P-Prompt: Quasi licence
When we invited Mexican scholar Gabriela Méndez Cota to join the reading group Limits to Openness we were very much interested in the project “Reuse, rewrite, disappropriate” that involved collectively reusing/rewriting an open access book, The Chernobyl Herbarium, [1] and in the project's reuse of Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza's work on disappropriation. In the conversations that followed, Gabriela stressed that we don't need more licences but instead we need to better articulate, for each specific project, the power dynamics that escape any licence. She suggested working with quasi licences that include a concept of trust, good will or good faith, in the sense of a commitment to dialogue and reflection around the meaning, or the situated ethical and political implications, of each reuse project, considering its specific aims and procedures.
To act in good will, conversation fragment
Gabriela Méndez Cota: “It's the problem of the law in general, since the law is not the same as justice, and we have to keep interrogating the law from its margins, from its limits. The issue with licences is, when you think you have achieved a licence that will prevent violence or all violence, well, then you will have reached a point at which you render the law and justice equivalent. And for me, that's injustice, that's unethical. That's my concern with juridical thinking in general. It would be interesting to produce something like a quasi licence, that includes a concept of good will or good faith. Such quasi licence would include working prescriptions –such as a commitment to equality and freedom for all --that could be relevant at the moment of negotiating the meaning of the licence in particular settings.
Have you worked with the idea of 'buena fe'? It translates literally from Spanish to “good will” or “good faith”. It's a juridical term here [in Mexico] “to act in good will”, and it does have some weight. If there is evidence that somebody did not act in good faith or good will, then there are consequences. And that's where a sense of ethical responsibility comes in — in our relation to others. I don't know if that's playing a role in your project with licences, but it is something that could work within a non-normative framework or outside a framework of content-based obligations.[2] Because in my opinion, as a practitioner who has worked in this particular experiment with the radical open access community, I’d say, we don't need more licences. We need to understand, and maybe articulate in a more explicit way, as feminism has been doing for decades, the power dynamics that escape any licence.” Brussels, Mexico City, Munich, May 2023
- ↑ The project was a collaboration with the COPIM project at the Centre of Postdigital Cultures in the UK (2019-2023). The Chernobyl Herbarium is a book by Michael Marder with artworks by Anaïs Tondeur, published in 2016 by Open Humanities Press.
- ↑ Earlier in this conversation we also discussed Joanna Zylinska's work on non-normative ethical frameworks: "What interests me more are various nonsystemic forms of ethics which dispense with a need for a content-based obligation telling us in advance what we should and should not do but which nevertheless retain a sense of ethical responsibility." ("Bioethics for the Age of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England The MIT Press, 2009: xiv)
