Plagiarism

Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural world.Typically it has been viewed as the theft of language, ideas and imagesby the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personalfortune or prestige. Yet, like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarismis easily inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation ofrepresentation and the privatization of language that are suspect;perhaps the plagiarist?s actions, given a specific set of socialconditions, are the ones contributing most to cultural enrichment.Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding thedistribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translatea sonnet from Petrarch and call it his own. In accordance with theclassical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectlyacceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested less in thereinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of workto areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared. The worksof English plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne,Coleridge and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the Englishheritage, and remain in the literary canon to this day.

Atpresent, new conditions have emerged that once again make plagiarism anacceptable, even crucial strategy for textual production. This is theage of the recombinant: recombinant bodies, recombinant gender,recombinant texts, recombinant culture. Looking back through theprivileged frame of hindsight, one can argue that the recombinant hasalways been key in the development of meaning and invention; recentextraordinary advances in electronic technology have called attentionto the recombinant both in theory and in practice (for example, the useof morphing in video and film). The primary value of all electronictechnology, especially computers and imaging systems, is the startlingspeed at which they can transmit information in both raw and refinedforms. As information flows at a high velocity through the electronicnetworks, disparate and sometimes incommensurable systems of meaningintersect, with both enlightening and inventive consequences. In asociety dominated by a ?knowledge? explosion, exploring thepossibilities of meaning in that which already exists is more pressingthan adding redundant information (even if it is produced using themethodology and metaphysic of the ?original?). In the past, argumentsin favour of plagiarism were limited to showing its use in resistingthe privatization of culture that serves the needs and desires of thepower elite. Today one can argue that plagiarism is acceptable, eveninevitable, given the nature of postmodern existence with itstechno-infrastructure. In a recombinant culture, plagiarism isproductive, although we need not abandon the romantic model of culturalproduction which privileges a model of ex nihilo creation.Certainly in a general sense the latter model is somewhatanachronistic. There are still specific situations where such thinkingis useful, and one can never be sure when it could become appropriateagain. What is called for is an end to its tyranny and to itsinstitutionalized cultural bigotry. This is a call to open the culturaldata base, to let everyone use the technology of textual production toits maximum potential.

Ideas improve. The meaning of wordsparticipates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progressimplies it. It embraces an author?s phrase, makes use of hisexpressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.^[1]

Plagiarismoften carries a weight of negative connotations (particularly in thebureaucratic class); while the need for its use has increased over thecentury, plagiarism itself has been camouflaged in a new lexicon bythose desiring to explore the practice as method and as a legitimizedform of cultural discourse. Readymades, collage, found art or foundtext, intertexts, combines, detournment, and appropriation ? all theseterms represent explorations in plagiarism. Indeed, these terms are notperfectly synonymous, but they all intersect a set of meanings primaryto the philosophy and activity of plagiarism. Philosophically, they allstand in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text: they allassume that no structure within a given text provides a universal andnecessary meaning. No work of art or philosophy exhausts itself initself alone, in its being-in-itself. Such works have always stood inrelation to the actual life-process of society from which they havedistinguished themselves. Enlightenment essentialism failed to providea unit of analysis that could act as a basis of meaning. Just as theconnection between a signifier and its referent is arbitrary, the unitof meaning used for any given textual analysis is also arbitrary.Roland Barthes? notion of the lexia primarily indicates surrender inthe search for a basic unit of meaning. Since language was the onlytool available for the development of metalanguage, such a project wasdoomed from its inception. It was much like trying to eat soup withsoup. The text itself is fluid ? although the language game of ideologycan provide the illusion of stability, creating blockage bymanipulating the unacknowledged assumptions of everyday life.Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to restore thedynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by appropriating and recombiningfragments of culture. In this way, meanings can be produced that werenot previously associated with an object or a given set of objects.

MarcelDuchamp, one of the first to understand the power of recombination,presented an early incarnation of this new aesthetic with his readymadeseries. Duchamp took objects to which he was ?visually indifferent,?and re-contextualized them in a manner that shifted their meaning. Forexample, by taking a urinal out of the rest room, signing it andplacing it on a pedestal in an art gallery, meaning slid away from theapparently exhaustive functional interpretation of the object. Althoughthis meaning did not completely disappear, it was placed in harshjuxtaposition to another possibility ? meaning as an art object. Thisproblem of instability increased when problems of origin were raised:the object was not made by an artist, but by a machine. Whether or notthe viewer chose to accept other possibilities for interpreting thefunction of the artist and the authenticity of the art object, theurinal in a gallery instigated a moment of uncertainty andreassessment. This conceptual game has been replayed numerous timesover the 20th century, at times for very narrow purposes, as withRauschenberg?s combines ? done for the sake of attacking the criticalhegemony of Clement Greenberg ? while at other times it has been doneto promote large-scale political and cultural restructuring, as in thecase of Situationism. In each case, the plagiarist works to openmeaning through the injection of scepticism into the culture-text.

Hereone also sees the failure of Romantic essentialism. Even the allegedtranscendental object cannot escape the sceptics? critique. Duchamp?snotion of the inverted readymade (turning a Rembrandt painting into anironing board) suggested that the distinguished art object draws itspower from a historical legitimation process firmly rooted in theinstitutions of western culture, and not from being an unalterableconduit to transcendental realms. This is not to deny the possibilityof transcendental experience, but only to say that if it does exist, itis pre-linguistic, and thereby relegated to the privacy of anindividual?s subjectivity. A society with a complex division of labourrequires a rationalisation of institutional processes, a situationwhich in turn robs Plagiarism has historically stood against theprivileging of any text through spiritual, scientific or otherlegitimizing
myths. The plagiarist sees all objects as equal andthereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. All texts becomepotentially usable and reusable. Herein lies an epistemology ofanarchy, according to which the plagiarist argues that if science,religion or any other social institution precludes certainty beyond therealm of the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with asmany categories of interpretation as possible. The tyranny of paradigmsmay have some useful consequences (such as greater efficiency withinthe paradigm), but the repressive costs to the individual (excludingother modes of thinking and reducing the possibility of invention) aretoo high. Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one shouldinstead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited tothe social conditions of a given situation.

It is a matterof throwing together various cut-up techniques in order to respond tothe omnipresence of transmitters feeding us with their dead discourses(mass media, publicity, etc.). It is a question of unchaining the codes? not the subject any more ? so that something will burst out, willescape; words beneath words, personal obsessions. Another kind of wordis born which escapes from the totalitarianism of the media but retainstheir power, and turns it against their old masters.

Cultural production, literary or otherwise, has traditionally been aslow, labour-intensive process. In painting, sculpture or written work,the technology has always been primitive by contemporary standards.Paintbrushes, hammers and chisels, quills and paper, and even theprinting press do not lend themselves well to rapid production andbroad-range distribution. The time lapse between production anddistribution can seem unbearably long. Book arts and traditional visualarts still suffer tremendously from this problem, when compared to theelectronic arts. Before electronic technology became dominant, culturalperspectives developed in a manner that more clearly defined texts asindividual works. Cultural fragments appeared in their own right asdiscrete units, since their influence moved slowly enough to allow theorderly evolution of an argument or an aesthetic. Boundaries could bemaintained between disciplines and schools of thoughts. Knowledge wasconsidered finite, and was therefore easier to control. In the 19thcentury this traditional order began to collapse as new technologybegan to increase the velocity of cultural development. The firststrong indicators began to appear that speed was becoming a crucialissue. Knowledge was shifting away from certitude, and transformingitself into information. During the American Civil War, Lincoln satimpatiently by his telegraph line, awaiting reports from his generalsat the front. He had no patience with the long-winded rhetoric of thepast, and demanded from his generals an efficient economy of language.There was no time for the traditional trappings of the elegantessayist. Cultural velocity and information have continued to increaseat a geometric rate since then, resulting in an information panic.Production and distribution of information (or any other product) mustbe immediate; there can be no lag time between the two. Techno-culturehas met this demand with data bases and electronic networks thatrapidly move any type of information.

Under such conditions,plagiarism fulfils the requirements of economy of representation,without stifling invention. If invention occurs when a new perceptionor idea is brought out ? by intersecting two or more formally disparatesystems ? then recombinant methodologies are desirable. This is whereplagiarism progresses beyond nihilism. It does not simply injectscepticism to help destroy totalitarian systems that stop invention; itparticipates in invention, and is thereby also productive. The geniusof an inventor like Leonardo da Vinci lay in his ability to recombinethe then separate systems of biology, mathematics, engineering and art.He was not so much an originator as a synthesiser. There have been fewpeople like him over the centuries, because the ability to hold thatmuch data in one?s own biological memory is rare. Now, however, thetechnology of recombination is available in the computer. The problemnow for would-be cultural producers is to gain access to thistechnology and information. After all, access is the most precious ofall privileges, and is therefore strictly guarded, which in turn makesone wonder whether to be a successful plagiarist, one must also be asuccessful hacker.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to thethings that technology is doing. I have never been able to understandthis sort of fear. Many are afraid of using tape recorders, and theidea of using any electronic means for literary or artistic purposesseems to them some sort of sacrilege.

To some degree, asmall portion of technology has fallen through the cracks into thehands of the lucky few. Personal computers and video cameras are thebest examples. To accompany these consumer items and make their usemore versatile, hypertextual and image sampling programs have also beendeveloped ? programs designed to facilitate recombination. It is theplagiarist?s dream to be able to call up, move and recombine text withsimple user-friendly commands. Perhaps plagiarism rightfully belongs topost-book culture, since only in that society can it be made explicitwhat book culture, with its geniuses and auteurs, tends to hide ? thatinformation is most useful when it interacts with other information,rather than when it is deified and presented in a vacuum.

The present requires us to rethink and re-present the notion ofplagiarism. Its function has for too long been devalued by an ideologywith little place in techno-culture. Let the romantic notions oforiginality, genius, and authorship remain, but as elements forcultural production without special privilege above other equallyuseful elements. It is time to openly and boldly use the methodology ofrecombination so as to better parallel the technology of our time.

?FOOTNOTE

^[1] In its more heroic form the footnote has a low-speed hypertextualfunction ? that is, connecting the reader with other sources ofinformation that can further articulate the producer?s words. Itpoints to additional information too lengthy to include in the textitself. This is not an objectionable function. The footnote is also ameans of surveillance by which one can ?check up? on a writer, to besure that s/he is not improperly using an idea or phrase from the workof another. This function makes the footnote problematic, although itmay be appropriate as a means of verifying conclusions in aquantitative study, for example. The surveillance function of thefootnote imposes fixed interpretations on a linguistic sequence, andimplies ownership of language and ideas by the individual cited. Thenote becomes an homage to the genius who supposedly originated theidea. This would be acceptable if all who deserved credit got theirdue; however, such crediting is impossible, since it would begin aninfinite regress. Consequently, that which is most feared occurs; thelabour of many is stolen, smuggled in under the authority of thesignature which is cited. In the case of those cited who are stillliving, this designation of authorial ownership allows them to collectrewards from the work of others. It must be realized that writingitself is theft: it is a changing of the features of the oldculture-text in much the same way one disguises stolen goods. This isnot to say that signatures should never be cited; but remember that thesignature is merely a sign, a shorthand under which a collection ofinterrelated ideas may be stored and rapidly deployed.