Question: What do eyeglasses, reproductive technologies, art forgeries, mimeographs, mannequins, parrots, sex dolls, Siamese twins, wax museums, Doublemint gum advertisements, carpel tunnel syndrome, and camouflage have in common? Answer: According to Hillel Schwartz, they are all clues to understanding "the culture of the copy," a culture thick with doubling, mimicry, repetition, and simulation. Hillel Schwartz's most recent book, The Culture of the Copy, has the best of scholarly intentions: to teach us about ourselves. Bringing together obscure historical facts and biographical anecdotes, Schwartz is concerned with how to negotiate authenticity in an era of multiplicity. The heart of Schwartz's argument is that "the more adept the West has become at the making of copies, the more we have exalted uniqueness" (p. 212). In other words, the more we copy, simulate, and mimic, the more we desire the original experience or object which, in turn, has become increasingly difficult to locate. Schwartz offers the following solution to this problem:
We must reconstruct, not abandon, an ideal of authenticity in our lives. Whatever we come up with, authenticity can no longer be rooted in singularity, in what the Greeks called the idion, or private person...The impostors, "evil' twins, puppets, "apes," tricksters, fakes and plagiarists who appear in this book may be agents provocateurs to a more coherent, less derelict sense of ourselves. They may call us away from the despair of uniqueness towards more companionate lives (p. 17).
As a scholar, Schwartz favors enigma, fancy, and playfulness over rigorous logic, persuasion, and contribution to the literature. Focusing less on chronological development and change and more on thematic "similitude," Schwartz does not actually support his claim that "the culture of the copy" has become more pervasive, or that uniqueness has become increasingly "exalted" (p.17). Despite this analytic shortcoming, Schwartz succeeds in taking the reader on an unconventional historical adventure. (And it really is an adventure in that we rarely know where Schwartz will take us next.) The strengths of The Culture of the Copy are its poetic sensibility, its passion for recording human endeavors, and the sheer quantity of historical information that it offers. Editor of the relatively obscure Journal of Unconventional History, Schwartz is an independent scholar long fascinated with unconventional topics, including forms of dieting, the topic of his 1986 book Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat, or responses to a new millennia, as in Century's End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siecle from the 990s through the 1990s. Schwartz packs a staggering amount of information into The Culture of the Copy: the footnotes alone in this book are 150 pages long! Using diverse sources that "jumble the lowbrow, the highbrow, and the middling," Schwartz succeeds in showing us "that the culture of the copy is pervasive" (p. 17). Each chapter focuses on a particular theme related to "the culture of the copy," whether twins, self-portraits, animals that mimic, duplication methods, or historical reenactments. For each of these chapter topics, Schwartz compiles obscure historical facts (often related to medical discoveries and technological innovations); stories from world mythologies; and biographical details about relevant actors. The first chapter "Vanishing Twins," for instance, informs us of twentieth century biological hypotheses about twins --specifically, the recent medical conjecture that almost a quarter of those born as single children were originally twins in utero. This same chapter also covers Hindu, Greek, and Old Testament stories of twins; British and American researchers at the turn of the twentieth century who studied twins to determine the relationship between nature and nurture; and the use of twins in modern advertising. A later chapter, entitled "Ditto," similarly spans geographical and historical boundaries, describing Thomas Jefferson's use of a copying press; a history of copyright laws; and the emergence of copy art in the 1970s (including the work of Timm Ulrich who made 100 "(de)generations" of the title page of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.") What stands out even more than Schwartz's penchant for unconventional history is his preference for unconventional methodology and forms of analysis. Schwartz brings together information from many different time periods and cultures. Even with his warning early on that "the argument will be more often by similitude than chronological lockstep" (p. 17), his method of doing history can be disconcerting. Schwartz covers a lot of territory quickly --few topics in the book get more than four paragraphs of attention. Sacrificing depth for breadth, Schwartz is unable to clarify how "the culture of the copy" developed, or how a particular experience like authenticity changed meanings in the West, even though this seems to be one of his concerns. Moreover, Schwartz does not address the challenges that come with using such diverse cultural and historical sources. Is a Biblical story about twins a valid backdrop for understanding the use of twin sisters in modern hair care advertisements? What forms of analysis become necessary when using "similitude" as the basis of a scholarly argument? Schwartz offers very little discussion of his methodology, let alone analysis of any kind. Judging from the title and the book's slick appearance, I had expected Schwartz to engage at least somewhat with theories of reproduction, authenticity, the real, and the hyperreal --possibly weaving together the works of Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, and others. Yet, the book makes only rare mention of these theorists and is anything but a theoretical treatise. This is clearly a deliberate interpretive strategy: in the index next to Derrida, Schwartz playfully sneaks in "Nary an appearance in the text" (p. 543). Next to Baudrillard he writes, "Vanished from text" (p. 539). That Schwartz chooses not to engage with Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Haraway is not so much the problem as the fact that he offers extremely little analysis of any kind. I craved more discussion and use of theory to examine, for example, how the various historical anecdotes supported or contradicted other interpretations of simulation or "the copy." In one of his only moments of analysis in the book, Schwartz offers a brief but refreshing response to Benjamin's interpretation of reproduction:
Walter Benjamin 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...of works of art but the assurance of our own liveliness...Only in a culture of the copy do we assign such motive force to the Original. (p. 140-41)
Even though Schwartz falls short of actually supporting this analytic claim, it helps us to clarify his position and to locate his argument in some of the classic literature related to "the copy." Whereas Schwartz is brief in his historical analysis and theoretical discussions, he is verbose when it comes to biographical descriptions. He delights in minute and curious details, conveying his passion for history, especially unconventional history. Why else would we need to know that Bertillon, the Parisian police clerk who developed the practice of photographing criminals from the front as well as from left and right profiles, was a "rebellious but anemic child, beset by migraines" (p. 97) whose father pulled strings to get him his civil servant job? Or that Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, suffered from spinal arthritis, wrote free verse, and had a deep interest in auras, Zen Buddhism, and extra-sensory perception? Schwartz, perfectly aware of his methodological quirkiness, sheds some light on his predilection for such details: he wants to celebrate the "individual, who inheres in these pages as endangered 'original growth'" (p.378). We can only understand the "doing of history" (p. 378) by understanding the individuals who do it --that is, by having some sense of their physical, emotional, familial, and economic circumstances. Such microscopic and surprising details also capture the spirit of playfulness that motivated Schwartz to undertake this historical project:
Some may say that the twins, the Dopplegangers, the self-portraits, the Second Nature, the seeing double, the copying and the reenactments are the best evidence we have of the playfulness of human beings. I would agree, and strongly recommend the virtues of companionship, joyful imposture, irreverent ventriloquism, communionwith animals, hide-and-go-seek, the uninhibited spread of art and ideas, the doing of history. (p. 378)
Microscopic biographical details, in addition to Schwartz's lyrical writing style, make The Culture of the Copy a playful and passionate a book, bringing to the forefront the poetry and humor that can exist in scholarly research about human lives. Still, Schwartz's unconventional methodology raises questions about the aims of cultural and historical scholarship. In Schwartz's words, The Culture of the Copy is more "historical mirror" (p. 378) than interpretive project. Does he believe that historical anecdotes, more than analysis and theoretical discussion, can teach us about ourselves? My own preference is for scholarship that combines empirical research with theoretical discussion. As it stands, The Culture of the Copy is fodder for anyone concerned with authenticity in an era of multiplicity. Rather than being an exhaustive response to the topic, the book inspires interest and further analysis. Sociologists, cultural historians, and artists can still untangle how the culture of the copy developed, what constitutes resistance of "the copy," and how recurrent experiences of duplication, simulation, and mimicry affect people psychologically, sociologically, and politically. The Culture of the Copy would be a grounded contribution to graduate and undergraduate sociological theory courses --especially the odd seminar on "The Hyperreal" or "Simulacra." Insofar as much of the sociological work done on these themes has been theoretical and extremely abstract, Schwartz's book, perhaps too much at fault in the opposite direction, could inspire work that balances the empirical with the theoretical. Karen N. Werner is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at Brandeis University.