Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology

IntellectualProperty Meets the Cyborg Performanceand the Cultural Politicsof Technology PhilipAuslander I SOME CURRENT USES of computer technology in the popular music industry , particularly the use of digital sampling in rap and rock music, have focused attention on an important nexus of cultural discourses: performance , technology, and the law. The issues that have come up recently, primarily in the context of popular music performance, resonate with other issues in the arts over the last decade, including battles between playwrights and theatres over uses of texts, the postmodern strategy of image appropriation in the visual arts, and the current debate over the use of unpublished biographical materials by literary scholars. All are questions of textual ownership that inevitably engage artistic practices, ethical questions, and legal concepts such as that of intellectual property. Some of these debates are new, some are not: whereas disputes between playwrights and theatres over the use of a play text are hardly novel, the issues raised by digital sampling present new challenges. While recent discussions of popular music focus on the uses of particular technologies , many of the debates in other cultural realms have little directly to do with technology. Nevertheless, I will argue here that our current technological environment is an important context for these debates, even in some instances where the use of a particular technology is not itself 30 in question. What I see at issue is less the ethicalness of using technology in particular ways, than the question of how our cultural and political environment is responding to technological change. II The technological environment governed by advanced information technologies now encompasses the cultural realm, bringing legal and political ambiguities with it. Through digital sampling, currently a widespread practice in popular music production, musicians can either incorporate parts of another's recorded music into their own, or build their own musical performance from information electronically sampled from another's. Beginning with a sample of a particular drummer, for example, another musician can elaborate an entire electronic "drum" performance whose stylistics will derive from the sample. In 1984, the group Frankie Goes to Hollywood sampled from Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham for their notorious recording of "Relax." The drumming on that record both is and isn't John Bonham's. Bonham, who was deceased, did not play on the sessions that produced the record, yet the drumming on it is his in that a new drum performance was electronically "cloned" (and that is the word used in the context of digital reproduction) from a sample of his drumming. The result is a drum track whose performance characteristics were "authored " by Bonham, even though he had never actually played it or anything quite like it. Digital sampling raises an issue that is, as far as I know, historically unprecedented. Specifically, performance itself is now commodifiable. By "performance itself" I do not mean "a performance," in the sense that a recording of a performance might be said to be a commodified version of that performance. What I am referring to here as "performance" is something much less concrete and specifiable than that. In the case of "Relax," Bonham's performing itself-not a song he wrote or a particular drum performance of his-acquires exchange value: genetic samples that encode what we might call performance style-rather than a specific textual content-now can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen. Such practices clearly challenge most of our traditional concepts of authorship and textual ownership. Who is the author here? Is it feasible to argue that a musician (or his estate) is entitled to compensation when someone else elaborates a musical performance from a tiny piece of electronic information extracted from his recorded performance? Or combines his performance with those of others? For that matter, could one argue 31 that the author of the software used in this cloning of a dead drummer is really the author of the performance? Or is the author actually the machine that did the work of bringing the software to bear on the raw digital information extracted from Bonham's original performance? Although I will confine myself to discussing this issue in terms familiar from critical discourse on the arts, I am tempted...