A Prescriptivist Take on Plagiarism

The "plagiarism = use without attribution" meme is going around again, and whenever it does, it really, really bugs me because by that standard Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both plagiarists--and any standard which results in that conclusion is for me a reductio ad absurdum. miriam_heddy has a good post discussing some of the issues here, but there are some things I want to say myself--mostly, I think, in parallel with her. She writes:

( plagiarism is judged by effect )

I'm not 100% sure whether she is writing in her own voice or merely summarizing a certain paradigm; her post is mostly descriptive, analyzing (quite well) the way "plagiarism" functions as a normative concept differently in academia and in fandom. But it doesn't really matter, because it's the paradigm cited above to which I'm going to respond in this moment as I make my extremely prescriptive argument as to what plagiarism is and is not. Under my view, the claim above isn't wrong so much as it is misleading, and (as miriam_heddy clearly recognizes) parallels issues of author intentionality in general. So I'd accept her use of Fish, but modify it with a use of Foucault (drawing on "What is an Author?").

It's not as simple as "what the author meant" or even "what the reader thinks," but a more complex hybrid: "what the reader thinks the author meant." The author's intentions are very much involved, but only insofar as constructed by the reader, as an author-function. Which was in my mind when I hazarded that perhaps ethics is about constructing a moral-agent function. I say in that post, parenthetically, regarding the then-recent "American President"/reel_sga wank (ETA: see here, courtesy of fairestcat), in which large portions of Sorkin dialogue were used in an SGA fusion:

( the most damning facts )

In other words, the problem wasn't that they used other texts in their own without citation, but that when people complimented on those specific passages, they didn't say, "Thanks! Eliot really could write couldn't he?" but instead accepted the praise for themselves. That is the dividing line between allusion and plagiarism, I continue to insist.

I've already made it clear I've posted in this issue before; most recently was here, when I linked to this languagelog post with commentary, which gave the following distinction between plagiarism and allusion (I quoted it even more extensively in my previous post):

( subtle line between plagiarism and allusion )

Note the reliance on (a readerly construct of?) authorial intent here; what matters is not whether something is noticed or not noticed but whether (we think) the alleged plagiarist wanted the plagiarism to be noticed. She could have misjudged her audience, and expected they would, say, recognize Buffy quotes in a Harry Potter fic, when it turns out they actually don't (what's wrong with them?). (I certainly don't recognize all of Pound's allusions in the Cantos, but that's why I have a trusty compendium--it's my fault for not living up to Pound's rather clear expectations, not his fault for having too high expectations.) I cited the Angel quotes in this XMM fic just to be safe, but I really feel like I shouldn't have had to do that--it was a virtual certainty that my flist would recognize the scene I was paying homage to. I could have been wrong (although judging by the response, I wouldn't have been), but it would still have been in good faith.

Of course, it's fairly easy to construct the intent of an author/moral agent who utilizes a passage from an obscure passage of which no one has ever heard; equally easy is it to construct that of one who uses an instantly recognizable line of Shakespeare. The problematic cases which lie in the grey area between are much harder to judge, but my inclination is always, in the name of increased artistic freedom, to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

miriam_heddy certainly seems to recognize all of this:

( fandom ethics generally dictate )

Yet miriam_heddy remains in the descriptivist mode; in the end, she seems happy to simply try to more clearly articulate what the fannish mores are which pervail at this socio-historical location:

( the vocabulary of fandom )

I'm not happy with that, because I'm afraid that if Eliot and Pound were in fandom, the fen would burn them in effigy right next to [insert accused plagiarist here], and I'm more than willing to take a normative stance on that as a very bad thing. If we're continuing the paralleling of ethics and literary criticism, my stance can be compared to feminist or post-colonial criticism: readings of a text given to multiple interpretations, but with a strong normative claim about the way we should be reading. There is something specifically deficient and detrimental about a definition of plagiarism as strictly equivalent to mere "use without attribution."

Note that I have no opinion on whether any specific individual is or is not a plagiarist by the standards I suggest (for one thing, I have no experience of their audiences, and thus what those audiences could reasonably be expected to know); I only want to ensure that all individuals are judged by the correct set of standards. The target of people's scorn may well deserve it; but when dishing it out, there's a very real danger in nonetheless painting with too wide a brush.

Memes, Stocking

( I resolve to lose ten metaethics by March. )

I'd do the "12 days of Christmas" meme but my interests, and thus my results, have not noticeably changed since last year (other than the deletion of "fictional incest" during Strikethrough). So you can go to that post, and while you're there leave things in my virtual Christmas stocking!