I just finished a pretty good article The Myth of Thomas Szasz, about the man who most famously attacked the psychiatric profession in part by claiming mental illness was manufactured, a myth. In a nutshell here is the point of the article:

“It is hard to doubt the reality of mental illness, especially when the suffering of affected individuals is so complete and the impairment so extreme, when psyche and identity are crippled almost beyond repair. But it is also remarkable how much of modern psychiatry is still theoretical rather than empirical, and how many of the supposed mental illnesses that appear (and multiply) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have no known biological underpinnings or explanations. Although Szasz’s critique often became a caricature, his intuition about the limits and deformations of modern psychiatry cannot be ignored. Many sick people have surely benefited from psychiatric treatment, both “talk therapy” and pharmacotherapy. But psychiatry’s long history of error—from snake pits to ice baths to spinning chairs to electroshock to lobotomy—should give us pause. Skepticism is not backwardness, even if Szasz often took his skepticism to rhetorical extreme”

The part I found most interesting (and now I must read it):

A piece in The New York Times Magazine[by Szasz] titled “Mental Illness Is a Myth” reportedly induced more reader response than any article in the magazine’s history. If he had preached from the pulpit with The Myth of Mental Illness, he had now nailed his thesis to the church’s front door.

I must must check out the reader response!

For those who know little about what came to be known as anti-psychiatry, this article is worth reading. It is written well and presents the virtue of skepticism, even if extreme, which is what Thomas Szasz, was all about. My only complaint is that if you know nothing of anti-psychiatry or the visible and patient-led challenge to psychiatry that followed in the 1970s, you would think that Thomas Szasz was entirely in a class of his own. While he may be the most famous figure, and may have certainly led the charge in many resepcts, there were others (that is critical psychiatrists like him (and not just in the US) not to mention wide spread critique from various social quarters. But a great great article otherwise.

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous.

Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a “far-away” exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation.

I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer.

One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon.

Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce).

Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it “to own unreality.” Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx.

The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and “gaming the virtual game.”

Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest:

“It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input—that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world.” p. 104

In the past and for my hacker course, I have taught Paul Ceruzzi’s History of Modern Computing but the book was a little too dry to fly high with first year students but thanks to Joe Reagle’s excellent syllabus on the Impacts of Technology, I read a short but very sweet (and teachable) piece by him entitled An Unforseen Revolution: Computers and Epectations that not only gives a window into the early history of the computer but provides a very nice conceptual entry as to why it is hard for inventors of a new technology, such as the computer, to “foresee” and fully come to terms with its future uses, full range of capabilities, and utlimately its impact.

Basically the context of invention combined with the training of inventors (which in this case, the first American digital computer, the ENIAC was invented by a physicst and an engineer for mathematical computing) stitches and thus initially limits the vision (and thus use) of the technology largely to its original purpose, while precedding technologies provide the conceptual juice drunk to understand the meaning of new technologlogies. So while today we clearly think of computers as a meta-machine, that can be whatever-machine-in-the-world-we-so-desire (so long as someone programs it to be “that” machine), in its time, with people so accustomed to machines as having one function, the cultural imagination was stuck. As Ceruzzie humorously conveys, “a machine having such general capabilities seemed absurd, like a toaster that could sew buttons on a shirt. But the computer was just such a device; it could do many things its designers never anticipated.” p. 126

With the passing of time came new innovations (Ceruzzi identifies new developments in programming as key in this regard) and use in new settings (notably businesses), the stitches were loosened and finally unraveled so that the computer came to take on the meaning it has acquired today.

One perennial topic of inquiry in the field of STS concerns how particular contexts and other factors shape new meanings, visions, and uses, or just limit them, along with unearthing the labor that goes into making new inventions or scientific theories more generally accepted. This is a great little piece to teach incoming students about some of these concerns in STS, and without a lot of heavy-handed anything.

And to make the project of teaching really fun, add this short clip from the Muppets, where Dr. Bunsen Honeydew totally ignores the Very Large Gorilla about to gobble him up because of his blind faith in technology.

Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law.

Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples).

At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the “ugly,” this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied.

I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at “The Law in Shambles” a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles.

For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy.

The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals).

While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is “meaner and more complex” than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover “motive,” which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that “I can force you to tell me everything—what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns.” The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force.

This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

“Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: “Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it?” He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law—which would take mandarin to learn—that no one enforces.. The law is “there.” On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it.” p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, “We’ve come a long way, Baby,” when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.”

There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time.

Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

So people may be wondering, “How does Biella pass her time in the vast, desolate Canadian north?” Thankfully there are many things to do in Edmonton proper, but I have delved quite a bit into reading so I thought I would take a break and give small reviews of the books I have read or am reading as they are all quite good. I am trying to be more systematic about my reading habits so I am back to using citeulike. I am adding anything new I read and then as I go back to I have already read (for articles), I am adding them to the list also. I hope this pays off in the future!

I started the reading bash with a book that was recommended to me over a year ago while I was still in Chicago: The Fugitive’s Property: Law and the Poetics of Personhood as it deals with the bread and butter of my own work, intellectual property, liberalism, market capitalism, and American history. I found the introduction enlivening and was sufficiently interested to continue on. I think there is not a lot of innovative work in the field of intellectual property (only because it has been covered very well) and to bring together slavery/the fugitive person and intellectual property under the same analytical lens, seems productive. Best looks at how the legal treatment of the slave and that of IP, hold striking parallels for their highly “fugitive” (formal) nature, driven and intensified by the legal/market framework that makes personhood into property. There is a lot of good stuff in there (including a fantastic discussion on legal positivism) but in the end, the labor it took to sift through some really obtuse prose was too much for me. I can’t remember the last time I languished under the heavy weight of language that was far too ornate and under sentences that just lacked clarity. This was compounded by the fact that he assumed you knew a fair bit about slave history, which I did not. My drive also escaped me and while I hope to return to it later, I took a break and turned to more readbale material.

After such heavy linguistic ornateness, I needed an antidote, QUICK, and I knew exactly where to go: William Sewell and his book I had on my shelf also nearly for a year: The Logics of History. Along with being a first rate historian he is like that black instrument popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Herbie Hancock, and Brian Eno, he is a synthesizer with an amazing ability to write clearly. Being the synthesizer that he is, he is skilled at connecting the dots between various theoretical topics like event, structure, and agency, making the theoretical implications so crystal clear you feel happy to have entered into a field (the social sciences that is) that feels awfully arcane and pointless at times. I left Stehpen Best, which was like leaving a cluttered medieval castle and into a simply decorated room filled nothing with good theoretical feng shui (I think about writing in spatial terms more than ever). He just makes reading fun, even when the topics can be less than enthralling.

Many of the essays were published previously and I had read a number of them, such as his famous essay on structure and agency. What I appreciated along with the great writing, was that he takes serious the question of plurality of social life within the net of various social, economic, political determinants. So while he assumes the existence of structure (and turns Marshall Sahlins to establish), he also is quick to show that structure, like a cultural system, can only act as partial (and unexpected determinants of social life) because of the existence and presence of events (which is really Sahlins great masterful point) but more importantly because of the plurality of structures… This was perhaps on the the central motifs in my dissertation; while I placed hacking within the cultural lineage of liberalism, in no way is this the only cultural system that hackers operate through and with; they move through a cultural domain more intrinsic to their own praxis, not to mention other systems of value that reverberate more widely among the digerati… And it is this movement between social positions that allows for forms of reflexivity and social change. I primarily used Bakhtin to make this point but now I got Sewell to add to this mix.

Here is a nice passage from the book that makes this point:

I would argue that a multiple conception of structures would make subjects cultural creativity easier to explain. If the cultural structures by which subjectivities are formed are multiple, then so are the subjectivities… Because persons, symbols, and objects of cultural reference overlap between structural realms, structurally generated rules, emotions, categories, and senses of self can potentially be transposed from one situation to another. Indeed, if actors commonly have the experience of negotiating and renegotiating the relationships between noncongruent cultural structures, it follows they should have some intellectual distance on the structural categories themselves, that they should be able to view one set of cultural categories from the point of view of others that are differently organized, to compare and critizise categories and categorical logics, to work out ways of harmonization or odering the seemingly contradictory demands of different cultural schemes. A multiple conception of structure, consequently makes human creativity and reflection an integral element in the theory of history, not a philosophically prior metaphysical assumption. p. 213

And here is a more engaged review that is a little more critical than my very short comments.

As part of a reading group organized by my tireless supervisor, I am also reading The Cultural Locations of Disability written by two of the most prolific scholars in the field, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Since I am a novice in field it is hard for me to judge the two chapters we have so far read but it is a total total total treat reading a book slowly with a group of other folks from a vast range of departments.

So far I appreciate the larger arguments presented in the introduction. For example, they point to two broad categories—capitalism and modernity/enlightenment– as driving forces in a new wave of obsession with the disabled. So while capitalism’s insistence on measuring the worth of humans through an abstract and actual ability to labor, marginalizes those who cannot offer their constant labor power (and makes them an “odd” cultural object), modernity–in its desire to march forward to the mysterious plane of progress, offers a technological promise to eradicate what it designates as deviant or primitive. As they nicely sum up: “In a culture that endlessly assures itself that it is on the verge of conquering Nature once and for all, along with its own “primitive” instincts and the persistent domains of have-nots, disability is referenced with respect to these idealized visions. As a vector of human variability, disabled bodies both represent a throwback to human prehistory and serve as the barometer of a future without deviancy.” p. 31

I, think, however, they should have also included some discussion of liberalism, which in many ways, was the legal and philosophical engine that helped to naturalize capitalism not to mention it also offered a vision of person, in which self-development, expression, and discrete autonomy was deeply cherished. Seen in this liberal light, disability becomes also a type of “tragedy” that can be resolved though new technological interventions they discuss under the guise of modernity.

I have just started Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, which promises to be quite a tour de force into the contentious politics of uncertainty and the play of perceptibility and imperceptibility that surround one of many many syndromes—sick building syndrome—that now are part and parcel of the medical and patient advocacy field.

Along with this I read and finished Andrew Lakoff’s Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, which will make for great teaching, and has one of the nicest discussions on the way in which psychiatry’s insecure status among the other medical science was one of the driving forces toward embracing the new scientism of the 1980s that coincided with new more general neoliberal trends. Another nice move about the ethnography is that he was able to clarify some of the trends and rationalities of American and European psychiatry by examining how it was received and resisted among more psychoanalytical Argentinian therapists. Very classicial anthropological lens in that sesne.

Finally I am in the middle of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loop and I will say more about it when I am done, which should be soon as I am tearing through it evern night. I have been waiting for this book for a long while now because Dibbell is part of that trinity (Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Julian Dibbell) that offers some of the best writing on hackers, the internet, and virtual worlds. And this book continues in that tradition of providing a fantastic read, a vivid ethnographic picture of the topic at hand, along with key insights into the nature of economies, money, and plau within (and outside of) virtual landscapes. What I respect about Julian Dibbell is that he took a long time to get this book out. He started the research in 2003 and then spent a few years writing up. I think there is a lot of pressure to get any material or book on “virtual whatever” out there as quick as possible but for the most part I think that is a mistake. You need to let these things brew a long while or else they won’t acquire that taste of a finished product.

If you have not read Jennifer Light’s amazing When Computer’s Were Women, today is the the day to read it.

update: yes, yes the Jennifer Light is not available freely. Just to show, we need more open access journal…

So, as readers of this blog know, I am deeply enmeshed and invested in a project that examines the cultural face of liberalism through such avenues as law, technoscience, and medicine. As part of this endeavor, I am interested in signaling and understanding the tensions in liberalism within one context (such as IP), one nation (as in the US) or across times and places.

Because I am going to this conference on Invention and Authorship at Case Western (am already in Ohio partaking of my family and the beautiful budding flowers of spring), I am revisiting these ideas as I chomp through all the marvelous papers that were pre-circulated.

And the theme of tensions in liberalism arose palpable during a visit at the CCA with Laura Murray an English professor who teaches at Queens College and runs the impressive Fair Copyright website, which every Canadian scholar should comb through, carefuly.

We read a her First Monday piece Protecting ourselves to death as well as another fascinating piece on Canadian copyrightTaking User Rights Seriously.

The session and her talk were quite interesting and my first real introduction to copyright’s life in Canada. Unsurprisingly, given the different role of the state as protector of certain rights (like health care) and a certain healthy suspicion of the US and its policy (and this is nicely explored by Murray), copyright is distinctly configured, with lines of similarity and diffferences. For example, IP provisions are not part of the Constitutional charter, the equivalent of fair use (“fair dealing”) is more circumscribed, universities often cower at what is perceived threat (she told us an amazing story about Simon Fraser’s draconian copyright policy that implored students to get permission for *every* citation, sigh), yet a a recent Supreme Court case came down very favorably strong for user rights and public interest.

By the end, it was clear that while there are similarities (and these will grow, I imagine, with “harmonization” via WIP0. TRIPS etc. but for reasons I state below, perhaps not), the life of IP is textured uniquely. And while there are differences in the law, point blank, some of the more interesting differences follow from non-legal conditions or legal factors quite independent of IP. And these are worth pointing out because they also give us a unique vantage point to really get at the motor behind SO much of American law, in general, and IP law, in specific.

During her visit, Laura Murray raised three (probably more but I am going by memory here) important differences, which were further elaborated during the disucssion:

1. Due to how governments congeal (through coaltions) and how they execute change, (apparently legal change/policy moves more slowly), this had led to change whose viscosity is more like molasses than oil in our country and often has worked in the favor of public interest and user rights in IP.
2. The Media still works in a more robust way than in the US in that it will shame and, shame some more, the government over things like IP so that they act as a constraint.
3. And in comparison to the US, the culture of litigation/lawsuits has a shadow of a life compared to the US.

So in fact much of the policy in Canada has little to do with the actual law of IP but with other legal factors or extra-legal factors. On top of this, it also made me realize that since things are stalled and since activists do and often compare things with their southern neighbors, I also wonder if activists are better positioned to actually intervne in this field than we are in the US, where things move quite fast, the media in general does not act as a lightning rod of shame (except for the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but I am not sure, yet, if we should count those as media) and even if the media does not shame, they rarely present IP as a pressing societal issue. Given these conditions, it will be very interesting, to the development and changes in IP in Canada following the pressures to harmonize.

Finally and this is perhaps to obvious to merit attention because it is signaled through the recognition that US law is largely case law, but lawsuits do truly generate so much of the law and are one of the central contexts underwhich we culturally understand (as I mean the proverbial citizenry “we”) the law. If anyone out there knows of any good articles/books that explores this, especially from a cultural, critical, or political perseptive, give me shout out… I would like to delve more into how this acrimonous and expensive (and potentially in some cases empowering) contextual matrix shapes US law.

Have you ever wanted to know more about the inner workings of online reviews and how they may weave with questions of repuation and plagarism? If your answers is a yes, then look no futher, as Shay David and Trevor Pinch from the STS program at Cornell University have published Six degrees of reputation, which addresses some of these questions:

This paper reports initial findings from a study that used quantitative and qualitative research methods and custom–built software to investigate online economies of reputation and user practices in online product reviews at several leading e–commerce sites (primarily Amazon.com). We explore several cases in which book and CD reviews were copied whole or in part from one item to another and show that hundreds of product reviews on Amazon.com might be copies of one another. We further explain the strategies involved in these suspect product reviews, and the ways in which the collapse of the barriers between authors and readers affect the ways in which these information goods are being produced and exchanged. We report on techniques that are employed by authors, artists, editors, and readers to ensure they promote their agendas while they build their identities as experts. We suggest a framework for discussing the changes of the categories of authorship, creativity, expertise, and reputation that are being re–negotiated in this multi–tier reputation economy.

Yesterday, Julian Dibbell (whose site is down) gave a talk at Rutgers on his forthcoming book Play Money and participated in our weekly seminar at the CCA (which has a nice new website). Thanks to his various presentations, he has convinced me, not that I needed much convincing in the first place, that his forthcoming book is going to be as fanstastic as My Tiny Life . And if there is one book on cyberspace sociality, ethics, and embodiement that has had some serious staying power, it is this one. It is assigned, with good reason, in nearly every class that has to do with cyberspace, and the packed room of undergraduates there to see Dibbell talk just confirmed his broad influence. If you have a chance to see him talk, do so, his dry wit combines with the material of money, economies, and gaming, quite nicely.

There is “soul food.” And you can eat soul food while hearing soul music. Poems and literature often direct us into the depths of soul. But academic books rarely enter that sacred territory. And being a social sciencey type of academic, it sort of makes me sad sometimes that our lot rarely spice our writings with the traces of soul. That sort of thing is discouraged, for reasons that often have to do with the “science” half of “social science.” For research, analysis, and writing, dispassion is supposed to be our guiding light and for the most part, this is not necessarily bad for it makes for more comprehensible, manageable works. And let’s face it, too much soul, and you get intractable mush.

But every once in a while a dash of passionate soul is delectable and thankfully does creep into our work to shake away the cobwebs of dispassion that cling to define our academic style of writing. The genre of ethnography, being it is so interpretive, is somewhat susceptible to such outpourings and we can find traces of soul in more daring political tracts, cultural studies material, as well as literary analysis too.

Now the study of intellectual property, being it is dry and arcane, is probably one area that seems more like a “soul-crusher” than a soul-magnet. But this week I was pleasantly surprised to find the strong currents and overtones of soul in Paul Saint-Armour’s delightful book on IP law: The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination

I guess I am just saying that alongside a really set of interesting arguments about the dynamic history of IP and literary property, the book is written really, really well. In particular, the chapter on Oscar Wilde is simply stunning and not to be missed. And given that Oscar Wilde’s writing and life are as soulful as soul can get, the chapter is doubly soulful! Take a look:

Rather than naively imagine orality as a tonic to writing, as nature to writing’s artifice, or as authenticity to the travesty of type, Wilde recognized that the longing for orality as origin, nature, or authentic prehistory may be the most characteristic thing about print culture, which thrives by manufacturing origins and measuring its distance form them in order, alternately, to wound or worship itself. His writing both embodies and inflicts an ache for the forms of orality while elaborately demonstrating their irrecuperability even their unknowability: we must return to the voice, yet as it now is, we cannot do so. (p. 94)