A Prescriptivist Take on Plagiarism

[alixtii]

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, like "technique" is judged not by intent but by effect, hence a writer's arguments that "I didn't mean to plagiarize" or "It was supposed to be a pastiche" aren't relevant when it comes to writing published or put out there to be read by someone other than the author. Or, as Stanley Fish points out with respect to irony not as a "fact" but as a "way of reading": The decision a reader makes will have been possible only in relation to decision procedures that have been authorized by the institution.

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 about the accused parties in the recent cases is the way in which they are reported to have acted after producing the texts, the comments they made which interpretive conventions lead us to read as to having been made in their own voices and thus cause us to construct their intent in a certain way, as being having not made a good-faith effort. I say this without firsthand knowledge. A fact can be damning without being true.

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):

That's the subtle line between plagiarism and literary allusion. It's plagiarism if you copy someone's writing and you don't want it to be noticed that you were copying; it's allusion if you do exactly the same but you do want it to be noticed.

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:

if a fanfic story includes dialogue from an episode and a reader doesn't recognize it and praises the writer for coming up with such a clever line, fandom ethics generally dictate that the fan writer write back and say, "Yeah--that was a great line, but it's canon" rather than sit back and accept the praise for a line s/he didn't write.

[. . .]

So what if a fan writer takes a whodunnit plot from a not-so-well-known text and uses it, with little or no modification, as the basis for her television fandom story without giving the plot author credit? If a fan reader says, "Great story!", should the writer (even if the reader make no reference to the plot) catch herself and say, "Thanks!" and then, in the interest of full disclosure, add a note saying, "I borrowed the plot from a novel by ____"? Is it the responsibility of the writer to pre-emptively give credit for all texts from which material was borrowed? Is it enough to just give a blanket "thanks" to that other author without specifying how much of a debt the fanwriter owes to that writer's published text?

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:

even though discussions of Cassie Claire's stories may have introduced "pastiche" into the vocabulary of fandom, it hasn't yet been picked up enough that fans regularly recognize and accept and sanction the incorporation of another (non-canon) writer's sentences and paragraphs (as  fans do recognize "remix" and "OTP" and "AU" as legitimate, fannish genres).

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.

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, at the true extreme that would literally be the case--if you are an archeologist and find The Gospel of Anne that no one else alive has ever read, and use it in your fanfic without citation, then that's plagiarism without question.

Not quite as extreme, but still pretty clearly plagiarism for me, I own a couple books that were vanity published by a local community figure. There's no way anyone on my flist not there because we went to high school together would have read the books--and since I went to a private school some towns over, I have strong doubts even then.

A potboiler in a genre not often read by fansis further into the grey area, but possibly not by much, a beloved work of children's literature may well be coming out the other side into "not plagiarism," etc.

Is that any clearer?

[wisdomeagle]

then that's plagiarism without question.

Yes, but, if said archaeologist (we'll call him Daniel Jackson for convenience!) found the Gospel, wrote and posted the fanfic that relied on it heavily, and buried it on a planet about to be engulfed in supernova, then no one would know -- could even begin to guess -- that it had been plagiarized. (Textual critics *might* get suspicious if it were different from his usual writing style, or seemed like two pieces woven together, or whatever, but even they wouldn't know for sure.

So, I guess my point is, from a theoretical perspective it's easy to say "that's a case of plagiarism," but in actuality it would be impossible for anyone to judge because it would be so well-hidden.

Huh. I don't know. I think I'm kind of stuck here because of all the unconscious borrowing I (and I assume most people) do. I don't cite Joss Whedon every time I speak, though by rights I properly should; Gvambat, you, and Elizabeth have influenced my fannish sensibility so much that you should probably get nodded to in beta notes on every fic.

... yeah. I think it's the way that I keep a writer's notebook and collect interesting bits of conversation, song lyrics and poetry and my boss's complete inability to spell -- we're always borrowing, always depending on other texts for our texts' meanings, and while direct and lengthy quotations should be cited, I don't think it's actually possible or desirable to cite everything.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

It's true that the clearer the case of plagiarism, the more likely the plagiarist is to get away with it. This . . . doesn't bother me.

And I'm arguing that the account of plagiarism used by fandom (as described by Miriam) should be loosened somewhat; for my influence on you to count as plagiarism, I think that account would actually need to be made much, much stricter.

[lim.livejournal.com]

I'm arguing that the account of plagiarism used by fandom (as described by Miriam) should be loosened somewhat;

Uh, in case it's not clear, I agree with you.