What is a Person?: Review of LiWoLi 2012

Question: if a salad is made in Britain with Chinese ingredients by Polish workers, what is its nationality? Or: do you own your name? These were some of the impossible questions put to us on the first day of the 2012 LiWoLi Festival of 'Art Meets Radical Openness'.[0] The questioner was Heath Bunting, as we sat round a wooden table in the conspiratorially dark room at the top of Linz' Stadtwerkstatt. After a brief introduction to his Status Project - which maps out ways of constructing a new identity from scratch - we dived right into the juicy debates that this project opens up. Adopting an air described by another participant as "halfway between flight attendant and headmaster", Heath guided us through a rigourous analysis of each of the deceptively simple components composing a legal identity.[1]

We worked during this session from one of the 'maps' accompanying the Status Project: a diagram showing how to start with a new name and email address, and work your way up to being approved for a credit card (and other such benefits enjoyed by those with the right credientials). It reminded me of the game where you trade upwards from a paperclip to a car. Simply to draw up and present such a map - which Heath suggested should be available to all new arrivals just as city maps are - is a deeply subversive treatment of the social and legal structures through which we claim validation, radically de-linking the credentials afforded our identity from the human being underneath. What is clever about the Status Project, vividly illustrated in this workshop, is that a detailed discussion of each stopping-point on the map is sufficient to elicit critical debate about the meanings underlying all of these various categories. How closely can physical date of birth, for example, be correlated with legal DOB? What exactly is a signature?

Over the course of this fascinating and lively discussion we got a good way into the conceptual issues that are up for debate here. A human (physical body) is distinct from a person (legal and social identity). To simply change your name is not to change identity; to assume a new identity is to assume a new social status - with all the rights that identity is entitled to. And Heath's implicit questions emerged clearly enough: on what basis do we assign these identities to humans, and what relationship do we have to those identities once formed?

Fakes and originals

It was significant that headmaster-Heath forbade us from using the word "fake" when describing these newly constructed identities. Of course, to create something supposedly natural from scratch is to reveal at the same time the artificiality of the socially-constructed "natural" original. This tactical creation of multiple identities sparked connections in my mind to my own research on artistic identity and authorship. We know, for example, that to create is to combine elements from many sources; to be open to inspiration; to be surprised. It is never a solo endeavour. And yet, the stamp of authorship always falls upon the finished product in a manner which suggests the opposite. You could say that these works produce 'the author' as much as they are produced by him - just as a set of credentials creates a person as much as indexes them.

It is no coincidence that identity should be so relevant a field of struggle for those concerned about authorship and intellectual property. From a copyright perspective, attribution is everything. It relies on an autonomous, identifiable person to credit with making the work. Though the question when we investigate identity becomes not only, "where do artworks come from?" but also, "where do authors come from?". How does a name or signature come to designate - indeed to be conflated with - a single creator, and how can this be challenged?

While radical copyleft tends to take the rhetorical stance of doing away with "author" as a stable autonomous identity - a subtraction - Heath's approach is a contrasting multiplication: a proliferation of identities which is equally, if not more, subversive. A hacking of the self, as it is socially understood.

Legal hacks

Another alternative to the abandonment of identity/authorship was presented later in the day by Dmytri Kleiner, speaking on his 2010 Telekommunist Manifesto[2]. In contrast to the conventional free culture emphasis on surrendering rights, Dmytri's speculative Copyfarleft license (detailed at the end of the manifesto text) insists upon exploiting the - albeit mistaken - capitalist construction of the proprietorial author. When I interviewed him later about how he squares this endorsement of reserving certain rights with his philosophical rejection of authorship, he insisted that his approach (perhaps similarly to Heath's) is a purely tactical exploitation of current legal & economic circumstances. "You're only asserting that ownership in the context where it has to be asserted, because that is the condition of your labour", he said. So 'worker' and 'author' are not the same thing for him. "I don't believe in the author", he said, as she is really only "a worker who writes". This distinction parallels the one Heath makes between 'human' and 'person'. Both legal fictions - 'person' and 'author' - can be exploited in legal hacks such as those employed by Heath and Dmytri, to question the stable identities they supposedly designate, and experiment with new possibilities.

It is interesting to note the way that, while Heath & Dmytri both draw attention to the legal structures codifying on human life, they have contrasting conceptions of the 'real' life lying underneath. Heath spoke a lot about flesh and blood; physical bodies - often patting his arm or shoulder by way of demonstration: 'this is the reality behind the legal fiction/s'. For Dmytri, the 'real' is about subjective experience; namely, the experience of labour in Marxist terms. His stance on copyright raises the question: what is the difference between 'the author' as conventionally understood, and a "worker who writes"? The rationale for retaining rights as per Copyfarleft is drawn not from a notion of individual genius (as in copyright) but more from an input of labour hours. A text is a product of labour like any other; its author merely a worker.

These contrasting references to a concrete 'real' experience point to an interesting dilemma. Is there something problematic, perhaps, in the idea of hacking social codes if that hacking must rely ultimately for its rationale on more essentialist notions of what human beings are? Is there a danger here that a critique of identity management, for example, could end up being made from the position that it does not accurately represent 'reality' - rather than a more radical questioning of what that 'reality' is or could be? Perhaps a contrasting of legal fiction with lived reality is an important starting-point. Simply to point out that a name needn't point to a single body might be sufficient to start a further debate. This possibility seems to be embraced by the Status Project, if not by the Copyleft Manifesto (the author swaps his halo of genuis for the worker's flat cap, and that's the end of it). I find myself wanting more space like this; more of the intermediate unknowing of what we are than the adoption of a more leftist label; more doubt, less certainty.

Physical hacks

This theme of doubt and transformation was continued on the second day of the festival, in an entirely different guise. From legal hacks we moved on to physical objects, riversides, bridges and trees. The first workshop of the day, Mey Lean Kronemann's 'Lovepicking', was billed thus:

Love Locks are a custom by which padlocks are affixed to a bridge or similar public fixture by couples to symbolize their everlasting love. ...By lockpicking the Locks of Love, we question the idea of love or relationships being bolted and barred, closed like a prison or cage, which can only be opened by breaking it. The picked locks will be re-arranged into one long chain.[3]

Traditionally, couples affix their lock to a bridge and throw the keys into the water, so it is never to be opened again. I find the idea of picking them open really beautiful. It is cheeky and eloquent, and of course the visual symbolism is irresistable. I also like how this project applies the logic of hacking to non-technological forms of social control and ownership, linking 'radical openness' to gender, sexuality and relationships.

So we set off with our new lockpicking tools along the river, inexperienced but optimistic, with eyes peeled for those locks o' love. But what I hadn't anticipated was the feeling of guilt that washed over me at gently teasing open the locks of these unsuspecting couples, many of which had been lovingly decorated or engraved with messages. There is of course an unavoidable penetrative symbolism in lockpicking, which by its nature is also a nonconsensual one. Does this matter? Is consent even relevant when working with inanimate objects?

Consent, ethics, remixes

I got to think over some of these issues more when I chatted to Mey later on. We discussed the connections Lovepicking makes between hacking, public space, polyamoury and the ethical dilemmas of 'openness'. Many people, she said, have reacted to the project with disapproval at the Lovepickers' disrespectful hacking of other people's relationships. There is a strange, quasi-superstitious connection made between the couple and their lock - as if by tampering with one, you are tampering with the other.

This conflation of people with their objects is also something I've found repeatedly when interviewing artists about their relationship with the work they make. A common resistance to letting others freely remix the work is a fear that the artist herself will be tampered with, in some immaterial but important way. So, here we return to the fragility of socially-constructed identities, and Heath's assertion that identity is a device to control authenticity from a distance, abstracted from physical presence. One way of doing this is to create and assert ownership over objects, whose integrity is a guarantee of the identity they sustain. So in this sense, our picking and rearranging of the love locks is a threatening remix.

And it's a good example to open up some of the social issues raised by remixing, as Lovepicking doesn't get bogged down in legalistic copyright questions. Clearly, a lock left on a bridge has been abandoned in a public place and therefore open to tampering. And as Mey said, when you put love into a work (as these couples have done with their locks) you are dealing with ethics, not law.

Open to risk

Of course, preferable to forcible hacking every time is the possibility for consensual and deliberately chosen openness - something I'm trying to move towards arguing for when it comes to control over artistic works. Polyamoury as the relationship equivalent is hinted at in this workshop in all but name, and there are interesting parallels between this practice of facing/overcoming jealousy and the practice of giving up proprietorial control. Copyright is after all a monopoly on reproduction, propped up with all manner of problematically gendered assumptions about partnership, procreation and control. In both open relationships and open culture we have a refusal of the logic of ownership, and its corresponding demand for control and monopoly. This is scary, but perhaps it is a fear that signals productive possibilities. (As Mey explained to the puzzled policemen who soon arrived to find out what we were up to, "it's to show that you can open your heart without breaking it".)

Appropriate, then, that later on I found myself confronted with another, completely different set of fears. When a few of us had been looking over the LiWoLi programme we noticed Heath Bunting's 'Climbing Trees!' workshop with amused curiosity.[4] What does tree climbing have to do with radical openness, exactly? But anyway, the sun was shining and after we returned from Lovepicking, Heath was hanging around, keen to offer a second installment. Now, some vital part of my childhood must have been missing because I never climbed trees, and the idea of scrambling up into them like the veritable monkeys doing this workshop fills me with dread. It was Mey who, strolling happily beside me, pointed out that this was precisely relevant to my research: facing and overcoming some deep-seated resistance, some idea of the self that might - just might - be possible to open without breaking it.

So yes, tree climbing is a form of hacking too, if you're one of those people who likes to describe anything vaguely subversive as 'hacking' this or 'opening' that. Heath described in his Identities workshop his aim of bringing people to a point where they realize things are possible that they had thought impossible; that more can be done than we first assume. As a sports-averse academic type it's good to be reminded that this realization can be reached as much with the body as with the mind: as surely by scrambling furiously against vertical bark as by the intellectual gesture of copyleft; as surely in the maddening clicks of a resistant padlock as in the hours of debate that follow its eventual opening.

Conclusion

My short time at LiWoLi exposed me to a range of ideas that connected with, challenged and expanded my thinking on authorship and autonomy. From a puzzling over what it means to create a work - and what implications this has for our fragile notion of autonomous authorship - I was challenged to look at the ways in which we construct social identities more widely. I came with the question, why are we afraid to relinquish authorship?, and left wondering where the boundaries, fears and rules lie which make up the idea of ourselves as individuals at all.

0. LiWoLi Festival, Linz: http://www.liwoli.at/programm/2012/.
1. Bunting, H. (2012) New Identities [workshop, 24 May]. http://www.liwoli.at/programm/2012/new-identity-workshop.
2. Kleiner, D. (2010) The Telekommunist Manifesto (Amesterdam: Institute of Network Cultures).
3. Kronemann, M.L. (2012) Lovepicking [workshop, 25 May]. http://www.liwoli.at/programm/2012/lovepicking.
4. Bunting, H. (2012) Climbing Trees! [workshop, 25 May]. http://www.liwoli.at/programm/2012/climbing-trees.