The Tradëscan Codex

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.

inlovewithnight linked to this article, "Harry Potter and the Framers' Intent," which discusses the way one should respond to JKR on Dumbledore's sexuality in relation to various theories of constitutional law. I used the same exact parallel in the comments of this post, actually, to discuss my position on authorial intent. What the article writer fails to emphasize sufficiently, however, (because he is too interested in selling his position on consitutional law, one I agree with) is that one doesn't have to go all the way to the place he goes wrt constitutional law to get to the rejection of JRK's authority. Even the position of a conservative originalist/textualist like Scalia would be enough to transfer the interpretative authority from JKR as author to the world as readers (which includes JKR, but also millions if not billions of others); the question of whether posterity should approach the text with the same interpretative conditions that we do is a question that can be saved for, well, posterity.

Scalia writes:

Two persons who speak only English see sculpted in the desert sand the words “LEAVE HERE OR DIE.” It may well be that the words were the fortuitous effect of wind, but the message they convey is clear, and I think our subjects would not gamble on the fortuity.

[. . .] As my desert example demonstrates, symbols (such as words) can convey meaning even if there is no intelligent author at all. If the ringing of an alarm bell has been established, in a particular building, as the conventional signal that the building must be evacuated, it will convey that meaning if it is activated by a monkey. And to a society in which the conventional means of communication is sixteenth-century English, The Merchant of Venice will be The Merchant of Venice even if it has been typed accidentally by a thousand monkeys randomly striking keys.

[. . .]

What is needed for a symbol to convey meaning is not an intelligent author, but a conventional understanding on the part of the readers or hearers that certain signs or certain sounds represent certain concepts.

And remember: this is the conservative position; the liberals would agree with it, and go even further (to the claim that meaning is even more manipulatable than Scalia would accept--but still not authorized by the [living, breathing, historical-biographical] author, but by a reader-constructed author-function).

The church down the street from me:

NO ONE IS TOO BAD TO JOIN US, OR TOO GOOD TO STAY AWAY.

Not all that interesting--languagelog is full of examples of intensifiers and negation screwing each other up in just this way--but it made me laugh in the "That doesn't mean what you think it means" sense. Although, returning to one of my old chestnuts, note that we do immediately know exactly what "you" "thinks it means" even though it seems to be at odds with what the text "really" says--that is, we manage to construct the author-function in a certain way, as having made a mistake, due to what we know about the socio-historical context in which the linguistic act took place.

(The Baptist church on the other side frequently provokes WTF? reactions from me--I'm still puzzling over "No one is poor who has a godly mother"--but the church up the street usually manages to have more reasonable expressions on their bulletin board thing.)

Okay, I better go take a shower now so I can go prove myself to be too good to stay away from my church.

executrix liz_marcs linked to this debate over the canonicity of the Season 8 Comics and as much as I knew I should, I couldn't look away.

So far, I have wisely refrained from joining in, because why bother when you know the other person is incapable of listening? (Although I always have to wonder at people who treat the term "canon" as if it were transparent. We as fen invented the relevant sense of the word. Nobody uses it that way outside of our circles.)

I do want to point one thing out, though, here because my flist is capable of listening. Now, it doesn't matter what Joss Whedon says. We as fen define what is canon. But if we look at what he did say? He never said the comics were canon.

He said that he understood the comics to be canon, and he understood them that way because he was writing them.

You might argue that the difference in meaning is small, but I never assume that Joss Whedon doesn't know what he's doing when he is using language. He made a statement about how he saw the comics. He never, ever told us as fen whether we should consider them to be canon. And I don't think he would, other than a) ironically, or b) unthinkingly. Joss understands that "[w]hat may or may not have happened is entirely up to the viewer, that's what makes it art."

(And seriously, if I'm going to read Joss Whedon-penned comics, I want him to treat them as canon. That doesn't make them canon, but I want him to treat them that way.)

ETA: And liz_marcs is my hero all over again, as I read through the comments more fully. She and janedavitt bitchslap this guy into the next century.

ETA2: And I finally gave in and threw my hat into the ring: ( Read more... )

ETA3: Actually, the whole exchange has me thinking about the fanboy/fangirl distinction I sometimes talk about with cathexys. This guy is so very much a fanboy. I can't help but think that his constant appeals to the Word of Joss and his inability to allow for any shades of grey in legitimate reader response somehow reveals an insecurity about his ability to exist outside of a hierarchical system--that he (unconsciously) sees fluidity of meaning as a challenge to his own position and power and privilege.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm a fangirl.

As remarked before in this journal, the underlying process of the game of "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" provides some interesting fundamental similarities and dissimilarities to other processes of inquiry: to a detective investigating a mystery, to a scientist developing a theory, to the work of logicians, linguists, and lawyers. So it should be in no way surprising that while going through my favorite blogs, I came across several matters of interest which speak to the philosophical issues at hand in the way we go about our canon-formation (speaking of canon here as a set of "facts" about a fictional and/or actual world derived from a text, rather than as the text itself).

( Language Log, Volokh Conspiracy, and Original Meta )

Via voleuse: hth_the_first on what makes a couple slashy, and liviapenn responding (not really rebutting) with "normal behavior isn't slashy."

See, the thing is: yeah, normal life is slashy. It's 'cesty. It's a lot of things, some of them things which even fandom doesn't have words for, that we don't see because we're not used to looking at a life-text that way. I've lived in an appartment with two other men, and I've lived in a house with my family members. And there have been perfectly innocuous events (doing the dishes even!) that if they were to appear on a television screen then yeah, I would read them as slashy or 'cesty.

Which is not to say that I wanted to sex with my roommates or my family members, or that they wanted to have sex with me. When we're looking at life, we tend to get caught up in the ding an sich, in issues of "what really happened." It seems perfectly sensible to wonder "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" when you've just had Lady Macbeth over for tea.

But literary texts don't work that way. Lady Macbeth has a dozen children and no children at the same time. The cat is both dead and alive. (Fanfic opens the box and collapses the eigenstates, so to speak. And this metaphor is so not my own; I remember wisdomeagle using it, but I doubt that it's hers either.) While for the most part we conveniently and deliberately forget that our life-text is a floating signifier (which doesn't mean that it isn't real or is radically modifiable or any other pomo nonsense, just that it's eternally cut off from the thing-in-itself), we can't forget that about our fannish texts. We can (and possibly should) argue over what is the most straight-forward interpretation of canon, or even the best interpretation, but not the right one. "It's just a story." (Real life is sort of story, too, but we don't usually look for morals in it, do we? And if I said, "The rain outside is a metaphor for racist intolerance" people would look at me funny, wouldn't they?) (Of course, sometimes we do treat life events as metaphors, like with tarot cards. But this is seen as an unorthodox response--and just not plain understood by some people.)

I mean, this is half the reason why RPF exists. Because John Kerry and John Edwards were slashy. Because William Moseley and Anna Popplewell really are het-tastic sometimes. (Sometimes as a deliberate choice on the part of the photographer, least as I construct the photographer-function.) Sometimes the subtext is a hint to "what really lies beneath" the floating signifier, as in the Lance Bass case, but I think that for the most case we (for at least the "my flist" value of "we") recognize that Kerry and Edwards weren't sexually attracted to each other, and that Will and Anna have almost certainly never had sex with each other. But because the signifier is floating, we can imagine it being attached to a completely different "what lies beneath," like Anna being a Vampire Slayer or Jason Dohring and Krsistin Bell breaking Katie Holmes out of a Scientologist fortress. (And OMG there's a sequel?! *goes to read*)

Do we really think that the only reason Simon could possibly have done what he did for his sister was if he were sexually attracted to River? And if we don't think this, does that mean their relationship isn't 'cesty? Because I think we can all agree that their relationship is 'cesty as hell and, if you privelege authorial intent or use interviews when constructing the author-function, deliberately so.

Reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness isn't like finding out whodunit in a detective novel. Because whodunit is revealed at the end of detective novel (although I'm sure there's some postmodern detective novel out there that doesn't reveal whodunit) and, y'know, that's text. It's only subtext if there is no explicitly right or wrong answer.

Cinematic texts have elements like the camera work and the soundtrack which influence the way we read a text without changing one whit "what really happened." But these elements are objective features of the text, and part of the communicative mechanisms which make up the medium. Reading a text is more complicated than just figuring out "what is really going on."

So reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness into/out of a text is a response to the floating signifier, to the text qua text, not to the Events Themselves. In Real LifeTM, if a brother accidentally enters a bathroom while his sister is getting out of the shower, that doesn't mean he wants to jump her bones (or vice versa). It just means they live in a house together and she forgot to lock the door and he neglected to knock or she didn't hear him and so he, completely by accident, saw his sister naked. That's what "really happened" (we say). And it happens. No big deal, although the sister probably isn't going to be very happy.

(Nor the brother, probably, who's likely to be actively repulsed by a combination of social taboos and the Westermarck effect. But we can read that repulsion as a performative act, either a deliberate dissimilation and pretense or as a less conscious Freudian denial. And of course this is why Freudian analysis is so much more popular in literary analysis than in, y'know, empirical psychology.)

And then, that evening, in the course of doing his wash, that brother takes his sisters' bras and panties out of the dryer and he puts them in a laundry basket. Hell, maybe he even folds them. This is Standard Operating Procedure in pretty much every family across the world that has its own washer and dryer.

But if I'm watching a forty-minute show and thirty seconds of it is devoted to each of these events, then yeah, it Means Something. Because things don't "just happen" when read as part of a literary text. Because we--if you let me channel Jubal Early for a moment--imbue them with meaning. We give it a purpose. We construct an author-function, and we decode a message, and yes, the decoder ring is jury-rigged so the message will be sex, sex, sex. The mechanism of literary (and within literary I include cinematic and other modes of artistic criticism) criticism is predisposed to read sex out of a scene, in large part because literary critics like thinking about sex. And so do writers, so they play along.

Let they who are without sin throw the first stone.

A long expositionary dialogue conducted while two female characters are dressed in towels in the girls' locker room is femslashy. Because yes, Virginia, the all-female space does queer the relationship, despite the fact that this is Perfectly Common Behavior and having conversations dressed in a towel in a locker room doesn't make one a lesbian. (I have doubts as a het male how often this type of behavior actually happens outside of television, but that's neither here nor there. Because, as I've said, "actually happens" isn't the point--there 's a system of cinematic signification and realism doesn't really play into it all that much at all.) (Plus we can't forget the camera as a placeholder for the het male gaze, which sexualizes things even further. I should probably have used two male characters in a boy's locker room, but that's not so much fun for me to visualize. But the point would be the same.)

When I watch Buffy and Faith in season 3 and see them as femslashy as hell, when the heart that Faith draws isn't a love-heart at all but really a vampire heart (with a stake through it), and besides teenage girls use that sort of heart imagery to each other all the time without meaning anything at all sexual by it (although I still think those interactions are femslashy as hell too), I'm not illegitimately reading my own interpretation into the text. (Although if I were reading my own interpretation into the text I don't see necessarily why that should be illegitimate, but I probably wouldn't write an essay for a grade on the Anne/Violet 'cest in Man and Superman just because there's not a lot of textual evidence.)

I'm using a more-or-less agreed-upon system of deciphering textual cues, regardless of whether cues were intentionally put in by the writer. (Are Rosalind/Celia so gay on purpose? Probably, but who cares if it's not deliberate? It's a facet of the text that's there. It even meets the non-visual criteria of hth_the_first's slash texts--and when I imagine it, it meets the visual criteria as well. Which is not to say that we would at all assume that two cousins who were that devoted to each other had to be sexually attracted to each other if it were happening in "the real world.")

And when someone points out that hermeneutic I'm using to interrogate the fictional text isn't the same one I'd use to interrogate real life, I answer: whyever the hell should it be?

And then I imagine them making out with their sister.

deliriumdriver was discussing V for Vendetta (the movie version, not the comic) in a flocked post on her journal, and it had me thinking about my own reaction to the movie. No one (and by "no one" I mean "neither deliriumdriver nor I") denies that it's a powerful emotional experience while one is in the theatre, but there is a sense in which it sort of falls apart when one thinks about it afterwards. (As opposed to, say, Donnie Darko, which had me screaming at the screen all through the ostensibly science-fictional parts because they made NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.)

Politically I suspect I am sympathetic to the views of the filmmakers, and I don't have any problem in principle with a movie being intended to be used to promote a political agenda; the intentional fallacy almost ensures the result will be richer and broader than the filmmakers intended. Some of my favorite literary works, from Shaw's plays to Rand's novels, were intended to serve as polemics (but succeed as literature for me insofar as they are read as failing at those intended goals; Shaw was a horrible polemicist because he always gave the devil the best lines). After all, texts don't speak with moral voices, or rather with a unified moral voice, speaking differently to different people in different situations in different places and times (who speak, so to speak, different languages).

Although from an aesthetic viewpoint I suppose I prefer a little more ambiguity à la Shaw (although the movie did impose ambiguity at points, and I suppose asking for the ambiguity to be "resolved" would mean asking for the movie to no longer be ambiguous), but I don't know what political message the movie was trying to make--or, to avoid the intentional fallacy, I'm clueless how I should be constructing the author-function. I mean, texts don't speak with a moral voice in themselves, but the message to me in this socio-historical moment was . . . I'm not sure. I guess I walked away with a feeling that dystopian governments are bad. Which is all fine and good, but did I really need to be convinced of that? Does anyone?

The claim that there is a point at which a government's authority becomes illegitimate and the only solution is violent insurrection is one that I can respect (and which, at its extremes, I suppose I hold--as probably everyone who is not a pacifist does). But the movie doesn't seem to answer the question of at what point a government has usurped its own authority, so I don't quite see what the point of the exercise was. There are not-stupid arguments that we have already reached that point, as Bush (or at least, Bush's lawyers) seems to be of the opinion that under Article Four he has the right to do whatever he deems necessary without oversight which to me is an interpretation of the text which makes Roe v. Wade look downright conservative.

And on some levels I'm just an idealist: is it better to live in a flawed government (and how flawed is flawed?) or to die for an ideal one. I'm already on the record that I'd rather a person let the Earth be destroyed than compromise their ideals, and this seems to be a related sort of ethical dilemma. I'd rather let terrorists blow up America than let people's civil liberties be infringed upon*, because otherwise what we're left with isn't really America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. And practically speaking, I have to admit that this isn't a realistic perspective (hence the idealism).

*Anyway to rephrase this sentence so the preposition isn't at the end of the clause? It's one of those passive constructions I'm so interested in, like "who(m) was whispered to."

As far as I can tell, V for Vendetta just channels (from the viewpoint of the filmmakers [at least as I construct the author-function] righteous and legitmate) anger with Bush and the current administration to a strawman (which I suppose considering the tradition of Guy Fawkes' Day is somehow strangely appropriate) and if anything I think that hurts their (my?) cause, because I walked out of that that theatre complacent with my life (it was better than the fictional England!--even though on reflection I'm not 100% sure how so) rather than, say, formulating plans to blow up the White House (or, as a nice middle ground, ready to fill out a cheque to send to the ACLU). (Which reminds me I really should fill out a cheque to send to the ACLU. Why am I putting it off*?)

"Off" is acting as an adverb in this question, if I'm not mistaken. Or else "put it off" just counts as idiomatic.)

I think my initial response to V for Vendetta was that I was too close to the events to really judge, and I think that was a wise stance. I mean, Nineteen Eighty-Four--on which most of you know I did my honors thesis--is a pretty shallow book if one reads it as a diatribe against Communism (or the Catholic Church or the BBC), and my English teacher who said that Animal Farm isn't "really" about animals, but "really" about Russians, plain didn't understand symbolism. (Animal Farm is "really" about animals and figuratively about Russians--but it's also figuratively about a lot of other things since symbolism is never an A for B substitution the way metaphor is.) (And a simile is a type of metaphor, except insofar as it isn't really a type of figurative language since similes are literally true.) (Most of my teachers probably didn't understand symbolism, which signals to me either a) I don't understand symbolism, or b) our educational system--both public and private--is a mess.) Brave New World--well, one of the things I like about Brave New World is that I can't reduce it to a single line of thought; I have no clue against what Huxley thought he was complaining. He's a little like Shaw in that respect I suppose (and I suppose that Brave New World Revisited could be seen as the equivalent of one of Shaw's prologues).

So the conclusion, insofar as there is one, seems to be that I should stop searching for V for Vendetta's moral voice (because it doesn't have one) and enjoy it (or not enjoy it, whichever the case may be) solely as a work of art, one which asks questions but does not provide answers. This is, of course, the type of hermeneutical process I outlined in my honors thesis, suggested for use on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, based on part on this passage from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him [sic] that he [sic] had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his [sic] propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he [sic] would not have the feeling that we were teaching him [sic] philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.

And because it seems an appropriate way to end this post, and because it's just that awesome, and because some of you might not be aware of it: Philosophy Songs, a site full of philosophical song parodies including "Antinomy" (to the tune of "Chim Chim Cheree"), "Solipsism is Painless," "Hume on the Brain," and (my favorite) "Supererogationisticextraobligation"!

I wrote yesterday that there’s a difference between the way fanficcers and fundamentalists approach their texts, with fundamentalists wanting the “right” interpretation with fanficcers only wanting the “best” interpretation. It doesn’t matter if the most reasonable interpretation of the Bible is that the Rapture is in two hundred years if God actually meant that it would start in an hour, and thus it is going to start in a hour. In a sense, fundamentalists still privilege authorial intent (it doesn't matter what God wrote as much as what God meant), and fanficcers don’t always do that (thank God).

Then it occurred to me that there are fanficcers for whom it is meaningful to speak of a difference between a “best” interpretation and the “right” one—those in an open canon. If one sees the entire source text as describing the same popsssible world, even when some of it isn’t written yet, then it’s true that the best interpretation of a part of the canon won’t always be “right.” Seen in this light, those fundamentalist Christians who make a reasonable conclusion about what Scripture means but are ultimately wrong can be sort of seen as being jossed by God.

This is of course why there’s an impetus to privilege authorial intent in an open canon like Harry Potter—it’s the best reliable indicator of what new canon will bring. Equally coherent interpretations of the same canon are only equal so long as no new canon is coming. It’s also why I’d be glad that I write in a closed canon if it weren’t for the fact that I so badly want to see Juliet Landau and Summer Glau to play their characters once again.