CopyCat Park

This section is about a major area in the landscape of the human imagination, and how the logic of that area is twisted by humour, thus revealing its contour lines and general topography... But first a personal note.

I well remember when I first started to see a pattern in the large number of cartoons placed on my floor. It was an exciting moment, even though in retrospect, I started off by making a bad mistake. But perhaps I should first explain why I chose to look at cartoons rather than the more normal form of verbal jokes.

Firstly, cartoons, especially when no captions are present, are - apart from slapstick - the most international form taken by the joke. And as we want to cover the many, rather than the few, it makes sense to focus on this wider visual dimension if at all possible.

Secondly, it is just so much easier to recognise cartoons, one from the other, when sifting through a large amount of joke material, because they all have a quickly recognisable face, quite unlike the anonymity of multiple portions of text...

Thirdly, I was very conscious of the importance of finding an area of relative simplicity to focus on. Not least because I had recently been teaching a very bright spanish philosophy graduate about scientific method - she knew Mendel's notebooks backwards - and she had reminded me of Mendel's 'lucky choice'. 'Lucky' because Mendel had looked at just those 7 characteristics of pea plants that inherit in a simple way, thus avoiding, complex systems like multiple alleles and polygenes which would have made his first forays into genetics impossible. And as cartoons favour the visible physical world, which is simpler than much of the rest of human meaning, I might have a better chance of breaking into humour that way.

And luckily for me, several possible areas did indeed seem to be emerging from the chaos of cartoons strewn across my floor. It was a slow business as many of the paths led to dead ends. But gradually I became familiar with an area of this 'landscape of meaning' as I liked to think of it. Two areas in fact. One being, as it were, a valley (of shadows and reflections), and the other a plateau (of two and three dimensional copies and doubles).  Both becoming visible because of the way in which the jokes twist the contours of the local meaning in these two areas, revealing the underlying topography in the process.

What emerged before my eyes was a place I had never even dreamed of, even though I knew all of its intricate details as intimately as the inside of my own home. Indeed it was the sheer reality and extent of this area of meaning that made me realise that the landscape of meaning was so much more than just the shadowy image I had dreamt up in a seminar in Oxford. It was almost as if the clouds of complexity that mist and fog our everyday life, and which totally obscure the bigger picture, had lifted for a moment, to reveal a landscape below, full of colour and forms that I had never guessed at. A place that I could now begin to map. As if I was about to venture inside my own head, where the jester guide would show me how all the stuff I knew but didn’t actually understand could fit together in a yet greater pattern of meaning. A pattern which would show just how feasible, fascinating and inevitable a science of meaning really is in our immediate future.

It is to one of these two areas of this landscape of meaning that we now turn.

Mapping the Park

If We Can Map The Twists That Play With Copies, Can We Map Copy Natural History Itself?

 

 

Now, at last, we know something about the range of twists that exploit copy natural history. But what do we know about copy natural history itself? What do we know about the variety of copies that we find in a copy-rich culture like our own? I mean, is there a fundamental pattern to this variety (just as there is to the variety of twists that attack them)? The answer is, there must be. There must be because the natural history of suns, butterflies, trees and rock types owe their nature to an underlying pattern (involving such matters as the Big Bang, Evolution, Ecology, the Periodic Table, and Plate Tectonics), and why should the natural history of copies be different?

 

So what approach might we take? Well, here are some copies. Lots of them. And to begin with, a pattern seems to emerge from the colloquial categories we already have in our language, and in the everyday organisation we use in our daily lives. I refer in this case to such categories as: ART, BATTLE, BODY, BUSINESS, DECORATION, FAKES, GEOGRAPHY, ICONIC FIGURES, LURES, SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY, SYMBOLS, THEATRE, TOYS AND GAMES. So we will begin our survey using those colloquial categories, and see where it gets us.

 

For example, here are some contributions from the world of ART:

 

        

 

 

And here are some from the world of the military to do with BATTLE:

 

 

  

               

 

 

Here are some from the copy rich domain of the human BODY:

 

 

            

 

 

 

Whilst some copies come from the domain of BUSINESS, ranging from publicity models to reproduction furniture:

 

 

    

 

 

The world of DECORATION is full of copies of all kinds:

 

 

      

    

 

 

 

Whilst there is money to be made in the domain of FAKES and FORGERIES:

 

 

          

 

 

 

Then there are the three and two dimensional copies that abound in GEOGRAPHY:

 

 

        

 

 

 

We also have the two and three dimensional copies of ICONIC FIGURES (representing real life, fictional, legendary and mythical figures).

 

 

 

          

 

 

Some copies are made to fool, not so much us, but the animals around us. But note that we also can become the victims of such copies. The world of LURES, DECOYS AND SCARES

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

Copy technology is an important part of our efforts in TEACHING and TECHNOLOGY:

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

A domain that normally relies on just two dimensions is also familiar as a source of copy  - SYMBOLS and SIGNS:

 

    

 

  

 

 

The world of the stage includes many props, puppets and costumes - THEATRE:

 

 

     

 

 

 

Finally, we have the whole vast domain of TOYS and GAMES:

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

Well, that’s quite a variety already! True, it is only a sample collection, and there are many more copies out there of course, but it does represent the range of copy natural history quite successfully, and for that, we must thank the everyday colloquial categories that we use in our language and social organisation.

 

And once we do see a range of copies collected in one place like this, we begin to truly appreciate both their importance and ubiquity. In addition, it also becomes clear that mapping such a wealth of form is going to be very challenging. Not least because the range of human purpose that created them in the first place is itself so very wide.

 

Why not be content with categories like ‘Art’, ‘Toys’, ‘Decoration’ and ‘Teaching’ though? After all, they must be based on fairly solid ground as we use them all the time? Well, a minutes consideration shows why they may be a problem. For example, does a Voodoo doll, intended to serve as a tool of magic, really belong with a statue of a Messiah? Both are loosely connected through religious belief certainly, but they serve such different purposes… And a globe of our planet belongs with both the study of Geography, and Teaching. Whilst a toupee or a false set of eyelashes surely fits both Body and Decoration, and could be surely be considered a lure and fake as well?

 

Indeed, there are many examples which fit more than one of these categories, which means that really these groupings are just a holding bay whilst we look for some more insight into their real nature. Now this does not mean that some of the categories are not useful exactly. Just that although some may be kept, some have to be discarded. And once we have devised a set of categories that defeat ambiguity and multiple membership, we must set up an overall picture of human purpose within which these groupings have their unity and sense.

 

It is at this level of insight that we finally see the true scale of the problem provoked by copy natural history. It is one thing to map out the copy relationship, and the twists and even the legits that play around with it, but quite quite another to create the map within which this small mapping of copy humour belongs. So when we talk about where the Copy belongs in the greater scheme of things, we really do mean the whole picture - the whole human condition. And categories like Toys and Art must immediately lead us into a consideration of the major dimensions of human value and purpose. Or to put it another way, if we can map copy variety properly, then we have created a real and substantial science of meaning, on a level with the physical and biological sciences.

 

We come back to this overall challenge later in the website, when we consider what the DNA of meaning might be. But for the moment, this section has served the dual purpose of dramatising both copy variety, and the question it leads to, so this makes a good place to move on to another relationship played with by humour. The Original/Image relationship, to be precise.