Franz Thalmair’s Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Berlin, Revolver, 2019)

A few years ago, Franz Thalmair wrote me to tell me that he was in the process of making a hand made copy of my book In Praise of Copying.  I didn’t quite know what to make of such a project, but Thalmair would send me regular updates as to how it was going … and then one day he finished. 

This hand made copy was then copied again and turned into the book Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1 – 285, which was recently published by Revolver Publishing in Berlin.  Thalmair recently sent me a copy.  It is a strange and beautiful object.  The typeface is a little blurry, as if slightly out of focus, imitating the stereotypical relationship of copy to original as having lost something, being a mere copy, ephemeral, slightly unfaithful to or divergent from the original.  On the other hand, Thalmair’s careful tracing practice reintroduces a practice of uniqueness, originality, authenticity that turns the copy of the book that Thalmair was working with, a multiple, whether in pdf or print form, back into a unique object, with a Benjaminian aura, that fuzziness or haziness that marks it off as being the product of a certain time and place, and a certain kind of awe inspiring patience and manual labor too.  But then this “original copy” is in turn copied and reproduced in an edition of 250 copies, the glossy paper allowing for an accurate facsimile of the hand produced tracing, and a grey border on each page framing the pages as being a visual object as much as a “book page”. 

Thalmair told me that he copied passages that he had tagged or that he was interested in.  At first glance, this makes the book feel like an erasure project, in which the gaps or spaces or silences encroach on the text. But Franz told me that he regarded the practice as containing a trace of his reading — and in that sense, the gaps seem less significant, and the text itself more like a positive memory or trace, as something that remains or has been collated, like a list of quotes. The feeling is uncanny — a rare moment when to read or look at a text is simultaneously to be reading or looking at someone else’s reading of the text. Of course we’re used to such things when we explore the marginalia found in an author’s library — but here the text and the phenomenological act of it being read by another person — and our access to that phenomenological event that belongs to someone else — all coincide. 

Thalmair, who is a writer, curator, editor and professor at the University of Applied Art in Vienna, is co-director of the arts based research project Originalcopy—Post-digital Strategies of Appropriation.  He and Michael Kargl recently put out a beautiful book of the same name containing work related to the project, including essays by myself, Bettina Funcke, Kenneth Goldsmith, Boris Groys, Jussi Parikka.  In the introduction to the book, Thalmair asks: “is it possible to develop a methodology of contemporary copying practices by initiating a copying process that always remains aware of itself? And how can such a loop of thought in the copying process reveal knowledge about the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of the phenomenon of the copy, with its deep historical, cultural, and technological roots in society?” For Thalmair, copying can be a performative research practice — as it is with the book described above. 

In Praise of Copying, now out in paperback!

In Praise of Copying was released today in that most or least arcane of formats: a paperback book!

A Few More Reviews of In Praise of Copying

A busy time of the year for me, but I have a backlog of posts re. copying that I’m working on. In the meantime, here are few interesting recent reviews of In Praise of Copying.  First off Amy Ione in Leonardo Digital.  Then David Banash in Postmodern Culture.  Finally Mark Fisher in The Wire.  All well worth a look …

In Praise of Copying Reviewed in PopMatters and Taipei Times

James Williams just wrote a nice review of In Praise of Copying for PopMatters … and there’s another interesting piece about the book in the Taipei Times.

On WFMU with DJ /rupture, Monday Dec. 27th

I’ll be talking with DJ /rupture a.k.a. Jace Clayton next Monday, December 27th on his WFMU show, from 6-8 p.m.  Jace is one of the finest DJs on this planet or any other, and one of the deepest thinkers about dancehall sounds in the age of globalization.  I’ve learnt a lot from him over the years. In particular, his blog, Mudd Up! is a must read for anyone interested in understanding new global dance sounds. He has some interesting things to say about In Praise of Copying.  Aside from talking about World Music 2.0, the global rise of Autotune, and how to live in a world of copies without originals, I’m going to play some music: expect Kuduro, Logobi, Saharan psychedelia, Ramadanman as well as some clips from other folks’ mixes and some archival hauntings.

Listen to the podcast, in two parts, here.

Copycats on CBC radio, Saturday Nov. 27

Sook-Yin Lee took a stroll with me through Chinatown to discuss copying for her radio show DNTO, which airs this Saturday, November 27, 2 p.m., on CBC Radio 1. You can listen to the podcast here.  We did a whole section of the interview live in a TD Bank ATM booth, watching people taking out cash, and trying to think through what that weirdest of copies, money, is really about. While it’s quite clear to me that paper money is literally a copy, the question “what is money a copy of?” is a very difficult one. Best response for me is found in George Simmel’s remarkable 1907 book The Philosophy of Money, which I notice Arjun Appadurai is also a fan of. Money is very close to the unstable plasticity of mimesis itself. It represents, i.e. imitates, value, but again, what does that really mean? For Marx, value itself could be a kind of hallucination whose effects were nonetheless very real … something that the current financial crises confirm. Money proliferates, it’s a great example of the contagiousness of mimesis, and it was a pleasure to watch people taking  small stacks of bills from the ATM, one after another — a very orderly proliferation.  But as a copy, money is also unstable and disappears, as those that bought subprime mortgage instruments in the belief that they represented something, now know.  Simmel struggles with this paradox: that money is supposed to be a guarantee of value, of the stability of the system of valuing, but is nonetheless in practice highly unstable.  But isn’t the enormous national and international financial apparatus, from the World Bank to academic economics to governmental monetary policy an indication of how much work it is to maintain the stability of the “original” of monetary value, and stop it from turning into a “mere”, “worthless”, “copy”?

When I was working on In Praise of Copying, someone told me, or perhaps I read somewhere that the Canadian visual art group General Idea had written that “money was the first multiple”, i.e. the first mass produced art object a la Marcel Duchamp.  I tried to verify the statement, or find a source, but I was never able to do so.  I guess that would make it a counterfeit statement about counterfeiting? Buyer beware …

The New Yorker, National Post, Chronicle and Erik Davis on In Praise of Copying

Several thoughtful early responses to In Praise of Copying….

The first is an excellent blog post by Jenny Hendrix for The New Yorker concerning my Borgesian Brooklyn book launch and how to handle the universality of copying, in the bookstore and elsewhere.

The second is the audio of an hour long radio conversation I had with Erik Davis and Maja D’Aoust on their Expanding Mind show on the Progressive Radio Network.  Erik was his usual brilliant self, and we covered everything from compassion for viruses, to cumbia, to the struggle to understand what sameness means.  A great pleasure to chat with these guys.

The third is a piece in the National Post by Adam McDowell entitled, “Copying, A Right“, which looks at my book and other recent attempts to figure out how to balance an expanded right to copy with restrictions that support artists and other copyright holders.  I do want to note that the conversation at the launch described at the end of the piece actually ended with a monologue by yours truly on the broader crisis of the workplace today, for artists, factory workers and everybody else, to which my questioner responded “that’s a good answer!” But this is generally a very astute look at a problem that we’re still barely able to even articulate.

Finally, a great piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, discussing In Praise of Copying along with Lewis Hyde’s Common As Air, and the notion that books are always copies of other books.

Uploading My Book to AAAAARG.ORG

I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am.  The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his  dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”.   Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector.  But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.

Walter Benjamin’s library card, Paris, 1940.

While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts.  I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book.  There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them.  There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author.  When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright.  I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument.  And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.

But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying.  I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes.  As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy.  I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:

“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.

Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.” —Marcus Boon

I’ve been reading some of Douglas Rushkoff’s arguments for writers abandoning conventional publishing for a direct web based sales approach as well as the various arguments for and against eReaders, and Ted Striphas’ terrific book The Late Age of Print, which outlines some of the desperate strategies currently employed by authors and publishers.  I understand the need for both authors and publishers to have a functioning economic model today.  I’m a professor at a university and I don’t rely on income from books to make ends meet.  The right to work and get paid is often invoked as a justification for existing intellectual property regimes.  It’s a serious matter and I don’t have an easy solution to it.  It’s not only authors and artists who are wondering how they’re going to get paid.  Couldn’t you say that the car plant worker whose job is outsourced is also experiencing a crisis in the way that we relate to copies?  In this case the industrial age copies that so much of our economy has been built around.  I don’t think that economic arguments are the only important ones – there’s such a thing as a moral right, not just for authors, but for those who participate in the public domain, i.e. all of us.

For example: in the last couple of years, the two most important independent booksellers in Toronto, Pages and This Ain’t the Rosedale Library have both gone out of business. While the chainstores are still there, the newly published “alternative” book as physical object has almost ceased to exist for those living in downtown Toronto.  Such bookstores were more than places to make cash transactions for books, they were an important part of my education: as a former teenager/student/bohemian lowlife/grad student/freelance writer I browsed there, I read chapters, consulted indexes, wrote down citations.  They were places were books were curated and presented in a powerful way I had more or less unimpeded access to the book as object.  Probably if I’d tried to photograph pages from a book it wouldn’t have gone so well, but it never occurred to me to do that.  And if I really needed to copy more, I would have searched the libraries and then copied a chapter while at work. Or actually bought the book, if I had the money.

All of that activity has moved online.  I don’t think we should rely on Googlebooks making texts available online. We should do it ourselves, or through our publishers.  The pdf functions more or less the same way as the book sitting in the bookstore or the library, and I’m happy that my writing will be accessible to those who have a somewhat marginal relationship to book buying, as I myself have had at different points in my life.  Making pdfs of all of our work available online is an easy but powerful gesture towards an expanded public domain.  And it may even support the economic needs of writers and publishers: James Boyle believes so. So do I.

There are proposals in the US for a National Digital Library, and perhaps one could dream of a Borgesian global Digital Library where every text ever written was to be found.  Those proposals raise a number of interesting questions.  But while the negotiation of legal protocols that would allow such a library to come into existence are daunting enough to make the project seem like a utopia, something like this library has already come into being, in a haphazard, piratical way on the internet.

Which brings me to AAAAARG.ORG.  AAAAARG feels like a secret because a lot of the texts that are listed on the site (but stored elsewhere) are arguably in breach of copyright law. But how secret is anything that has a URL?  It’s already an open secret in the sense that scholars like Sedgwick and Taussig described it: something that everybody knows about but no one can talk about.  And what is that something? The public domain itself as the primary fact of our society or any society. Many grad students, artists and professors I talk to have heard of AAAAARG and browsed it. It’s an amazing, but controversial resource, since the site is a library of theoretical texts that encompasses most of the work of most of the key thinkers of the last hundred years … except when  their publishers have issued takedown notices to prevent copies of their texts appearing in the AAAAARG archive.  There have also been attempts to shut AAAAARG down completely, including at least one this year. But the site floats up A.AAAARG turning into AAAAARG or some other iteration.

I enjoy the curatorial aspect of AAAAARG and it’s become one of the first places I go to when I want a quick heads up on a topic, usually be looking through one of the many “issues” that link various texts in the archive.  Anyone can add a text to an issue.  I added IPOC to the Piracy, collaboration, Collage, objects, surplus, Aesthetics, copyleft cuture (sic) groups. Not that I think that’s an accurate summary of what goes on in my book, but it’s a useful set of links.    What happens next? I think that’s something we’re all waiting to find out.  “Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects”, said Benjamin as he finished unpacking his library.  A book collector dwells and lives inside the books that he owns, he continued.  Today, the question of how we can dwell in or with the objects that surrounds us has never been more pressing.  Books, as Benjamin knew very well, are just a tiny part of it …

PDF of In Praise of Copying available from Harvard website now!

You can now download the entire text of In Praise of Copying from the Harvard website. There’s a Creative Commons license attached but otherwise it’s free. I’ll post some thoughts on this in the next few days …

Toronto Launch of In Praise of Copying w. John Giorno, October 12

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010, 8 p.m.

This Is Not A Reading Series presents:
Marcus Boon and John Giorno in a creative performance and dialogue
at The Annex Live, 296 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto. $5 cover charge.

For the Toronto launch of In Praise of Copying, I’ll be reading and talking with the great New York poet John Giorno, whose work I recently edited.  It’s a great honor to be reading with John and an auspicious way to launch my book.  Aside from admiring his mastery of the poetic practice of copying, repetition, montage and other mimetic forms, reading John’s work allowed me to see the ways in which Buddhist practice and avant garde techniques and critiques of originality and authorship resonate with each other.  John’s also an amazing performer … it should be a great night!