How we remain modern

Writing on his Occupy 2012 blog, Nicholas Mirzoeff begins a post on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘Declaration’ in ‘the manner of Derrida in Limited Inc., … with the inside matter’. He does so to tease the authors of Multitude and Commonwealth for having published their pamphlet on the global social movements of 2011 using a ‘Copyright…All rights reserved’ license. ‘For a project about commoning, wouldn’t a copyleft or Creative Commons license be more appropriate?’, Mirzoeff asks. ‘OK, it’s only 99 cents on Amazon but you have to have a Kindle-friendly device: why not just put out a free PDF?’  

No doubt, for many, there is indeed something hypocritical about radical theorists and philosophers advocating a politics of the commons, commoning and communism, yet letting little of this politics impact on the decisions they make regarding their own work, business, role, practices and actions as authors. And all the more so when a good number of them end up supporting ‘feral’, profit-maximising corporate publishers as a result, despite the wide range of more commons-orientated and politically radical alternatives that are available.  (Hardt and Negri brought out ‘Declaration’ with Amazon, who are included on the list of privately-owned companies that aggressively avoid paying the standard rate of 26% corporation tax in the UK, along with Apple, Facebook, Google and Informa plc, parent company of both Taylor & Francis and Routledge.) Yet what’s so interesting about the question of the social/legal/professional stakes of sharing online, is the potential it contains to raise the ante for theory and philosophy even higher than Mirzoeff’s comments on ‘Declaration’ ‘as a form of copylefting’ - which he hopes ‘isn’t just a cheap shot’. For would addressing this question rigorously and responsibly not require us to also pay close critical attention to some of the ideas and practices that many initiatives associated with online sharing and the commons have themselves taken too much for granted, repressed, ignored, or otherwise relegated to their margins: ideas and practices to do with authorship, subjectivity, originality, the text, the book, intellectual property, copyright, piracy, and even the human?

(The above is the first two paragraphs of a slighly longer post on the MediaCommons front page. It's a response to the survey question: What are the major social/legal/professional stakes with sharing online? The rest of this piece can be found here, where you are also invited to join the discussion around this question.

It is also available on Media Gifts here)