Copy, right, copyright: An anti-manifesto against intellectual property

The cultural legitimacy of authorship and the legal bases of copyright reciprocally support one another. Here, I argue that the historical margins of the authorial figure are correlative to the logical and literary shortcomings of intellectual property. Exposing the fault lines of copyright also reveals the contingencies and limitations of the author that are hidden under its universalist garb. I first demonstrate that mimetic plurality is the core drive of an image, allowing it to appear – thus become a visual medium – before the onset of meaning. Copyright seeks to codify this flow of constitutive imitation while harnessing the reproductive ability of art to recreate the same object across space and time. Then, I shift the focus onto anthropological material from certain vernacular traditions to foreground some processual and embodied methods of doing art that defy the notion of a finished work which may be owned. All this leads to the separation of the author from their work, not to undermine their labour but to vitalise their creativity and signature with the hope that they will have united with their product more freely at some point in the future anterior.