In Praise of Copying

Excerpted from Excerpted from Chapter 1: ‘What Is a Copy?’ (footnotes omitted) from In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon. Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

1/ What Is a Copy?

IT’S A VUITTON

and you know that Vuitton trunks have been called “the trunks that last a life-time.”

A VUITTON WARDROBE TRUNK

not only IS French but it LOOKS French, not only IS the finest but APPEARS to be the finest.

VUITTON TRUNKS ARE GENUINE!

— Advertisement in Town and Country, May 15, 1922, quoted in Paul-Gérard Pasols, Louis Vuitton: La Naissance du luxe moderne (2005)

Book: In Praise of Copying

Author: Marcus Boon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Publication Date: 2010-10

Format: Hardcover

Length: 304 pages

Price: $25.95

Affiliate: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/ (Harvard University Press)

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/book_cover_art/p/praisecopyding-cvr.jpgLouis Vuitton

Brooklyn, New York, April 2008. A row of street stalls in front of graffiti-covered iron gates. Tables full of merchandise: Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, with their familiar “LV” monograms; brown and beige; white with multicolor fruit-like designs. You can find them for sale on Canal Street in New York, in the night markets of Hong Kong and Singapore or the covered market in Mexico City, and in many other places around the world where the urban poor go to shop—“LV” articles piled up alongside the Patek Philippe watches, Chanel perfume, North Face jackets, and Adidas shoes. Copies, fakes, counterfeits; cheap, poorly made reproductions… or are they? For you are not in a night market, or on the street. You are standing inside the Brooklyn Museum, surrounded by cameras and elegantly dressed men and women; Kanye West is performing in another room in the building. This is the opening night for Copyright Murakami, a retrospective devoted to the work of Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami, including his celebrated collaborations with Louis Vuitton, such as the multicolor monogram handbag you just saw. And the bags in the street stalls are the real thing, made by Louis Vuitton, for sale at high prices. According to spokesmen for the company, the fake street stalls selling fake fakes are intended to draw attention to the phenomenon of counterfeiting, the production of illegal copies of Louis Vuitton’s products.

Vuitton handbags have been called the most copied objects in the world. This statement, part of the folklore of contemporary global consumer culture, seems immediately open to question. Louis Vuitton, after all, is a manufacturer of luxury goods which are defined, even in this age of global branding, by their scarcity. Internet folklore has it that only 1 percent of Louis Vuitton bags are actually made by the company. The copies, then, would be the 99 percent made by others. The selling of such mass-produced copies—which in its current form can be dated back to the 1970s, when Vuitton bags began to be made en masse in various East Asian locations—is not a new thing. In fact, Vuitton’s famous “LV” monogram was developed in 1896 by Louis Vuitton’s son Georges, as a trademark that would authenticate the family firm’s products, in response to the alleged copying of Vuitton Senior’s checkered-cloth design. Although Georges designed the monogram to distinguish his company’s products, today it is the distinctive “LV” logo that makes the bags so easy to copy.

The market for such copies has developed in surprising ways. Today in Taiwan, we are told that there are five grades of copy, ranging from the highest—which are handmade, almost indistinguishable from the bags made by Vuitton, and costing thousands of dollars—to the cheap plastic fakes available in night markets in cities. Some of these bags, which are sold complete with certificates of authenticity, fake receipts, and logo-stamped wrappings, have been “returned” to stores which sell the real items but which did not detect the replicas. On the other hand, famous movie stars have been spotted carrying Vuitton bags which include designs that are not actually made by the company. Furthermore, because of the difficulty in actually purchasing some of the limited-edition bags made by Vuitton and other companies such as Hermès, with its famous “Birkin” bag, it has become fashionable to celebrate rather than hide the fact that a bag is a copy, and the vogue for certain copies has resulted in their prices exceeding those of the originals that they supposedly imitate. Online, one can find images of Vuitton bags which bear the word “FAKE” in bold letters on the side of the bags.

The fragility of the trademark as an identifier of authenticity is illustrated by the fact that in China destruction of copies is often prohibitively expensive, and so labels from counterfeits are merely removed and the now-generic items sold in the marketplace again. Conversely, in order to circumvent the law on illegal vending of counterfeits in Counterfeit Alley in New York, fakes are often sold as “blanks” in one location, with logos and other trademarks being added at a second location later. The instability of the word “copy” in this situation is also illustrated by the fact that factories that produce “originals” under outsourcing contracts from international businesses may also produce the same goods illegally on the “ghost shift” at night, which are then sold as fakes or counterfeits.

The ironies on the Vuitton side mount, too. The “LV” monogram was designed four years after Louis Vuitton’s death. The firm remained a family business for many years, but became a publicly traded company in 1984; the family lost control of the business in 1990, after a hostile takeover bid by Bernard Arnault that resulted in the formation of the “French” luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). This shift was magnified by the hiring in 1997 of New York–based fashion designer Marc Jacobs as the brand’s artistic director and the hiring of global talent such as Murakami to develop product designs for the company. Although the company still makes luxury hand-crafted goods, it currently has 390 stores around the world. Unlike many other luxury businesses, Vuitton has resisted the urge to outsource production of its goods, maintaining fifteen factories in France; but the company also recently opened factories in Spain and the United States, and began a joint factory venture in Pondicherry in India. So Vuitton is a mass-producer of luxury, artisanal, unique individual bags, faking the faking of its own products at an art exhibition, while zealously pursuing the prosecution of the actual fakers through police action and courts of law around the world.

The not-by-chance meeting of Murakami and Vuitton in an art museum in Brooklyn embodies many of the contradictions involved in thinking about copies. Murakami is one of the most famous visual artists working today, exhibiting his paintings, the pinnacle of individualistic self-expression, in art museums, the most prestigious archives of the unique and original object. In the 2008 Brooklyn show, there was a Louis Vuitton boutique where the visitor could purchase some of the handbags Murakami designed in collaboration with Vuitton. A number of the paintings in the exhibition featured Vuitton’s logo incorporated into their complex “superflat” surfaces. At the entrance to the Copyright Murakami show, visitors were greeted by the statement: “The concept of copyright holds an exalted position within Murakami’s practice, rooted in the acknowledgment of his work as simultaneously interweaving deeply personal expression, high art, mass culture and commerce.” The title of the show references a long-standing stereotype concerning the illegal and anonymous production of copies in East Asia, and playfully transforms it. Murakami himself runs a company called Kaikai Kiki, which manages artists and produces and sells merchandise. At the same time, his own work is based on an explicit appropriation of materials from a variety of sources, including traditional and contemporary Japanese culture. Furthermore, the idea for the museum installation itself appears to have been copied from previous works, such as an installation by Fred Wilson at the 2003 Venice Biennale in which he hired a black man to stand outside the main pavilion selling fake generic designer bags, and Korean artist Zinwoo Park’s 2007 exhibition of real Louis Vuitton “Speedy” bags with the label “FAKE” attached to them.

Authentically Original Imitations

The everyday saga of intellectual property and its protection is here elaborated to an unusual degree. Marc Jacobs may claim that the Brooklyn Museum’s tableau was just a little amusement, but the fact that all the players involved choose to pay close attention to such an apparently trivial matter as copying should indicate the existence of a crisis. Such a crisis might involve: the globalization of commerce and the transport of texts, images, symbols, objects, and products across national boundaries and cultural spaces in a way that calls into question the ownership of such things; the problem of when some “thing” can be called “art” and the ever-expanding role of the museum in legitimating objects as being art or otherwise, even as museums themselves are forced to function as part of a market economy; consequently, the erosion of the gap between financial and aesthetic value and the increasingly open question as to the source of the prestige of particular fabricated objects; the inability of the law to resolve, both intellectually and practically, questions about the identities of objects, about what can be claimed as private property or not, and what the rights of various parties as to the use of things are; last but not least, the apparent indifference of the general public to whether the things that they buy are “real” or “fake,” “original” or a “copy,” as evidenced by the expanding market for both originals and copies of many products.

So: what exactly constitutes a “copy” in this situation—or rather, what does not? Writing admiringly of the LV copies available in New York City, for example, fashion journalist Lynn Yaeger struggled to put her finger on the difference between an original LV bag and a well-made copy. The site Basicreplica.com, one of a number of Web-based companies that in 2009 offered high-end copies of Vuitton, along with Dior, Marc Jacobs, and others, proclaimed:

No tongue in cheek, we can honestly say that our Louis Vuitton replica bags are absolutely indistinguishable from the originals. You can take your Louis Vuitton replica handbag to a Louis Vuitton flagship store and compare, feel the leather, test the handles, check out the lining—not even a Louis Vuitton master craftsman will be able to tell which is the original and which the Louis Vuitton replica handbag from Basicreplica.com. Louis Vuitton replica bags with the same Alcantara lining, quality cowhide leather given a finish that oxidizes to a dark honey just the way the original Louis Vuitton handbags colour as they age, authentically original imitations of the real originals!

Aside from being a fabulous rhetorical flourish, what is an “authentically original imitation”? Or more specifically: What is a copy? In everyday parlance, the word “copy” designates an imitation of an original—for example, a copy of a Louis Vuitton bag. But a brief survey of the kinds of objects called “copies” today raises basic questions about this definition. What does it mean to say that something is a copy of something else? How is the claim that object A is a copy of object B established? What do we mean when we say that A is “like” B, that it imitates it? At first, these questions strike one as banal and the answers obvious or self-evident. But when original and copy begin to overlap to the extent that they do today (and the struggle to maintain the distinction between these two things, “original” and “copy,” is precisely what constitutes the crisis, to my mind); when original and copy are produced together in the same factory, at different moments; when a copy is actually self-consciously preferred to the original, we must ask again: What do we mean when we say “copy”?

The Platonic World of Intellectual Property

What is the origin of the vocabulary—legal, commercial, aesthetic, or otherwise—that is used to describe the complex global situation of the Louis Vuitton bag? To answer the question adequately might require one to tell a history of the world, which is perhaps why no one has attempted it. Nevertheless, it is a situation in which a specific philosophical history is being deployed, knowingly or not, ingenuously or not, by all those involved. In this history, Plato’s writings on mimesis—a word usually translated as “imitation” but also “copy,” “representation,” “reproduction,” “similarity,” or “resemblance”—play a key role. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates presents the argument that everything in this world is an imitation, because it is an echo or reproduction of an idea that exists beyond the realm of sensible forms. A Louis Vuitton bag is the imitation of an idea, in leather and other materials, while a photograph of such a bag is an imitation of an imitation. In what way is the bag an imitation of an idea, though? In an analysis of the Platonic idea, Martin Heidegger gives an answer to this perplexing question: “Mimesis means copying, that is, presenting and producing something in a manner which is typical of something else. Copying is done in the realm of production, taking it in a very broad sense. Thus the first thing that occurs is that a manifold of produced items somehow comes into view, not as the dizzying confusion of an arbitrary multiplicity, but as the many-sided individual item which we name with one name.”

So copying is a matter of “presenting and producing something in a manner which is typical of something else.” All copies are made—they are produced—and the making involves an attempt to turn something into something else, so that that which is produced is now “like” something else. But in what way is it “like” something else? Why is the bag “like” the idea of a bag? Or for that matter, why is the fake Louis Vuitton bag sold on Basicreplica.com like the original object sold in Vuitton’s Paris flagship store? Heidegger responds: “Making and manufacturing . . . mean to bring the outward appearance to show itself in something else… to ‘pro-duce’ the outward appearance, not in the sense of manufacturing it but of letting it radiantly appear”.

Outward appearance is crucial here, for “in the outward appearance, whatever it is that something which encounters us ‘is,’ shows itself” (173). It is outward appearance that makes something “like” something else; but more profoundly, it is in outward appearance that the idea, the essence of something, shows itself. The quote from a 1922 Louis Vuitton ad that figures at the head of this chapter articulates this Platonic belief very clearly: the bag not only “looks like” something but “IS”; it not only “IS” but “appears.” The famous “LV” logo also makes sure we know that something not only “appears” to be an actual Louis Vuitton bag, but “IS.”

The astute reader or shopper will immediately realize that there is a problem: the fact that something appears to be a Louis Vuitton bag does not mean that it is. For, as we know, an “LV” logo, indeed the entire design of a Louis Vuitton bag, can be copied. Plato, too, recognized this problem, and Socrates poses the following riddle to his respondents in order to think it through: There exists a producer who can produce not only chairs or tables, but the sun, mountains, everything in this world. Who is this producer? Answer: Someone holding a mirror. In the mirror, everything in the world is produced and appears. Again, we ask, in what sense does a mirror “produce”? Heidegger explains that if we understand “produce” to mean manufacture, then obviously a mirror cannot be used to manufacture the sun. But if we understand “produce” to mean “manifest the outward appearance of,” then a mirror does “produce” the sun, even if it clearly does not manufacture a sun.

There are, then, different ways in which an outward appearance can be produced—and different producers, too: the god produces the idea, the craftsman is able to make the idea radiantly appear in an object, and the painter makes it appear in a painting.

What then differentiates these three ways of producing outward appearance? The latter two are diminutions or distortions of the first. Hence Plato’s mistrust of mimesis, and of the artist—the mirrored image, and even the craftsman’s object, confuse the ignorant as to what is essential. At the same time, it is the Platonic belief that the outward appearance of something indicates its essence which continues to generate much of our confusion about what a copy is. When we say “an original,” we usually mean something in which the idea and the outward appearance correspond to each other. There is no distortion in the relation of appearance to essence, to “what a thing is.” Copies, then, for Plato and for us, most of the time are distortions of this relationship. The mirror produces the sun, yet it is not the sun. Basicreplica.com produces a Louis Vuitton bag, yet the article is not a real Louis Vuitton bag.

Is Authenticity Relative?

Under “Frequently Asked Questions” on the website, the people at Basicreplica.com deftly exploited the confusions that underlie Platonic thought:

“1. Are these Authentic Louis Vuitton hand bags? No, we do not sell Louis Vuitton registered trademark bags. The real Louis Vuitton bags can only be bought from authorized dealers. Our bags are replicas. They have all of the proper labeling in all the correct places, lining, locks, and keys, are of the high quality you should expect, and look authentic.”

The bags are not authentic; they are replicas. But they look authentic. What is the difference between something “looking authentic” and “being authentic”? Especially if, taking Basicreplica at their word, we can say that everything in the copy is made with the same materials and is of the same “high quality.” If the 1927 Louis Vuitton ad claimed that LV bags not only have essence, but look as though they do—their outer appearance being in accord with their essence—then Basicreplica could claim that although their bags’ outward appearance was identical to those made by Louis Vuitton, they were not liable to charges of copyright or trademark infringement, because they were not claiming that the bags were “Authentic Louis Vuitton hand bags.”

Intellectual-property law functions through Platonic concepts. IP law’s three constituent parts—copyright, trademark, and patent law—are each built around the paradox that you cannot protect an idea itself, but can protect only a fixed, material expression of an idea. One claims an idea as property by materially fixing it through describing a process for realizing it (patent law), by inscribing or figuring it materially in the form of a picture, text, notated music, film sequence (copyright law), or by developing some method of inscription that one uses to mark otherwise generic objects as one’s own (trademark law). What is the ontology of intellectual property? Ideas cannot be owned, because they are intangible, but the original expression of an idea can be owned when it is tangible, material, fixed. While the idea itself exists in a realm beyond the human realm, the expression belongs to this world, and to the person who, receiving the idea as author, inventor, or owner, fixes it materially as self-expression through his or her labor and turns it into property. This is called “originality.” Others who fix it materially via access to the this-worldly original expression, rather than receiving the idea, are said to be making a copy. The law protects the rights of the former, but not the latter—unless the expression is a fact, a generic term, etc., in which case it belongs in the public domain.

In the age of globalized capital, the commodity itself has adapted to the structures of Platonic legal ontology. Manufacturers work to produce products with distinctive outward appearances that fix, mark, the originality with which they claim to express an idea. Thus, the distinct shape of Louis Vuitton’s Monogram bag can be copyrighted, the name “Monogram” and the inscription “LV” on a bag can be trademarked, and certain innovations in the otherwise generic product called a “bag” can be patented. And those who wish to make similar products must situate their productions within certain legal spaces: that of the art object, protected by fair-use doctrine (though Vuitton has attempted to prevent artists from making LV bags for this purpose without the company’s permission, at the same time legitimizing the productions of others such as Murakami or Stephen Sprouse, with whom the company is collaborating); the parody (for example the “Chewy Vuiton” squeaky toys made by pet toy manufacturer Haute Diggity Dog, which Vuitton unsuccessfully attempted to sue); the generic item called a “bag” which receives no IP protection; or the more spurious, yet also more philosophical arguments offered by Basicreplica.com. At all costs, one should avoid being associated with copies or copying, or face being banned from the republic! It all comes down to what “is,” or rather what is legally granted the status of being. Yet paradoxically, since ideas do not or cannot receive legal protection, IP law encourages those who produce commodities to exaggerate the inevitable distortion of the idea as manifest in the actual object. And the result of this is the kitsch version of originality, “thinking outside the box,” that prevails in the marketplace today.

Alternatives to Platonic Mimesis

All of this assumes that the Platonic model is true. It is unclear how seriously the producers of the Basicreplica.com website—or the advertising agency that produced the 1927 Louis Vuitton ad—take their astute deployments of Platonic concepts. Platonism, as new media theorist McKenzie Wark recently pointed out, is a game, complete with screens, darkened rooms, and headsets. Through the immense historical networks which have resulted in globalization, the game has been installed (to use the word explored by theorist Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in describing the advent of particular mimetic regimes) almost everywhere today, and in a limited sense this game is functional. But beyond this limited sense, with its official protocols of exchange, law, ownership, and identity, what accounts for the multiplication of Louis Vuitton bags?

The history of the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with Aristotle, consists in good part of a series of responses to—modifications, negations, and reversals of—Platonic mimesis. An in-depth review of this tradition is beyond the scope of this book and I refer the reader to the excellent accounts that are available. Christianity takes up Platonic ideas in a variety of ways, from Augustine’s positing of the world as a “region of dissimilarity” separated from God, to Aquinas’ Imitation of Christ, in which mimesis has a positive valence as a way of participating in the divine. Although, after the Renaissance, mimesis thus named is increasingly downplayed in Western philosophy, the underlying problematic of mimesis remains.

As for contemporary critical theory, we can summarize the situation as follows. Elaborating on Nietzsche’s “reverse Platonism,” Gilles Deleuze observed that the Platonic Idea is always accompanied by a swarm of simulacra, fakes, and copies that threaten it, distort it, etc.; and he affirms the equal ontological rights of these simulacra. Jacques Derrida, continuing Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics, tracked down residual traces of Platonic idealism in Husserl and others, proposing the freeplay of the trace as an alternative way of understanding phenomena. Michel Foucault, in “What Is an Author?” argued that authorship and the language of original and copy that accompanies it are variously constructed by particular legal-social-political regimes. Thus, we find ourselves in the now-familiar condition of postmodernity, set out most famously by Baudrillard in Simulations: a world of “copies without originals.”

From the perspective of this tradition, we see an infinite proliferation of Louis Vuitton bags, regulated by something like Foucault’s “author function,” and the historical-social-political institution of a system of property rights management that assigns ownership and authorship to an entity known as Louis Vuitton. But while this is a valid description of the situation as far as it goes, it does not explain how something like a Louis Vuitton bag comes to appear as such at all. While it affirms the power of the fake to challenge the original, through a reversal of Platonism, it does not explain how this happens—or why it fails, insofar as it does. While “Platonic mimesis” is disavowed, it insidiously reasserts itself in the absence of persuasive alternatives.

We find ourselves in a certain impasse—legally, philosophically, theoretically. But the various philosophical and theoretical responses to Plato hardly exhaust the possible framings of mimetic phenomena. And given the situation of the vast swirl of objects known as “Louis Vuitton bags” circulating around the planet today, it would be impossible to claim that this situation is solely the result of a particular history, or a competing set of counter histories, within Western philosophy. This is confirmed by a number of recent comparative studies revealing that historically, philosophically, and otherwise, different cultures have had very different ways of understanding and valuing the phenomena that today are associated with intellectual property.