Last Straw

The mar­ket­place of ideas, like any mar­ket­place, is fit only for looting.

I. “Intel­lec­tual Property”

Many of us have been taught from our youth that “there is noth­ing new under the sun.” Whenever a child has an excit­ing idea, an older per­son is quick to point out either that this idea has been tried before and didn’t work, or that someone else not only has already had the idea but also has developed and expounded upon it to greater lengths than the child ever could. “Learn and choose from the ideas and beliefs already in cir­cu­la­tion, rather than seek­ing to develop and arrange your own,” seems to be the mes­sage, and this mes­sage is sent clearly by the meth­ods of “instruc­tion” used in both pub­lic and private schools through­out the West.

Des­pite this com­mon atti­tude, or per­haps because of it, we are very pos­sess­ive of our ideas. The concept of “intel­lec­tual prop­erty” is ingrained in the col­lect­ive psy­chosis much deeper than the concept of mater­ial prop­erty. Plenty of thinkers have appeared who have asser­ted that “prop­erty is theft” in regard to real estate and other phys­ical cap­ital, but few have dared to make sim­ilar state­ments about their own ideas. Even the most notori­ously “rad­ical” thinkers have still proudly claimed their ideas as, first and fore­most, their ideas.

Con­sequently, little dis­tinc­tion is made between the thinkers and their thoughts. Stu­dents of philo­sophy will study the philo­sophy of Descartes, stu­dents of eco­nom­ics will study Marx­ism, stu­dents of art will study the paint­ings of Dali. At worst, the cult of per­son­al­ity that devel­ops around fam­ous thinkers pre­vents any use­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of their ideas or art­work; hero-worshipping par­tis­ans will swear alle­gi­ance to a thinker and all his thoughts, while oth­ers who have some jus­ti­fied or unjus­ti­fied objec­tion to the con­ceiver of the ideas will gen­er­ally have a dif­fi­cult time not being pre­ju­diced against the ideas them­selves. At best, this emphasis upon the “author-owner” in the con­sid­er­a­tion of pro­pos­i­tions or art­work is merely irrel­ev­ant to the worth of the actual pro­pos­i­tions or art­work, even if the stor­ies about the indi­vidual in ques­tion are inter­est­ing and can encour­age cre­at­ive think­ing by themselves.

The very assump­tions behind the concept of “intel­lec­tual prop­erty” require more atten­tion than we have given them. The factors that affect the words and deeds of an indi­vidual are many and var­ied, not the least of them being her social-cultural cli­mate and the input of other indi­vidu­als. To say that any idea has its sole ori­gins in the being of one indi­vidual man or woman is to grossly over­sim­plify. But we are so accus­tomed to claim­ing items and objects for ourselves, and to being forced to accept sim­ilar claims from oth­ers, in the cut­throat com­pet­i­tion to acquire and dom­in­ate (before we are acquired and dom­in­ated) that is life in a mar­ket eco­nomy, that it seems nat­ural to do the same with ideas. Cer­tainly there must be other ways of think­ing about the ori­gins and own­er­ship of ideas that war­rant con­sid­er­a­tion — for our present approach does more than merely dis­tract from the ideas.

Our tra­di­tion of recog­nising “intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights” is dan­ger­ous in that it res­ults in the dei­fic­a­tion of the pub­licly recog­nised “thinker” and “artist” at the expense of every­one else. When ideas are always asso­ci­ated with proper names (and always the same proper names, in point of fact), this sug­gests that think­ing and cre­at­ing are spe­cial skills that belong to a select few indi­vidu­als. For example, the glor­i­fic­a­tion of the “artist” in our cul­ture, which includes the ste­reo­typ­ing of artists as eccent­ric “vis­ion­ar­ies” who exist at the edge (the “avant-garde”) of soci­ety, encour­ages people to believe that artists are sig­ni­fic­antly and fun­da­ment­ally dif­fer­ent from other human beings. Actu­ally, any­one can be an artist, and every­one is, to some extent; being able to act cre­at­ively is a cru­cial ele­ment of human hap­pi­ness. But when we are led to believe that being cre­at­ive and think­ing crit­ic­ally are tal­ents which only a few indi­vidu­als pos­sess, those of us who are not for­tu­nate enough to be christened “artists” or “philo­soph­ers” by our com­munit­ies will not make much effort to develop these abil­it­ies. Con­sequently we will be depend­ent upon oth­ers for many of our ideas, and will have to be con­tent as spec­tat­ors of the cre­at­ive work of oth­ers — and we will feel ali­en­ated and unsatisfied.

Another incid­ental draw­back of our asso­ci­ation of ideas with spe­cific indi­vidu­als is that it pro­motes the accept­ance of these ideas in their ori­ginal form. The stu­dents who learn the philo­sophy of Descartes are encour­aged to learn it in its ortho­dox form, rather than learn­ing the parts which they find rel­ev­ant to their own lives and interests and com­bin­ing these parts with ideas from other sources. Out of defer­ence to the ori­ginal thinker, dei­fied as he is in our tra­di­tion, his texts and the­or­ies are to be pre­served as-is, without ever being put into new forms or con­texts which might reveal new insights. Mum­mi­fied as they are, many the­or­ies become com­pletely irrel­ev­ant to mod­ern exist­ence, when they could have been given a new lease on life by being treated with a little less reverence.

So we can see that our accept­ance of the tra­di­tion of “intel­lec­tual prop­erty” has neg­at­ive effects upon our endeavors to think crit­ic­ally and learn from our artistic and philo­soph­ical her­it­age. What can we do to address this prob­lem? One of the pos­sible solu­tions is plagiarism.

II. Pla­gi­ar­ism and the Mod­ern Revolutionary

Pla­gi­ar­ism is an espe­cially effect­ive method of appro­pri­at­ing and reor­gan­ising ideas, and as such it can be a use­ful tool for a young man or woman look­ing to encour­age new and excit­ing think­ing in oth­ers. And it is a method that is revolu­tion­ary in that it does not recog­nise “intel­lec­tual prop­erty” rights but rather strikes out against them and all of the neg­at­ive effects that recog­nising them can have.

Pla­gi­ar­ism focuses atten­tion on con­tent and away from incid­ental issues, by mak­ing the genu­ine ori­gins of the mater­ial impossible to ascer­tain. Besides, as sug­ges­ted above, it could be argued that the genu­ine ori­gins of the con­tents of most inspir­a­tions and pro­pos­i­tions are impossible to determ­ine any­way. By sign­ing a new name, or no name at all, to a text, the pla­gi­ar­iser puts the mater­ial in an entirely new con­text, and this may gen­er­ate new per­spect­ives and new think­ing about the sub­ject that have not appeared before. Pla­gi­ar­ism also makes it pos­sible to com­bine the best or most rel­ev­ant parts of a num­ber of texts, thus cre­at­ing a new text with many of the vir­tues of the older ones — and some new vir­tues, as well, since the com­bin­a­tion of mater­ial from dif­fer­ent sources is bound to res­ult in unfore­see­able effects and might well res­ult in the unlock­ing of hid­den mean­ings or pos­sib­il­it­ies that have been dormant in the texts for years. Finally, above all, pla­gi­ar­ism is the reappro­pri­ation of ideas: when an indi­vidual pla­gi­ar­ises a text which those who believe in intel­lec­tual prop­erty would have held “sac­red,” she denies that there is a dif­fer­ence in rank between her­self and the thinker she takes from. She takes the thinker’s ideas for her­self, to express them as she sees fit, rather than treat­ing the thinker as an author­ity whose work she is duty-bound to pre­serve as he inten­ded. She denies, in fact, that there is a fun­da­mental dif­fer­ence between the thinker and the rest of human­ity, by appro­pri­at­ing the thinker’s mater­ial as the prop­erty of humanity.

After all, a good idea should be avail­able to every­one — should belong to every­one — if it really is a good idea. In a soci­ety organ­ised with human hap­pi­ness as the object­ive, copy­right infringe­ment laws and sim­ilar restric­tions would not hinder the dis­tri­bu­tion and recom­bin­a­tion of ideas. These imped­i­ments only make it more dif­fi­cult for indi­vidu­als who are look­ing for chal­len­ging and inspir­ing mater­ial to come upon it and share it with others.

So, if there truly is “noth­ing new under the sun,” take them at their word, and act accord­ingly. Take what seems rel­ev­ant to your life and your needs from the the­or­ies and doc­trines pre­pared by those who came before you. Don’t be afraid to repro­duce word for word those texts which seem per­fect to you, so you can share them with oth­ers who might also bene­fit from them. And at the same time, don’t be afraid to plun­der ideas from dif­fer­ent sources and rearrange them in ways that you find more use­ful and excit­ing, more rel­ev­ant to your own needs and exper­i­ences. Seek to cre­ate a per­son­ally con­struc­ted body of crit­ical and cre­at­ive thought, with ele­ments gathered from as many sources as pos­sible, rather than choos­ing from one of the pre­fab­ric­ated ideo­lo­gies that are offered to you. After all, do we have ideas, or do they have us?

III. Lan­guage and the Ques­tion of Author­ship Itself

Words, musical and artistic con­ven­tions, sym­bols and ges­tures, all these things are use­ful only because we hold them in com­mon — that alone makes them cur­rency for com­mu­nic­a­tion. Human beings, just like everything else in the world, are not isol­ated entit­ies: each of us exists as part of a vast web, as in inter­sec­tion of strands that pro­ceed from every dir­ec­tion. None of us could be what we are if not for the oth­ers around us and before us, and the nat­ural world bey­ond — our thoughts are con­struc­ted from the lan­guages spoken around us, our val­ues and nar­rat­ives are assembled from the found objects of this world; we rep­res­ent our exper­i­ences and memor­ies to ourselves in the con­fig­ur­a­tions developed by the civil­isa­tion that raised us.

This is not to say that noth­ing is ori­ginal; rather, everything is ori­ginal, for every expres­sion, every action, how­ever fre­quently repeated, issues from a unique point in the web of human rela­tions. But at the same time, this means that the recon­tex­tu­al­isa­tion of pre-existing ele­ments (which some call “pla­gi­ar­ism”) is essen­tial to all com­mu­nic­a­tion. And if every expres­sion is both bor­rowed and unique, it seems absurd to try to sep­ar­ate expres­sions into one cat­egory or the other. Yes, each of us par­ti­cip­ates in the con­tinu­ation and evol­u­tion of the lan­guages we speak; but in truth, the line between imit­a­tion and innov­a­tion is so blurry that any dis­tinc­tion are bound to be arbitrary.

If that is the case, then let us leave it to the sci­ent­ists to fig­ure out the chro­no­lo­gical details of who was the first to arrange words or musical notes in a par­tic­u­lar order. Much more import­ant, for us, is what we can do with these com­bin­a­tions of shared elements.

Some claim for them­selves the rights of own­er­ship over com­bin­a­tions they believe (rightly or not) they were the first to apply; many of them jus­tify this by insist­ing that these com­bin­a­tions are the per­fect expres­sion of their emo­tions or exper­i­ences, and that those who read or hear them are being gran­ted dir­ect access to their souls. But the fact is, a poem or song always has a dif­fer­ent sig­ni­fic­ance for the listener or reader than it did for the com­poser. The reader applies the words to her own exper­i­ences, searches her heart to see which ones will res­on­ate with the unique emo­tions she has felt. Like it or not, once you cre­ate some­thing and send it out into the world, it has a life of its own in the reac­tions and emo­tions it pro­vokes in oth­ers — and it will not answer to you or rep­res­ent you except by coin­cid­ence. For the writer, the true sig­ni­fic­ance of the work is in the act of cre­ation itself, in the rearran­ging and shap­ing of forms. Those who hope to retain con­trol of the products of their cre­ation after­wards are liv­ing in denial.

Thus we can throw out all the super­sti­tions sur­round­ing the author’s sig­na­ture — the ques­tion of so-called authen­ti­city, the glor­i­fic­a­tion of self-expression, the concept of intel­lec­tual prop­erty — and see the sig­na­ture for what it really is: another ele­ment of the com­pos­i­tion itself. The sign­ing of a work is a part of the cre­at­ive pro­cess: it offers a con­text in which the work will be inter­preted. What sig­na­ture could truly cap­ture the com­plete ori­gins of a work, any­way, con­sid­er­ing all the dis­par­ate and ancient com­pon­ents that make up any given work of art, and all the human rela­tions and innov­a­tions that were neces­sary to arrive at them? For that mat­ter, if the notion of the fixed, dis­tinct iden­tity of indi­vidu­als is also a super­sti­tion, that renders ever the pos­sib­il­ity of an indi­vidual sig­na­ture pre­pos­ter­ous! If one wanted to be hon­est, one would sign the name of one’s entire civil­isa­tion to one’s poetry or pot­tery, and add to that the seal of the cos­mos from which it arose — effect­ively com­mun­al­ising the work.

This being the case, if the sig­na­ture is just another ele­ment of the com­pos­i­tion, it makes just as much sense to sign with another’s name, or with a false name (com­plete per­haps with a fab­ric­ated iden­tity), depend­ing on which can offer the con­text that will best enhance the con­tent of the work. For once we are through with the delu­sion that we can own expres­sions — con­text and all — that will best serve to help us find ourselves and each other and, then, to trans­form what we find.