Preface

In September 2010, I brought a group of students to the exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993” at the White Columns gallery in New York’s West Village.1 Arriving at the gallery, I expected to find the documentary traces of a movement I had never encountered firsthand. After all, when the AIDS crisis was at its peak and ACT UP was most active, I was the age of the students who had accompanied me to the gallery and was pursuing a degree at a small liberal arts college hundreds of miles away. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been there—in New York in the late 1980s to early 1990s—when I arrived at the gallery what I encountered was surprisingly familiar. I not only recognized most of the posters on display but also recalled photocopying and distributing many of the same posters. As I would say to my students, “This is what my undergraduate campus looked like.” What I meant was that the slogans and iconography on display—words and images put into circulation by art activist groups like Gran Fury—were part of the visual backdrop to my college years in the early 1990s. Just as familiar as the slogans and iconography, however, was the distinctive gritty aesthetic of the posters, many of them photocopied reproductions.

The materials on display were not only familiar to me because they had circulated widely enough to reach my campus far from their site of production, but more significantly because I had participated in their dissemination. Without giving much thought to who had originally produced the posters (usually already photocopies of photocopies of photocopies by the time I encountered them), I felt a responsibility to reproduce and distribute these materials. Indeed, as a student activist in the early 1990s, I spent an extraordinary amount of time copying and distributing posters produced by queer and feminist activists from organizations across North America. The posters became part of my visual memory of the era, because I was part of their reproduction and distribution.

One might conclude that photocopying and distributing posters in the two decades or so preceding the arrival of the web was simply a pre-social-media equivalent to reposting articles about political events on Facebook, but the analogy quickly breaks down. Anyone who has spent time photocopying and postering knows that this is an entirely different activity. You have to find a copy machine—an affordable copy machine, ideally a free one. You have to be willing to fix its endless jams. You have to care enough to keep fixing these jams. You have to find time to put up the posters. You have to choose your adhesive—staples or packing tape or wheatpaste. More importantly, you have to choose either to respect the bylaws (poster only in designated areas) or to reject them. In short, you have to be willing to do the work, deal with the mechanics, and get caught, and none of this has much in common with reposting slogans, photographs, or articles on Facebook or Twitter.

In many respects, the story of the “ACT UP New York” exhibit is where the story of the copy machine told in this book begins—in another era, to be precise in the two decades or so just before the widespread arrival of the web.² It is also a story that begins in urban spaces—in New York, Toronto, Chicago, and other cities across North America—but it is by no means a story confined to these spaces. The copy machine, like the web, is a technology that was readily embraced because of its ability to transgress borders. Like other histories of communication technologies, then, this one is at least partially a history of spatial practices.³ It’s about how communication technologies redefine, expand, and collapse spaces and in the process open up the possibility for new types of networks and communities to take shape. Of course, the copy machine is also marked by its own specificity. Despite its status as an office machine, the copy machine is deeply entangled in histories of 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s subcultures, playing an especially notable role in the era’s punk, street art, and DIY movements. Yet, as I emphasize throughout this book, the impact of the copy machine cannot be fully understood by tracing how this office technology became synonymous with the aesthetics of punk rock and downtown art scenes. Beyond being appropriated by artists and anarchists, these machines also played an essential role in late twentieth-century social movements, specifically the activist movements that emerged in response to the AIDS crisis and increased demand for queer rights in the 1980s to 1990s. Finally, because this is not the story of a slick handheld digital device but rather the story of a clunky piece of office equipment dating back to the late 1940s, this is also a history of repeated gestures. In short, it’s about the monotony of reproducing documents in the late age of print and about the banality embedded in even our most subversive acts.

As I have worked on this book (a research project that dates back to 2004),⁴ the copy machine has undergone a significant decline in use and status. In 2004, it was still impossible for most white-collar workers to imagine carrying out their everyday labor without the aid of copy machines. By 2008, change was imminent, empowering some people, like the dean of my college at the time, to declare that we would be “photocopy-free” by the end of the decade. My dean never realized this ambitious mandate, but his prediction was not entirely unfounded. If I once spent several hours a week making handouts for students and illegally photocopying and binding entire out-of-print books for my research, by 2010, like most of my colleagues and nearly all of my students, I had moved on. I was downloading and uploading rather than copying. Suddenly, everything seemed to be already available as an electronic edition or contraband pdf. So as I finally turned my full attention to this book, my relationship to the copy machine was, in a sense, already on the rocks.

I am well aware of the dangers of ascribing feelings to machines. Yet there is little doubt that many of us have big feelings about copy machines; more oddly, we have a tendency to attribute feelings to these machines. In a 2002 survey commissioned by photocopier manufacturer Hewlett-Packard Canada Ltd., one in ten workers admitted to kicking or punching their copy machines. A widely circulated newspaper article written about the survey emphasized that rates of “abuse” were significantly higher among women than men: “A total of 48 per cent of women surveyed reported that they had assaulted a photocopier, compared to 37 per cent of men.” (The article failed to mention that women are also more likely than men to find themselves relegated to photocopying tasks in the workplace). Most notably, the article emphasized that while there is no question that copy machines are subject to abuse, they may also be partially to blame. One machine technician observed that copy machines are “notorious for not giving you what you want.”⁵ More than the statistics, which merely confirm what we already know—many of us have a strained relationship with the copy machine—the article is notable for its use of language. Reading between the lines, the reader is left with the impression that copy machines are potential culprits, since they apparently often don’t put out when we need them to or don’t put out in quite the right way. Copy machines apparently do more than produce documents—they also produce an entire range of affects from blame to anger to anxiety. In the late 1960s, when the copy machine was still a novelty in most workplaces and educational institutions, a feature article in the New Yorker painted a remarkably similar portrait. With specific reference to the 914, Xerox’s most popular copy machine at the time, John Brooks reported, “I spent a couple of afternoons with one 914 and its operator, and observed what seemed to be the closest relationship between a woman and a piece of office equipment that I had ever seen.” Copy machines, he insists, are unique for their living, even animal-like, qualities. “A 914 has distinct animal traits,” Brooks explains, “It has to be fed and curried; it is intimidating but can be tamed; it is subject to unpredictable bursts of misbehavior; and generally speaking, it responds in kind to its treatment.” To support these claims, he cites the copy machine operator he shadowed. “I was frightened of it at first,” the operator explains, but “The Xerox men say, ‘If you’re frightened of it, it won’t work,’ and that’s pretty much right. It’s a good scout; I’m fond of it now.”⁶

I too hold a fondness for copy machines, though my fondness has increased as my reliance on them has decreased. I have not only relied on copy machines to carry out my work (at least in the past) but also frequently made copy machines and their ephemeral output the subject of my research. Over the past two decades, I have published articles on topics ranging from zines and illegal book reproduction to public postering and copy shops. For this reason, I appreciate that alongside the fear, rage, dread, and disappointment copy machines evoke, they can be associated with more positive affects. These are machines we love and machines we love to hate. Remarkably, however, despite the strong feelings copy machines appear to incite, to date they have received virtually no attention from media studies scholars or scholars working in allied fields, such as book and publishing history.

What follows, then, is a history of a common machine, and one, as I argue throughout this book, with a deep affinity to people on the margins—people living on geographic margins (e.g., outside urban centers) and people affiliated with symbolic margins (e.g., the margins that gather up the punks, the queers, the immigrants, the visibly marked, and so on). What follows is also a social history of a banal office technology and how it came to play a major role in the development and dissemination of late twentieth-century aesthetic and political movements. Finally, because I write this at the end of the copy machine’s era, this is also an elegy to a once ubiquitous technology in the process of being replaced and retooled as its utility wanes. Yet, as this book brings into focus, the margins, broadly defined, were permanently altered by the copy machine. As a result, in the face of the machine’s pending demise, the impact of this adjustment continues to leave a mark on our everyday lives.