Copyright and the facebook generation
The beauty of new materialist generative practice is that satisfies and intensifies life in a non-metaphorical manner. We don’t need to speak of and against the past and the other that we leave behind and aside. Positioning ourselves in the affirmative mode shows cartographies of alliances, the specific unborderedness and the radical openness of life. It not moving away but joining in with movement, the radical untogetherness and flux of experience. It is saying My reality is life.
Craftiness, creation, generation.
Haraway speaks of ‘critters’ rather than creatures, mapping a boundary that emphasizes a movement away from monotheist creation narratives. But a lovely capacitity of the new materialist mode is that any notion can be reclaimed, reterritorialized. In fact, that is precisely the generative mode; performing a qualitative shift by continuously expanding what any concept may stand for.
Therefore, let us happily throw creation back into the assemblage if we intuitively enact a new encounter in which it may become productive.
Take being, placed aside or as second in Deleuzian thinking, as that which may now reenter, as we are already on the way in the onto-epistemology of new materialism. Generating, creating may then also be generation and creation, by which its stability and facticity can be affirmed. This is important in our time of facebook revolutions, never before having been so aware that the facts on revolution are actively produced in the battle over mediation and representation. In short, let us affirm the new materialist generation as the growing body of alliances, transnational, glocal, multispecies, multi media cartographies. Multispecies worlding is the appealing term that Haraway uses for this.
After all is not precisely the affirmative mode expressed in the power of ‘like’ and absence of a ‘dislike’-button on facebook?
Coming back to the generational element: we found ourselves in a recent encounter most clearly defined as the facebook-generation brought up in postmodern blindness, nothingness.
Take the problem of copyright and authorship. Our initial response to anxiety over such issues was that it marked the digital immigrant mindset of our predecessors. We favor throwing our thought-oids out in the public, but the warning does leave me worried, somehow. Self-preservation and protection, we are not sure what these entail if the boundaries of selfness shift so radically.
Would it indeed be crucial to ask patents and place names on any thought that we produce? But if citation practices as well shift radically to the here and now of encounters, the possession of ideas as objects becomes disputable. What are the risks of abuse, of unethical behavior in this realm.
Will the deterritorializing, dehumanizing, decentering movement be powerful enough to prevent the return of Ego? Is it safeguarded from egocentrism by posing it precisely as it’s greatest contradiction? Do ‘I’ risk to end up at the margin and should I somehow maintain a ‘survival-of-thefittest’ mentality? Further insights on this may be found in the writings of Elizatbeth Grosz, who joins Deleuze in moving explicitly away from the Darwinist mindset.
Is the facebook generation reclaiming ego, though living in a post-dissolutionment of the work/activity opposition? Life in the already-reclaimed side-communication now central: surplus as every-day? Trading in the supplements to old musicologies of which facebookers have no need, and which they have scarcely read?
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