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The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles
A stunning, innovative blend of microsociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflection that will fascinate anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality.The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of our Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in both its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us.Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates most varieties of simulacra, including counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, ditto marks, portraits, genetic cloning, war games, camouflage, instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, photocopies, wax museums, apes, art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy.At the same time Schwartz works through a range of modernist, feminist, and postmodern theories about copies and mechanical reproduction, posing the following compelling How is it that the ethical dilemmas at the heart of so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, or our own creations, indeed our very selves?The Culture of the Copy is a stunning, innovative blend of microsociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflection that will fascinate anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality.
568 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 31, 2008
The unavoidable influence of Walter Benjamin's essay "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is openly admitted at the end of chapter three entitled "Self-Portraits".
"Walter Benjamin, a theorist who for some readers must have been lurking behind each of these pages, did not say it best when he said that through replication the original has lost its aura...What withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is not the aura, the Happen-Stance, of works of art but the assurance of our own liveliness".
Having read Benjamin's fabulous essay, after reading the works of William Gaddis, another man who had a sort of lifelong obsession with artistic authenticity and the paradoxical effects that industrial reproduction has had on it, I felt compelled to read a more updated account of this ceaselessly fascinating cultural concept. The question obviously is; does Culture of the Copy offer any new insights? Well, yes and no.
For starters, Schwartz's book reads like a lot of contemporary cultural studies texts in that it can do one of two things as an academic discipline; offer theoretical connections of some of the most trivial aspects of culture, or make an overriding theory concerning some of the most trivial aspects of culture seem even more trivial than its relative examples. This sounds confusing, but I believe that it is intended to be to some extent. Schwartz seems to do a little of both here. Culture of the Copy is divided into about eight chapters, seven of which have their specific category of reproduction. Vanishing Twins, deals with actual biological copies. After this, they seem to biologically descend into more synthetic non-human examples of copy. What follows is an encyclopedic account of reproduction; daggeurotypes, mimeographs, film, photography, parrots and monkeys (apparently metaphors for our second nature), prosthetic limbs, theatre, camoflage, virtual reality, war simulation, etc. You get the idea. There is very little in the way of historical anecdote/example that Schwartz leaves out.
Of course, this vast scope, coupled with almost psychotic erudition was, ironically enough, what made this book seem like large pile of unrealized potential. Scwartz's ideas are intriguing, and he is ultimately making a point here. It's just that reading Culture of the Copy can seem forgetable due to the fact that the occasional theoretical commentary that he offers is consistently inundated by anecdote after anecdote (the bibliographical references top out at around 180 pages!). It's an impressive range of supporting references, but it seems like he just didn't want to edit out anything inessential here. Then again, thinking about that makes me think twice, I mean isn't this endless cutting and pasting of information, in itself, an example of the Culture of the Copy? Is Schwartz's book essentially mimicking it's own subject matter through its structural aura? Well, even if it is, I find it mildly annoying. This sort of postmodern trickery just doesn't make for a focused study. As historical sketch, it functions a little more efficiently, which is why Schwartz should have avoided offering too much commentary. He certainly should have avoided refuting Benjamin's ideas. It just sounds embarassing. It hardly even makes much sense because he almost seems to agree that when people desperately strive to remain close to the essence of a work of art by reproducing it, they become distanced from the uniqueness of a reproduction. Benjamin clearly states that time and space influence originals and copies to the point where they are almost just as unique as each other. Schwartz claims that we should be wholly aware of these cultural metaphors. So, in a way his study of reproduction is just an elaboration of Benjamin's idea.
I hate to think that I'm just being obtuse here, and essentially not reading in between the lines. However, on the last page Schwartz seem to reassure me that I was not alone in thinking that his book was a rather drawn out series of contradictory theorizing
"This book has never been intended for the congregation of either/or. It is rather for the congregation of and/also, and it bristles with contradiction".
Ok. So this basically permits you to write an aimless study? There just isn't any closing argument here. It seems like a book that he should have never stopped writing, and very well could have if he wanted to.
For any reader with an interest in the theme of copy/reproduction, I suggest Benjamin's essay, or even the Recognitions by Gaddis. This book will frustrate to no end.
"Walter Benjamin, a theorist who for some readers must have been lurking behind each of these pages, did not say it best when he said that through replication the original has lost its aura...What withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is not the aura, the Happen-Stance, of works of art but the assurance of our own liveliness".
Having read Benjamin's fabulous essay, after reading the works of William Gaddis, another man who had a sort of lifelong obsession with artistic authenticity and the paradoxical effects that industrial reproduction has had on it, I felt compelled to read a more updated account of this ceaselessly fascinating cultural concept. The question obviously is; does Culture of the Copy offer any new insights? Well, yes and no.
For starters, Schwartz's book reads like a lot of contemporary cultural studies texts in that it can do one of two things as an academic discipline; offer theoretical connections of some of the most trivial aspects of culture, or make an overriding theory concerning some of the most trivial aspects of culture seem even more trivial than its relative examples. This sounds confusing, but I believe that it is intended to be to some extent. Schwartz seems to do a little of both here. Culture of the Copy is divided into about eight chapters, seven of which have their specific category of reproduction. Vanishing Twins, deals with actual biological copies. After this, they seem to biologically descend into more synthetic non-human examples of copy. What follows is an encyclopedic account of reproduction; daggeurotypes, mimeographs, film, photography, parrots and monkeys (apparently metaphors for our second nature), prosthetic limbs, theatre, camoflage, virtual reality, war simulation, etc. You get the idea. There is very little in the way of historical anecdote/example that Schwartz leaves out.
Of course, this vast scope, coupled with almost psychotic erudition was, ironically enough, what made this book seem like large pile of unrealized potential. Scwartz's ideas are intriguing, and he is ultimately making a point here. It's just that reading Culture of the Copy can seem forgetable due to the fact that the occasional theoretical commentary that he offers is consistently inundated by anecdote after anecdote (the bibliographical references top out at around 180 pages!). It's an impressive range of supporting references, but it seems like he just didn't want to edit out anything inessential here. Then again, thinking about that makes me think twice, I mean isn't this endless cutting and pasting of information, in itself, an example of the Culture of the Copy? Is Schwartz's book essentially mimicking it's own subject matter through its structural aura? Well, even if it is, I find it mildly annoying. This sort of postmodern trickery just doesn't make for a focused study. As historical sketch, it functions a little more efficiently, which is why Schwartz should have avoided offering too much commentary. He certainly should have avoided refuting Benjamin's ideas. It just sounds embarassing. It hardly even makes much sense because he almost seems to agree that when people desperately strive to remain close to the essence of a work of art by reproducing it, they become distanced from the uniqueness of a reproduction. Benjamin clearly states that time and space influence originals and copies to the point where they are almost just as unique as each other. Schwartz claims that we should be wholly aware of these cultural metaphors. So, in a way his study of reproduction is just an elaboration of Benjamin's idea.
I hate to think that I'm just being obtuse here, and essentially not reading in between the lines. However, on the last page Schwartz seem to reassure me that I was not alone in thinking that his book was a rather drawn out series of contradictory theorizing
"This book has never been intended for the congregation of either/or. It is rather for the congregation of and/also, and it bristles with contradiction".
Ok. So this basically permits you to write an aimless study? There just isn't any closing argument here. It seems like a book that he should have never stopped writing, and very well could have if he wanted to.
For any reader with an interest in the theme of copy/reproduction, I suggest Benjamin's essay, or even the Recognitions by Gaddis. This book will frustrate to no end.
February 5, 2014
An enjoyably written and beautifully illustrated compendium of anecdotes on twins, copying, human nature, authenticity, and fakes. Hillel Schwartz is an excellent writer. His sentences are clever (if sometimes corny) and enjoyable as language before you even process the information - which is encyclopedic in scope and often artfully connected. Unfortunately, while the individual entries are interesting, there isn't much over-arching analysis of them - of how they fit together, and what they say about human nature and nature itself. The book has the feel of a bound set of a poetically arranged and expertly crafted note cards. The most valuable part may be the huge back section of notes and bibliography, which sets you up to dive deeper into any of these fascinating anecdotes on your own. In fact, you could almost look at this book as a portable card catalog on copies - with a loose essay made from poetically linked entry descriptions in the front.
January 10, 2014
I first read Schwartz's odd but very engaging book for an art history course and have returned to it often since. It's lengthy and ranging in its foci yet the uniting theme is the idea of a "copy", which runs the spectrum in this book from actual copies to fakes (fake people, impostors, faked works of art) to twins to means for making electronic or physical copies of visual information. The author's prime interest is how duplicity and authenticity function in contemporary culture and have throughout Western history, mainly in the arts, but also in actual life. Schwartz is somewhere between Ira Glass and Diane Ackerman in writing style: he is an engaging storyteller but like Ackerman, can become overtaken in the most utterly giddy of manners by his own prose and his zest to stuff as much information as possible on each and every page. Given that this is a 600+ page book of small print, you feel like you're falling into an endless sea of copies, twins, impostors, and reproductions at times. Which isn't always a bad thing: the author must be commended for taking a difficult and cumbersome central topic and building so compelling a book around it: while his topic forces unity on his varied examples, it could be a tough sell except for the merit of his writing and the comprehensive, always adroit, level of his skillful research.
A fascinating book to just read, it's also quite necessary (as it was introduced to me in that art history seminar) for those interested in understanding post-modern art and literary and the idea of self, unique identity, duplicity, superimposition of or recreation of identity and related concepts in the arts as well as in actual life. Highly recommended.
A fascinating book to just read, it's also quite necessary (as it was introduced to me in that art history seminar) for those interested in understanding post-modern art and literary and the idea of self, unique identity, duplicity, superimposition of or recreation of identity and related concepts in the arts as well as in actual life. Highly recommended.
December 17, 2007
This book is a tragically neglected study of the culture of reproduction, facsimile, simulacra, simulation, et cetera.
If anyone is interested in vanishing twins, automatons, golems, mimicry, Frankenstein's monster, contemporary visual culture/critique (Im talking about you Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Doug Crimp, and Johnathan Crary), citicism of the mass-produced culture (the youngins all over and their Forefathers/mothers the MAI 68ers), or anything dealing with contemporary philosophy (yea, you Baudrillard, you're getting a shout out) then this is a great book for you.
It is the "1,001 Things to Read on the Toilet" for people that can't stand banality and cliche. (yes I know that you do not "quote" titles)
Ha- cliche as the antithesis of a book about reproduction.
Imma stinker.
If anyone is interested in vanishing twins, automatons, golems, mimicry, Frankenstein's monster, contemporary visual culture/critique (Im talking about you Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Doug Crimp, and Johnathan Crary), citicism of the mass-produced culture (the youngins all over and their Forefathers/mothers the MAI 68ers), or anything dealing with contemporary philosophy (yea, you Baudrillard, you're getting a shout out) then this is a great book for you.
It is the "1,001 Things to Read on the Toilet" for people that can't stand banality and cliche. (yes I know that you do not "quote" titles)
Ha- cliche as the antithesis of a book about reproduction.
Imma stinker.
May 15, 2024
I enjoyed the crazy all over the place vibe that this book has, and at some points I felt maybe I needed something more from it. Not just facts, places, people, but something that would put it all together, at some points she does give a little more, but it is mostly going through all the info and the way it is put together. I made a list of just a few of the themes: twins, siamese twins, wax museums, doubles, mannequins, parrots, monkeys, taxidermy, camouflage, war, fake jewelry, stunt doubles, seeing doubles, copying, Xerox machines, war games, restaging for documentaries, living museums, placebos, photography, Dorothea Lange, deja vu, sampling, liars, and political liars. My list stops there, but it goes on to more. Any way, a lot of the themes I loved, and I am interested in doubles an copies, but I would have liked a little more thought on why she put it all together.
November 17, 2021
What?
December 20, 2021
Such a thought-provoking book - Schwartz is not always right but he is always thoughtful and interesting
Want to read
January 5, 2016"Why, if advertisers resort to identical twinship for its implicit oracular power, did the estimable gift of prophecy fall so overwhelmingly to identical twin women? Because advertising has become our sibylline medium, for deciphering our dreams, telling us who we are and what we should be doing. Because the intuitiveness, the communitarian sensitivity, the ecstasies of the oracular are qualities linked more tightly to women than to men ever since the Greeks found their Fates and sibyls. Because advertising is every which way twinning: a profession of repeating, of making the old seem new in a world of the Twice as Long and Twice as Much, Buy One Get One Free, Double Your Pleasure or Double Your Money Back. Because this twinning is sponsored by a commercial faith that consuming should be a passion, as it must have been in the womb; that the consumer must ever be unsatisfied, as it is the singleton; that through hyperbole a commodity can leave behind its lookalike sisters to become a Brand; that, in other words, the Control will be forgotten as humanity is possessed in the name of the other. Identical female twins appear as oracles in advertisements not simply because they mirror a consuming culture but because they are templates to the process of advertising itself" (Schwartz, pgs. #42–43).
"This was, concluded Capgras, son of a civil engineer, a disorder of exactitude. More precisely, it was a disease of chronic exactitude, of double time. Each of us must admit that we are slightly older, slightly different each day. In social intercourse we allow for disruptions of mood and appetite, affect and demeanor, presuming an inner continuity by which we recognize friends regardless of fashion, frustrations, wrinkles, worry. The greater the exactitude of feature and character demanded of people over time, the more likely they will come to resemble 'diverse apparitions of the same individual,' Doubles each a little off the original. Mme M. and Mme. H. (another case written up in 1923) could accept their own timelines and aging, but not that of their loved ones, whose features and characters had to be in what to us must seem unreasonably permanent detail. All other appearances of their loved ones could only be facsimiles, never the real thing. Their was the pinch: to be protected under such strict tolerances, loved ones had to be unchanging objects, real things" (Schwartz, pg. #75).
"Who might not be a sosie? The Capgras syndrome was — and still is — spreading. The divorce rate is sustained by depositions that one's spouse is no longer the person one married. Plastic surgery makes for almost unmistakeable substitute wives; the parallel universe of television produces proxy parents while asking the real Mr. Q to please stand up; the Other World of old–age homes fosters impersonated relatives. Reviewing the literature in 1987, a neurologist concluded that the Capgras syndrome was not rare. Indeed, so common to European, North American, and Japanese culture are delusions of substitution that the Capgras syndrome is sometimes demoted to a symptom — of an industrial society afraid for itself" (Schwartz, pg. # 77).
"Freud, having decided that his patients were telling him tales, drafted a psychic architecture of screen memories, oedipal turrets, camouflaged emplacements, but some historians suggest that he was building a castle in the sky while patients were in harm's way down below" (Schwartz, pg. #85).
"This was, concluded Capgras, son of a civil engineer, a disorder of exactitude. More precisely, it was a disease of chronic exactitude, of double time. Each of us must admit that we are slightly older, slightly different each day. In social intercourse we allow for disruptions of mood and appetite, affect and demeanor, presuming an inner continuity by which we recognize friends regardless of fashion, frustrations, wrinkles, worry. The greater the exactitude of feature and character demanded of people over time, the more likely they will come to resemble 'diverse apparitions of the same individual,' Doubles each a little off the original. Mme M. and Mme. H. (another case written up in 1923) could accept their own timelines and aging, but not that of their loved ones, whose features and characters had to be in what to us must seem unreasonably permanent detail. All other appearances of their loved ones could only be facsimiles, never the real thing. Their was the pinch: to be protected under such strict tolerances, loved ones had to be unchanging objects, real things" (Schwartz, pg. #75).
"Who might not be a sosie? The Capgras syndrome was — and still is — spreading. The divorce rate is sustained by depositions that one's spouse is no longer the person one married. Plastic surgery makes for almost unmistakeable substitute wives; the parallel universe of television produces proxy parents while asking the real Mr. Q to please stand up; the Other World of old–age homes fosters impersonated relatives. Reviewing the literature in 1987, a neurologist concluded that the Capgras syndrome was not rare. Indeed, so common to European, North American, and Japanese culture are delusions of substitution that the Capgras syndrome is sometimes demoted to a symptom — of an industrial society afraid for itself" (Schwartz, pg. # 77).
"Freud, having decided that his patients were telling him tales, drafted a psychic architecture of screen memories, oedipal turrets, camouflaged emplacements, but some historians suggest that he was building a castle in the sky while patients were in harm's way down below" (Schwartz, pg. #85).
July 11, 2014
This book is something that informed a lot of my theoretical writing at uni but it is a really visual book as well, even though there are no pictures it conjures things and tells stories about the image in a way that probably could not be done visually. Its not really creative in the sense of being writing that produces imagery in the reader, but it has this kind of magnetic pull that gives you this open window into human thought and the process of making and reproducing that is mind blowing.
One of those things you come across that turn out to be a surprise. Thought it was going to be straight-out postmodern theory but turned out it tracks the history of everything from copying (in publishing, industry, culture), doppelgangers, and freak-shows to pre-celebrity tricksters and turn-o-the-century identity theft.
One of those things you come across that turn out to be a surprise. Thought it was going to be straight-out postmodern theory but turned out it tracks the history of everything from copying (in publishing, industry, culture), doppelgangers, and freak-shows to pre-celebrity tricksters and turn-o-the-century identity theft.
March 7, 2016
tidak semua bagian sy butuhkan. bagian2 ttg fenomen kembar siam aku lewati, tapi ttg hubungan antara copydan originality itu menarik (bab VI-VII-VIII):
"the copy will transcend the original"
"replications as means to arrive at the truth"
"the copy will transcend the original"
"replications as means to arrive at the truth"
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews