Law, Culture, and Activism: An Interview with Lawrence Liang

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Lawrence Liang, a
legal scholar and activist based in
Bangalore, India.
For Lawrence Liang, studying law
means more than studying what
happens inside a courtroom or a law
firm.
"Laws," he says, "are impossible to
understand without understanding the
culture from which they grow."
These connections are clear in
Liang's work on intellectual
property law, which combines an
awareness of contemporary copyright
issues with an understanding of the
deep conceptions of identity and
selfhood from which these issues
arise.
Throughout his career, Dr. Liang has
worked as an activist as well as a
scholar. In Bangalore, he
founded the Alternative Law Forum, a
nonprofit collective that provides
legal services to various
marginalized groups.
He's the co-founder of two
open-access video archives that make
annotated footage widely available
for noncommercial use.
And he regularly writes and speaks
about pressing political issues in
India.
To put it simply, he's a perfect
example of what a public
intellectual in the 21st century
looks like.
And I began by asking him about his
academic training and how it
prepared him for his work as a
scholar, lawyer, and activist.
So my undergraduate training and my
masters was in law, and
I trained to be a lawyer, but I
ended up doing a Ph.D.
in film studies.
And I think part of the reason for
that move was even when I was
doing law, I approached
or entered the world of law
primarily as a lover of literature.
And so here I was, I mean,
encountering the world
of the law, which seemed very
different from the world of lawyers
that I encountered in fiction.
So whether it was through Kafka
or Dickens, you had a certain image
of justice or an idea of what
motivated you to become a lawyer.
And then, you realize that in the
study of law, there was no
connection between the two.
So to kind of retain my own
sanity while I was at law school, I
decided to abandon classes on
Saturday and ended up doing
kind of a three years English honors
program, primarily in modern
poetry and in comparative
literature.
And that was initially a way
of actually kind of segregating
between my passion and my
profession.
But as I started studying
them in parallel, I realized that
the only way to actually do this,
both in terms of a
way that was intellectually exciting
but also one that was kind of truer
to what my own interests were to
bring them together rather than keep
them apart.
Yeah.
Well, you have an early essay you
wrote called Conceptualizing Law and
Culture, where you talk about the
way that the two are combined
and should be combined and how both
legal studies and humanities
gain from being in contact with each
other. Can you talk a little bit
about what those two areas of study
gained from that contact.
In a narrow technical sense, I mean,
the emergence of the law as some
kind of an isolated,
self-contained discipline of
inquiry is a relatively new
phenomenon.
I mean, in a way, the old tradition
of looking at the law as being very
much a part of the question of the
humanities, or more broadly,
the question of life.
The important challenge was, okay,
if one had to think about not of
legal studies alone but
of a cultural study of law, which is
to say that the law is steeped in
ideas of value. It's steeped in
ideas of meaning. And how do
people actually make sense then of
the legal institutions and of
institutions of justice, not merely
in a technical sense but really in a
cultural sense?
And that, for me, was what the
excitement of bringing together, in
a way, a kind of a cultural studies
and legal studies together was.
Sure.
I wonder, in that same essay, there
are examples of Indian film stars,
in particular, the issue of
publicity rights, that around which
you were able to kind of talk about
thinking about culture and law
together. Can you talk a little bit
about that kind of the publicity
rights issue and how those two
things kind of allow us-- how
humanities and legal scholarship
allow us to understand that issue
more fully.
So my specialization and my
kind of professional inclination
kind of ended up veering towards
intellectual property law.
And intellectual property laws is
nothing if not a kind of
a legal theory of culture.
So if you take the domain of
copyright, I mean, it deals with
literary works. It deals with
artistic works.
It deals with musical works.
But they don't deal with them merely
as property, and they don't really
deal with them as kind of legal
artifacts.
They actually have to have an
aesthetic theory before they have a
legal theory of what these products
are about.
So in that article, I was looking at
this entire question of the question
of the relationship between fans,
appropriation, and who owns
the identity of a star.
Now, in the U.S., you have the idea
of publicity rights where celebrity,
in a way, own their publicity
as a commodifiable right.
This is not a right that actually
exists in India. And that period of
time was the time when the right was
being articulated into
the provisions of Indian copyright
law with a whole deal of ambiguity
and ambivalence about what that
actually meant.
And in a culture where fandom
has been a very crucial aspect
of political mobilization, the
implications of granting
property rights in
the frame of a star had huge
implications. And I felt that that
answer could not come from the law.
It had to come from a domain
that understood both the cultural
dimensions as well as the legal.
Yeah. Well, I want to ask you one other
question about
the particular kind of educational
background you bring to your work,
and that is that you freely cite
French theorists in your work,
Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, they all
come up. And I wonder does
that particular tradition of
intellectual work contribute
something valuable to the work
that you do as a legal scholar and a
cultural thinker.
Oh, absolutely.
When you're dealing with
intellectual property law and
dealing with copyright law, you
suddenly realize the absolute
centrality of the figure of the
author. Right?
So the idea of the romantic genius
creating something out of nothing is
so crucial to the mythology
of copyright law.
And then, outside of class, your
reading boxes, declaration
of the death of the author, or
Foucault's questioning of the
function, the author function, etc.
And you start seeing the
connections, and you start
realizing, oh, this is a very kind
of an important conversation out
here. And that led me to exploring
the works of scholars
like Peter Jaszi here
and Martha Woodmansee, who is a
literary historian.
And they had actually come together
to create, in a way, a kind of law
and literature approach to copyright
law, which was very influential for
me at that point of time.
So I feel that there's a certain
kind of a richness that one can
bring into one's understanding of
the technical domains.
The question is, of course, of
translation.
I mean, French, poor
structural theory doesn't translate
well into any domain, and
particularly in the legal domain.
But scholars like and
philosophers like Derrida have been
very crucial in terms of their
thinking of questions of law as
well.
So Derrida's very, very
influential article on the Mystical
Foundations of Authority has left
a lasting imprint on the way that
people distinguish,
and importantly so, between the
legal and claims
of justice.
So I think that's been a lasting
influence on my own work as well.
Well, I want to follow up on your
mentioning intellectual property
because this is one of the things
that you've written about, one of
the central things you've written
about in the law.
I've read you talking about the
fact that intellectual property has
become more urgent in the last 20
years than ever before.
Can you talk about what's happened
in the last 20 years that has made
that issue as urgent as it is?
I mean, at a very large kind of a
structural level, it's the
transformation in kind of modes
of production where increasingly,
I mean, the entire question, for
example, of value and where
value accrues from with
the rise
in outsourcing, manufacturing
in two kind of countries with much
cheaper labor.
The question of the value that
arises from the mode of production
in terms of the actual old-fashioned
industrial form
began to take on less kind of
salience.
And it really became, in terms of
the division of labor, where if you
were, for example, in Nike,
what is really crucial for you was
the swish and the brand.
It wasn't really the actual
T-shirt or the shoe that
you produced because that could be
produced for very cheap. So the
management of the intangible value
of commodities took on an important
salience. And that kind of, in the
political economy of the world, it
became really the division between
the global north and the global
south.
And I think that if you take other
domains, I mean, where it's much
more a question of life and death,
the question of access to medicine
and the high cost of medicines.
So the pharmaceutical
companies would claim that you need
a huge amount of investment, which
is what justifies stronger patent
regimes, to ensure
that there's a return of investment.
At the same time, if you actually
look at the political history of
what's happened, it's really a
transformation where increasingly
the amount of money that is spent is
on marketing and less on research
and development, etc..
And what this means at a global
level in terms of the HIV pandemic
or the cancer bomb that has burst,
where intellectual property battles
are really at the foreground, both
of questions of life and death, as well as
of culture.
Sure.
Well, one recent case
that has specifically to do with
access to knowledge and intellectual
property is the Delhi University
photocopy case.
And you were involved in that.
I wonder, can you talk a little bit
about what that case is, the details
of it? And then, I'm interested in
hearing your involvement as well.
So this is a case that will
be very familiar to
people in the US because, in many
ways, you guys had the same battles
but a couple of decades earlier.
And it's about the extent
to which academic material and
scholarly material can be
photocopied and circulated in
classrooms.
And you can imagine in terms of
the-- for a country with as sharply
divided
in terms of inequality as India is,
the question of access to learning
materials is a very crucial one
to be able to actually exercise your
fundamental right to education.
So we were looking at this case as a
very important test case because it
was a case that was brought about by
the leading academic publishers in
the world - Oxford, Cambridge,
Taylor & Francis - against a very
small photocopy shop that operates
in Delhi University.
And they were targeted primarily for
their efficiency.
This is a photocopy shop that almost
every student who's studied in Delhi
relies on to
access, I mean, books which are
otherwise absolutely unaffordable.
I mean, to give you one simple
example.
And we cited this fact in
the courtroom, one particular course
within a master's program in
sociology, 22 books prescribed,
a lot of them, of course,
exorbitantly priced, the
total cost of which would be close
to like $1,500 just for that one
course.
One course.
Which, in the Indian context, is
absolutely ridiculous.
So the publishers went to court
arguing that coursepacks were a
violation of their rights and a
violation of copyright.
We were arguing that fair dealing
and fair use in India includes
an educational exception, which
does not lead on a quantitative
restriction. It's about the end
use of the material, and
if it was for education, then this
is an exception to copyright law.
And so, we won that in the Delhi
High Court before a single judge
bench. The publishers went on appeal
to a division bench, which is two
judges, and we won it there as well.
We hope that they won't go
to the Supreme Court.
It's easy for me, I think, to
divide this into what
you working on behalf of
access to knowledge.
The publisher is being motivated by
greed in other things.
Things
we don't want, things we don't like.
What is the best, most charitable
interpretation of their case
for why this is something
that they should continue to appeal
and fight for that that you can
muster?
I mean, to be fair to academic
publishers, academic publishing
isn't the most lucrative
business to be in.
It is a difficult terrain to operate
from because the number of sales
that you're talking about is going
to be always very, very low.
But I think it's important for the
publishers to recognize that
it's not teachers and students
who are their greatest enemies.
They're their greatest allies.
For us, the argument that we were
trying to make, which is not just a
legal argument. It's really an
ethical argument, which is that
the only way in which you can ensure
a market for books is
by ensuring that there are a larger
number of readers.
The only way in which we are going
to ensure the large number of
readers is by ensuring that there
are students who are able to access
material at a time when
they are students. They're going to
be a future market.
And that, I think, is the larger
argument, which is important.
I think it's also important to
locate this.
Wouldn't the transformation of the
academic publishing industry-- way
earlier, if the model was about a
low-cost book or a low-price
book with the hope that this
would reach a wide market in terms
of students?
The transformation has really been
in terms of de-risking
by making it into a high-cost,
low-volume model.
Right? So you only need to sell to
institutions like libraries and not
really to students, which makes
it much easier for you in terms of
overall cost, etc., of running the
business. But that's not the way
in which you're going to address
creating a wide pool of readers.
Yeah. Well, one of the other things
that I want to ask you about your
concerns the breadth with which
you approach intellectual property.
And I'm thinking, in particular,
here of the kind of attention that
you pay to the philosophical
assumptions about property and about
selfhood and identity that need to
be made in order to make
certain kinds of claims about
copyright.
This is, in particular, I'm thinking
of an essay you have, great title,
called The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Book.
Can you talk a little bit about that
essay and maybe explain the title
too, and where it comes from?
So the essay, it is an exploration
into the question of the
relationship between property and
personhood, because obviously
crucial to the imagination of
intellectual property is also the
notion of the self.
And this comes from the kind of the
Western liberal tradition,
particularly in people like John
Locke.
And in the essay, I try to point out
how in Locke, there's a tension
between the self and the own as
kind of being interchangeable.
And in the domain of
tangible property, and particularly
in terms of land, this
was the fulcrum on which a
philosophy of property
and identity was actually
articulated.
And I was interested in exploring
what the limits of that when A.
when you translate this into the
domain of the intangibles and B.
when you translate it into a
non-Western context.
And the title of the essay is a
reference to a book that I really
love, which is Oliver Sacks's The
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat, in which he speaks about this
particular neurological condition in
which a person is unable to conceive
of
people that he meets in
terms of their totality of how they
look. So he constantly keeps
mistaking them because certain
elements or features of their face
get foregrounded, which is why
he mistakes his wife for a hat.
And so, I was here looking at the
question of if one had to equate
between tangible and intangible
property as though they were equally
kind of the same or translatable
in any easy manner.
You run the mistake of
mistaking relationalities for
relations of property when it comes
to questions of knowledge.
And so, what does it mean to make
the claim that I own a pen
as opposed to I own a poem?
Right? So the question of the
ownership in the former might be an
exclusive claim, which is that when
I own the pen, nobody else can use
the pen. That's the classical kind
of property argument.
But when it comes to the question of
I own a poem, it's also
about what it means to own up to a
poem in the sense of a relationality
that you establish through the poem
and through that to a wider range
of people.
So I was making the argument
and trying to use the example that
sometimes, the question of what
it may mean to claim that
my pen is my own is way different
from my brother is my own right.
So that's the domain where you move
into relational proximities.
And when you impose the norms of
property into knowledge creation,
you run the mistake of
mistaking your wife for a book.
Yeah, yeah.
Hearing you talk about this reminds
me, again, of your interest in
French theory and literary theory in
general because the focus there on
relationality and owning up to a
poem and things like that really
seem consistent with this interest.
Well, I want to also ask you about
another issue that you've written
about
throughout your career is free
speech.
And recently, in particular,
because of some events that took
place in February at Jawaharlal
Nehru University.
Can you talk about a little bit of
what those events were?
And then also the the questions
about free speech that were raised
in India.
So, in the early part of February,
there was an event that was
organized at Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
And JNU is one of the leading
kind of social sciences and
humanities universities in the
country with a very strong tradition
of political opinions
and of dissent.
And this was a
remarkable incident because
basically what had happened was it
was an incident that raised
the question or was challenging
certain kind of preconceived notions
of sovereignty and
self-determination in relation to
Kashmir, a very, very kind of a
touchy political issue in India.
But what the government did was that
we ended up arresting
the president of the students union,
along with a few other students, and
charging them with sedition.
It also created a public sphere,
which became entirely divided
on the question of sedition and
anti-nationalism.
So this kind of created this
very, very kind of a charged-up
environment where everyone was
accused of being anti-national if
you raise any critical voice against
the government.
And so, in that context, I mean,
a lot of the work that we were doing
as political activists and as
lawyers was to actually remind
people of the rich constitutional
tradition on freedom of speech and
expression in the country that
actually allows and supports a very
high threshold of
dissent.
And why this was under threat in
terms of - especially if the
university, which is in some ways
the last great bastion
of free speech, was under assault
- what that might mean
for a democratic public sphere
and the dangers that kind of posed.
Yeah. I mean, you've written a lot
about the fact that, as you said,
the Supreme Court in India
has upheld very high thresholds
to when it's permissible to
curtail speech. But that the
criminal process and police,
there are other mechanisms
of curtailing free speech that are
getting used. And that's what happened
in this case.
Absolutely. And increasingly, that's
what we see happening, where
it's not so much about whether or
not you will be prosecuted
by law.
The chances of you succeeding
in a courtroom are extremely high.
But that doesn't really matter if
you've already been locked up for
like two months.
So the chilling effect arises, in a
way, from the procedural
aspects of the law but also from
the extra kind of legal
mechanisms of control, which is
straightforward violence, threats,
etc..
And I think that the greatest
danger, in a way, and threat to
freedom of speech and expression, I
think, in India, but also globally,
is ironically the democratization
of means
of communication.
So if you look, for example, at
social media.
And you look at the vast incidents
of trolling, I mean, this is
something that as classical kind
of free speech advocates.
It's a very difficult one to
actually reconcile.
On the one hand, you want to fight
against any kind of governmental
curbs on social media, while,
at the same time, knowing that this
is not an equal terrain. It's not
some kind of a domain where everyone
participates with equality.
There are well-paid, professionally
organized bodies of
trollers who will ensure that only a
certain kind of public opinion
gets articulated.
And, in the US,
no one understands this very well in
the context of all the recent
political developments that you have
had.
I wonder, thinking about the
thinking about the campus climate,
you spent a lot of time on U.S.
campuses. You're at Yale currently
and have been in other places in the
U.S.
Can you compare some of the free
speech issues that you've seen and
been involved with in India with
some of the free speech-- free
speech is an issue here in the U.S.,
but it's different. The same issues
aren't at stake. Can you compare the
two?
I mean, the place where I was
most inspired in terms of at
the time or immediately after
the JNU was happening.
I was in Berkeley.
And Berkeley has been
a site of incredible resistance,
and the history of the free speech
movement in terms of the activism of
people like [inaudible], etc., has
been very, very influential for us.
But I feel like the big difference
is in terms of a political
atmosphere that one feels.
And I think that I'm yet to feel
that in a way in the U.S.
Where, I don't know, maybe being an
outsider, you're not clued into
what are the weirdest kind of sides
of political activism and debate
that's happening.
But the way in which the electric
charge that you felt
when you were at JNU when things
were unfolding was that everyone
believed that there was something at
stake. Right?
I mean, and everyone was kind of
participating in it.
So there were teach-ins that were
organized with thousands of people
and thousands of students attending.
There were rallies. There were
protests.
There were rallies that went
beyond JNU and into the city, where
15-20,000 students
rallying in favor of JNU.
Now, that kind of a charged
atmosphere I haven't felt or
experienced here yet.
I don't know whether there's a
division of labor between kind of
the discourse of politics that
people engage in - of which there is
a very high standard.
You encounter that in terms
of in a very impressive manner.
But as mobilizing
and translating from
kind of theory to action or
bringing it into praxis together,
I haven't seen too much of that.
Yeah. I mean, I'll say, just from my
point of view, one of the things I
watched as a lead-up to talking with
you today was a speech that you gave
at what's called the alternative
classrooms on YouTube at JNU.
And this was in February,
while the student leader was still
in jail, I think. I
sensed exactly what you're talking
about there, watching from as an
American and somebody who is very
familiar with American higher
education campuses.
There was some atmosphere that was
there present in that video that
wasn't familiar to me.
In particular, there was one moment
in that video, and I'll put a
link to it up on the
up on the site afterward when they
put the video here.
When we put the interview up.
But you were introduced, you got up,
and then there was a chant
that happened. What was that?
What was happening at that moment?
So, I mean, the political rallies
are very much a part of the kind of
public culture of JNU and
political speeches
and kind of
chanting, etc., is very much a part
of the lively tradition.
So the chant that was there was
about continuing the battle of
ensuring that we are demanding the
release of Kanhaiya
Kumar, of Umar, and the others
who were in jail and
slogans against fascism.
Yeah. I want to ask you about the
kind of political climate in general
in India. Has your work with free
speech and the work in free speech
in general taken on a greater
urgency with the particular-- with
the president and the ruling party
that's there now?
I think, of course, the
present government is a right-wing
nationalist government.
And so, a lot of the debates
have been converted and given
a charge of kind
of an affective immediacy on the
grounds that you're either for us or
against us, again, terms that you're
familiar with.
And all of it hinged around the
question of patriotism.
So the Supreme Court,
recent order has mandated that
the national anthem has to be played
in every theater before a
movie is screened, and it's
mandatory for everyone to stand up
when the national anthem is played.
Now, to my mind, this is
unprecedented.
There have been very interesting
judgments in the past which have
been about the question
of is it mandatory for someone to
stand up when
the national anthem is played if it
goes against their political
convictions. For example, like the
Jehovah's Witnesses.
Right? And would that be a conflict
of interest in terms of your
personal belief versus
patriotic
kind of duties that you have?
And I think in the past, you would
never have had a problem answering
that question in the affirmative in
terms of the fact that fundamental
rights, including the right
to belief, would
trump any kind of patriotic
sentiment.
And that has changed.
And I think that that's really where
the question of having
a thick understanding of
democracy and having a thick
understanding of free speech becomes
so crucial because dissent
is really what is kind of being
targeted at the moment.
And I think that this is, of course,
certainly a question of the present
regime, but I would say that it's
not restricted to them.
Even the previous regime, which was
led by the congress, for example,
were not great allies and friends
of free speech. I think it's
important to remember that free
speech is, in a way, kind of--
or speaking truth to power
disturbs any government
left, right, center.
But in the case of the right, it
seems to disturb them a little more.
Well, speaking about the current
administration and Narendra Modi,
the current President-- sorry,
Prime Minister in India.
I was reading an article
in The Atlantic on him, and this is
from 2009.
And I want to read you something.
While he was still-- he was chief
minister in the state of Gujarat at
the time.
And I want to read you this one
sentence and then just kind of
ask you about the--
ask you about it in light of current
developments in the U.S.
and India.
And so this is after Obama was just
elected. And the sentence is, "While
Barack Obama may give hope to
millions in the new century, a
leader like Modi demonstrates how
the century can also go very wrong
when charismatic politicians
use modern electoral tactics and
technology to create and exploit
social divisions and then pursue
their political and economic goals
with cold, bureaucratic efficiency."
So I read that, and I thought on the
one hand, being wary
of making easy comparisons
between big, complex places like
India and the U.S..
But on the other hand, that sentence
jumped out at me because I read it
recently, and I thought, "Well, this
could be written about-- it probably
has been written about Donald Trump
in the last few months." Can you
talk about that comparison based
on this write up of Modi
from seven years ago?
I mean, I think it's-- while one has
always to be a little cautious about
kind of making cultural
translations, it's also very
important to recognize that we live
in a global moment.
There is a global trend.
And the rise of kind of populist
politics globally
and not just in India and the U.S.,
but in Turkey,
in Japan.
It's all over the world.
You need to account for that.
And I think that what is certainly
crucial in actually
what is common to a lot of what's
happening in different parts of the
world is a new kind of populism.
And this is kind of a mediated
populism that runs
on the logic of a new
kind of figure of power.
So there is increasingly,
if you look at, for example,
charismatic leaders, not just
in terms of, let's say, the prime
minister or the president here,
but people who act on their names
or vicariously enjoy
a certain sovereignty, especially
as social media personalities.
Right? And I think that this is
really, really crucial because the
media management of the 2014
election was very
crucial in transforming
what used to be a predominantly
negative image that
someone like Narendra Modi had
to becoming a leader that
who was oriented towards development
alone. And I think that that idea
of understanding the political
rhetoric is very crucial because
I think the way that liberal media
got it so wrong with the Trump
election was that you don't actually
pay attention in a close
manner to the actual
content of what people
on the right are saying.
It may be completely disagreeable to
you. It may be completely kind
of unbearable to even listen
to it. But I think it's very, very
important to actually engage very
seriously with the kind of rhetoric
that they are producing.
Because I think that, and I hate
to say this, but what actually
unified, let's say, Trump's
campaign, with Modi's campaign,
with Obama's campaign is, at
the end of the day, they were about
a politics of hope.
You may not have agreed with the
political vision that each one
articulated, but they were offering
you a concrete kind of a political
vision that was lacking,
I feel, in the opposition.
And I think that that's why it's
important to actually listen
to the right a lot more.
Yeah. I see in your work
a sense of kind of resistance
to these workings. Not workings
of government and not just kind of
like Modi and Trump and figures
like that. But as you said, there's
something that actually links them
with Obama's campaign.
And I see a different way of
thinking in your work.
Can you talk a little bit about how
with the kind of different
opportunities for thinking about the
world that you try to offer in your
work as a legal scholar and
as a film critic and all the other
things that you do?
I mean, the difficulty is always in
terms of if you
are a critical intellectual,
the demand is always about,
"Okay, so what is your alternative?"
It's as
if you are a
political opponent in the sense that
if I am critical of you,
I want to take power from you.
No, that's not the role of the
critical intellectual.
I mean, the idea of the independent,
critical intellectual is to be able
to critique and hear critique
in the deepest sense of the word,
which is to actually hold
accountable any kind of
government that's in power,
regardless of their ideological
leanings. And I think, in a way,
this may almost sound like an
anarchic kind of intellectual
tradition. And I think it's
important, actually, in the
contemporary, where it is so
polarized and so divisive in
terms of the need to take kind
of clear stances in terms of where
you come from - are you from the
left? Are you from the right? - that
it becomes very important to
actually maintain the
role of the public intellectual
as really one of the gadfly,
constantly buzzing
in the years of sovereignty and
constantly questioning and speaking,
or attempting to at least speak
truth to power.
Yeah. I mean, the idea
of kind of thinking about
alternatives to me reminds me
of the creation of the Open Content
Archives. Because it seems like what
you're doing there is allowing for
that to happen for other people to
have access to materials so that
new ways of thinking-- so that new
things can be created.
Can you talk a little bit about
those archives?
So as a part of my kind of work in
intellectual property and my
collaboration with a whole range of
other people, there's an artist
collective called Camp in Bombay.
There's a group in Berlin called
Pirate Cinema, and we've been
working for a long time.
We created two archives.
One is Padma, which is a public
access digital media archive, and
the other is Indiancine.ma.
And both of them are basically a
kind of online open-access
archives. One that deals
with the history of Indian cinema in
terms of the heritage of Indian
cinema, and the other one that deals
with kind of more in
documentary film, but not the
finished film, but with footage.
And the idea for us is really that
in terms of in our time when
we are producing an astonishing
amount of images, both in terms
of still as well as moving images,
we are producing way too much
to the point that we cannot consume
that amount of information
as images.
What does it mean to actually create
a technological platform
but also a political imagination of
image-making?
And for us, the idea of these two
archives was to slow down the image
by writing alongside the
image. So the image is not something
that you would read as
progression that kind of passes
before your eye without you having
to do anything. But it's so densely
annotated that you have to pause,
read, go back to the image, play
it again.
So the politics of the archive is
both in terms of one that's about
access but also the terms of
access and about the aesthetics of
access. So I think it's an attempt
to bring all three together.
Sure.
Well, I also want to talk to you a
little bit about your most
recent publication, and that's
the book Invisible Libraries.
It's a wonderful book. It was
recently put on a list of 35
great books that was by Indian
authors in 2016.
It's an unusual book
in various ways.
I wonder, can you talk about what
the book is and the inspiration for
writing it?
So this is a collaboration
between me and
four other writers.
All of us, if pushed
to name one
attribute of ourselves,
it would be bibliophiles.
So we are creatures
of the book.
We live for and believe that the
book is one of the highest
embodiments of human possibilities
in terms of thought, imagination,
ethics, etc..
And this is a conversation that
we've had for many years.
We've constantly reading
each other's libraries, constantly
sending book recommendations to each
other. So this has been a community
of readers in a way where
friendships have been forged through
literary kind of loves.
So the book is, in a way, kind of
a coming together of our collective
interest in terms
of the world of books and reading,
but also, as you know,
our tribute to libraries.
So it's
a riff on Italo Calvino's
Invisible Cities.
The premise of Invisible Cities was
Kublai Khan has conquered the world,
and he enlists the help of Marco
Polo, who describes to him
all these wondrous cities that he's
actually traveled through.
And it's a beautiful, poetic kind of
metaphorical and
fantastical cities.
But in the book, it turns out that
even as Marco Polo was describing
all these wonderful cities, it turns
out that he's only describing
different facets of one city.
It's Venice yeah.
And we were interested in a similar
premise. And it's true, Jorge
Luis Borges, one of
the greatest writers in the world,
when he was appointed the
librarian of Argentina,
it was the same time that he had
gone blind.
So we took that as the
kind of fictional context
where Borges invites a whole
range of people to describe
the wondrous and the imaginary
or the fantastical libraries that
we have visited.
And they all come back, and they
describe this to him. But of course,
what they all are doing is
describing the potential of a single
library. So that's the premise of
the book.
Well, would you be willing to read
one or two-- it's a series of
short passages
of the descriptions of these
fantastical descriptions of these
libraries. Are you willing to read
one or two of them?
I'll read the shortest ones, since
I've mentioned Borges.
I'll read one where he's kind of
invoked as well.
So this is called Fanafilhaq.
"When the Argentine (quoting,
perhaps, a Persion who in turn
was quoting your mind or mine)
said that paradise was a library, he
disclosed a limit of human dreaming
no less clearly than did
the Greek when he proposed an
afterlife made up of endless
philosophical conversation;
for libraries, like colloquies, are
hallowed by our need for enchantment
and instruction, our yearning
for force and delight, but
paradise, if it is paradise,
knows nothing of yearnings or needs.
And so it is that in the
Library of Fanafilhaq, which is not
a library, the only books you will
find will not be books,
and it will not be you who finds
them, and it will not be a finding.
The Library of Fanafilhaq,
of which we cannot dream."
And I'll read you another really
short one.
This is called Nakojabad.
"The Library at Nakojabad
consists solely of the silence
that its librarian compels you
to maintain within its precincts.
It is no ordinary
silence."
Thanks, Lawrence. That's great.
All of the passages.
I can't recommend the book highly
enough. They're really great.
I mean, it gives you a sense, I
think, of the possibility that every
library presents us with
and is really an inspiring work.
Thank you, and in a time I think
when reading is under such assault,
and this has always been the case in
the sense that technological
advancement is always created, in
a way, a condition of the
possibilities of distraction.
But I think that the combination
of the world of WhatsApp, Facebook,
Twitter, and the constant
buzzing on our phones has made
the task of reading seriously a
huge challenge. And I'm coming to
this as a lifelong reader
who did not have a problem
earlier immersing myself
into, let's say, a book and
being lost in it for 4 to 5
hours. I can't do that any longer.
I just feel like I don't have that
span of attention.
I mean, I can read for,
let's say, spans of 20 minutes each,
and that's kind of becoming shorter
and shorter. So, in a way, the book
is also an attempt to work
through for ourselves
what the future of reading
and the future of this object called
the book might be so.
Yeah.
And is that a-- are
you pessimistic about that and the
shortening of the time span if you
look even at your own. Actually, I
should say I feel similarly when I
think about my own capacity to
spend large amounts of time with
books.
Do you have an optimistic or
pessimistic outlook or is it just a
change without a value?
If you look at the book, we're
ambivalent about that because in the
sense that I'm as
much a creature of the iPad and the
Kindle as I am of the book.
And I love my collection of my
EPUBs and my PDFs as much as I
love my physical books.
There
is a way in which the physical book
will never be replaced because
there's a tangibility in terms of
its smell, its texture, its heave,
and we try to address that in terms
of that at different libraries so
that it's not just a nostalgic
lament for the loss of the library
and for the loss of reading.
But in a way, taken from what
Svetlana Boym describes as the
future of nostalgia.
For us, the question is not just
about what uses we
have of the past, but how many
one actually projects into the
future.
And I think that I am certainly
concerned about the loss of
a certain
immersiveness in terms of a way that
demanded the totality of your
attention.
Because I think that the careful
attentiveness to life,
to people, and to their beliefs,
to what makes them who
they are, is so crucial, in a way,
to an ethical imagining of oneself.
This inattentiveness
and the inattentiveness that kind of
becomes at a larger political
collective level
and apathy to the lives of
others is certainly something that
we should think about.
But I'm not pessimistic
about this being a technological
problem, although I do feel
that every once in a while, one has
to withdraw from technology.
One has to take that break in
order to be able to go back into
and understand, in that sense, the
value of the book as an object
that cannot be replaced.
So I think if you believe that it
can be, we run into serious
dangers. I mean, the scariest image
of reading that I've encountered in
recent times is something called the
capital F rule.
And the capital F rule was that,
given the nature of attention in the
contemporary, writing
should be aimed towards
knowing that the reader is going to
read the first paragraph in
its totality.
He's going to read the middle
section skimmingly, and he's
not going to read the end.
And that's a very scary thought.
So I think that the idea of slowing
down reading by returning
to its roots in terms of the books
is still a crucial idea to hold on
to.
Yeah, well, it's not-- I will say,
too, it's not a pessimistic book
for me at all. It's an inspirational
book. It actually kind of propels
me to want to spend more time
in libraries and thinking more about
what you can gain from books.
Lawrence Liang, thank you so much
for joining us.
Thank you. Pleasure being here.
Thanks. That's it for this edition of
Being Human.
This episode was produced by Matt
Moret, Undergraduate Media Fellow
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned next time when my guest
will be Jane Ward, professor of
Gender and Sexuality Studies and
author of Not Gay: Sex Between
Straight White Men.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
Law, Culture, and Activism: An Interview with Lawrence Liang
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Liang, Lawrence (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
March 3, 2017
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0017
Description
An interview with Lawrence Liang, legal scholar and activist based in Bangalore, India. The interview focuses on Liang's work as a lawyer and activist, particularly the way he brings his background as a scholar of literature and film to bear on his work. The speech that Dr. Liang gave at the JNU Alternative Classroom, and which we discuss at 21:51, can be seen on YouTube.
Extent
41 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Lawyers
Political activists
Literature--Social aspects
Motion pictures--Social aspects
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

Primary tabs

Law, Culture, and Activism: An Interview with Lawrence Liang

In collections