I find myself really taken by the ethical and epistemological stakes in considering Hegemann’s literary technique (the technique itself, and her use of it) in the context of global media production, circulation, and consumption. The technique in question involves using material without acknowledging their source, what whistle blowers call plagiarism, but Hegemann defends as “mixing,” according to Nicholas Kulish’s New York Times article. We may ask which it “really” is, or whether the technique itself challenges prevailing notions of knowledge/cultural production, or whether Hegemann’s use of the technique in this case was ethical. Rather than taking and defending a position in the debate (of which there are many sides), I think it’s more interesting to think about different aspects of some of the broader questions such a debate raises.

Hegemann is right, I believe, in claiming that there’s no such thing as originality anyway, and that knowledge production always involves a sort of taking and remixing. I think this is a pretty solid epistemological stance, one which challenges proprietary notions of knowledge and culture, notions grounded in Western philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment that presuppose/require a rational subject, and which are universalizing in nature. This stance also threatens canonicity in art, literature, and other institutionalized domains of cultural production, thus challenging imperial cultural hierarchies of race, nation, gender, class, and ability. Challenging these prevailing notions of knowledge and culture as proprietary and therefore profitable entails a critique of rights predicated on ownership, the model according to which most modern nation-states are articulated; transnationalism enables such a critical position, and transnational approaches to knowledge and cultural production can shine a light on other ways the nation-state is involved. In describing this epistemological stance, I suppose I’m thinking in terms of the post-positivist stance taken by poststructuralist, postcolonial and transnational feminist academics including those thinking in terms of new materialisms, but I also wonder to what extent Hegemann’s defense of her literary technique represents an epistemological stance characteristic of more and more widely held (ie not purely academic) attitudes towards cultural production in the current phase of globalization. In either case, it’s important to clarify that the stance is not the technique. In other words, the technique itself may or may not do these things that its justification does—it depends on context—but the technique and its use are perhaps part of a wider shift in consciousness regarding cultural/knowledge production that attends the current phase in the global circulation of media and information technologies.

I’m more of mixed minds when it comes to the claim that this technique represents a generational shift in thinking about knowledge and culture, as Hegemann’s defense of her technique makes. There are perhaps bits of truth in such a claim, but it’s a bit too totalizing and needs to be thought through in terms of specific and deeply contextualized histories of the developments in new media and information technologies and the global circulation of culture and ideas, as well as the specific techniques, practices, and aesthetics that have developed across a range of modes of cultural production. In other words, we must be careful not to let a specific technique, like sampling and remixing, stand in metonymically for all kinds of similar techniques used in different contexts under globalization, lest we risk losing historical specificity. This is, perhaps, where a transnational analytical approach would be most critical.

And finally, whether or not the technique itself is epistemologically legitimate, or indicative of historical shifts in processes of cultural production and knowledge production (and common sense understandings of/attitudes towards these) in the current era of globalization, was Hegemann’s use of the technique ethical, given the technique’s (implication in) various histories? Answering this question requires taking the long historical view of globalization as driven by the processes of colonization and its aftermath advocated by Paul Jay, while keeping in mind warnings of the inadequacy of theories of “Western” cultural imperialism in explaining globalization, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan and others remind us. I make this point in order to be cognizant of the central role that stealing ideas played in various histories of imperialism and colonization—the theft of local knowledges has been central in oppressing indigenous and local mixings of culture via colonization, by which colonizing powers extract local knowledges like a raw material resource and appropriate them in order to exploit colonized peoples, processes which lead to the extermination of entire groups of people and local histories. So the stealing of ideas is not without its history in the history of globalization, but we must also be careful not to let this understanding become reductionist. Acknowledging this tension as part of the context in discussions of “mixing” as a literary technique in the current phase of globalization invites a mode of study similar to what Grewal and Kaplan advocate: one that “adopts a more complicated model of transnational relations in which power structures, asymmetries, and inequalities become the conditions of possibility of new subjects” (671). This view of transnational relations, one that takes the material histories of various kinds of transnational encounters as central to understanding the practices that flow through and out of them, enables a more rigorous and ethical approach to answering the questions such as those raised by Hegemann’s “mixing.”