Elif Demirkaya
GIFT CIRCULATION, SEED CAPITAL, AND CULTURE OF SHARING (1)
The possibility of reproduction created by technological advancements has a direct impact on the use existing products in new productions. At the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, recorded materials -thanks to the possibility of recording audio and visuals- were regarded as materials that can be used for productions that follow them. Thus, reproduced materials and copies assume an important role in the field of art production. Montage, collage, bricolage, assemblage and borrowing techniques start to spread among visual artists. These techniques can be traced in cubist and futurist movements and are used frequently by Dadaist artists. Among these techniques is a famous one where a text is created by picking random newspaper text clippings from inside a hat and arranging them in that order.
In addition to technical advancements, theoretical studies questioning the author's position have also been influential on the idea of appropriation. In 1962, Umberto Eco publishes ‘The Open Work‘ in Italy in which he treats the idea that works can be left open ended for readers’ interpretation in lieu of collapsing in on themselves by mandating a singular way of reading a text. ‘The Open Work‘ interacts with the reader and invites them to join the work. In 1969, Michel Foucault gives a lecture titled ‘What is an author?’ at Collége de France. In this lecture, Foucault emphasizes the classification function of an author. This author-function investigation traces the meaning of ownership and attribution of a work in relation to author’s name/legacy and position in society. In 1977, Roland Barthes announces ‘the death of the author’. ‘The death of the author’ also marks the birth of the reader. Thanks to Barthes, it then becomes possible to talk about the reader-post-producer.
From 1960s onwards, it is possible to see the effects of re-evaluation of the author, work, and reader relationship in literature, visual arts, and music. William S. Burroughs creates his own works by combining parts of different texts, Bryon Gysin develops the cut-up technique in 1960s. Christian Marclay, in 1963, creates a sound collage by pasting samples from different long plays. In 1970s, John Oswald coins the term plunderphonics inspired by Burroughs’s cut-up technique. Oswald pirates existing musical productions and re-composes them by mixing. It is possible to see the effect of the intellectual works that shook the author's position on the visual arts in the 1977 exhibition ‘Pictures‘ curated by Douglas Crimp.
Christian Marclay, who created an audio-visual collage by bringing samples from different long plays, uses cut-up technique in his later works. In 1995, he edits a short video titled ‘The Telephone’ by using scenes from various movies. The scenes consist of telephones themselves or people talking on the phone. ‘The Clock‘ is a similar work of Marclay’s from 2011. This time, Marclay edits the video in 24 hours realtime and borrows from movie scenes featuring clocks. This work emerged at the end of a three-year research process and makes references to the entire history of cinema. Each minute appears on a movie scene simultaneously as you watch the video. Each imported sequence is linked together in this new arrangement. The process of reconstructing by cutting and pasting parts is called remixing. Remix shakes the foundation of existing notions of ownership and originality; problematizes the positions of authors, agents, and buyers.
“Hip-hoppers 'pirated' music from the radio and cut and mixed it. Then they split them into components and recorded their remixes on cassettes. By doing so, they were violating the copyright law. But the cut'n'mix attitude proclaimed that no one could have a rhythm or a tune. You could just borrow them, use them, and give them back to people in a slightly different form.” (2)
Appropriating a tune or an image via re-editing is also a way of creating an intimate bond with cultural production. Approaching culture as a common ground for production, joining and transforming it requires the closest contact with the material. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, one of the reasons that artists lean towards ‘product mixing and matching strategies’ is the abundance of ‘product’ or ‘the produced’. An inflation of objects and images is created by the radical increase in production. This situation drives conceptual artists to produce abstract works whereas postproduction artists are driven towards cut’n’mix. Thus, ‘DJ’ing of forms’ transforms production surplus into a ‘cultural ecosystem’. (3) Post-production is form of production on its own. Art works are reintroduced to circulation through methods of post-production as ‘gifts’.
In 1924, Marcel Mauss has defined gift economy as ‘a cycle of receiving, giving and reciprocating’. (4) Relations based on exchange of gifts should be understood beyond economic, religious, legal, moral, familial, or political categories, and their use or exchange value. All institutions find reciprocity in gift economy. Gift is the phenomenon that regulates the whole of social sphere, holds communities, not individuals, responsible and binds them together. It aims to create social bonds rather than exchanging commodities. It serves to make friends and build reputation. Since it operates on giving/spending principle rather than accumulation, it prevents the development of surplus value. We could say that practices of appropriation and recirculation of cultural products have similar characteristics to gift economy. Then, what should our approach to the act of giving look like if the thing given is not lost to the giver, or it does not create a lack for the giver, and the gift is one of the innumerable copies of production??
Gabriel Tarde calls the intellectual capital of intellectual production ‘seed’ or ‘germ’ capital as ideas carry the dissemination and reproduction characteristics of seeds. (5) Sharing ideas does not mean giving them up, meaning the one person sharing their idea does not lose anything by way of this act. Seed capital cannot be transferred but shared. It can be evaluated on axes of reproduction and dissemination rather than a binary gain-loss index. From this perspective, intellectual production is regarded as a space for collective reproduction and sharing; and intellectual products are evaluated on the basis of their beauty and truth values rather than their use and exchange values.
(1) Sections taken from the unpublished master's thesis titled ‘Contemporary Sharing Culture and Gift‘ completed in 2014 at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Sociology, have been rearranged for this article.
(2) Dick Hebdige, ‘Cut‘n’Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music‘, London & New York: Routledge, 1987
(3) Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World‘, Sternberg Press, 2007, Translated by Jeanine Herman
(4) Marcel Mauss, ‘The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies‘, Norton, New York, 1990
(5) Gabriel Tarde, ‘Psychologie économique, tome premier’, Paris: F. Alcan