Latour's Common World Meets the Lolcats

​In his 2004 Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour offers a re-inscription of his long term project: What, he asks, is “the right way to compose a common world”? (8). All work, be it science, politics, education, etc., participates in the creation of such a common world through their participation in “collectives,” made up of humans and nonhumans; these disciplines, defined by their areas of concern, have a common purpose: “stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable and to make them speak” (89). All entities, human and nonhuman, user, producer, and technology itself, participate in the creation of the common world and are made articulate (both in terms of connecting – to articulate one thing to another – and in terms of speaking). Nonhumans can speak, though they may speak through a spokesperson, and they must speak in order for the collective to successfully create a common world sensitive to the role of its nonhuman participants. Consider, for example, the phrase, “The facts speak for themselves.” Though they do so through a spokesperson, the facts, the nonhuman actants, speak. Without the facts, the spokesperson offers nothing of great import.



But what is an appropriate basis for such a common world, composed as it is by such disparate entities? What’s the best common language from which to build our common world? One answer, I’d argue, is the “meme.” Remixes and memes offer a shared platform (a common reference world/language -- See Gerard Hauser's Vernacular Voices for a great discussion of the importance of a common reference world for the creation and maintenance of deliberative public spheres) for groups to speak back to one another. In a common world based on memes, each remix acts as an invitation to another set of texts to participate in (as well as complicate) the common world being created. (By the way, copyright, especially in terms of fair use,  becomes vitally important to the construction of a common world because without liberal application of fair use doctrines, no one will able to accept such an invitation.)

Operating from such an invitational model, we can begin to co-create a world built on the kind of sharing Clay Shirky (see his 2010 TED Talk on cognitive surplus here) identifies with the invention of Ushahidi, a technology that allows for the aggregation of the tacit information available in the network but not available to any single person in the network. Shirky calls Ushahidi an intersection between "digital technology...and human generosity” and an example of “cognitive surplus,” a system in which members of a network use their free time to improve the common world they’re helping to create. Because, Shirky suggests, social concern is a more powerful motivator than punitive action, because we have long bought into the fallacy of the “rational, self-maximizing actor,” we have yet to fully recognize the inherent possibilities of cultural generosity. As Lawrence Lessing notes in his 2010 TED Talk, “our lives are sharing activities” and memes, no matter how silly, exemplify this vision of the world.