the... decide to be inevitable death

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and he, Peter Linebaugh narrates interesting stories 

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of a number of communities who were formed

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by an act of divine intervention where after the celebration 

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of this temporary autonomous zone of property,

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the ships actually didn't actually sink. 
And they ended up in islands

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 or in places where all of a sudden, 
you know once you'd already suspended, 

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even for a brief moment, 
the logic of private property,

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what is the term or what are the terms, 
through which you will then create a new community.

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And this is a very interesting metaphor for our contemporary

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because this is the time where all of a sudden 
after having survived,

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they clearly couldn't go back to an older logic 

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where property determined social relations 
and they created for themselves

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temporary communes which celebrated the idea of commoning,

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or returned themselves to a memory of the commons.

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All of which were brutally crushed, 
and piracy has its roots in this particular history.

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In the same that if you look in the contemporary

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where the emergence of piracy as a mode of circulation 
and distribution of knowledge etc

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it is not so much the fact that the "Phantom Menace" 
is downloaded  500 times,

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or 600 times etc, yes of course 
there's an imaginary specter of economic loss

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that informs that. But the real battle 
or the real threat lies in a shift in the ways that we think

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of the possibilities, we think of the shift 
of possibilities, of ourselves as creators,

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and not merely as consumers, 
as writers filmmakers, photographers etc,

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and i think that is really where the danger lies 

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Because if the imagination of global mass media 

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is dependent of a particular kind 
of relationship between production,

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circulation and consumption, 
now this is where the rules are being changed altogether.

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The fact that the DVD writer is the new 
weapon of mass destruction in the world,

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is primarily for the fact that a 50 billion dollar film

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can be reproduced at the cost of 
virtually 10 or 15 cents on a DVD.

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Now you have a strange paradox, 

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you have a situation, you know, 
where in some senses 

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the ability to even think of ourselves

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sitting on our computers with a DVD writer, 
as competition

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to a 535 billion dollar industry 
is not science fiction anymore.

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And it's really the ability to think of the possibilities

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you know that have happened. 
Earlier people were happy with reproducing the DVD,

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then people started looking for 
their favourite scenes and archiving it,

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then people who were not happy with the scenes 
decided they would make parodies. 

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and remix some scenes, and then people realized 
they had a better film in their head

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they could make and they could of course use some bits of the existing film,

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so that the possibilities really became endless.

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I think the example that highlights 
the gap between the possible and the proscribed

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is really in terms of let's see filmmakers who are 

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suddenly making films outside of the logic of the studio,

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outside of the logic of industrial mode of production,

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which demands that a film 
is a particular kind of cultural commodity that 

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is manufactured in a particular kind of manner.

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And an example of this 
is a filmmaker called Jonathan Caouette

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who made a film called Tarnation which used home video, 
clips from other sources,  etc 

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and all of this for $280, when the film was sought 
to be distributed because it made a splash

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in independent film festivals, and when they tried 
to distribute the film and tried to get copyright 

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permissions from the different owners of copyright, 

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the budget of the film suddenly shot to $800,000.

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And again one cannot speak about the gap 
between the possible and proscribed 

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with looking at what actually exists between the two.

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And what exists between the two are legal fictions

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 backed by extreme capabilities of violence. 

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 So it's a terrorism of the mind that 
actually sustains concepts like intellectual property,

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it's a terrorism that's grounded 
on an idea of brutal repression,

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of that which was actually possible. 

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What actually lies therefore between the two,

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is in some senses the bare naked idea of sovereignty and

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authority and power, linked to the service of property.

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I think that what we need 
to start imagining for the 21st century

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is to create a museum of all the lost objects, 
cultures, thoughts, poetry music,

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lost cultures in the sense that the kind of cultural commodities 
that could have been created,

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the kind of practices that could have been initiated 
had it not been for the law.

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 I think it's time to create a similar museum of this sort, 

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which memorialises the loss of culture 
created by the enforcement of property,

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the loss of cultures created 
by the boundaries of the law.

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And this museum would look very interesting 
because it would be partly Marquez,

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part Kafka, a bit Borges and a lot of very very grey 
murky Proust in between.

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So let's start thinking of ways in which we have lost.

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 But the time is not to lament because the 21st century 
is marked by the possibility that

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in some senses these museums are also being archived.

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there are these museums that people have secretly created 
in their personal space

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and it's just the ability now of 
these museums to speak to each other

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and come together in sense in a way that we can retrieve 

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these lost cultural commodities  or objects,

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where they no longer lost then, but are actually found.

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So I think it's time to find our place of culture  
in the 21st century

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and forget our lament for the loss 
that took place in the 19th and the 20th century.