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Another year, another prosecution (or attempt), which shows how outmoded the legal system and the notion of copyright are. Following on the heels of Napster, some people involved in the running of Pirate Bay, the bit torrent site, are being prosecuted for copyright infringements. During the trial there have been some delectable moments: the prosecutor not understanding the horizontal nature of the Pirate Bay project and its non-hierarchical structure; and one of the accused being asked to leave the court during another’s testimony, only to ask the court as he was being guided out whether he was permitted to listen to the proceedings on the internet, where they are being broadcast to all. But perhaps the most delicious is the exchange below, which highlights the shift in this group’s thinking between the real and the digital:
Prosecutor: When did you meet first time IRL?
Sunde: We don’t use the expression IRL, we use AFK.
Judge: IRL?
Prosecutor: In Real Life
Sunde: We don’t use that expression, everything in life is real life. We use AFK, Away From Keyboard.
Prosecutor: Well, then I’m a bit outdated.
[Walter] Benjamin reminds us never to take for granted the leap of cunning that allows the theorist of historical materialism to conspire with images of the past in order to redeem the present.
Catherine Liu, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, University of Minnesota Press, 2000. p.x.
In producing a history of mechanised writing and its relationship with and to the interpretation and construction of the body, the concept of dexterity is one which has thrust itself to the fore, not least from the historical material itself. In attempts to explain why women in the late nineteenth-century became the ‘natural’ bodies to operate the new writing machine, the typewriter, it was often argued that women’s natural tendency for dexterity was the driving force. And from this spring a ream of what ifs. If women were naturally dexterous and therefore ideal typewriters, why were they not also ideal compositors? Why not other forms of work which require small, repetitive movements of the hand? If women are naturally dexterous, can men’s work with their hands only be described manual labour? In whose hands did skill really lay? etc. etc.
In this historical hunt for dexterous and dexterity, other words are dragged through to the conceptualisation of working with one’s hands:
- Legerdemain – slight of hand, from the french léger de main, or lightness of hand.
- Prestidigitation – quick fingers.
The hunt continues. But this subject also makes me think of the curious ways in which the words for creative production are used – art becomes ‘artful’, design becomes ‘to have designs on’ whilst craft is always ‘crafty’. But then the machine itself contains this doubling, the ambivalent and the negative, as Catherine Liu notes further on in her book, with its definition of an ‘artificial contrivance for performing work’, sitting alongside machinate, ‘to contrive, to invent, to devise, to plot evil’.
Here is my article Interrobang, for the incredibility of modern life; or How to Punctuate the Zeitgeist, about a mesmerising piece of punctuation and its place in the history of texts. (From KIOSK: An Annual of Art, Design and Architecture, 08/09)
In Roman times a pair of testes (witness to virility; Latin) qualified one – as it did not a eunuch – to testify, give testimony, provide a testament, in court. Among the Hebrews an oath could be taken while grasping the testes, a rite translated as placing one’s hand under the thigh. (re Abraham, Genesis 24:2; re Jacob, Genesis 47:29).
From S. Levin, Genital Mutilations: Some Curiosities, Adler Museum Bulletin, vol. 23, No. 2 (July 1997), p.13
Sometimes doctoral reading can take you in some strange but nevertheless interesting directions ….
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