Remix Culture

Per The New Yorker, a 17-year-old German has become the latest in a long line of authors to incorporate other writers’ work without attribution into a novel. The response over at The New Yorker strikes me as a little naive.

But where does such logic lead us? In most universities (hopefully all universities), plagiarism is an offense punishable by expulsion. Does this mean that if a student rips whole pages from Adam Smith for his paper on capitalism without citing or crediting the work he shouldn’t be penalized? That his action should be understood merely as “mixing” Smith’s statements in with his own? Surely not, and the same rules should apply to any other printed text, whether it’s a newspaper article, a screenplay, or a coming-of-age German novel.

I would venture to suggest that that’s a small bit of difference between a purported work of art and a term paper. Obviously scholarship has a long legacy of attribution built into it, and there are strong norms and best practices surrounding the correct way to quote, paraphrase, and credit fellow scholars.

The world of art is, well, different. To say the least, when Duchamp appropriated a urinal most people weren’t concerned about issues of copyright. Or, to take an example from literature, Georges Perec and Jose Manuel Prieto haven’t been accused of plagiarism despite unattributed direct quotes from some of the greatest writers in the history of literature. And let’s not even get started with William S. Burroughs, who, contrary to The New Yorker’s assertions, did indeed prove that cutting and pasting was writing.

Obviously there’s a difference between appropriating from another work in a truly creative capacity and just being lazy and shoveling a bunch of prose from another work into yours, which gets into the distinction made by T.S. Eliot in his famous quote “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” I’ve long taken “borrow” to mean just that: lesser artists are incapable of truly making another writer’s work their own, so they borrow it, and it shows. It looks out of place, it looks like something someone grabbed from someone else. Whereas the stealers, the true artists, they possess another’s work. They take ownership of it, to the point that no one wonders if said work came from anywhere else.

Not so many people are capable of this, and I’d say there’s a direct relationship between the amount you steal and the difficulty of preventing anyone from noticing. Which is all to say, I’m not so concerned that we’ll soon see a rash of borrowing among writers.

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