https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo182881918.html

Interview by Lynda Chubak

Lynda Chubak: Scott, thank you for writing this wonderful book! Central to The Copy Generic is your contention that the generic is a potent conceptual space. On the one hand, with an appearance of neutrality, generic is considered the universal, the unmarked, the non-specific, or the general. Alternatively, generic may be negatively valenced as the discarded, the copied, the mimetic, or the inauthentic. How has exploring the intersection of these two loosely congregated parts as a conceptual space been productive for you, and where do you see future applications?

Scott MacLochlainn: It was this intersection that drew me to the generic in the first place. I was fascinated by how much ground the concept of the generic covers without really ever drawing attention to itself, and how most of us live with the generic in one way or another. We all live with ideas around generality and types, and universals to allow us to understand and make sense of the world. But we also use the generic as a means of evaluation, often seeing the generic as the unauthentic and overused. And so I became interested in this intersection between the generic as the ubiquitous and as the culturally diminished.

In the book, I describe how this isn’t a coincidence, or just an overlap of the term “generic,” but that these different spaces mingle and co-constitute each other.  This book is trying to make sense of that mingling, and explores how people depend upon and cultivate social action through specificity and nonspecificity. I describe how the generic is a strange thing, in ways a weakening of something, a dissipation, a loss of specificity and of uniqueness, of authenticity and originality. But on the flip side, the power of the non-specific is a force to be reckoned with. And so, in order to explore the complexities I move through multiple different conceptual, ethnographic, and archival spaces in the book. These range from different genealogies in anthropology, NFTs and movie prop designers in LA, to 19^th century colonial world’s fairs and architectural design, and especially Christian communities in the Philippines, with whom I conducted the majority of my fieldwork for the book.

It was in one of these spaces during my fieldwork, a Bible translation workshop in the Philippines, that I first thought about the generic as something that needed to be ethnographically accounted for. For these Bible translators, who were trying to translate the Bible into six different indigenous Mangyan languages on the island of Mindoro, the problem of the specificity of metaphors in the Bible, and their ability, even when translated, to resonate with people was an ongoing concern. For a number of the translators, the goal was to strip away these metaphors, and arrive at a language that was more generic, and so could then be better understood by people across very different linguistic and social worlds.

In terms of application, I hope that the concept of the generic allows us to perhaps better attend to those ethnographic spaces in which people are not necessarily engaging with the forms of specificity that we are accustomed to seeking out. Moreover, I do want the book to speak at least in part to anthropology’s own relationship to what is ethnographically compelling, to its own engagement with generality and specificity, and to what is deemed new.

Lynda Chubak: As you argue, if formal categories are socially powerful forces, covert ones are often even more so. Thinking in terms of naming and unnaming, how does returning to the semiotics of markedness or unmarkedness speak to the generic in a way that can help us better understand contemporary media and identity politics?

Scott MacLochlainn: Well, firstly, it’s very true that the theory of the marked and unmarked are perhaps surprisingly present throughout the book. The cover of the book, while appearing to just be two pleasant looking geometric circles, is actually a replication of the diagram used by Linda Waugh in the 1980s (“Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure.” Semiotica 38 (3–4)), where she discusses Roman Jakobson and the uses of un/markedness in semiotics and linguistic theory.

As to why the marked/unmarked speaks to the generic, it is because markedness theory always emphasized the vast power and potential of the ubiquitous and taken for granted. When something is so ubiquitous, it has a force all to itself that no longer needs to be articulated. While markedness theory has a particular history in anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics, as I describe in the book, the dichotomy has become an increasingly useful and popular way to understand everything from political echo-chambers and media bubbles, to our relationship with technology and identity writ large. One really important aspect of markedness theory is grappling with collective, unspecified backdrops.

Roman Jakobson himself saw the use of marked/unmarked outside the remit of linguistics. It’s an immensely attractive way of framing things. And for all the difficulty it gets one into in terms of thinking about linguistic features, I think in its more popular guise, it actually does allow us to think in useful ways about generic types, and the assumptions we make, from everything about positionality and ideology in speaking, to how we frame our social worlds.

For example, in thinking about naming, and the push to remove the gendered forms of certain words such as Latinx or Filipinx, or the unmarked forms of whiteness in the US. These spaces have catapulted thinking about the un/marked in very different ways than it was in linguistic theory, foregrounding the asymmetries and practices of exclusion. I would argue the generic is very much key to understanding how majoritarian forms of sociality circulate.

In my own research, and in thinking about the generic, such markedness, even on a lexical level was hugely important. In Chapter 4, for example, I describe a remarkable Philippine Supreme Court case in 1919 about the forced imprisonment and relocation of indigenous Mangyan groups in Mindoro, and how the case revolved around the proper usage of the term “non-Christian” to describe indigenous groups. Configured in terms of inferiority to an ostensibly civilized and Christianized other (or self), and enabling the withholding of basic rights, one can see how the unmarked forms of Christianity helped constitute generic forms of Christianity. And continues to do so!

Lynda Chubak: I particularly enjoyed your eclectic range of ethnographic evidence. For example, Chapter 2 describes the work of movie and television prop designers who create fake and generic alternatives to branded products, a practice that entails “indexical leapfrogging”. Can you describe what that expression means in relation to the role and importance of the generic in the world of shorthand and proxies within and beyond branding?

Scott MacLochlainn: I am really interested in the uses we make of shorthands and substitutes. We don’t take people through the steps of our thinking, but often used shared generic forms to help us fast-forward through the chains of semiosis and our logics. And “indexical leapfrogging” is part of that. What forms of indexicality can one skip through, with the knowledge that others can still understand? But that has always been part of Charles Peirce’s framing of semiosis. That is, meaning aggregates and connects, the lines of legibility extend, so of course people can use forms of indexicality to leapfrog explication, and employ shorthands, proxies, and substitutes as a means of communicating. Of course, equally important is how indexical meaning also diminishes and fades, and indeed ossifies, which is where we might also start to think about the generic in semiosis. But at the heart of thinking about the generic here, for me at least, is the reliance on shared repertoires of knowing that enable us to enact these shorthands. And how we use social categories to sort through things quickly and easily.

In the context of television and film, we might think here of the classic “establishing shot.” With just a two-second shot of a skyline or street, or whatever it might be, so much is conveyed to the viewer, seamlessly and immediately situating them within a particular context. So it needs to be very precise, but also remarkably legible and conventional in order to work. The establishing shot only really works if the viewer already understands the shorthands that are being used. Not only the genre, but specifics of nonspecificity that are at play. It’s also about sorting and categorizing, trying to find the quickest and cleanest referents to particular genres. I think one can quite quickly see how such a reliance on generic forms then takes us into the worlds of algorithms and AI, where sorting and categorizing of information have assumed an increasing presence in our lives, but in very different ways.

Lynda Chubak: Lastly, there are often stories attached with book title selection. Is there one behind yours?

Scott MacLochlainn: I have a tortured relationship with titles! I had originally just wanted it to be The Copy Generic as to have some connection to the wonderful literatures on mimesis and copies in anthropology and social thought, but also center on the generic. Initially, I didn’t want a subtitle. But then my editor helped me come to my senses. Interestingly, in those conversations with my editor, and the process of the coming up with a title actually brought to bear many of the things I am fundamentally concerned with in the book. It’s interesting how book titles come to be. They are indeed a play between specificity and nonspecificity. How legible will the title be to people, while at the same time having some originality to it? And so, a really interesting question here is what do we mean by legibility? What shared and collective repertoires is a title and subtitle predicated on? For the marketing of the book, it needs to be readily apparent to a reader what the book is about. More than that, it needs to locate itself within particular genres and disciplinary subfields. So how can we slot the book into a legible space for the reader, but at the same time, be compelling? There is so much going on with titles, even in terms of current fashions. For example, and my book is an example, the popularity of having the subtitle begin with “How…” is really common. Similarly, I could be mistaken, but there definitely seemed to be a previous fashion ten or twenty years ago for using word reversal (or chiasmus) in academic subtitles (“the rhyme of reason and the reason of rhyme,” and so on). And of course, in terms of the visuality of any book cover, there is equally a remarkable set of factors that are playing with genre and the generic. I personally think there is something slightly 1970s pop-science about mine, like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Or indeed, to keep it within anthropology’s wheelhouse, the paperback cover for Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. One of the great covers!