Pirate cosmopolitics and the transnational consciousness of the entertainment industry

Abstract

As cultural texts, music and movies generate transnational publics united by shared identities and tastes. As objects of economic value, they fall under the juridical protection of global intellectual property institutions. These institutions aspire to produce their own version of a global citizen qua the responsible consumer. This paper argues that illegal copying and distribution have a capacity to forge new transnational affiliations. At the same time, they are subject ‘abjection’ by the apparatus of copyright enforcement. Focusing on the acts of semantic enclosure that such enforcement produces, the paper concludes that ‘policing’ has been increasingly mobilized as a path to becoming ‘global citizen’, thus reducing possibilities for the development of a critical, pluralistic subjectivity commonly termed ‘cosmopolitan’.

Keywords:

• intellectual property
• media piracy
• globalization
• cosmopolitanism
• abject

Notes

1. I chose to focus on this basic and in some sense primary definition of ‘cosmopolitanism’, although the debate in the literature has evolved to include much more: a cultural critique based on the unexpected absorption of ostensible difference, the cutting edge and so forth (see Dent 2009; Erlmann 1994; Straw 1991).

2. One may also relate here to Michael Warner (2002) and how he addresses two different registers of world-making: the public and the political. The key to Warner's thinking is the definition of a public as a group rhetorically hailed by strangers – ‘Hey, you!’ or ‘my fellow Americans’. It is this relation to the message that proscribes the expressive and behavioural possibilities of interaction. Warner's goal is thus not to explain the origin of a public, but to refocus the inquiry on reflexive behaviour and the imaginative projections that characterize different kinds of publics.

3. See the opening quote of the paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olga Sezneva

OLGA SEZNEVA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.