So, I've been writing away at this chapter on intellectual property and Levinasian ethics, and I've stumbled upon some ideas that actually might not suck. Here is the opening to the chapter as it stands now...two quotes by way of epigraph followed by a few paragraphs...
Chapter 3 – ‘Like a Thief’: Hospitality, the Commons, and Intellectual Property
An ambivalence that is the exception and the subjectivity of the subject, its very psychism, the possibility of inspiration: to be the author of what was, without my knowledge, inspired in me—to have received, whence we know not, that of which I am the author. In the responsibility for the other, we are at the heart of this ambiguity of inspiration. The unheard-of saying is enigmatic in its an-archic response, in my responsibility for the other. This ambiguity within the subject is the trace of the infinite, alternately beginning and intermediary, the diachronic ambivalence that makes ethics possible.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony”
A lot of the great art of the past is the work of multiple hands, though there may only be one name on the wall next it in the museum.
— Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
In Crack Wars, Avital Ronell interrupts her reading of Madame Bovary (though, the entire book can be read as a series of interruptions) with a futuristic sci-fi excursus. The narrator of this sci-fi tale muses about “back then”—that is, now: “It was bizarre back then, everyone hoping they were autonomous, but in fact more or less hypnotized by these allotechnologies, held off at a distance that was just that much more fascinating” (Ronell 67). The narrator brings us these musings as she waits in line for her “implant packet,” a packet that allows her to write:
I needed a lot of silence mapped into my packet, because I had to cogitate. Still, right before I started writing I would need some stimulators, so I chose about sixteen sonic overlays. How did they do it in the old days, I wondered, relying on chance or inspiration, like waiting for winds to fill your sails? (67)
Inspiration, the narrator explains, comes from elsewhere. While in Ronell’s future, it will be a bodily ingestion, we should note that inspiration “back then” (now) is no less bodily. Inspiration is a bodily trauma that happens prior consciousness. Even “back then” (now), we wait for the winds to fill our sails. Inspiration—writing—does not spring forth, it responds to something. It channels the wind. In the future, silence is injected so we can “cogitate” and write. Such futuristic injections do not describe a new writing situation. Rather, Ronell offers us a futuristic, technological fantasy that describes every writing situation—even the writing situations of “back then” (now). We all need some silence mapped into our packet and some stimulators, even if we can’t necessarily inject them (yet).
But what needs to be silenced? If we follow Lévinas, we would have to note that the other is silenced in the every act of writing. The Other is silenced in the name of representation and logos. The Other is folded into the Same, appropriated, killed. In the face of radical alterity, an Other that affects us prior to being, we silence that Other in the interest of consciousness, logos, writing. This is not a move that we can hope to avoid or get outside of, but we can acknowledge that such a non-experience (as Lévinas notes, we cannot experience this trauma, it happens on the “hither” side of experience) grounds every writing situation. An Other affects me, and I respond. I am not the origin of my utterance, I am merely responding to a call (a call that comes from “I know not where”). A digital commons like Wikipedia becomes more understandable if we formulate the writing situation in this way. In this virtual-textual community, the author of the text is not one person. In fact, tracing authorship is nearly impossible. Finding the origin of the text is impossible as well, and this is where Wikipedia reminds us of how writing is/was “back then” (now).