In Praise of Copying

In Praise of Copying IN PRAISE OF COPYING Marcus Boon Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Some rights reserved Copyright © 2010 CC Attribution Share Alike Non-Commercial Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boon, Marcus. In praise of copying / Marcus Boon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04783-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-674-07252-7 (pbk.) 1. Copying. 2. Philosophical anthropology. 3. Mahayana Buddhism— Doctrines. I. Title. BD225.B66 2010 153—dc22 2010005047 Contents Introduction 1 1 What Is a Copy? 12 2 Copia, or, The Abundant Style 41 3 Copying as Transformation 77 4 Copying as Deception 106 5 Montage 142 6 The Mass Production of Copies 176 7 Copying as Appropriation 204 Coda 238 Notes 251 Acknowledgments 277 Index 279 There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the way I love it. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1934 Introduction he pilgrims line up for miles and miles around the mountain. They have come here from all over the world to this fabled place, Tat the edge of a swamp. Individuals, couples, families. Some first came when they were children. Now they bring their children. Or their children’s children. Some look anxious, others bored; others are full of gleeful anticipation. My palms are sweating—I don’t exactly know why. The line moves slowly and we enter the darkness of a tunnel. Inside I can hear the whirring of machines. As with anything that one is scared of, there is a nervous, almost erotic energy that buzzes through my body. But I feel foolish too, surrounded by children, ordinary folks, who hide their own fear so well, or else mas- tered it long ago. Finally the tunnel opens up. A black night sky, the whirling of galaxies, costumed security guards. A bullet-shaped car pulls up. Now it’s our turn to step up, step in, ride the rollercoaster at Disney World’s Space Mountain. I first came here in 2005 at the suggestion of my Tibetan Buddhist teacher Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, a seventy-year-old Ti- betan lama who lives a nomadic existence traveling from Buddhist center to Buddhist center around the world. One afternoon during a teaching in Toronto, a member of the audience, perhaps exasperated by the elevated tone of Rinpoche’s philosophical talk, asked how we could really experience the luminous emptiness of all phenomena and of the mind—described in the Buddhist sutras that Rinpoche quotes from. “Go to scary movies, amusement park rides,” Rinpoche replied. “And when you’re frightened, meditate by saying, ‘This is a dream’ or ‘I died and this is a bardo.’ Go to Euro Disney, Space Sta- tion 2, and you’ll be thrown into nonconceptual states!” We laughed, the way Western students do, enjoying the supposed irony of a Bud- dhist master talking about state-of-the-art amusement park rides and bringing Disney and Tibet together. But Rinpoche continued: “This is a great way to practice MahÀmudrÀ—which is meditation on whatever’s happening in your mind. MahÀmudrÀ isaveryvivid meditation because you look directly at your own mind and relax— that’s the supreme meditation. If you meditate in this way, suffering won’t be unbearable. When you’re up in the dark, flipping around, you don’t have much time to think of anything. If you practice like this, you’ll be able to do it in a moment of great fear. In the modern world it is impossible to avoid dangerous, frightening activity, but if we embrace fear and difficulty and cultivate the meditation of look- ing directly into its essence, and relax into it, then it’s not difficult. And if you train now, when you face difficulty, such as death, you’ll be able to meditate.” So a few months later I got on a plane and headed south. I was prepared for the fakeness, of course, but not so much for the feeling that, in fact, Disney World is like Tibet. Disney World’s various at- tractions, like the most famous Tibetan monasteries, cost you a lot of money to visit as a tourist, and are patrolled by undercover security forces making sure that nothing gets out of hand. In Simulations, Jean Baudrillard argues that the Disney theme parks are a fine exam- 2 / IN PRAISE OF COPYING ple of what he calls “modeling”—which is to say the production of designed spaces which can be implemented at various places, rather than organically existing in a single place, the way a particular church or town does. Such modeled spaces are obviously “construc- tions,” yet they occupy space in the same way that something “real” or “original” does. Prefabricated suburban condo villages and shop- ping malls are a good example of this. Disney, which has created replicas of its theme parks around the world, is another. But the Tibetan monasteries are too. Samye, the oldest monastery in Tibet, for example, was built as a replica of an Indian Buddhist temple called Otan- tapuri. There are other replicas of this mandala-like structure to be found in other parts of Tibet. Mandalas are patterns, mental frame- works. Just as a Disney theme park is an iteration of a framework, al- beit one with a not particularly stellar meaning, the Tibetan monasteries are also “hard copies” of a mental framework. This principle— that of the model—is apparently one that works exceedingly well. As I rode the rides at Disney World, attempting to experience the fact that Space Mountain and the mythical Mount Meru of Buddhist scriptures, hegemonic oppressive late capitalism in all its cheesy neg- ativity and the highest meditation practices of the Tibetan Kagyu lineage, are, to use a Buddhist formula, “of one taste,” I found myself thinking about an apparently very different project that I was work- ing on, relating to imitation in contemporary culture. Wasn’t part of the point of this meditation that we are always in some kind of mimetic framework, even in the act of dying, being tossed in the air, or at home asleep? And that one could investigate such a framework? But suppose copying is what makes us human—what then? More than that, what if copying, rather than being an aberration or a mis- take or a crime, is a fundamental condition or requirement for anything, human or not, to exist at all? If such is the case—and this is what I will argue in the pages that follow—then the activities known as “copying,” the objects known as “copies,” and those who find Introduction / 3 themselves making these copies would all need to be revalued. But— is there anything that does not involve “copying”? And if that is the case, why exactly does copying another person’s actions or works make us so uncomfortable? Furthermore, having recognized copying for what it is—what kind of freedom do we have to transform the imposed mimetic structures that frame us, internally and externally, individually and as societies? For me, a Buddhist meditation on copying implies not assimilation to hegemonic structures, but the insight to see them for what they are and then to change them. This book grew out of the observation that copying is pervasive in contemporary culture, yet at the same time subject to laws, restrictions, and attitudes that suggest that it is wrong, and shouldn’t be happening. On the one hand, many of the most visible aspects of contemporary culture—the art of Takashi Murakami or Elizabeth Peyton, electronic music ranging from hip-hop and techno to dub- step and mashups, BitTorrent and other digital networks of distribu- tion, software tools like Google Earth or Photoshop, social network- ing sites like Facebook and Twitter, movies like Borat or Slumdog Millionaire (all no doubt hopelessly out of date by the time you read this)—rely explicitly on something we call “copying.” Indeed, many of the most vibrant aspects of contemporary culture indicate an ob- session with the act of copying and the production of copies, and it seems that we find real insight into what human beings and the uni- verse are like through thinking about how and what we copy. On the other hand, every time we install a new piece of software, listen to music, or watch a movie, we encounter the world of copyright and intellectual-property law, and the set of restrictions that have been placed around our access to and use of objects, processes, and ideas produced by the act of copying. Simultaneously, as our ability to make copies expands at both the macro (geophysics and the manip- ulation of global weather systems) and micro (nanotechnology and the fabrication and replication of matter from the atom up) levels, 4 / IN PRAISE OF COPYING these same laws are used by corporations to appropriate, copy, and sell increasingly large parts of what was once the “public domain.” I have been teaching a course on copying at York University in To- ronto for the past two years.

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