Law in Contemporary Society

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StephenSeveroFirstPaper 11 - 18 Jun 2010 - Main.StephenSevero
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A Right to Destroy - "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

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Who Said That?

 
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-- By StephenSevero - 16 Feb 2010
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And Why Do We Care?

 
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Kafka and Emily Dickinson - The Right to Destroy as the Absence of Compulsion

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-- By StephenSevero - 18 Jun 2010
 
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In American law, we often recognize a right to destroy goods which would be valuable to society as a whole. Human beings are allowed to retain healthy, functioning organs in a lifeless and decaying corpse. But some people contend that this right should not extend posthumously to authors and their unpublished material. However, to forbid the right to destroy is essentially to compel publication.
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Last week, my father talked to me about the book he was currently reading. It "proved beyond a doubt" that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote all the plays now attributed to that name. Thinking about this in conjunction with my first paper, I began to wonder. Why was he so invested in the question? If the author is one man, as opposed to another, does that matter? Always?
 
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It isn't wise to build an entire essay around a straw man. "Some people say" means that you don't have anyone who was actually willing to take the other side of this in a principled argument to which you could have responded in kind. This is a clue, of course, that the other side is impossibly weak, and that your efforts to slaw this straw man will be largely if not utterly wasted.
 
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This may actually work to discourage creation. If a creator is worried that some misstep, something he considers a creative failure, will be made permanent, he will likely be even more hesitant to make that initial step.
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Why We Say We Care:

 
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Only if you really believe that there is (a) some power, (b) some willingness, and (c) some method to prevent people from erasing files or tearing up drafts. And that's ludicrous.
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The two main ways it appears we use an author is 1) to ties works together and 2) to tie facts and authority to an individual work. We say to ourselves that each of these is designed solely to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the work, but they often have their downsides. For this paper, I will focus on point 2, why does it matter that this particular author wrote the piece.
 
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As I watched the wiki over the course of the week, I noticed few students, myself included, putting up their rough sketches and outlines. Even fewer had their brainstorming sessions made public. In all creation, there is a fear, perhaps unfounded, that others will judge our unfinished work and find us wanting. Until the idea is fully crystallized, it may not be committed to paper. And since few of us have eidetic memory, this will lead to degradation of the work and many lost moments of brilliance.
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My father told me that he cared because historical fact (or what little of it we know) can add layers and depth to a work. If we know that the author is as geographically limited as Kant, it could add a bit of whimsy or the fantastic to any description of exotic locales. On the other hand, if we know facts about an author that make the story seem more autobiographical, then that adds an element of gravitas to the scene. By tying the story to the metatext of history we achieve much the same affect as when we view an author's corpus as a whole - except this time we have a more "honest" view. The author as an author can dissemble, but a real history can ground the work in truth.
 
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Writers and composers keep notebooks. They don't show them to people. Often they burn them when work is complete. The digital workflow makes that even more trivial. But keeping your notebook in public, as this wiki, is a very different matter. You are right that people are by and large shy about it, and that shyness has nothing to do with the degree of talent or the extent of mastery. I don't therefore require anything of people, I merely make more options possible than were possible before.
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While I found myself agreeing with his first points, I was troubled by the idea that the life of an author could add "reality" to the work. I was stuck contemplating the dangerous aspects of that association.
 
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We recognize the right for a living author to destroy or overwrite his work, and it may be harmful to not extend this posthumously. By forcing a reticent author to destroy his works in his lifetime, we would encourage premature destruction. A sickly author might not wish his unfinished work to be "completed" as Tolkien's Silmarillion was.
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Why We Should Worry:

 
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If so, given the long posthumous extension of copyright and the strength of copyright on unpublished works, he can long prevent it.
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We often rely on heuristics in making judgments, and the collective opinion of an author can easily inform our opinion of a work. Further, any statement (and here I'm thinking particularly of trenchant quotes and other supposed statements of "fact") can be given more credence and more bite by being attributed to a famous figure. "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter" can move from cynical elitism to funny but slightly depressing truism when you append "-Winston Churchill". Rather than reevaluate all the evidence, we are more likely to save ourselves the trouble and rely on the conclusion of a trusted figure.
 
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Fearing his sickness may be unto death, and knowing that his wishes will be ignored, this author may feel compelled to destroy the work while he still has the power.
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By trusting the pedigree of the author, we may be overestimating the value of a work. We cover up our dislike for fear of seeming uncultured or lacking in taste. But at the same time, the pedigree can buoy us up and inspire us to keep mining a difficult work. I can think of many books where the initial goings were rough, but in light of the author I slogged through until my dedication was rewarded. Conversely, the author may be used to discredit the work, much to our own detriment.
 
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You seem to have forgotten the existence of family, friends, and literary executors. Getting people to destroy things for you after your death is comparatively easy, if you know whom to trust. Surely literary history is replete primarily with the opposite problem: destruction of letters, journals, drafts by family members,
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This way of using the author as "cultural" support primarily influences our aesthetic appreciation of a work, but often we overstep that line and use the biography of the author as "factual" support. An unattributed work may be just the ravings of a pothead, but if we know that Carl Sagan wrote it we give it more credence. Why should it matter whether the unfactual, unsubstantiated opinion is that of a scientist? Perhaps this might suggest a greater sensitivity to reality and "deeper thought" on the issue, but both of these should be secondary to our own personal assessment.
 
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This would prevent any chance of him later modifying the work until it is sufficiently improved to be published.
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The factual support is much more dangerous than the cultural support, particularly where individual quotes are removed from all context and then distributed widely. "Misevaluation" of a cultural sense isn't all that troublesome, as anyone out of the loop in high school could attest. But it can be quite dangerous to rely heavily on the authority of the author in factual matters - some may be genius in one area but woefully misguided when outside of their expertise. Too often people confuse a specific and limited preeminence with a general one. (Tom Cruise is no doctor.
 
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Vergil and Nabokov - The 'Need' for Greater Understanding

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The Benefits of Focusing on Text

 
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When dealing with previously established authors, the argument in support of compelled publication is stronger. The work must no longer be published just for any individual (potential) literary merit, but because it will aid our understanding of the author's published works of known literary value. But this very reason increases the likelihood that a work will be prematurely destroyed. An author usually wishes his work to be destroyed because he feels it is not "good enough" to warrant publication, and that its release will temper his current status.
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At all these points we are abdicating part of our duty to evaluate the information being presented to us. The phenomenon is not limited to cultural appreciation (I see it more often and more dangerously used by students responding to professors), in fact it affects everything we do. But it's easier to notice ourselves doing it with the printed word. We're not trapped in a public moment, being expected to convey our immediate conclusion - we're given the time to reflect and digest, and at no point will the author be able to step outside the text and influence us directly. We should take advantage of the opportunity to strengthen our analysis, so that when we are pressed for time we can still be appropriately critical.
 
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This is a peculiar generalization, failing to account, for example, for "Across the River and Into the Trees."

A known commodity will be even more keen to protect his image, lest his past brilliance be deemed a fluke.

As I say, not a very strong inference from an imagined single version of the creative ego.

Also, how far would this shield extend? Would we compel publication of personal letters and private diaries? These works, arguably more than an unfinished novel, would give us tremendous insight into the author; but few would support such an intrusion.

And you don't have any legal basis or power for such a move. Straw man alert.

By compelling publication of a work, we would also discourage collaboration. The more people that know of a work, the harder it will be to destroy. Beyond a single person whom the author trusts to destroy his work, he would keep the manuscript a total secret. This novel, even if completed, may lack a true sense of discourse and would certainly have benefited from the input and help of other eyes.

Dr. Seuss - Information Distribution when the Cat is Out of the Hat

The right to destroy, however, is essentially extinguished once the work is published. No longer is it comparable to a compulsion to publish, and any "right to destroy" is rendered practically meaningless. The author does not wish to destroy a single manuscript, but instead wants to erase every copy of the work. It would be impossible to place the he cat back in the bag, and until all media is under the control of Kindle, copies of the work would be forever disseminated.

You should have discussed Spelvinizing. The issue isn't whether the work exists: the issue is whether the attribution exists. The right of deattribution would have been a more suitable subject for an essay.

Further, the right to destroy his own work cannot be extended to destroy the works of others. Since our culture is built by accretion, this would require surgical precision - removing the grain of his own work without damaging the nacre added by others. Would he be allowed to destroy all translations? Isn't translating a creative and not merely a determinate process?

So?

The Extension to Tangible Art

The dichotomy of published and unpublished works does not extend to more visual and tangible forms of art where the expression is almost inseparable from the physical instantiation. In the case of sculptures and paintings, the work is inherently unique and cannot be perfectly copied. This means that the destruction is now practically possible, and can easily be done without destroying the work of others.

Some destruction is of course accepted as a necessary part of the creative process. A traditional marble sculpture is created by repeatedly destroying its predecessors each time hammer meets chisel. Denying the creator the right to destroy his art denies him the ability to determine what is outmoded and what needs to be altered - would we stop a sculptor when we feel the work is complete? The expressive urge which drove him to create is integral to his desire for destruction. His initial creation was a way of stating "This should be expressed", and the destruction should be seen in the same light - similar to performance art.

Possibly, depending on context. You're going too far too fast without actually thinking about the history here. Consider the dedication of Beethoven's Third Symphony, for example.

Also, unlike in a published work, the destruction is not an attempt to Herostratize* the work. (The mere creation of this verb speaks to the impossibility of that goal, particularly in the age of digital storage and dissemination.) Instead, the destroyer only wishes to eliminate this single instance of the work. All photos, descriptions, and other echoes of the work (the works created by others) will remain untouched.

Unfortunate Results

To be certain, there are unpleasant repercussions. We would be without much of the work of Kafka and Dickinson. We would be without Vergil's masterwork. But we should not build our artistic culture by conscription.

A fine conclusion, easily earned by victory over the scarecrow. In my view, the route to revision is to find a position someone actually takes and argue with it, if you must, or find a position you actually take and explain it, which would be better. A desire for culture built by willing artists is easy to have: look around. It's a desire to make problematic the obvious that's more difficult of satisfaction, and I wonder whether it is worth the effort.

* In verbing this name, I mean to refer to the Ephesean response, and not to Herostratus' plan. Also, most of the links are not directly relevant to the text, but instead are various things that I was thinking about as I wrote the paper. Interesting, but often tenuously connected at best.

 
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  • Conceptually, I have a hard time buying that people are not writing because they're afraid of missteps. Sure, at the margins, fear I might be judged might make me not put something in writing (notably in email), but you have very little evidence to back up the idea that the work of Kafka and Dickinson and Vergil and (maybe more importantly) everything that has been built creatively upon it would have been worth losing to society. It's fairly obvious to me that we grow more by interaction than by lone rumination, and so I have difficulty accepting your claim to the opposite without much more than conjecture to back it up. Finally, as a practical matter, how would you suggest I should have made my brainstorming public? It was going on in my head. Other than using the TWiki editor and saving every few minutes (I happen to prefer a classical text editor, but considered that route), what could have made my work more public? -- DTRK - 01 Mar 2010

I'll go through your points in reverse. Perhaps we mean different things by "brainstorming" - Posting on the wiki is exactly the way to make it public, and to a lesser extent a personal conversation. I think Nona's page is a good example of making brainstorming public. Keeping it between your brain and your text editor is "lone rumination". I think interaction is important, and hermitage (mental as well as physical) is the domain of gods and beasts. We, as a society, certainly do grow better by collaboration, and I don't see where I made the claim to the contrary. But I don't want to conscript anybody into that collaboration. If someone wishes their work to remain private, I don't want to force them to share. I also don't want to make the choice binary: total participation (publication) or none. If someone is hesitant, that will only further discourage them. I have no evidence for this (and it doesn't seem possible to have evidence for or against it), but it doesn't seem too large a step from Vergil's wish to burn his manuscript (he must not have heard "manuscripts don't burn"). Also, maybe it wouldn't create works to step up in their place, but so what? Culture will survive. There are plenty of great books by willing authors to take the place. And that's what I want - a literary culture built by willing artists. - Stephen Severo

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By not relying on our own appreciation, we stifle our creativity. Hemmed in by an overly strong desire to connect art to historical fact, we place a false border around the work and prevent ourselves from coloring outside the line. Certainly, what we can state with any authority about the history of an author should influence our opinions, but it should not dominate them.
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Revision 11r11 - 18 Jun 2010 - 19:55:49 - StephenSevero
Revision 10r10 - 13 Apr 2010 - 11:03:01 - EbenMoglen
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