On 'Copying'

The word 'plagiarism' seems to come up a lot nowadays in discussions about writing, and student writing in particular. I wonder: why now?

I have been reading a book about the legal history of plagiarism (The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard Posner). This engaging book does not immediately assume criminal motives behind plagiarism - as so many university guides for students do - but recognises the complex cultural and moral issues behind the term and its shifting definitions. Also, how sensitivities around plagiarism are heightened by digital technology which makes the re-use of texts easy and widespread.

Plagiarism is one of those fuzzy concepts that is nevertheless used to make serious charges, usually akin to theft, fraud or deception. Posner's book recognises the need to be careful with terms in this area, to separate 'plagiarism' from 'copying', and both terms from 'infringement of copyright'. Often they are all lumped together.

Also, the need to distinguish between paraphrase as textual influence (or as the 'response' of one text to another) and paraphrase as deliberate plagiarism.

And, further, the need to recognise what he calls 'creative imitation' - how a text might rework, allude to, or borrow from a precursor or model. He gives some great examples here - Shakespeare's transformation of North's Plutarch in the Cleopatra barge description, Manet's allusion to Titian in his Olympia. We might add: rap artists' sampling, film directors' visual quoting, modern painters' collage.

Before slapping the word 'plagiarism' on a text, one would have to work through a number of other possibilities for what might be called 'copying'.

Simple, clear-cut accusations of plagiarism become more difficult if we accept that all texts are related to other texts and not just to their authors and/or readers. In many ways the digital world brings this inter-textual tracery more clearly into view; but it also muddies the waters of what we traditionally mean by 'authorship'.

Authors and Authorship

Most current debates about plagiarism still draw on a notion of the author - propositional, independent, originary - which much critical theory has challenged. I think at least some of the anxieties about plagiarism have something to do with this deconstruction, and its resistance.

Moreover, the digital world threatens the splendid isolation of the author as producer and 'owner' of texts. Writing nowadays is perhaps less a solitary than a collaborative act. It is, for example, a major commodity in online industries, like those where texts are packaged using templates, bought and sold (and re-sold) as models, ghost-written by stand-ins, or 'coached' online for a fee.

Writing, perhaps more than ever before, is a market, but the ruling notion of authorship is still based on originality. As Posner observes:

Ours is a time and place in which market forces favour originality and in which a robust concept of plagiarism backs up the market valuation.

However, looked at from another point of view, writing, rather than being the work of single authors, is increasingly absorbed in what the French social theorist Michel de Certeau called 'scriptural economies'. It was always so, but the digital world makes us more aware of it.

The current concern about plagiarism might be an attempt to shore up the idea of the sole author against the waves of those economies - and the profusion of available texts - which threaten it. And shoring up not just the sole author. Also the notion of 'grading', and the assumption upon which schooled writing depends - that a piece of writing can be incontrovertibly traced to an individual mind.

For me, the limitation of Posner's book is his uncritical acceptance of 'the market' as a determiner of writing's values:

...in a commercial society anything that fills an empty niche, however tiny, in market space has value, and that value is diminished by plagiarism.

Posner here adopts a market-oriented view of plagiarism and originality in which 'the book' is the main thing; he does not consider the possibility of textual practices bearing multiple values, and operating in different kinds of 'market spaces', even in the same society.

Interestingly, he does not discuss blogs and blogging, where 'originality' and 're-use' of texts play out differently to the book publishing world. He gestures to the new digital world; but his perspective stays locked in a juridical view of the individual and a capitalist view of the market.

'the copied text'

Linkage between 'copying' and 'criminality' is never far away when accusastions of plagiarism are made. Even Posner uses words like 'sin', 'culprit' and 'punishment' without much qualification, though it's striking how rare actual legal convictions for plagiarism are. It seems to be as much about social disgrace as punishment.

Against this background, it's quite hard to get other perspectives across. Plagiarism is seen usually as a moral/legal issue of theft of property and rarely as a psycholinguistic issue of development, for example, or a semiotic issue of composition (such perspectives would entail a change of terminology but would treat the same phenomenon). And the roots of this linkage lie in a Western tradition.

It seems to me that the western concept of plagiarism in academic writing owes a lot to the opposition of 'originality' and 'repetition'. To repeat is not to be original or to do anything new, apparently. If I cite the words of another then they must be counterpointed somehow to my 'own', authorial words. Authorship is here the frame that separates 'my own' from 'other' words, divides what is 'cited' from what is 'original'. If I cite, I must be an author.

But what about if I 'cite' without having words of my own to frame them? Am I then plagiarising? Am I then an author?

Aside from Derrida's acute and prolonged reservations about this problem of origin and citation (he argues for a profound 'citationality' in all language, in its dissemination), I am reminded of Walter Benjamin, who dreamed of writing an essay made up entirely of quotations from other authors.

Reading Benjamin again brings some much-needed fresh air into debates about plagiarism which are always tinged with anxiety and moral panic, and quasi-legalistic concerns that underestimate the slippery nature of words in use. This is not the least because of his awareness of textual practices in non-European cultures.

I love the sensuous movement of this passage, for example, from 'One-Way Street', which I copy here, word for word:

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.

Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas.

Walter Benjamin, 'Chinese Curios' in 'One Way Street' (1926)