POPPING THE SEAMS

OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Christine Harold
University of Minnesota Press; 2007.

For Harold, resistance takes the form of interventions in the field of texts, signs and symbols that dominate our culture. OurSpace contextualizes contemporary interventionist media – appropriation art, culture jamming and media pranks – within a history of Situationist detournement. While Harold does not categorically dismiss this work she argues that while the tactics of the SI were relevant to the early stages of late capitalism the shift from a production-based disciplinary society toward a post-Fordist society of control calls for different tactics.

Following Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture) she notes that any sort of culture of dissent becomes marketed as a commodity and that the individualism, distinctiveness and novelty of subculture are what drive consumer culture anyway.

She ends by referencing Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics and the idea that texts are not created for an existing public but that texts create their own publics and by embracing the Creative Commons model as a way to foster the creation of texts which create publics in ways which are not locked into being simple negations of corporate-controlled culture.

She invokes the classical Greek idea of “kairos” to suggest a model for us to consider texts as always in the process of being created, not as fixed and owned.

For Harold, Creative Commons is not so much about freeing intellectual property as about creating an intensification of the regulation of texts so that they remain subject to reconfiguration and recontextualization.

“In other words, whereas traditional copyright offers prefabricated products for the public to consume under a priori conditions and restrictions, an open content approach opens cultural products to a public process, by “wrapping” content in a flexible, accessible layer of regulation.”

She sees here the opportunity to build an alternative order within the present order as theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. “Resistance, say Hardt and Negri, should not be concieved as an opposition to Empire, but as simultaneously productive of and different from it: ‘The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.’”