The Two Freedoms

What every talesman ought to be free to do
and where that freedom ends

Speech & Talesmanship

I take it as a general principle of civics, that each of us should be allowed to do what he wants, to the utmost extent. The corollary of this is that none of us should act in a way that bars someone else from doing what he wants.

This involves a balance between what I do and what my neighbors do. And it has a lot of implications in the physical world, where real harm can be done and where this balance must be held as the foremost principle of justice. But the balance fades in the non-physical world of speech and the arts. Talesmanship is the place where speech and art are yoked together.

The Untouchable Arts

If we look at all art and ask ourselves, ‘Can I touch it? Can I hold it in my hand? Could I smash or destroy it?’ When we do that we find that there is a class of art that can be touched, held, and destroyed. And there is another class of art that can not be touched or held or destroyed.

You can hold a painting. You can touch it and destroy it. This is true also of every piece of art that exists as a unique physical creation, that is created upon and out of some physical object, and has no existence apart from this physical object. It is true, say, of statues and drawings.

But we can’t touch or hold a song, nor could we destroy it. This is an art whose representation and whose existence form two distinct entities. The song, if you will, is an idea, and when someone sings he he only represents it, and when someone else records that singing he creates a representation of the song that we can touch, hold, or destroy. But the thing we touch and hold and may destroy is not the song itself. It isn’t even the singing of the song. It’s only a representation of a representation of the song.

Music and tales and architecture are among the Untouchable Arts. These arts exist as ideas that come before any physical representation. The representation of these arts is no better than a sketch or approximation or version of the underlying art. And these sketches can take many forms, they can be copied and the art thereby shared, and they can be destroyed — with no harm to the art itself.

A song can be represented on paper or other medium using any one of many systems of musical notation. A tale can be written down using different alphabets, pictograms, ideograms on paper or parchment or vellum or wood or stone. The song can be sung, the tale can be voiced; these vocalizations can be recorded in many ways upon many different media.

It is a feature of all the Untouchable Arts that they have some system of notation that allows us to represent them in a basic sketch or scheme. The system of notation forms a code that embodies the essence of the artwork so that someone else who knows that code can ‘re-present’ the artwork.

The Untouchable Arts exist most of all in the minds of those who perform and present and share them. The various codes or systems of notation serve us as aids and jogs to our memories, or if you will as extensions of our minds.

To the extent that digital file formats have become infinitely extensible, it may be true now or will be in the near future that all the arts will join the camp of the Untouchable. (A painter, for example, can create not with brush and dyes on canvas or board, but through a system of digital capture using a program that encodes and decodes the painter’s gestures as strokes of color on a screen.)

The Two Freedoms in Art

Let’s go back to our rule of freedom and see how it works in the art world. But let’s speak of tales and talesmen, and let them stand in for all art and artists of the Untouchable kind.

The talesman can do what he wants. So he can tell whatever tale he chooses. But no talesman can bar another from telling whatever tale he wants. So he can’t stop another talesman from repeating the tale he himself has just told.

The Touchable Arts can’t be shared or duplicated, their works are unique and so when we deal with these works we must strike the balance of all the physical world. You are not allowed to paint over another artist’s painting without his permission, for if you do you harm his work. But the Untouchable Arts can be shared and duplicated with ease, so many singers can sing one song, each after his fashion.

Consequences

The logical result of the twin rules of freedom for artists of the Untouchable Arts are the following radical guidelines:

• if you hear it, you are free to say it
• if you see it, you are free to copy it
• if you learn it, you are free to repeat it

And this undoes all copyright, trademark, and patent monopolies in the world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 12 February 2008)