Thursday, February 2, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Arts W-215
Media@McGill visiting scholar, Professor Laura Murray will be giving a talk on conversation as a conceptual model of the commons as part of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies Speaker Series.
In discussions about Intellectual Property law and creative practice, the "commons" has become a touchstone for everything good, and yet it has proven to be a difficult concept to define or locate. I suggest in this paper that the knowledge commons is all around us in ordinary conversation, and furthermore, that conversation is a more fundamental and versatile conceptual model for creative labour than the utilitarian or rights discourses that prevail in much policy thinking, or the gift or sharing discourses valorized in critiques of the same. While conversation is often considered a diversion from the important tasks and moments of life, it is in fact an ideological and cultural necessity to social relations. Most of what we know about expression, originality, creativity, and community we learn from, and continually practice in, conversation. Our contributions to conversation establish us both as individuals and as members of a group, or groups. Whether or not we are “creative” conversationalists in an aesthetic sense, our words help to create social outcomes for ourselves and for others. Conversation is a noncommodified creative activity, one in which every human participates. It is not governed by rules, but neither is it a free-for-all, and it exists in numerous specific modes and types. Thus as a model for creative labour, conversation invites us to emphasize and characterize collaboration, process, and local value rather than genius, rules, and market value. We all know that conversation is not always easy or pleasant, and we daily experience the new and newer technologies turning our desire to converse into money: as a model conversation will not incline us to romanticize the commons or neglect issues of power and capital. But it allows us to start where we are: in the everyday. To sketch out the power of conversation as conceptual model, the paper will draw on eighteenth-century etiquette manuals, nineteenth-century fur trade journals, twentieth-century literary theory, and twenty-first century linguistics.
Biography: Laura Murray (PhD Cornell) is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Cultural Studies at Queen's University, and a visiting scholar this term at Media@McGill. She comes to work in copyright and cultural theory from work in American literature and journalism before the Civil War and Indigenous Studies. Coauthor with Sam Trosow of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Guide (Between the Lines, 2007), which will go into an updated second edition later this year, she is working with Tina Piper (Law, McGill) and Kirsty Robertson (Visual Art, UWO) on a book manuscript Putting Intellectual Property in its Place: Creative Labour, Rights Discourses, and the Everyday, of which this talk will form a part.