CREATIVITY: Common As Air: Revolution, Art and OwnershipBy Lewis Hyde Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 256pp. $25
POPULAR imagination has tended to prefer our great artists solitary, harried only by genius, compelled to bring forth creations from deep inside their individual selves. We often see them, like Mozart in the film Amadeus, sweating by candlelight and maddened by the effort to shape the surge of pure inspiration. But the truth of creation is generally more prosaic. Almost all great artists, thinkers, scientists and inventors have worked under the influence of their peers, in tandem with their times and in response to their predecessors.
Such an insight is hardly profound. As Lewis Hyde points out in his new book examining the idea of a cultural commons, artists have been telling us this for years: you steal, according to Eliot and Picasso; “You use what’s been handed down,” in the words of Dylan. Yet what is considerably more significant are the implications drawn by Hyde from these ideas. These are the notions that culture is a common resource increasingly under threat from overly restrictive intellectual property rights and that such property rights are questionable when the irreducibly common, plural dimensions of identity and selfhood are recognised.
Hyde, a professor of art and politics at Kenyon College, in Ohio, has been tracing the relationship between artistic practice and commercial concerns since his 1983 book, The Gift. There he argued that creativity need not be completely determined by market considerations and that the true work of art functions more accurately as a gift bestowed upon our cultural heritage. In Common As AirHyde often sounds comparable notes of idealism and nostalgia for creative times less constricted by commercial ends, but to his credit he is well aware of their risks. Here he attempts not merely to criticise what he sees as the increasing encroachment on artistic practice, scientific endeavour and cultural innovation by restrictive copyright and patenting laws, but also to set out an alternative vision of how we might balance creativity and the protection of its rewards.
Hyde’s solution is to suggest we think of culture – the accumulation of intellectual insight and creative endeavour – as a commons along the model of the traditional English agricultural commonage. Cultural works thereby become not the property of individuals but things we can all access according to certain rights of usage. Such rights are protected by “stints”, or limitations put in place to protect the commonage from exploitation.
The gradual decline and enclosure of British commonage through the 18th and 19th centuries is portrayed as an analogue to the increasing restrictions on intellectual property throughout the 20th century. The first copyright law, the Statute of Anne (1709), limited it to 28 years, with work automatically entering the public domain unless copyright was specifically applied for. Today in the US, work stands restricted by ownership for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.
In all of this Hyde’s greatest asset is arguably also his greatest weakness. He delicately avoids taking extreme stances and all the time searches for a position of subtlety and complexity appropriate to the issues. His is never the predictable far-left position that decries all notions of private ownership. He attempts to balance the concerns of the individual with the need for a rich public domain that enables rather than restricts. But in doing so he ends up taking a middle route that feels unsatisfying precisely for its lack of radicality, as it is difficult to see how the notion of stinting the cultural domain amounts to much more than perhaps reducing copyright limits back to their 1709 levels.
Much of what is valuable in the book revolves less around what we should do to renew the cultural commons and more around why we should do it. In a provocative reading of the American founding fathers’ comments on intellectual ownership (provocative at least in the current US climate of Republican and Tea Party constitutional originalism) Hyde links Jefferson’s and Franklin’s distrust of monopolies and restrictive ownership to notions of social identity and civic republicanism quite at odds with today’s American individualism and conservative Republicanism.
Hyde emphasises Jefferson’s commonwealth position that intellectual ownership is a privilege rather than a right, the privilege to briefly gain exclusive reward for something that should ultimately be available to all for the benefit of mankind. This for Hyde precisely encapsulates a model of citizenship that sees freedom not in its negative sense as a protection from the impositions of others but in a positive sense as the freedom to participate in society and work towards public ends. To allow one’s work to enter the public domain in an unrestricted manner enriches that domain.
Conversely, the public domain becomes the source of all that we are and all we can become, raw material for the lifelong construction of a self that is not an isolated individual but one that is civic, communicative and “other reliant”. Hyde seems to suggest that the maintenance of a cultural commons is our duty as citizens, as without it “we”, indeed “I”, would be nothing.
If there is radicality to be found in Hyde's work it is here. This is a debate about the freedom to access culture, and in debates that revolve around freedom – particularly American debates – fears about governance on both the left and right start to coalesce into a general suspicion of control. Common as Airdistinguishes itself by taking on the mantle of civic republicanism, suggesting that where extremes become blurred the truly radical position is the one that deals in considered moderation, a position that limits not others but itself in the service of others.
Aengus Woods is co-editor of Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey. He is completing a PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York
