make the world larger

by asi

““any utterance is a link in a very complexly organised chain of other utterances”


Bakhtin was a really smart man. He argued that every piece of creative work is always inhabited and interlaced by the ‘voices’ and ‘works’ of others. I was thinking of him and Barthes and Marcus and Faris last weekend when I read this great essay by Jonathan Lethem, titled The Ecstasy of Influence”.

He ponders about creativity, influence and ownership of ideas and artistic creations and skillfully challenges our taken-for-granted perceptions of ownership and copyrights. He reminds the reader how copyright is not an objective, absolute “truth” but an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation:

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.