Postcolonial Pirate Domain." Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South

Poduval, Satish. "Hacking and Difference: Reflections on Authorship in the Postcolonial Pirate Domain." Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South. Ed. Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 273–292. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472519450.ch-012>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 06:23 UTC. Copyright © Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 12 Hacking and Difference Reflections on Authorship in the Postcolonial Pirate Domain Satish Poduval Philip K. Dick famously observed about science fiction that ‘Jules Verne’s story of travel to the moon is not SF because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much SF if they went by rubber band’ (Dick 1995: 57). A remark like that is peculiarly resonant in postcolonial spaces where historical experience tends to be framed as a story of travel, as a destinal narrative1 in which modernity is simul- taneously a destination to be reached and the ensemble of mechanisms destined to accelerate the journey. However, in recent decades, the helical loop of this narrative appears to be unravelling. Neither the vision nor the vehicle of modernization is any longer monopolized by the state or the older national elites, and earlier conceptions of a shared Third World identity forged by imperial exploitation and industrial backwardness do not typify the global South uniformly today. In India, for instance, the historical ground on which the Nehruvian programme of ‘development’ was enacted has shifted in significant ways since the 1990s: the present conjuncture is characterized, on the one hand, by the rapid accumulation of wealth by the state and a growing middle class, and on the other, by the rise of subaltern movements for social justice and empowerment at the blunted edges of civil society.2 Tangential to the political flux is the rapid and relatively low-cost proliferation 1 The term is borrowed from Geeta Kapur who suggests that it means ‘at once destiny and destination, immanent life and a metanarrative that proxies for transcendence’ (Kapur 1999: 224). 2 Sudipta Kaviraj (2011), Partha Chatterjee (2011) and Satyanarayana and Tharu (2013) present incisive analyses of these developments. 274 Postcolonial Piracy of digital technologies and networks, a substantial portion of these beyond the ambit of governmental or corporate control, facilitating a distinctive breed of practices that have been termed ‘recycled’ or ‘stolen’ or – most popularly – ‘pirate’ modernity.3 The pirate domain is constituted by various acts ofhacking , in diverse senses of the term. The figure of the ‘hack’, until the mid-twentieth century, was an object of derision: an uninspired doppel- ganger of the modern author, a contemptible grub-street ‘wit-pyrate’ and mercenary. Since the 1960s, two very different discursive practices have resulted in a more complex engagement with existing notions of authorial originality and the hack’s ‘creativity’. First, within the field of computer programming, the early sense of hacking as playful and exploratory (rather than goal-oriented) interactions with the computer soon developed into a pride associated with the ability to innovate and bypass proprietary controls, moving towards an ethic of keeping infor- mation – as content and as tool – open and free. The classic definition of hacking that emerged from this impulse was ‘an appropriate appli- cation of ingenuity’.4 Second, appreciation for the patchwork nature of a computer hack’s transgressive inventiveness was paralleled, with the growing impact of post-structuralism, with a new perspective on the significance of bricolage (of adapting available instruments to unforeseen operations) and of the ‘author-function’ within literary discourse (as a means of regulating/delimiting meaning rather than its proliferation). Setting aside as ‘pure romanticism’ the hasty proclama- tions about the ‘death’ of the author, Michel Foucault had suggested that ongoing societal and juridical changes would eventually lead to the refashioning of the author function in its historically familiar form. In the place of concerns about authorial intentions and self-expression would emerge newer questions about cultural production: 3 For a compelling account of this phenomenon, see Sundaram (2001, 2009) and Prasad and Kumar (2009). 4 Stephen Levy puts it with characteristic aplomb: ‘To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. … When a hacker needed something to help him create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights’ (Levy 2010: 95). Hacking and Difference 275 [W]hat are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? (Foucault 1984: 120) This cluster of questions has prompted new research on intellectual property and copyright piracy worldwide. Extending Foucault’s leads, scholars such as Martha Woodmansee, Peter Jaszi, Mark Rose, Ramon Lobato, Ronaldo Lemos and Kavita Philip have sought to historicize forms of creativity not ‘limited by the figure of the author’. In India, key debates on these questions at Sarai (New Delhi) and the Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) resulted in the drafting ofThe Delhi Declaration of a New Context for the New Media (2005), which underscored the importance of the heterogeneity of forms and protocols of commu- nicative practices in contemporary South Asia – as opposed to the tendency in much ongoing intellectual property legislation to situate cultural production only within a proprietary framework. The Delhi Declaration also sought to move beyond the prevailing developmental pietism of granting the digitally deprived of the global South ‘access’ to the new media networks. It emphasized the need to shift focus from striving to ‘catch up’ with the latest technology to being responsive to ‘the ecology of the media landscape as well as to the vitality of the relationships between actually existing practices’. Lawrence Liang, in a similar vein, has pointed to the significance of the sheer scale and modes of functioning of the informal economy in the South, noting that ‘the majority of people in India are only precarious citizens who often do not have the ability to claim rights in the same manner as the Indian elite’ (Liang, Chapter 2, this book). According to Liang (2009), instead of endorsing only instances of transformative authorship and criminalizing other acts of copying as ‘bad’ Asian piracy, it may be more useful to examine the transformations that might be wrought by what such piracy does; that is, by looking at: (a) the ways in which piracy facilitates the lowering of the costs of 276 Postcolonial Piracy technologies, since ordinary people cannot become content producers until the infrastructure for the means of production of culture is within their reach; (b) the ways in which the apparently non-transformative acts of piracy have much in common with the aspiration to create a more plural and diverse public sphere of cultural production and participation supported by the transformative authorship approach within the open source and free software movements in the western world; and (c) the ways in which the pirate may be seen as the subterranean other of the hacker, lacking his urbane savoir-faire and seemingly bereft of the higher moral ground, but whose activities effectively promote the normative considerations that public domain advocates argue for – and yet are unable to achieve immediately. Such arguments problematize the tendency to slide from a moral condemnation of imitation into a legal attack on theft. They valorize, instead, the ‘porous legalities’ that open up newer democratic vistas in postcolonial societies where the tug of war between the imperatives of accumulation and redistribution are especially sharp. Liang views this porosity as the result of social relations of power, and argues that social struggles, whether they constellate around power, law or knowledge, also have an internal logic of their own where they tend to be performative, as they actively produce (rather than merely reproduce) the forms of power, law or knowledge that best suit their horizon of expectations. (Liang 2005: 16) In this chapter, I will briefly examine how the horizon of expectations of the subaltern shapes the fraught relationship between the public and the pirate domain in postcolonial spaces such as India. I wish to focus not on the widely discussed figure of the software pirate or hacker but that of the relatively obscure literary hack: someone who brings into play a ‘fake’ ticket to ride into no-entry zones of the cultural economy, who seeks entrée rather than sublime finale, and whose acts of appropriation or mimicry, in certain contexts, unexpectedly menace Hacking and Difference 277 the sway of authorship and cultural authority. The idea is not a mere reversal of the terms or protocols of literary evaluation or celebration of neglected creativity ‘from below’, but to examine certain specific condi- tions under which a hack-writer emerges into visibility – and perhaps effectivity – within the field of cultural production. I seek to do this by considering two distinct and striking instances of literary ‘hacking’ in the south Indian state of Kerala: the first involving an acrimonious copyright dispute within left-wing literary circles in the mid-1990s about the unauthorized use (rewriting) of a classic Malayalam drama; and the second involving a blockbuster Malayalam film from 2005 in which an auteur’s screenplay is stolen by an ‘incompetent’ actor who then achieves rapid/vapid success within the seemingly inaccessible film industry (the comic plot culminating with the revenge of the auteur against the ‘hack-star’).

Load more