The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying

Darren Hudson Hick, Reinold Schmücker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474254526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying responds to the rapidly changing attitudes towards the use of another's ideas, styles, and artworks. With advances in technology making the copying of artworks and other artefacts exponentially easier, questions of copying no longer focus on the problems of forgery: they now expand into aesthetic and ethical legal concerns. This volume addresses the changes and provides the first philosophical foundation for an aesthetics and ethics of copying. Scholars from philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, philosophy of law, ethics, legal theory, media studies, art history, literary theory, and sociology discuss the role that copying plays in human culture, confronting the question of how-and why-copying fits into our broader system of values. Teasing out the factors and conceptual distinctions that must be accounted for in an ontology of copying, they set a groundwork for understanding the nature of copies and copying, showing how these interweave with ethical and legal concepts. Covering unique concerns for copying in the domain of artworks, from music and art to plays and literature, contributors look at work by artists including Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Rauschenberg, Courbet and Manet and conclude with the normative dimensions of copying in the twenty-first century. By bringing this topic into the philosophical domain and highlighting its philosophical relevance, The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying establishes the complex conditions-ontological, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and legal-that underlie and complicate the topic. The result is a timely collection that establishes the need for further discussion.

Part One

The Copying Animal: Exploring the Cultural Value of Copying

1

Copying and the Limits of Substitutability

Dieter Birnbacher

1. Introduction: An unusual case of copying

Perfect copies, the analogue of Nelson Goodman’s “perfect fakes” (Goodman 1976: 99) have their own fascination, not only in philosophy, but also in literature and popular imagination. One of the most fascinating literary examples of copying is the story of Amphitryon, retold by a long series of playwrights in dramatic form, among them Plautus and Molière, of which the play by Heinrich von Kleist is acknowledged to be the deepest and psychologically most complex development. As with many works of Kleist, the core of the play is a tragic irritation, a disconcerting dialectic that shatters the coordinate system of our habitual ways of thinking. In Amphitryon the object of irritation is the impossibility of distinguishing between original and copy and the breakdown of the usual criteria of identification. Alcmene is caught in the contradiction between the strict identity requirements inherent in her love for her husband Amphitryon and his apparent reduplication. On the one hand, Alcmene is adamant in maintaining that she loves only one of the copies, the authentic Amphitryon. On the other hand, she is unable to tell which of the two Amphitryons is the authentic one and goes so far as to identify the false Amphitryon as the real one in the presence of the real one. The following is the climax of the scene in which this happens:

First commander: Speak!

Second commander: Talk to us!

Third commander: Tell us!

Second commander: Lady, one word!—

First commander: We are lost if she goes on saying nothing.

Jupiter: Give truth your voice, dear.

Alcmene: This one here is Amphitryon, dear friends.

Amphitryon: That man over there is Amphitryon! Almighty Gods!

Act 1, Scene 2

The fact that Alcmene mistakes the false Amphitryon for the real one is what manifestly happens on stage. What looks, at first sight, as a purely farcical gag, has, however, a deeper meaning. It can be interpreted as the expression of an unconscious feeling that, in some way, her love is not as strictly individual as she thinks and that, given that the false Amphitryon is a perfect copy of the true Amphitryon, identity, to use Parfit’s phrase, does not, after all, matter. Another interpretation is that Alcmene is so much impressed by Jupiter’s passion for her that she instinctively attributes this quality to her beloved husband, i.e. by dissonance reduction, the tendency to bring valuations and perceptions into harmony, even at the cost of illusion.

One of the comical turns of Kleist’s play is that the dialectic within Alcmene’s heart is mirrored by an analogous dialectic in the heart of Jupiter, who is by no means satisfied with his role of a perfect copy. This god may be sufficiently perfect to act as a perfect copy of Amphitryon, but he is not perfect enough to leave it at that and to keep his vanity at rest. His ambition is to be a more than perfect copy. He insists on individuality and irreplaceability no less than Alcmene. He prides himself that though indistinguishable from Amphitryon in order not to betray himself, he is slightly more perfect in surpassing Alcmene’s legitimate husband in passionate love-making. He attempts the impossible, to be numerically identical with Amphitryon and to be qualitatively different from him at the same time. He urges Alcmene to promise that she will never lose the vivid memory of the “day with a god” in her future marriage and of its exceptional pleasures, incomparably superior to those of her marital love life.

2. What is it for a person to be a “copy”?

Under what a conditions can a person legitimately be imagined to be a “copy” of another person in the first place? There are a number of conditions that a personal copy shares with other, non-personal, copies.

One condition is that there is an O (the original) with which C (the copy, which is numerically distinct from O) shares a broad range of qualitative features. Which of these qualitative features have to be identical depends largely on context. Jupiter obviously intends to copy Amphitryon to the extent that Alcmene is unable to notice any relevant difference. In the case of Amphitryon, this condition should be more perfectly fulfilled than in non-mythical cases. After all, Jupiter is a god, even the supreme god. But in fact, the copy is far from perfect. Jupiter’s all-too-human arrogance makes him enact a less than perfect copy by striving to be more perfect than the original.

A second condition is that C is the result of an intentional replication of O. A qualitatively identical replica would not be a copy unless intentionally produced as a copy. As Wollheim mentions in the context of his discussion of the identity criteria for works of art, there might be what prima facie might be called an involuntary copy: a naïve poet of the nineteenth century might have written a short poem that proves later to be identical with a poem of the sixteenth century. In this case, the later poem could not be called a copy of the older one. Nor would it be the same poem as the older one (Wollheim 1980: 170). This kind of case must be distinguished from “involuntary copies” where the author has prior experience of the original. Thus, the only piece of music I ever composed (in early youth) soon proved to be an exact replica of a part of a composition of Bartók that I had heard but forgotten about. Something similar often takes the form of involuntary plagiarism by what in psychology is known as kryptomnesia: an author writes a text that is identical with the text of an author of a book he has read before but which he does not remember. Though this may not necessarily hold in legal cases, it seems counterintuitive to say that, in cases such as these, the author copied the older text. Copying seems to presuppose awareness that one is copying.

In the case of Amphitryon, there are, however, some features that distinguish it from other, more normal kinds of copying and which seem inseparable from the fact that the copy is imagined to be a person rather than a material object. The most important is, no doubt, that a personal copy, however perfect a copy it may be as seen from the outside, has, in addition, an inner life which may be completely different from that of the original, both in its phenomenal and in its intentional dimension. In particular, a person, in contrast to a material object, is able to make assertions about its own authenticity. In the case of Jupiter, Jupiter-alias-Amphitryon is a fake. But whereas fakes are normally declared to be authentic by some other person (e.g. its author or its devotees), Jupiter himself declares himself to be the authentic Amphitryon.

Claims of this kind are common enough, but they do not normally go together with perfect qualitative identity. Even world views, religious or philosophical, that assume that a person has more than one life, in virtue of metempsychosis or resurrection for example, do not generally assume that the re-embodied person is qualitatively identical with the former person in all respects. It is true that we sometimes say of a non-personal fake or of a piece of plagiarism that it makes a false claim to authenticity, but this is only a metaphorical way of speaking. A material copy does not literally say anything, even if we are strongly tempted to speak in this way if, for example, a piece of plagiarism betrays itself so blatantly as a BA thesis in my faculty did some years ago, by omitting to erase from the title page the name of the university to which the original had been submitted.

Is a “perfect” personal copy imaginable that exemplifies all qualitative features of the original including its inner states and mental acts? The answer obviously depends on how the term “qualitative” is interpreted, and especially if “qualitative” is taken to refer only to observable or also to unobservable properties, and whether it is taken only to manifest or also to dispositional properties. In an idealized world of “series persons”—a science fiction world in which a great number of persons are indistinguishable from each other in bodily aspects—a person C may behave exactly like another person O, so that it is behaviorally indistinguishable from C, without however having the same thoughts and feelings. Obviously, this would not suffice for being qualitatively indistinguishable. Comprehensive qualitative identity, as required by a “perfect copy,” has to include unobservable properties along with observable ones. Take, for example, the case of an original of a painting and a copy that differ only in the fact that under the observable surface of the original there are hidden layers of color that have become invisible but which have to be assumed in order to explain certain phenomena revealed by X-ray analysis (cf. Wollheim 1980: 174). Even if C reproduces only the observable surface of the painting it might be termed a copy. It cannot, however, be termed a perfect or qualitatively identical copy. Qualitative identity requires that O and C have the same qualitative properties irrespective of whether these are observable or detectable or epistemically accessible in any other way.

The same holds for dispositional properties such as tendencies, liabilities, and potentials. An object can count as a perfect copy of another object only if it shares with it not only its manifest but also its dispositional properties. Also in this respect, Jupiter, being immortal rather than mortal, cannot be a perfect copy of Amphitryon. A subclass of dispositional properties, relevant for authenticity questions in art, are those that refer to properties that are unobservable now but will become observable in the future due to scientific and technical progress, thereby opening up new avenues to tests of authenticity. Because of the openness of the future in this respect and the impossibility of exhaustive verification, it seems hardly possible to assert of any copy that it is perfect with perfect certainty. The same holds, a fortiori, for any personal copy. Any person that claims to be a perfect copy of another person might reveal itself as a less than perfect copy by the detection of a piece of memory that it does not (or could not) share with the original. But a perfect personal copy is not thereby a matter of impossibility. There do not seem to be any logical limits to the idea of a personal perfect copy. A personal perfect copy must, of course, be thought to think that it is the original, in spite of the fact that this thought is necessarily false. This, however, does not imply that the copy can share all descriptive properties with the original. Qualitative features represent only a small subclass of descriptive properties. Though qualitatively identical, A and B may differ in their relational properties, and that is how O and C usually differ, over and above the relation of identity in which they differ necessarily.

Even if Jupiter is far from being a perfect copy of Amphitryon, a perfect doppelgänger of Amphitryon does not seem beyond imagination. One condition is that his inner life, including his apparent memories, is identical with that of the original and that he shares all of the original’s dispositions. There would be logical limits to the identity of their thoughts only as far as relations enter their content. If C and O meet, C perceives O and vice versa, so that the content of their perceptions of each other differ, just as the direction of their perceptions of each other differ.

3. Identity and value

Why do singularity and authenticity make such a difference to emotional attitudes such as love? In the case of Amphitryon, Alcmene holds fast to her expressed conviction that there is a world of axiological difference between the true and the false Amphitryon, or between the original and the copy. For her, her love is strictly dependent on the singularity of its object. From the perspective of her love, this object is strictly non-substitutable: all possible value belongs to the original, none to the copy. In point of value, original and copy are at the extreme ends of the spectrum. And this would be so, it seems, even in the case that Jupiter were a truly perfect copy of her husband.

Does Alcmene have a point? What kind of value is present in the original that is not to be found in the perfect copy? And if there is such a value, why should it make so much of a difference to the overall value of the object?

Prima facie there seem to be reasons to doubt whether there can be values that differentiate between O and C. One is that axiological value generally resides in properties and not in individuals. Whenever an individual is valuable, it is, as a rule, valuable qua being the bearer of certain general properties. It is characteristic of general properties that they are indifferent to the identity of the individuals that have them. It is not the individuality or singularity of the individual as such, its haecceitas, in which value resides, but the specific constellation of values to be found in it. Even if this individual is the only one to exhibit this specific constellation of values, there might in principle be others that exhibit the same constellation.

Another way to express the same is by means of the concept of supervenience. Value properties are generally supervenient on certain descriptive properties. If an individual entity is valuable, this is in virtue of some descriptive property the individual possesses. It follows that if two individuals are descriptively indistinguishable and among their properties is at least one on which a value property supervenes, then the two indistinguishable individuals should have the same kind and the same degree of value.

It follows that if O and C differ in value, this difference must depend on corresponding differences in descriptive properties. These descriptive properties must be general properties, i.e. they must not be strictly bound to the individuals that possess them. If an individual A has it, it must be logically possible that another individual B has it, instead of A or in addition to A.

There are, t...

Table of contents

• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 The Copying Animal: Exploring the Cultural Value of Copying
• 1 Copying and the Limits of Substitutability Dieter Birnbacher
• 2 Deep Copy Culture Mark Alfino
• 3 Imitation and Replication of Technologies: The Prospects for an Evolutionary Ethics of Copying Wybo Houkes
• Part 2 What Is a Copy? Conceptual Perspectives
• 4 What Is the Object in Which Copyright Can Subsist? An Ontological Analysis Maria Elisabeth Reicher
• 5 What Is an Artifact Copy? A Quadrinomial Definition Amrei Bahr
• 6 Are Counterfeits Copies? Massimiliano Carrara
• 7 The Nature of Copying and the Singular Literary Work Darren Hudson Hick
• Part 3 The Copying Artist: Aesthetic and Ethical Challenges
• 8 Illegitimate Legitimate Copies: A Grey Area in Dealing with Literary Works Annette Gilbert
• 9 Appropriating Fictional Characters James O. Young
• 10 Plagiarizing Nonfiction: Legal Cases, Aesthetic Questions, and the Rules of Copying David Oels
• 11 Appropriation and Derogation: When Is it Wrong to Appropriate? Lisa Jones
• 12 The Paradox of Style as a Concept of Art Jan Bäcklund
• 13 Blurred Lines: A Case Study on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Copying Eberhard Ortland
• Part 4 Freedom for All? Towards an Ethics of Copying for the Digital Age
• 14 The Ethics of Copyright and droit d’auteur—An Outline Thomas Dreier
• 15 Self-Copying and Copyright Lionel Bently
• 16 Ethical Approaches for Copying Digital Artifacts: What Would the Exemplary Person [junzi]/a Good Person [phronimos] Say? Charles Melvin Ess
• 17 Ethics, Evolved: An International Perspective on Copying in the Networked Age Aram Sinnreich
• 18 Online Piracy and the Transformation of the Audiences’ Practices: The Case of the Czech Republic Jakub Macek and Pavel Zahrádka
• 19 Normative Resources and Domain-Specific Principles: Heading for an Ethics of Copying Reinold Schmücker
• Coda
• 20 In Defense of Disco Edits Hans Nieswandt
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright