To Represent and To Co-Opt

“It was vague and easy to co-opt.”

When I hear this statement, all I can think of is two children. They are looking at the same cloud. The child sees a smiling guy in the cloud and laughs. The other child sees a horse. The one who sees a smiling guy gets very angry and slaps the other. Then, the other child takes the time to look for the smiling guy. By the time the child’s face stops smarting and they can barely concentrate, the cloud has faded away. “How stupid you are!” Says the slapping child. “Who would see a horse in that?”

In many ways, intellectual property law is deeply related to representation. By stamping one’s sense of representation onto a congregation and enforcing it, one can thus “serve its form” best and be “the elect”. Yet, inherent in this serving is the fact that the form comes easily or inherently to some forms and not others. And, for that matter, these recognitions can be considered disabled under other paradigms…ones where, for instance, a horse comes more naturally than a smiling guy. Yet, certain of its recognition, the child slaps and the form that is less easy for the entire group (a smiling guy) becomes the form of the day. In such a case, are “the elect” (the smiling guy “knowledge-bearers”) accurate or are they simply the possessors of superior force, a force that is only the function of an ongoing representation and self-recognition process?

Representation works similarly. When we say representation does not represent, we put into question whether representation is an organic, meritocratic process.

Let’s say that within a given congregation, there are a diversity of forms. These forms are recognized and weighed against their representation…whoever “the elect” are….and assigned equivalent values. The farther they differ, the less likely they are to be held at weight (the weight possessed by “the elect”). For instance, we see the classic example of a black woman who is under the jurisdiction of a white man. Unless she speaks in a way that is familiar to him, she has nearly 0 chance of receiving recognition, even if she is a formidable part of the congregation. His recognition abilities are stretched too far beyond his central node of representation…himself. Thus, he continues to assign a low weight in a way that does not represent, but represents to himself. Unable to recognize her form, her steals her fruits insofar as they are audible to his zone of self-recognition…he may call this “appropriation”, but in truth it was simply that she was not deeply annexed enough to his capacity for self-recognition through which he allotted the weights of representation. What many may have thought to be jealousy in appropriating mechanisms may in fact be not more than a low-functioning or even non-functioning (unable to adapt to novel forms) mechanism of perception and discrimination.

We can make a quick demonstration of this in the sense of shareholding. If someone owns a very small share of stock and doesn’t like one practice of a company, of course the company would treat this stockholder as a nuisance that ought to just be appeased and then put back on the shelf. They do not carry weight, measured by their level of investment, into the company. In the same way, a populace under representation of someone with a low-functioning or non-functioning self-recognition apparatus may very well constitute the representation, but not be represented by it…none of their concerns are acted upon.

Thus we can see how those who have low-recognition to a representative may only receive due when they speak in a recognizable way to a low-functioning representative; only when this individual hears their own voice do they pay attention, and they only pay attention insofar as they can use it to further themselves as justified “the elect”, instead of act and adapt in a sort of reciprocal dialogue of mutual evolution.

What does this look like? Interacting until one has “had their fill” and then making their own copy more comfortable to them, creating the [more identified-with property] version of an individual (black Santa, Asian Lebron, white Gandhi). Then, we see such statements as “it was vague and easy to co-opt”.

We see this also in issues of property theft utilized by foreign states, that information unless it is entirely protected, encrypted, and riddled with obfuscation tactics is fair game to be subjected to appropriating mechanisms if self-recognition meets threshold. Of course, the problem with this is that the sources are starved of the representational weight that would allow them to receive higher comparative value recognition and buy more of the company in terms of influence, volume, and say…which would, as for as value goes, be the accurate and healthy adaption. This is what we mean when we say representatives don’t represent.

They may be the elect, but that does not mean the function of election is accurate, adaptable, or in good faith dialogue with its constituency.

We will continue to come back to this discussion of appropriation, rationalized appropriation, obfuscation of products from their sources and representation.