The Haunting of the Digital Copy. Towards An Economical Correctness
Mercedes Bunz
The digital copy is irritating our economical system — even more: it irritates the form of authorship as a model of ownership and therefore our cultural and juridical system. The act of copying, of burning and consuming material via digital equipment has a strong critical potential that can be introduced as a utopian machine, a machine that unfolds an imbalance in our economy. The following text is an appropriation of Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), wherein one of his gestures is copied. Benjamin tried to import a utopian moment into the technique of film. Now a utopian moment will be imported into the technique of the digital copy.
In the history of reproduction digital copies play an extraordinary role. Compared to the mechanical copy, the digital one not only lies a level higher on the stairwell to the perfect copy, it also changes and transforms the copy such that it deletes its own conception. A digital copy is incorporated into a mathematical chain of discreet signs, making the process of reproduction as exact as it is simple. The digital copy becomes an identical copy. Whereas Walter Benjamin still reported in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “the whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical reproducability”[1], authenticity now lies within the possibilities of digital multiplying. Identical copies do not need the certification of an author, as their exact repetition certificates the authenticity. Hence, the central need of an author in the order of the analogue world, who identifies the original and authenticates the copy, is absent in the digital world. Authenticity does not defy its technical reproduction, as it does in mechanical reproduction. The mechanical copy as a replica has always been substantiated by an original. Its modern form was serial production, which may have emphasized its sequential nature, but nevertheless bore a relation to a prototype, a “first form” as its origin. In the case of the identical copy, however, the quality of the difference between original and copy or series has been realigned. The difference between the original and the copy, the relationship towards a prefiguration, is haunted by the digital, by the strange format inherent in an identical copy.
The Irritating Potential
To understand this potential for irritation intrinsic to the identical copy, it is important to be aware of the fact that the digital copy fails to make a clear distinction between the original and its reproduction. At the same time, however, it does not simply deny it. Complicated yet important to understand is that the mathematical back-up of the chain which leads to the production of two identical copies does not annihilate the moment of difference. Gilles Deleuze would have loved that one: The difference continues to exist, as there are still two copies in the process of digital reproduction, the only difference being that these two copies are not distinct. They are not distinct quite simply because they do not refer to a primordial identity that is used by the copy as an origin. The new quality of the difference is brought about via repetition, via an iteration of identical files. The difference does not need a “first” anymore.
This small shift provides immense effects. Authorship is a form of ownership. Something can only be property if it is bound to a name, whether this is the name of a real person or a juridical person. In a certain way, the name plays the role of the first, the origin of the original. The original is owned by the author, because the author is its origin. Someone owns something. With the digital the meaning of this sentence changes, because the something mutates. We are all aware of the examples: sharing is limited in the material world. If someone owns something, this something is in use – it is unique and in its uniqueness can be eaten, consumed, outworn, or maybe even made obsolete. With the digital, this “something” behaves differently. If you give the digital-something away, it still remains where it was, because all that happens is that it gets copied, multiplied. With the digital copy, copying in itself turns into a form of transport, it mutates into a new form of logistics. Normally, we define transport by movement from point A to point B. The outcome of this move is that something is in B, while A is empty. The digital copy, on the other hand, introduces a new topology of space, because nothing is moved anymore in the sense of leaving anywhere. Transport and iteration are therefore indistinguishable from one another: with digital copies, files are transferred from A to B without ever leaving their original place. They are at the same time in A and in B as identical copies. Sharing is therefore unlimited – or at least only a question of bandwidth. Compared to the analogue – material world, the structure of the digital is determined by its potential for multiplicity, for dissemination. It is precisely this form of potentiality that confuses our cultural protocol.
The potential for multiplicity, the potential for dissemination, is by no means new. Writing, for example, is a so-called “early example” of what is going on in the digital. As Jacques Derrida showed, the peculiar relation between an author and his writing determines one part of the potentiality for the dissemination of writing. The relationship between the author and his/her work is unstable by principle, and must be unstable in order to fulfil the function of writing. To quote Derrida: “One writes in order to communicate something to those who are absent.”[2] Therefore, “a writing that is not structurally readable – iterable – beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.”[3] In other words, it is the absence of the addressee that determines writing and this absence is only made possible by the iterability inherent in the written sign:
Repetition, or iterability, characterizes writing as much as it characterizes digital code. It is conspicuous that the written sign and the digital code should share these aspects. However, while writing may have been tamed technically due to its material attachment, in the digital the act of multiplying eludes control. It eludes control, because the organization of multiplying is in itself multiplied. This is exactly the point where the new potential of the digital copy is introduced. This dimension of a logistics of iteration makes writing’s traditional forms of dissemination obsolete. It is where the digital copy reaches beyond the existing potential of writing and hauntingly irritates the matrix of our cultural formation.
Filesharing: The Logistics of Repetition
The actual logistics of iteration are the logistics of filesharing. With the digital copy there are two originals and thus two new platforms as locations for further distribution. Filesharing uses this principle as a programmed logistics of iteration. If in his early work Marx defines “capital” as an inequitable form of property or as the accumulation of collective work which now belongs to a single person instead of belonging to all, then filesharing, as a programmed logistics of iteration of data, can be a technological answer to that problem. Dissemination of the digital copy irritates the process of accumulation indeed. Or does the digital copy only shift the process of accumulation to another level?
In fact, filesharing as the programmed logistics of the iteration of data neither suspends accumulation nor the alignment towards a centre in control of the accumulation. First of all, filesharing is nothing else than an organizational form for disseminating digital data, a type of program that ties together the search engine with the copying and transport mechanisms. Its function is to iterate data. But that does not necessarily mean that the program itself operates under the order of repetition, because the execution of an identical double does not force the program to act in the sense of the same dictum. On the contrary, we can observe that the two differential orders – the order of representation and the order of repetition – cut through the middle of filesharing programs and divide their functional logic at the moment when the logistic of iteration itself is centrally organized along befriended technical and legal issues.
A prominent example of this centrally organised logistics of iteration was the filesharing program Napster, which was shut down after a huge career. While the act of copying was performed on a peer-to-peer basis among the users themselves, Napster coordinated the filesharing operations via a central server. The technological and legal issues of filesharing could therefore be fully controlled. Napster anchored the order of repetition – the iteration of identical data, filesharing – in the order of representation.
As opposed to Napster, the filesharing programs working without a central server did survive the attack of the music industry thanks to their technical organization of distribution. If sharing files can do without a central server, and is operated on a peer-to-peer basis – directly among the users themselves – then technical filesharing enters the order of repetition. And exactly this brings in a new and irritating potential.
The identical copy that has entered the order of repetition and proceeds within the logistics of doubling, irritates the established order by suspending it. That’s all. It is not an alternative, it is an irritation – a haunting. “The future can only be for ghosts”[5], writes Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994), but the spirits that were cited are obviously more difficult to control than assumed. There seems to be a certain resistance within the Internet, within the digital copy. The digital haunts the logic of our economy.
Towards an Economical Correctness
To shift this haunting finally to cultural production: The traditional model defines authorship as a form of expression, characterizes a work first and foremost as the product of an artist and thinks of an artist as a producer, while in the order of repetition the artist is seen as a consumer as well. Producing here is not merely a form of expression, but a form of consuming other works, other material, formats, traditions, habits. The relations within different products are of the same importance as the relation between the producer and its work. One could say that the aesthetics of the copy are about, as Richard Barbroock from the London Hypermedia Research Centre puts it: “Not just the right to consume media, but also the right to produce media.”[6]
On the first sight, there seems to be a certain democratic notion in the law of copyright, because nowadays even the American copyright is immediately valid for everything that is produced. You don’t have to claim copyright or spend some fees, like you have to do with patents. However, this democratic moment of copyright fades, when looking at the reality: digital copying as form of creative production is only for those people, who can afford to pay the lawyers to clear the licenses. Everybody else may only work with stuff that is about 70 years old.
In Germany, a producer can do a little more: popular samples can at least unofficially be used as long as the record label does not sell more than 1000 records. If the track becomes a hit, there will be a claim for copyright, which will force the producer to burn its stock. This means: It is all right to be creative in one’s small niche. Culture is for everyone, but don’t start to make money with your culture. So the question is: Whom does the copyright connect to the flows of the economy, who is excluded, because of a financial impotency to clear the rights? There are already certain movements that try to make things better. One is the movement Creative Commons[7], which is directed, among others, by law professor Lawrence Lessig. Creative Commons developed a new way to deal with copyright, as working with knowledge and intellectual property becomes more and more important in a digital world and is shifted to the central form of production. It is therefore no longer enough to signalise what one is not allowed to do, but also what one might do: Taking back the politics of distribution in one’s own hand. To this aim, Creative Commons developed different licenses, which allow other people to use a certain work according to the conditions of the author. One can choose a license depending on the intended distribution of the work. Copying by other people can be allowed, for example, but with the restriction for non-commercial purposes only and with the obligation to name the credits of the author. There are other licenses that allow downloading, filesharing, copying, and webcasting music with the restriction not to sell or make any other commercial use. Another license gives permission to sampling and invites other users to transform the work, but does not allow distribution of the same work as a simple copy of the whole.
With these licenses, Creative Commons takes one step towards economical correctness, because the licenses clear the rights and help to avoid the intermediaries. They thereby actively perform the politics of distribution, which is important. Nowadays it is necessary to complete a movement like political correctness with something that could be called “economical correctness”. An economical correctness that completes the question of identity politics with one for today’s politics of distribution.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Illuminations – Essays and Reflections, New York, Schocken Books Inc. 1969, S. 220
[2] Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1997, p. 5
[3] Ibid., p. 7
[4] Ibid., p. 8
[5] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1994
[6] Richard Barbroock, Giving is Receiving. In: Digital Creativity, 2003, Vol.14, No.2, p. 94
[7] http://creativecommons.org
