The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

The Copy Generic

The Copy Generic

How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

Scott MacLochlainn

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82275-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82277-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82276-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822761.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: MacLochlainn, Scott, author.

Title: The copy generic : how the nonspecific makes our social worlds / Scott MacLochlainn.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022018126 | ISBN 9780226822754 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822778 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226822761 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Generic, The (Philosophy) | Generic, The (Philosophy)—Social aspects | Generic, The (Philosophy)—Social aspects—Philippines | Christianity—Philippines. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion

Classification: LCC B105.G46 M33 2022 | DDC 128/.6—dc23/eng/20220610

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018126

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Part I: The Copy Generic

Introduction: Copies Generic, Templates, and [Insert Text Here]

1. Roses Are Red: The Seduction of Order and the Covertness of Category

2. Generic Goes to Hollywood: Trademarking, Unmarking, and the Brand Displaced

3. Source Mimesis: How We Think about the Unauthored and Collectively Owned

Part II: Christian Plurals and a Generic Religious*

Introduction

4. Formatting the Religious: Non-Christians and the Naturalness of Language

5. Divine/Generic | Olive/Mango

6. Big Faith: Christian Plurals and the Ambience of Catholicism

Epilogue: House of Generics Pro Forma

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Part I

The Copy Generic

Introduction

Copies Generic, Templates, and [Insert Text Here]

the important

thing

is

the obvious

thing

that

nobody

is

saying

—Charles Bukowski, Always (1990)

It is an odd concept, the generic. Commonly used, but rarely thought about: at times its meaning is obscure, at others, simply multiple. There are those famous examples, such as elevator music, off-brand consumer products, internet memes, and cultural stereotypes, as well as its more formal designations, within copyright and patent law, for example. For the most part, however, the term is used loosely and often, without any great specificity, mirroring its very own meaning. It is a remarkably common concept, with some version of it found in most languages and in most places, sometimes nudging closer to the meaning of general than in others. But what exactly is the generic? And what might its importance be for how we understand contemporary social worlds?

Much of the time, the generic suggests the copied and worn out—the unauthentic. In this light, it is seen as the husk of meaning, left over and unwanted. Often serving as a designation for what things are not—original, new, or unique—the generic exists as a pejorative, devaluing term. It is the culturally exhausted—those objects, meanings, and spaces that have been overused but are still lingering in the world. We unsurprisingly tend to look elsewhere when trying to understand a particular social context, especially if that context is seen to be important and generative of new meaning. While anthropology often looks to the understudied and the underappreciated, even at times the deviant, the generic is none of these; it is neither the underappreciated nor the overappreciated. Rather, it has already been appreciated, but now has been cast aside, lingering in the semiotic cracks of culture, between non- and post- meaning. Assuming some sort of process, it is a byproduct, the leftover. The generic is the waste from the culture machine.

But this is only one lens through which to view the generic. In another sense, the generic is simply the nonspecific. Scraped of particularity, it can come close to meaning universal, or at least a certain type of universal. It is the starting point, the template and background, upon and against which we build and create—again invoking a process of some sort. Presupposing an all-encompassing quality, it emphasizes type over token. It is a category of encompassment, inclusive of multiple specificities, but always itself remaining stubbornly nonspecific. While we often look upon the essentialized and reductive as problematic, they are nevertheless key to how meaning circulates, and are predicated on the semiotic practices of stripping away specificity. While the singular and unique are so often held to have more intrinsic value, the flip side is of equal, maybe even of more importance. The ability to summarize, substitute, and generalize—these are the engines of the social. To strip away surface detail and begin to order and classify the world in meaningful ways is also the generic. Thus, it is not just the culturally discarded, but in many ways the beating heart of how we make sense of things.

In our everyday ordering of things, we have the generic, indeed, scales of the generic. Lexically, for example, in English there is fruit, which is more generic than an apple, which in turn is more generic than a Braeburn or a Golden Delicious apple. Or consider the common phrase blah blah blah, proclaiming boredom and meaninglessness, simultaneously highlighting the separation of generic form over content by way of substitution. We often seem to need generic terms and categories to move through the world. They are also, it seems, the workhorses of everything from cognition and psychology to infrastructures and technology. At times the generic seems to erase difference, and at other times it becomes a starting point from which to make further differentiation of the world. In this neutral sense, it is about similarity and difference, types and universals—the shared and common grounds of meaning. At other times, it is still about sorting, but of sorting value—determining what is to be valued and what is not.

Within these two roaming definitional spaces of the generic—that of depreciatory evaluation and that of abstracted classification—there emerges a concept of the generic as something fundamentally necessary to the circulation of meaning, something crucial to sociality. When we see the generic enacted in the world as a concept, it most often moves between both definitions, simultaneously neutral and pejorative. It is sort of everywhere, the generic, and so it goes unnoticed. It is as if the concept of the generic is itself generic. There is of course the risk of fetishizing it—seeing everything thusly, overloading the concept with all that is similar. If it is understood as having some aspect of mimesis and similarity, what then is not generic? It is undoubtedly a slippery slope, and one that I wish to avoid. Instead, I shall describe the inherent importance of the generic as a driving factor of the social. Here it moves past just similarity and mimesis, merging them, repeating them, warping them, until it might emerge as its own concept—a concept crucial to an anthropological project of understanding the nature of how things repeat, circulate, and are ultimately classified in the world.

Taking a word from the language and place in which I mostly work, the Philippines, banal in Filipino/Tagalog is a linguistic false friend in English, and denotes not the common,¹ but rather the holy. In this book, then, I want to make a pitch for the generic as something holy rather than banal—a strange and potent space. I want to explore the concept of the generic, and consider what sorts of spaces it occupies both in anthropology and in the milieus in which we study. I do so by examining how the generic is at play in the interwoven contemporary modes of technological and media formation, design, and ideologies of classification. Ultimately, I stake a claim for the importance of the generic as a space of analysis within the social. Indeed, as I will show, the generic is not something that we should begin to study in earnest, but rather something that we already do study. We would be well rewarded for bringing it into focus. Perhaps not intentionally, it has lingered here and there in the anthropological shadows, whenever people have spoken of patterns in culture, traits, and indeed the general, ubiquitous, and universal. As I describe, the generic is ethnographically alive. It is there every time we roll our eyes upon hearing a clichéd song, in the similarities in architectural design, or the ease with which a person who has lived all their life in Manila can so easily read a map of the New York City subway system. It is in the engagement anthropology has had with metaphor and tropes (Fernandez 1991), and analogy (Jones 2017), as well as with broader, often implicit projects of comparison, extrapolation, and generalization. It serves not only in the highlighting of difference, but in the multiple forms of replication, mimesis, and similarity.

Not only is a better accounting of things generic essential to any understanding of a social world, but also it underscores the need to push back against a problematic trend in anthropology (and a classic problem in media) of emphasizing the sensational. That is, to attend to the generic is equally a political and ethical project of realigning anthropology with a clear and fundamental humanism—moving away from a focus on exceptionalism, and instead assigning ethnographic and conceptual value to everybody and equally, challenging increasingly accepted, though often implicit hierarchies of what and where constitutes the culturally important. If we think through more fully the importance of generic social forms, we might then ask anew: what constitutes the compelling anthropological subject or object of study? And what compels anthropology itself as a project (Pandian 2019; McLean 2017; Ortner 2016). To that end, and to somewhat contest a marketplace of newness and arguably a troubling logic of relevancy and irrelevancy—indeed, the importance of trends in anthropology—I use the concept of the generic as a way to theoretically deepen those spaces we too often gloss as the quotidian, mundane, and everyday, terms that do so much heavy lifting for us descriptively but that demand a fuller conceptual engagement.²

This book, however, is not simply about the ordinary, or the normative, but rather is an argument for the need of a conceptual space—the generic—that fundamentally resituates how we think about copies as related to templates and blueprints of the social. While the generic moves in and out of focus, and overlaps with several other conceptual spaces, critically it tethers a number of ethnographic and theoretical spaces that are too often seen to be distinct. If we move beyond ideological contestations over originality, and the indictment of social contexts as disenchanted, no longer sacred in their authenticity, what happens if we simply assume that cultural milieus, spaces, and contexts in fact often lose their originality and authenticity, becoming a commingling of replication and the quotidian, no longer sacred in their unfamiliarity? What then? We know that the culture machine does not stop. Having to step out of the confines of conceptual oppositions of new and old, mimesis and replication instead assume new roles in a semiotics of meaning-making. Originals and copies cease to be oppositional, or even distinct. For it is arguably how we derive from, circulate, and play with origins and sources—how they constitute shorthands—that constitutes our social worlds, not the origins and sources themselves.

Much of this book is ethnographically located in the Philippines. At first glance, the Philippines might easily be associated with the generic. With its colonial histories vast and multiple, the country, and in particular its capital, Manila, has both willingly and unwillingly always looked outward, consuming and being shaped by external forms of language, economic trade routes, architecture, food, and art. Famous in the eyes of many as a mishmash culture of Taglish, smartphones, call centers, karaoke and dancing prisoners, Americanized culture, shopping malls, dubbed South Korean television shows, and self-styled Mexican telenovelas, the Philippines often stands as an icon of the everywhere and nowhere. Ostensibly lacking in the cultural specificity of its Southeast Asian counterparts, such as Indonesia or Laos, and without the economic and cultural force of South Korea, Japan, or China, its cultural exports are commonly predicated on digesting the cultural practices and tropes of elsewhere. Even in the small towns, appearing strangely South American, with Spanish architecture, plazas, and street names, and at the same time thoroughly Southeast Asian, with rice fields and water buffalo, there are seemingly endless moments of disjuncture within the cultural stereotypes of Filipiniana.

Or at least that is how the story goes. Within this narrative, the Philippines stands in the middle, a conglomerate of colonial pastiche and outside influence. Of course, I would strongly argue against such a narrative, if for nothing else, for how it is predicated on an outsiders’ view, if not an outright imperial gaze. Such a narrative is also deeply determined by a hierarchy (and definition) of cultural value that relies on difference and exceptionality as inherently more worthwhile. At the same time, I would suggest there is the need to move beyond the tropes of the swirling cultural amalgamation of globalization and global cities. Something more important, I argue, is at play—in how sameness and difference is semiotically transacted and circulated. It is precisely the ideology of generic culture with which the Philippines has often been labeled that hides other forms of genericness that are not as queasily evaluative, but rather are critical to understanding the vectors of universalism that are central to social practices not only in the Philippines, but everywhere. Within the smaller world of anthropological genealogies, the Philippines is also important for thinking through the generic. As I describe in chapter 1, in the 1950s the Philippines was a key ethnographic (although classically and problematically othered) space in which a burgeoning cognitive anthropology emerged—a subdiscipline that would increasingly depend on ideologies of universalism that were seen to embody the category of generic. It was also the ethnographic space, two decades later, in which that same cognitive anthropology came under severe critique (for example, through Michelle Rosaldo’s work on language and metaphor [Rosaldo 1986, 1982, 1973]), a critique that I argue is particularly useful in thinking through contemporary issues around the politics of naming. And it is within a contemporary politics of naming, and of identity, that we can arguably begin to consider the ethics at play within the generic. For there are inevitably structures and inequalities relating to who gets to constitute and rely on the generic. As I show, to be able to choose when and how to reside in specificity and nonspecificity, to define the very parameters of such, and to be able to determine others along such axes is a striking mode of power.

Part II of this book is likewise, and more fully ethnographically, situated in the Philippines, famously Asia’s only Christian country.³ The history of Christianity highlights these global, colonial histories of the Philippines, missionary projects of attempted homogenization, as well as the inherent universalist ideologies that run through Christian doctrine. Moreover, as the long dominance of Catholicism in the country slowly gives way to a more pluralist Christian context, the increasingly multiple forms of Christian affiliation that exist (ranging from Pentecostal, Methodist, and Iglesia ni Cristo to Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness) redefine the very rubric of Christian ubiquity and universality. As the shared backdrops of Catholic predominance are contested, the generic becomes ever more useful in how people engage one another across lines of religious and ethical difference. For these reasons contemporary Christianity in the Philippines offers an immensely fruitful context—one that moves among linguistic, media, ethical, political, and ideological spaces—in which to think through the generic as something critical for how we navigate the fluid worlds of universality, sameness, and difference.

Formality and Informality

There are any number of spheres in which the generic is not only important, but used explicitly as a definitional term, often with partial overlaps of meaning. For example, generic swaps in finance, often referred to as the most basic form of derivative swap, are also known as vanilla, or straight, swaps. In this meaning of the term, generic clearly has less to do with universals, and more to do with basic and nonspecific forms of practice. In psychology, the term generic knowledge refers to that form of knowledge distinct from personal experience. Here, elements of the abstract and nonspecific combine. In programming, the term generic type font describes those fonts that are expected to be shared by a computer and a webpage. This, obviously, has connotations of the universal and basic, but not of the inclusive.

Given the multiple contexts in which the generic formally appears, there are two that would necessarily appear as first ports of call for an anthropology of the generic. First, the most widely known use of the generic over the last two decades has occurred within patents and branding, in particular, the enormous growth and popularity of generic drugs (Hayden 2013, 2007). The explosion of the global generic drug market, accounting for 88 percent of US prescription drug purchases (Conti and Berndt 2020), has brought a new legal encounter with the generic as a concept. As discussed in chapter 2, fake and generic knockoffs of consumer products are part of the branding landscape and are constantly pushing at the lines of patent and copyright infringement. Unsurprisingly, pharmaceuticals are highly regulated. As a result, the legal concept of the generic is more fully realized for prescription drugs than other commodities. For example, when patent protections on a branded drug expire, widespread production of generic versions is common. However, in several countries, the generic copy is specifically refused the right to sell under any type of branded name and must use a lowercase form of the nonbranded drug name to mark it as generic (Greene 2014; Hilliard et al. 2012). Such regulatory separation of the generic from the real brand coexists with the fact that generic drugs are thus increasingly associated with the real ingredients, and are at times viewed as the actual drug, purified and stripped of its brand. In this way, the generic emerges as something other than the knockoff or fake, and is constituted as a type of space in and unto itself—at once both the imitation and the original. Throughout this book, I describe how the generic negates the classic oppositional framing of original versus imitation. While much critiqued in social thought (Auerbach 1953; Benjamin 1968), and more recently in anthropology (Taussig 1993; Urban 2001; Nakassis 2012), the problematics of original and copy remain stubbornly in place in the social worlds most of us inhabit.

The second port of call is arguably linguistics, in which generic(s) is not only a technical term, but a subfield and a sustained focus of scholarship. Linguistic approaches to the generic have emphasized not only the difficulty in pinning down its precise nature, but the wide range of hugely important and deeply social concepts that are implicated when we think, even peripherally, about the generic. Linguists have highlighted how the marking of specificity and nonspecificity in language is key to understanding the complexities of how we think and speak about types, kinds, and categories of things. The generic has perhaps most often been associated with ethnosemantics, language development, and the concepts of subordinate and superordinate prototype categories, as well as kinds of things (Pelletier 2010). This is not to say, however, that it has a precise meaning in linguistics. Outside of semantic and lexical scales, clearly delimiting the generic in the much broader and informal spaces of language is quite difficult. For example, what determines a kind of thing? A space of entanglements and ambiguity, the generic is nevertheless one of immense productivity in understanding how language works (Carlson and Pelletier 1995; Croft and Cruse 2004; Gelman 2009; Leslie 2007; Mannheim and Gelman 2013; Mari et al. 2013).

For many linguists, the importance of the category of the generic lies in its ability to provide shorthands for kinds of things that are otherwise lacking in sufficient detail. In the absence of more information, generics are enacted as a way to characterize, afford general properties, and delineate kinds of things. Enacted not so much as background but as backup, the generic is the minimal basis of agreement and understanding. This, of course, runs counter to the generic as something overly specified to the point of being useless and culturally discarded, and exists as something of a shared semiotic ground. Charles Zuckerman, for example, has noted that a fuller engagement with generics allows us to better understand not only how people linguistically categorize things, but the nature of abstraction in the social (Zuckerman 2020).⁴ I pay particular attention to language practices throughout this book for this very reason. Language is a compelling space in which to understand how the generic is constituted in the world. Not only is the study of language central to understanding how people configure the consortium of generality, shorthands, and background worlds, the generic itself is essential to language, ever-present in the pull and play of talk and text.

That is not to say however, that outside of semantic and lexical scales, clearly delimiting the generic in the much broader and informal spaces of language is necessarily easy. For example, in an American context, is the phrase whassup generic, because it has cycled through so much appropriation and parody that what once had a niche and temporary cache (perhaps) now no longer does?⁵ How is it different from hi or hello? Are they the more generic salutations, given their remarkable ubiquity, or do they lack the discarded and diminished affect of whassup that is often accorded the generic? Or, in the Philippines, what about the phrase It’s more fun in the Philippines! originated by the BBDO Guerrero advertising agency for the Department of Tourism as the slogan for a government-led global tourism campaign, but subsequently the wry and universally chuckled response to everything that goes wrong, from national financial scandals to when someone spills coffee on their shirt? Does that form of appropriation and ubiquity see it fall under the rubric of generic, or is that simply satire through mimesis? What of a slogan such as Make America Great Again? For many people in the United States, such a political tag moved beyond trite and into meaninglessness, and became a classic example of the generic, in both its denotative components and its connotative motivations. It seemed almost designed to be generic. Does meaninglessness enable language and objects to become placeholders? And yet, in part because of that supposed meaninglessness, the phrase became famously pointed and instantly recognizable, not as a free-floating idiom, but as a marker of a distinct political affiliation—arguably the inverse of the generic.

One important question that runs throughout this book is whether the generic needs to be widely read as such. Are elements of explicitness necessary, or inherent, in the generic, and what types of attention does it draw to itself? Like internet memes, is the explicitness and citation of its own replication necessary? Or are there forms of concealment involved? For sure, much of what we understand as generic is called just that. One of the most famous and regularly used examples of genericness are placeholder names, such as John Doe and Jane Doe. As placeholder names, John and Jane Doe are fully generic in the United States, known as such, and only function because of the widespread acknowledgment that they are generic. They are dependent on the transparency of their genericness. Similarly, for example, with their Philippine equivalents, Juan dela Cruz and Maria dela Cruz. These terms are used within legal, medical, and bureaucratic spheres as placeholders. Serving as proxies for the universal and nonspecific Filipino, gendered but nothing else, they are inclusive of everyone, but pointing to no one in particular. Moreover, they align easily with their US counterparts. This is no accident. Juan dela Cruz has a specific history, emerging from a US colonial context, in which the author, and sometime editor of the Manila Times, Robert McCulloch-Dick coined the term Juan dela Cruz as an everyman Filipino. Culling the names from what he perceived to be the most popular first and last name at the time, Juan dela Cruz was represented in cartoons as wearing traditional Filipino clothes, including a salakot, a type of wide-brimmed hat. Depictions were sometimes comical, sometimes sympathetic, but always portrayed the naïve native, and more often than not ran closer to the representational economy of Jim Crow. Unlike Jim Crow, however, Juan dela Cruz (and later Maria), was rehabilitated, or reappropriated, not necessarily within a charged political context, and has come to inhabit the same generic space as John Doe, arguably without any racializing intonations. Thus, both the explicitness and particular histories of the generic are at play. Moreover, the history of Juan dela Cruz points to how the rolling stone of genericness does indeed gather semiotic moss, shifting in meaning and open to appropriation and reinterpretation and erasure, all the while maintaining its usefulness as a generic artifact.

But what of those things and spaces that are not widely viewed as generic, but still might be? In chapter 1, I describe how, for some cognitive social scientists, the generic exists as a covert category (Whorf 1945) enacted by us in our perception and memory, but not consciously so. I argue, however, that we need not reach that far to find the generic. The generic exists in blueprints and templates, and in shorthands all around us (Mattingly 208; Wilf 2016). For present purposes, in this book, I want to look beyond the explicitly generic, and past the classificatory tensions of what falls into and out of it in the strictest terms, and rather make a case for the expansiveness of the concept and its usefulness in thinking about how things are meaningful and meaningless, and the movement back and forth between the two.

In arguing for a prominent role of genericness across social contexts, I do not mean to curtail the social. For example, accepting even the most basic remit of an ethnographic landscape is to accept the expansive ecologies that engage and are engaged by the social. Infrastructural environments are one such space. For example, consider the MIFARE series of microchips, manufactured and designed by the Dutch corporation, NXP Semiconductors. Over the last fifteen years, MIFARE chips have been key to the global expansion of smart cards. Notably used in urban transport payment and ticketing systems, MIFARE chips are also used in everything from library cards to social welfare and medical IDs, as well as passports and driver’s licenses. The technology, while simple enough, is in no way legally generic. MIFARE chips are most definitely patented. And yet, there is something determinedly generic about the use and universality of the chips—that is, their situatedness in the world. They are everywhere, used in nearly every country—and with an estimated ten billion cards produced in just the last decade, there are more MIFARE chip cards than people in the world.

It is not just their universality. MIFARE chips have become so embedded within our lives that the technology is wholly indistinct and unnoticed. That is the generic. Indeed, unlike smartphones, which have particular forms of constant self-referentiality of the technology inherent in their use, including branding and popular discourses on the role of phones in culture, MIFARE technology, though ubiquitous, is rarely mentioned.⁶