| Counterfeit goods now comprise a significant portion of global trade, with counterfeit luxury goods accounting for approximately half of these products. The revenues generated from the sale of these items bolster a growing informal economy that manifests itself in a diversity of physical and virtual forms and locales. In recent years, these have become increasingly subject to scrutiny in an effort to prohibit the sale of counterfeit luxury goods. In addition to attempts to limit the supply of counterfeits, government and industry have also sought to curtail demand by dissuading consumers from purchasing such goods through a series of anti-counterfeiting initiatives that discursively link the consumption of counterfeits to a variety of social ills (including child labor, terrorism, and organized crime) and construct counterfeits as threats to morality, the economy, and personal and public health and safety. As Toronto in particular is regarded as a hotspot of counterfeit consumption, the city has been host to several anti-counterfeiting initiatives. Framings of the counterfeit economy in such initiatives work to promote particular conceptions of the role of consumer as citizen, and to protect the increasing instability of "luxury" by emphasizing the importance of "authenticity" in ways that mask and/or invalidate the complexity of the counterfeit economy, and its relationship to the neoliberal economy. While the state and certain segments of capital seek to shape a particular kind of subject (the citizen consumer) through anti-counterfeiting discourses, the counterfeit economy continuously escapes this categorization, partly because it is a site in which subjects negotiate their relation to the economy, class positioning, and potentially gender through a set of spatial practices that are unique to the counterfeit economy. As such, the counterfeit economy not only reflects changing conceptualizations of subjectivity, morality, and luxury in the neoliberal economy but is also a productive site in which people actively appropriate objects within a whole set of other concerns. Counterfeit consumption serves as a powerful site by which to examine neoliberal capitalism, not as a monolithic economic order, but as a set of heterogeneous practices in which elements continuously escape the capacity of state and capital to control. |
