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In Praise of Copying
This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, In Praise of Copying seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2010
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178 people want to read
About the author
Marcus Boon
13 books13 followersMarcus B. Boon is a Professor of English teaching contemporary literature and cultural theory at the University of York, Toronto, Canada. His interests include literature in the digital age, critical theory, the Beats and other alternative and countercultures, popular music, and the cultural study of spirituality and religion.
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June 1, 2012A Tale of Two Cities: Marcus Boon and Copia
I'm proud of my friend Marcus for defending the indefensible -- the multiple, maddening and redundant copies produced by contemporary capitalism -- without defending capitalism itself. His argument unfolds like a series of Chinese hats, one inside the other. Quickly he locates the goddess Copia, mother of all copies. The cornucopia is her emblem: the Horn of Plenty. The only way to have lots and lots of anything -- grains of barley or Barbie dolls -- is to make duplicates. Besides, in this material universe, true duplicates don't exist. Each Barbie is -- under a microscope -- unique.
In his breathtaking first chapter, "What Is a Copy?", Marcus details the varieties of Louis Vuitton bags. Once individually handcrafted in an atelier in Paris, these handbags now exist in multiple variants and copies, some perfect duplicates, some absurdly amateurish. According to the Internet, only 1% of Louis Vuitton bags are made by the original company. Takashi Murakami, the Japanese artist, included counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags in a show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. Consumer capitalism has become a Talmud of products imitating and endlessly critiquing the ur-texts of Chanel, Levi's, Louis Vuitton and Tom Cruise movies.
Marcus' most remarkable contribution is the question: "Is one MP3 file different from another?" (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes!)
Titles cannot be copyrighted. That's why I called this essay "A Tale of Two Cities."
A unique work of art cannot be distinguished from a copy, philosophically -- and therefore legally. For example, I am using words right now. Words are all copies of other words. In a sense, all writers are plagiarizing the dictionary. For example, how many other thinkers have already written: "I am using words right now"? Let me search for that sentence on Google.
[Pause]
You're not going to believe this, but no one has ever employed that phrase before. I am more unique than I thought! Even when I'm trying not to be.
Marcus raises numerous questions. What are the ethics of copying? Is there "good" and "evil" copying? Should modern people try to make new works of art that have never been essayed before? Or is pure copying -- like Christian and Buddhist monks duplicating the great Scriptures -- as valid as "art"?
The central argument (as I see it) is that the Platonic ideal on which copyright law is based no longer holds. Yes, at one time Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and crafty forgers made sleazy fakes. But now the "original" of the latest Jay-Z CD is virtually the same as the Chinese counterfeits. The Buddhist concept of sunyata ("emptiness") best explains all our contemporary stuff. The latest number one Hollywood movie (Dr. Seuss' The Lorax) is based on a children's book, which is a variant of The Cat in the Hat, which itself derives from African-American minstrel shows (according to The Dartmouth magazine -- I just found this on Google, in 0.31 seconds). Copying allows variation, which makes our era confusing, noisy and wildly fertile.
I'm proud of my friend Marcus for defending the indefensible -- the multiple, maddening and redundant copies produced by contemporary capitalism -- without defending capitalism itself. His argument unfolds like a series of Chinese hats, one inside the other. Quickly he locates the goddess Copia, mother of all copies. The cornucopia is her emblem: the Horn of Plenty. The only way to have lots and lots of anything -- grains of barley or Barbie dolls -- is to make duplicates. Besides, in this material universe, true duplicates don't exist. Each Barbie is -- under a microscope -- unique.
In his breathtaking first chapter, "What Is a Copy?", Marcus details the varieties of Louis Vuitton bags. Once individually handcrafted in an atelier in Paris, these handbags now exist in multiple variants and copies, some perfect duplicates, some absurdly amateurish. According to the Internet, only 1% of Louis Vuitton bags are made by the original company. Takashi Murakami, the Japanese artist, included counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags in a show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. Consumer capitalism has become a Talmud of products imitating and endlessly critiquing the ur-texts of Chanel, Levi's, Louis Vuitton and Tom Cruise movies.
Marcus' most remarkable contribution is the question: "Is one MP3 file different from another?" (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes!)
Titles cannot be copyrighted. That's why I called this essay "A Tale of Two Cities."
A unique work of art cannot be distinguished from a copy, philosophically -- and therefore legally. For example, I am using words right now. Words are all copies of other words. In a sense, all writers are plagiarizing the dictionary. For example, how many other thinkers have already written: "I am using words right now"? Let me search for that sentence on Google.
[Pause]
You're not going to believe this, but no one has ever employed that phrase before. I am more unique than I thought! Even when I'm trying not to be.
Marcus raises numerous questions. What are the ethics of copying? Is there "good" and "evil" copying? Should modern people try to make new works of art that have never been essayed before? Or is pure copying -- like Christian and Buddhist monks duplicating the great Scriptures -- as valid as "art"?
The central argument (as I see it) is that the Platonic ideal on which copyright law is based no longer holds. Yes, at one time Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and crafty forgers made sleazy fakes. But now the "original" of the latest Jay-Z CD is virtually the same as the Chinese counterfeits. The Buddhist concept of sunyata ("emptiness") best explains all our contemporary stuff. The latest number one Hollywood movie (Dr. Seuss' The Lorax) is based on a children's book, which is a variant of The Cat in the Hat, which itself derives from African-American minstrel shows (according to The Dartmouth magazine -- I just found this on Google, in 0.31 seconds). Copying allows variation, which makes our era confusing, noisy and wildly fertile.
June 16, 2013
I was initially extremely excited about this book - the propositions of the introduction are wonderful, and directly relevant to my current area of research. I had hoped to assign a chapter of this book for a class I teach on appropriation in the arts. But after wading through the first chapter without finding any clear thinking about copying, or development of any of the promising propositions of the introduction, I began to lose hope. The problem is that any potentially interesting or provocative shift in the way we are trained to think about copying is buried under a ton of philosophical jargon and new-age assertions. I agree that bringing non-Western traditions to bear on our current understanding of copying could be essential to developing a more practical understanding of the phenomena, but even for me, and I did a degree in comparative religious studies focusing on Eastern philosophy, it was too dense to wade through. I'm sure there are some brilliant insights somewhere in here, but it doesn't seem worth the trudging through jargon and parsing nearly unintelligible sentences to get to them. And I certainly wouldn't ask my undergraduates to do so. Its frustrating, since there are so few books on this subject, but the others I've read (Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing, Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Remix, etc.) are all far more accessible than this one is. I firmly believe in the ability of brilliant academics to express their complex insights in ways that are not absolutely off-putting for people outside their disciplines. I've seen it done. But the dominance of philosophical jargon in academia still holds sway over many scholars, who unfortunately restrict their reach by conforming to those more and more outdated notions of scholarly authority.
November 13, 2011
The value we place on originality is one of the great paradoxes of the modern and contemporary worlds, alongside the limits dominant ideas and ideals in our existing political cultural climates draw around legitimate forms of cooperation, appropriation, deception, transformation and combination of things into something different and perhaps new. Most of this list is not mine, but Marcus Boon’s, except the question of limiting cooperation – which is an issue that I become acutely aware of in my work, where at my University I have the dubious task of being the point of last advice to staff about managing plagiarism and other activities deemed to be forms of academic misconduct – after me, it is the formal academic complaints and appeals procedures.
One of the things that makes this task/role so paradoxical is that alongside the ideal that everyone does their own work, where student scholarly activity is the product of their own independent original work we also profess a commitment to building a community of scholars, and that one of our defined forms of academic misconduct is unauthorised collusion, leaving me to conclude that there are forms of authorised collusion, which seems odds when collusion suggests that there is something illicit about the activity – it is collusion, not collaboration. What is more, in academia we find ourselves further torn between the genius of the individual and our recollection that even Newton, one of the great minds of the Enlightenment, wrote “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants” in a letter to another of the Enlightenment’s great minds – Robert Hooke – in February 1676. Even more paradoxical, there are few among even the most celebratory of the postmodern tendency to pastiche, reappropriation and adaptation or even among the most intense advocate of the use of ‘copyleft’ who would likely celebrate the unattributed appropriation of their own work, ideas, writing or other products of their labour to someone else’s commercial or other gain. In the age since the Romantics and as solidified by the Modernism, a celebration of individual originality has become one of the great markers of our times.
All this makes Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying all the more unsettling, even more so because he adds to the discussion three potent factors – a critique of existing intellectual property laws that protect the expressions of an idea but not the idea itself (something many of my colleagues in academia learn the hard way when talking to, say, TV show producers), a delicate balancing act between modernist conservatism and the celebration of the individual genius and postmodern celebration of appropriation, and a delicately blended debate between classical and modern aspects of western philosophy on the one hand engaged in a mutually self-correcting and criticising debate with aspects of Buddhist philosophy. All this makes for a superb read. There is much about this book that is an exploration of the tensions between the individual and their community, between shameless grandstanding and the knowing irony of displaying the fake, the wonder that is the montage as a cultural, artistic and political practice, and the notion that copy is derived form the Latin for plenty (copia – as in copious). Just one of these would be rich pickings for a scholarly analysis – and Boon challenges us by weaving them together and more, to explore (as noted above) ideas of copying as appropriation, deception, transformation and montage.
There are two parts of the book I especially appreciated – the critique of the Platonist underpinning of intellectual property law (the idea that there must be a pure something/idea out there that our texts are only an expression of), and the discussion of appropriation that leads him to a political exploration of ‘depropriation’ or a political indifference to possession (although my modernist cultural sensibilities and love of the films of Sergei Eisenstein mean that I must add the montage chapter to this list). This idea of depropriation seems to me to be one where Boon gets closest to his Buddhist political formation and seems almost to celebrate forms of poverty – but he does not go that far, instead he mounts a Buddhist inflected, materialist (influenced by writers such as Hardt and Negri – I’m not sure how materialist they are) critique of property ownership: if it isn’t owned, can we care about it being copied? In case this comes over as excessively nihilistic, Boon has one more influence that weaves its way through the texts – Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin-inspired discussions of mimesis. At the heart of Boon’s argument (pace Taussig) is the notions that all of social life is dependent on mimesis – on copying. To copy, for Boon, seems to be a fundamental element of being human – so not nihilism, but a recognition of copying as an essential aspect of humanity.
All the way through the book I kept coming back to the contemporary ideas of intellectual property and especially David Harvey’s argument (in The Enigma of Capital and elsewhere) that modern forms of primitive accumulation – that is, of turning a non-commodified thing into a commodity – centre on the commodification of nature, our biological components (gene sequences and so forth), and of human cultural and intellectual practice. So much of Boon’s argument then caused me to muse on various forms of anti-copyright, and especially various forms of the Creative Commons licenses that we are seeing as the basis of more and more cultural including written production – and the paradox of this book having its copyright vested in the regents of Harvard University: that in the small remains the power of capitalism to accommodate its critics.
Boon’s case is challenging and eclectic in its sources – which makes it demanding: this is in no way an easy read, but it is read worth it even if it requires revisiting aspects of the case, and I know that I will and will have to as I continue to try to make sense of the work I do and try to keep it open and accessible to all.
One of the things that makes this task/role so paradoxical is that alongside the ideal that everyone does their own work, where student scholarly activity is the product of their own independent original work we also profess a commitment to building a community of scholars, and that one of our defined forms of academic misconduct is unauthorised collusion, leaving me to conclude that there are forms of authorised collusion, which seems odds when collusion suggests that there is something illicit about the activity – it is collusion, not collaboration. What is more, in academia we find ourselves further torn between the genius of the individual and our recollection that even Newton, one of the great minds of the Enlightenment, wrote “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants” in a letter to another of the Enlightenment’s great minds – Robert Hooke – in February 1676. Even more paradoxical, there are few among even the most celebratory of the postmodern tendency to pastiche, reappropriation and adaptation or even among the most intense advocate of the use of ‘copyleft’ who would likely celebrate the unattributed appropriation of their own work, ideas, writing or other products of their labour to someone else’s commercial or other gain. In the age since the Romantics and as solidified by the Modernism, a celebration of individual originality has become one of the great markers of our times.
All this makes Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying all the more unsettling, even more so because he adds to the discussion three potent factors – a critique of existing intellectual property laws that protect the expressions of an idea but not the idea itself (something many of my colleagues in academia learn the hard way when talking to, say, TV show producers), a delicate balancing act between modernist conservatism and the celebration of the individual genius and postmodern celebration of appropriation, and a delicately blended debate between classical and modern aspects of western philosophy on the one hand engaged in a mutually self-correcting and criticising debate with aspects of Buddhist philosophy. All this makes for a superb read. There is much about this book that is an exploration of the tensions between the individual and their community, between shameless grandstanding and the knowing irony of displaying the fake, the wonder that is the montage as a cultural, artistic and political practice, and the notion that copy is derived form the Latin for plenty (copia – as in copious). Just one of these would be rich pickings for a scholarly analysis – and Boon challenges us by weaving them together and more, to explore (as noted above) ideas of copying as appropriation, deception, transformation and montage.
There are two parts of the book I especially appreciated – the critique of the Platonist underpinning of intellectual property law (the idea that there must be a pure something/idea out there that our texts are only an expression of), and the discussion of appropriation that leads him to a political exploration of ‘depropriation’ or a political indifference to possession (although my modernist cultural sensibilities and love of the films of Sergei Eisenstein mean that I must add the montage chapter to this list). This idea of depropriation seems to me to be one where Boon gets closest to his Buddhist political formation and seems almost to celebrate forms of poverty – but he does not go that far, instead he mounts a Buddhist inflected, materialist (influenced by writers such as Hardt and Negri – I’m not sure how materialist they are) critique of property ownership: if it isn’t owned, can we care about it being copied? In case this comes over as excessively nihilistic, Boon has one more influence that weaves its way through the texts – Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin-inspired discussions of mimesis. At the heart of Boon’s argument (pace Taussig) is the notions that all of social life is dependent on mimesis – on copying. To copy, for Boon, seems to be a fundamental element of being human – so not nihilism, but a recognition of copying as an essential aspect of humanity.
All the way through the book I kept coming back to the contemporary ideas of intellectual property and especially David Harvey’s argument (in The Enigma of Capital and elsewhere) that modern forms of primitive accumulation – that is, of turning a non-commodified thing into a commodity – centre on the commodification of nature, our biological components (gene sequences and so forth), and of human cultural and intellectual practice. So much of Boon’s argument then caused me to muse on various forms of anti-copyright, and especially various forms of the Creative Commons licenses that we are seeing as the basis of more and more cultural including written production – and the paradox of this book having its copyright vested in the regents of Harvard University: that in the small remains the power of capitalism to accommodate its critics.
Boon’s case is challenging and eclectic in its sources – which makes it demanding: this is in no way an easy read, but it is read worth it even if it requires revisiting aspects of the case, and I know that I will and will have to as I continue to try to make sense of the work I do and try to keep it open and accessible to all.
May 2, 2022
I thought this book was good but incredibly boring. It’s a deep exploration into contemporary uses and philosophies of copying.
March 19, 2024
this may be the heaviest, most complex book i have read in my life so far. so many astute observations, so useful, so absurd that this is how things came to be. i too praise copying.
July 13, 2012
Now finally finished with this. Its major achievement was to bring mimesis into the conversation. But now I find myself thinking of other things it could have done...but didn't. Boon's argument is at once predictable and far out. Its rhythm of introducing a problematic example, analyzing it, then turning to Buddhist notions to enlarge it and view it from another perspective gets tiresome and needs to be varied. He also seems to gloss over a lot of real and substantial ideological differences when he takes such a broad view. Not as engaging as I'd hoped...still more a fan of Hillel Schwartz loony magnum opus on the subject, "the culture of the copy"
April 8, 2013
Marcus Boon examines copying as a whole and as various parts, though he touches on IP this book isn't so much about agreeing or disagreeing with copyright, but examining what is copying and how it is affected and how it affects. One of his main points is that copying is an aspect of humanity and even nature.
I would have liked if more attention had been paid to IP laws in this book as I feel some very good insight could have been given, but I guess without it it does fall to the readers to determine that for themselves.
I would have liked if more attention had been paid to IP laws in this book as I feel some very good insight could have been given, but I guess without it it does fall to the readers to determine that for themselves.
March 1, 2014
Boon does a lovely job of distinguishing himself amongst the larger crowd of copy-left proponents to offer a philosophical treatise on what copying really is and what the human stakes behind the practice entail. I do think he over-relied on theory (which, when combined with his explanations of Buddhist traditions, got too heavy to parse at junctures). But, the overall spirit of this book make it a strong contribution to the current and continued discussions of the issue.
December 13, 2016
The introduction was kind of enthralling for me, but, unfortunately, the rest of what I read (I say that because I didn't finish) didn't develop those initial propositions. I admire, respect, and would endorse a project that attempted to either resist or expound upon a Platonic model of mimesis, but this didn't quite execute that project well enough for me.
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The concept is interesting. It didn't seem to go anywhere interesting.
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