Fake logos,fake theory,fake globalization |
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| Authors: | Hsiao‐hung Chang |
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| Institution: | Hsiao‐hung Chang (Translated by Yung-chao Liao) |
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| Abstract: | This essay attempts to map out the global networking of counter‐feit production and consumption by considering the historical and economic complications of fake superlogograms in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China as a point of departure. It traces not only the ‘capital logic’ of the counter‐feiting industry, which duplicates the international division of labour, but also its ‘cultural logic’, which creates the Euro‐American superlogograms under the spell of Western imperialist ideology. The essay is divided into three main parts to foreground the ‘glocal’ circulation of fake superlogos. The first part considers the famous French Louis Vuitton as a case study to explore the economic, historic and cultural formation of the logomania in East Asia piloted by Japan in the 1980s. The second part discusses the double cultural reproduction of fake logos in Taiwan as both an imitation of Japan and an imitation of Japanese imitation of Europe. The third part seeks to theorize the fake under the context of Asian consumption of the superlogo and to foreground further the historical change of how the ‘fake’ becomes ubiquitous, how the ‘fake’ could be produced out of no originals, and how the ‘fake’ turns out to be perfectly indistinguishable and doubly authentic, which could rewrite the whole theory of mimesis. A new theorization of ‘fake dissemination’ is attempted in this essay to map out the co‐dependent ongoing (de)construction between ‘fake globalization’ and ‘globalization.’ What we mean by ‘fake’ here is no longer the mere difference between real/fake; the ‘fake’ in ‘fake globalization’ means ‘counter‐feiting’ as well as ‘appropriating’. (In Chinese, ‘Jia’ means both ‘fake’ and ‘by a particular means’.) That is, counter‐feit products appropriate the power of globalization to disseminate themselves. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘dark flow’ within globalization; it counter‐feits and appropriates globalization, repetitively reduplicating and deconstructing it. ‘Fake globalization’ and ‘globalization’ are not a pair in binary opposition. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘subversion’ of global capitalism; it is subject to global superlogo fashion consciousness and simultaneously resistant to the manipulation of ‘glogocentrism’. This subversive fake globalization is different from the traditional anti‐globalization movement, which tends to highlight the protection of international worker's rights, anti‐monopoly and anti‐sweatshops, for the latter focuses chiefly on the ‘oppositional’ stance while the former stresses more the ‘reverse’ side of it. Fake globalization helps to turn globalization itself inside out and outside in. Fake globalization is not an external attack on globalization from without, but an internal exposure of how the historical and psychic formulations of the logics of global capitalism are subject to the cultural imagination under (western) imperialist ideology, and how they are influenced by the political‐economic deployment of international divisions of labour. What fake dissemination does is to expose from within the possibility and impossibility of ‘glogocentrism.’ |
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| Keywords: | brand name counter‐feit logo globalization logomania cultural reproduction ‘glogocentrism’ fake dissemination |
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