More and more of the conversations I have end up being about copies. The point is that copies — the ease of making copies; the value invested in each copy — basically are culture; and cultural eras are demarcated above all by their relationship to the proliferation of copies.
Recently, I was at the Cloisters. The thought there was every single object is worried over, turned into a palimpsest of multiple layers of meaning. The art seems to express many different scenes at once — not, as I’d thought when I was first learning about medieval art in school, because people of this era were naive or were incapable of a unified field of vision — but simply because material objects were so precious that they had to be overlaid, had to have multiple functions. In this condition of scarcity, tremendous emphasis is placed on selection. If there is only so much room on a piece of parchment or canvas to work with, there is an inbuilt tendency for the scene selected to be important — a depiction of a religious or royal theme; while the artisan conducting such precious work is expected to be a highly-skilled and reliable craftsman. But, meanwhile, in the margins of the work, there’s room for surprising freedom and creativity — medieval monks elaborately doodling or carrying out elaborate practical jokes. It’s assumed that this marginalia won’t be painstakingly copied over, and so these doodles, love notes between monks, bits of sophomoric humor serve as the true record of daily life of an era that’s otherwise marked by a sense of high seriousness.
With the printing press, and then later with the radio and the camera, we move into a completely different relationship to copies. All importance is placed on the original manuscript, recording, or image, but all power resides in the capacity to proliferate copies. A book’s success is defined by the size of its ‘run’ — number of copies sold, which corresponds also to the number of copies printed. With radio and television, a new simultaneity appears within the process of proliferating copies. A single event is taking place — a DJ speaking in a sound studio, a scene occurring on a movie set — but through the power of distributed networks that event is simultaneously broadcast to homes around the country or the world. The reach of the number of copies is what’s impressive about the event, but the emphasis is on curation, on selecting some experience that’s worthy of being replicated so many times. In writing, writers endlessly work and rework a single article or book until it makes ‘good copy’ — i.e. until it’s worthy of being sent off to the print shop and replicated ad infinitum. In broadcast media, studios hold tight control over the distribution networks. Status and power in the society are largely perceived as being a person worthy of having some fragment of their lives recorded and then having that recording radiate outwards. Meanwhile, even though the process of copying is of prime importance, the copyists themselves have no authority to alter or doodle in the margins the way that they might have in the era of the illuminated manuscript (and the essentials of the copying work are, as a rule, done by machines).
With the proliferation of distribution networks in cable television, satellite radio, etc, some of that solemnity starts to erode. It becomes a bit of a joke that any ordinary person can have their life recorded and broadcast for a moment — this is the society of Guy Debord and Andy Warhol and reality TV, the moment when the making-of-copies loses some of its magic, and the society is collectively amused that a person who can’t sing is on a TV show celebrating singing talent or a bunch of spoiled urbanites are on a show dedicated to wilderness survival.
In retrospect, the era of basic cable, satellite TV, reality shows was part of the transition to what Martin Gurri calls ‘the fifth wave’ of the transmission of information. This culminated of course in the ubiquity of the internet. With the internet, copies take on a very different form than they do in the era of radio or television or the printing press. There is less of a quality of simultaneity and less of a sense of the proliferation of copies. The material lives at a stable home — a ‘page’ — but may be viewed infinitely many times from infinitely many locations. Meanwhile, material on the web presents itself with a very different character. It’s not particularly solemn and likes to give the impression that it hasn’t gone through the same process of painstaking curation. Material on the web can be amended almost immediately — and often without particular consequence — and admits of the possibility of two-way flows, of those receiving the material commenting on it or altering it themselves.
In terms of thinking about copies, with the web we find ourselves in a completely different dispensation from anything that has occurred before. There are all kinds of retro attempts to regain an emphasis on material culture — and with it the age-old practices of craftsmanship and selection — but it’s understood that that simply is not the direction our era is headed in. And meanwhile — although we’re slower to recognize it — the practice of curation becomes rapidly outmoded. Writers endlessly perfecting their manuscript, actors dedicating themselves to landing their role — all of it envisions a system in which there is an onerous process of selecting what’s worthy to be copied and then virtually infinite copies are made of what passes that threshold. None of that is in keeping with the direction that technology is moving in and with the resulting implications for copy-making. As we come to grips with what the internet offers, and with how to create for it (which, actually, has been a slow-moving process), those seem like the parameters to keep in mind. The mode of transmission of the internet places inherent value on flexibility and (to a more fraught degree) on interactivity.
These may be obvious points for people reading this piece. Journalism has, for instance, almost completely made itself over for the internet — a ‘newspaper’ now is a page refreshing rather than a distinct object copied at regular intervals. But, for me, it’s been helpful to think in these terms as I try to orient myself to the new reality — decide, for instance, to post fiction on Substack rather than hoarding it with the idea that it will be all be published by a legacy outlet in some distant day. And, in doing that, I’ve noticed that the fiction writers and filmmakers I know have been slower to take in the new landscape of information transmission. In the case of writing, there’s still a bit of a fetish around the material object of a book, but more important in people’s minds is the drama of ‘publication’ or of ‘distribution’ — the moment when a ceaselessly perfected work, having won the approval of the right people, is copied and distributed over some vast network. That’s still a great game in our culture, but it strikes me as not being the most promising route to being a creative person in our era. The more promising route involves working with the available technology, treating one’s expression as a ‘creative home’ accepting of however many visitors — and having the flexibility to ‘refresh’ or ‘update’ continually, to treat creativity as an ever-evolving, ever-unfolding process.
Sam Kahn writes
Encouraging post, Sam--as I keep trying literary magazines and have hesitated to post my fiction and memoir and creative non-fiction essays here.
Fine writer and reader of Substack—we are starting a movement to get a poetry section added to the platform. Can I ask, are you with us?
https://substack.com/profile/10309929-david/note/c-15579327
If so, please consider clicking the above link and liking the Notes post—leave a comment or even share within your own community. Poetry lives on in the minds of hearts of writers, it breathes on the page.
Your voice can be heard among the starry illuminations, howling at the moon.
Thank you for your time and support.
Love and appreciation,
David