Where are your texts now?

This article looks at a writer who had gotten away with plagiarism, until someone dug deep enough to uncover his latest 'crime': a spy novel cobbled together from various sources, ranging from Fleming, Ludlum to even a nonfiction book about the NSA.

Copying is nothing new. As discussed in our last tutorial, the idea of tropes (WARNING: DO NOT CLICK UNLESS YOU HAVE THREE HOURS TO SPARE.) and classics make our world a much easier place to make sense of. 'Songs' by Girl Talk, which are the creative rearrangement of sections other popular songs, take the mash-up genre to new heights. The poetic medium has examples like Eliot's The Wasteland which references other poems and texts, and newspaper blackouts, where paragraphs from articles, horoscopes and books are subject to some extreme editing.

What did Quentin Rowan do that we aren't already doing anyway? Creating a personal narrative from existing sources and material from mass media seems to be how we interact with our social world. We decide what links to post and like on our online social networking profiles, which and whose other posts to repost and which song lyrics to cryptically sum up our last 12 hours of living in existential angst... WITHOUT CITATION. What a convenient label and reference point for only those 'in the know'!

Varying in degrees of 'copying', but all raising the same question: with so much existing text, why bother making new ones?

There is an obsession, especially in the academic realm, with making your mark in the world with an original idea. The arts don't seem to care, especially if there is a disclaimer that the act of outright copying is a 'tribute' and 'homage', critical satire or just plain tongue in cheek.

Or maybe: we actually encourage copying. Why else self-identify as 'neo-Marxist' or 'Weberian dabbling in some structuralism'? See what I did there? The latter label has no meaning because it hasn't reached label status. These labels only make sense if they are copied and if the labelled is close enough to the 'original' to be recognised as such. Why are these sacred texts are cited again and again? A cynic would gripe something vaguely about money and power and influence. Would anyone care where an idea is from if it was good, worked perfectly well independent of interpretation, and brought no fame and/or money to the person(s) behind it? A believer would declare because it is True. An academic would say because the 'times cited' count is high, and by reliable and authoritative journals, so hey why not.

We can safely say that referencing texts lend credibility and add dimensions to otherwise simple ideas. (Would The Simpsons be funny without pop culture references?) This post is not about exploring the differences between simple allusion and quoting/lifting, but offers the possibility that nothing is really original anyway. Stinchcombe (1982) looks at how the classics are important and even instrumental to the discipline, that, in my own understanding, there are benefits in being 'unoriginal'.

Drawing on Stinchcombe's idea of "intellectual small coinage", we may postulate that 'cultural small coinage' is how we see the world today. As mass media provides the means for a wider circulation, breaks it down into varying denominations and sets an exchange rate of sorts for this currency, texts that become tropes become 'legal tender'; they are accepted and traded, valued both in and of themselves as well as what they may be used for.

eliel