[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet]

The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University By Sean K. Johnson Andrews Master of Arts George Mason University, 2002 Bachelor of Arts Southwestern University, 1999 Director: Paul Smith, Professor Cultural Studies Summer Semester 2009 George Mason University Fairfax, VA Copyright: 2009 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License ii DEDICATION This is dedicated to CONAIE, the Sarayacu, the people of the Intag valley, and the Pirates. Thanks for helping me see what’s at stake. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my committee—Paul Smith, Tim Gibson, and Peter Mandaville—for helping me turn this into a defensible project. I know you have spent many precious hours laboring over this project and I appreciate all your help. I developed key ideas in conversations with Rob Gehl, Siva Vaidhynathan, Nick Couldry, Carol Stabile, Vincent Mosco, Michael Perelman, and Doug Henwood—as well as with various contributors to the lbo-talk and Pen-L list serves. I also received extremely helpful advice from Jordon Hatcher, Joel Rice, Jens Klenner, Chris Piper, Robyn Ross, Fan Yang, Lesley Smith, and Janette Muir; Denise Albanese not only pointed me to some valuable resources, but gave me essential feedback in the revision process. Along with her courier duties, Lia Uy-Tioco was a valuable colleague and gave long distance, high-tech encouragement throughout the writing process. Likewise Katy Razzano, Michelle Meagher, and Ludy Grandas, all of whom have helped me work out the conception of culture in one way or another. The faculty of the Cultural Studies program and HHSS department at Columbia College gave me many questions to consider in relation to this conception and helped me hone the argument of the project in general. I look forward to working with them in the future. In Ecuador, Yury Guerra provided deep, informative guidance through the intricacies of politics, culture, and property there. I also owe thanks to the other faculty and students in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason. It was a fantastic crucible of ideas and arguments and I appreciate all the conversations I’ve had with the people in it over the years. I couldn’t have made it to this point without Michelle Carr’s vital bureaucratic navigation and support—as well as her occasional stern word of motivation. Two fellowships from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences helped sustain the research and writing; before that my experience teaching in New Century College helped to develop some of the basic ideas included below. For that I must thank Dean Nance Lucas and Janette Muir as well as Sue Woodfine, Kelly Dunne, and Sarah Sweetman. In Austin, The Bibas and Trashlee welcomed me as one of their own and helped me scoot through the composition and revisions. My mom and dad, brothers and sisters have provided unreasonably unconditional support throughout; I was sustained and encouraged by their confidence in me. Lee and Patti Johnson have been both supportive and patient with my keeping Jill away from home. As for Jill, my wife, I’m sorry this took so long; thank you for your help and support. I couldn’t have done this without you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................................................................................……….vi Introduction.......................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Culture, The State, and (Intellectual) Property Rights..............................…43 Chapter 2: Property, Value, and Primitive Accumulation in the Liberal State.............112 Chapter 3: Law, Economics, and the Apolitical Culture of Capitalism........................214 Chapter 4: Culture, Commodification, and the Social Production of Value ................291 Chapter 5: The Properties of Hegemonic Culture, or Cultural Imperialism, Redux ....355 List of References.……………………………………………………………………..423 v ABSTRACT THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS Sean K. Johnson Andrews, PhD George Mason University, 2009 Dissertation Director: Paul Smith The argument of this dissertation is that the debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) exposes the underlying reified culture of property that pervades western capitalist societies. This culture rests on the Natural Law ideology of Locke and his defense of the liberal state. In large part the participants in the debate around IPR have presumed that the stakes are only over the way this reified culture is extended to “intangible” products. I contend that it is truly over a longstanding process of commodification, primitive accumulation, and the division of labor into mental and manual capacities which are all different dimensions of this “reified culture of property.” These are the indispensable characteristics of the “purely economic” state that is necessary to produce subjects adhering to the classic ideal of Liberal culture. IPR appears a conjunctural concern, in relation to digitization and globalization, but these are just catalysts which produce points of conflict over a more fundamental theory of value and property. Therefore the expansion of the scope and scale of IPR is less about IPR than about the continued health of global capitalism and the reified culture of property itself. INTRODUCTION: The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights: Policy as Culture in the Global Political Economy The effects of the U.S. preference to consider radio, TV, and other communications media as nothing but business enterprises, a view being taken up in Europe and Latin America, should provoke us to reexamine questions of property among these media, be they state- or privately-owned.1 This dissertation is not about intellectual property rights. It concerns the debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) and what that debate reveals about the reified culture of property that pervades Western capitalist societies. The debate about IPR is centered on the way digitization and globalization have changed the way the properties in question are produced and distributed, and their owners remunerated; but the rupture created by these global, digital processes opens up broader questions of value and the liberal defense of law and the state. This is especially visible in relation to the imposition of this reified culture of property into other cultures through the policies leading to what is understood as globalization. I argue that the opening created by globalization and digitization and evidenced by the debate over IPR allows us to reevaluate this broader culture surrounding property and to contemplate allowing for alternatives to emerge. To engage in this evaluation, however, we must develop a conceptualization that helps us to more deeply understand culture. From here we can evaluate the specific relation 1Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 9. 1 between property and the state in the Anglo-American culture—as well as the way culture itself can be a part of the reimagining of this relationship. It allows us to see that the conflict over intellectual property rights should really be seen as a conflict over property rights in general. To reiterate: looking at the debate over IPR, I argue that what it shows is a potentially terminal crisis around the concept of property rights that is most visible through the lens of the cultural. For it is only by assuming property rights (and intellectual property rights) as they are currently configured as pre-political, as not cultural, that their expansion in scope and extension around the globe can be seen as “natural.” The extension of property rights in both the tangible and intangible to other cultures through globalization, alongside the more frequently discussed emergence of what Henry Jenkins calls the “convergence culture” of new media, precipitates a crisis in the current configuration. 2 The first case, in the projection of IPR onto other countries through treaties and institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) shows the narrow cultural relevance and specific cultural history of the general concept of property and the political institution which protects it—namely the liberal state; in the second case, the exciting discovery of the participatory, social production of value around so-called intellectual property recalls the observation, made by Marx, that all value is produced socially. I ultimately argue that it is in this temporal and spatial opening, facilitated by the uneven distribution and development of globalization and digitization, that we can see the already vibrant alternatives to the current configuration. Thus this dissertation is not about IPR, but about what the debate about IPR tells us about property, value, and power in the early 21st century. One of the most important revelations of this analysis is what I’m calling the culture of property. By a culture of property I mean a culture whose social relations are ever more deeply commodified; where the ultimate goal is to subject all social interaction (not just those of 2 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 2 commerce) to the market system’s understanding of the social process of valorization, geared as it

Load more