Objects of Property and Subjects of Politics: Intellectual Property Laws and Democratic Dialogue

In this article, I address the political dimension of relationship between legal and cultural authority. What we experience as social reality is a constellation of cultural structures that we ourselves construct and transform in ongoing practice. Any consideration of contemporary life must take into account both the production and the consumption of media-disseminated cultural forms. The type of practice I am concerned with is most readily apparent in trademark law, but examples may also be found in the publicity rights and copyright fields. I will momentarily leave aside the question of whether trademark rights give you ownership of a sign or symbol in any and all contexts (authorities say they don't, but then it is judges who authorize their use). With Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov, Bakhtin developed a body of philosophy about the constitutive role of language in human life and the cultural life of democracy, which he saw as quintessentially dialogical. I borrow Bakhtin's authority here because he transcends and rejects the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity by understanding culture as the ongoing activity of transformative meaning-making.