Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
vii. fundamental question: "not 'who is plagiarizing?'...but 'who is reading plagiarism?' in other words: why do some instances of literary repetition become plagiarism, and others become great art?" the aphoristic answers: "plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder and...plagiarism is power. in other words, plagiarism is pragmatic."
xi. object of the study: "not primarily the 'plagiaristic' text, but rather the sociocultural conditions of the production of plagiarism as a negative--or positive--aesthetic category, and the discourse that constitutes this production"...."plagiarism is a judgment imposed upon texts, and in determining the history and progress of this literary category what is needed is a study not of texts, which are not in themselves a priori plagiaristic, but of the judgments that have deemed them so, or that, on the other hand, have absolved them"
20. "plagiarists...are essentially failed or false authors--those who are seen to have transgressed or left unfulfilled the cultural function authorship defines for them. thus, according to the aesthetic and critical assumptions adopted, the plagiarist may be judged either a theif or a kleptomaniac; an imperialist or a victem of imperialism; a cultural industrialist or revolutionary"
31. "variously defined as 'unacknowledged borrowing' and 'copying,' plagiarism is clearly present in the second case...while 'borrowing' needs to be qualified by the presumption of covertness to be judged illegitimate. in fact, 'copying' implies covertness, because of the relationship of identity, and therefore of the potential for substitution of the copy for the 'original.' the accusation of plagiarism presuposes not imitation, but copying....and mistaken identity, in the realm of intellectual production, is a crime against the relation of authenticity subsisting between the author and the work"
59. "the Author is alive and well in contemporary aesthetics...surviving as a network of functions...not remarkably different from those traditionally attributed to authorship. at one end of the literary-historical spectrum, the existence of accusations of plagiarism guarantees the presence of the 'author' during those benighted historical times for which contemporary literary history has proposed his not-yet-being. at the other end of the same spectrum, the real death of the author would entail the disappearance of plagiarism that is posited on individual authorship and a proprietary relationship over one's discursibe productions. that this death has not yet occurred is a matter of daily experience....the theoretical impact of this limited death notwithstanding, the reality of contemporary accusations of plagiarism attensts to the durability of the attributes of the author: especially to the authority, authenticity, and originality that define authorship both as a privilege and as a transhistorical function." (<-- take that, stupid metaphor.)
95. "ultimately, if copyright is a function of the economics of property, plagiarism is rather an index of the intimate and timeless relationship of identity and propriety obtaining between personhood and intellectual activity--a relationship that appears independent of and impervious to institutional and social sanctions or conventions and that surfaces in accusations of plagiarism throughout history....the very existance of charges of plagiarism...is sufficient indication that usurping another's ideas, words, and expressions has always constituted an affront to the integrity of the victem, and a slur on the integrity of the perpetrator. the intense disputes that preceded contemporary copyright laws should provide a stumbling block to theories maintaining the modernity of authorship and of propriety over intellectual work, as well as a stimulus for their reassessment"
125. "readers of plagiarism, ostensibly recognizing repeated discourse, are actually...readers of an act in which they recognize the absent, but presumably dishonest, intentions of a failed author."
profit plagiarism
159. in defining plagiarism, the notion of "unearned advantage" is constant even when "the question remains as to what, exactly, is lost or gained in the appropriation of intellectual property"--"the two most important and intuitively evident contenders for undeserved profit are money and reputation (honour), which can be either intimately associated or completely separate"...."it is often not financial loss, or even the loss of potential fame or reputation, that is contexted, but the unearned gain, either financial or symbolic, acquired by fraud on the part of the plagiarist."
160. then again, it is also often money--"plagiarism is most economically advantageous in modern periods where there exists no legislation covering a particular practice, as in the case of 'cross-border' copying before the internationalization of copyright legislation....however, financial gain as a consequence of discursive repetition inevitably gets recast as intention."
161. the "two categories of profiteer: the parvenu or the industrialist, both...presuppose lack of talent": (you can't just be a bad writer, but must be successful at it to get noticed and charged) the parvenu is the "literary upstart...an untalented writer bent on rising above the level of 'grub street' and on achieving fame--or noteriety--by virtue of a genius to which he can only pretend," is in his most innocuous form "deluded rather than dishonest"; the industrialist "writes purely for popular success and the ensuing financial advantage. his economy supposes quantity, rather than quality, of production, according to the principle that the lowest forms of work will be the most palatable to the greatest number"
179. "accusations of industrialism and parvenu plagiarism are, these days, often conjoined, and the perpetrators may rather seem to take on the face of victims, inhabiting margins other than the ones defined by financial profits"--s.a. alex haley, who
181. "will not be unseated--he was both a 'great author' and a cultural hero by the time the accusations of plagiarism and fraud were brought forward" even though "his success was due to industrial modes of literary production, both in his own use of researchers and 'editors,' and in terms of the marketing strategies...applied to his work"--i.e. his work wasn't his alone but was influenced by & in part written by other writers; it was a co-authored, collaborative work.
185. in calixthe beyala's case, her "defense...shifts from 'reminiscence' to evoking the african 'oral tradition' to, eventually, charges of racism, in a move that may be more astute than it first appears....her counter-attack, while not constituting a defense per se, strategically situates the responsibility for condemning 'borrowing' as 'plagiarism' clearly in the reader's court, and shifts the terms of the argument from the author's to the reader's motivations."
imperial plagiarism
190. "while plagiarism is in the eye of the beholder, the beholder is not a timeless and objective judge, but is inscribed in a complex context of social, aesthetic, economic, and political determiannts that govern the reception of texts and judgments made about them....plagiarism, like literature, can not be found in a text, or even in an intertext. it exists only in the space circumscribed by texts, readers, and their cultural presuppositions, that is, in the pragmatic space of the literary context"
192-3. "translation-as-conquest" & "cross-cultural appropriation"--first you could steal/copy/translate ancient texts but not modern ones (although ppl did, of course), then modern ones were ok as long as they were from other countries/languages ("to take from one's compatriots is theft, but to steal from foreigners is conquest"--except then the foreigners' ideas get exhaulted & spread around, even w/o their names, so really everybody's still winning, just in different ways) (her larger point is that the conquest metaphors persist even as cultural definitions/conceptualizations of "conquest" shift)
206. "the theory of symbiotic assimilation" accounts for this, & "is generally espoused by...later post-colonial critics"; "edward said argues against nationalism in the study of world and post-colonial literatures, maintaining that 'no one today is purely one thing' (336)"
215. "cultural appropriation" & the legal limits (are there any stablized?) of parody are a whole other kettle of (borrowed) fish.
guerrilla plagiarism
218. & so ultimately: "'plagiarism' might be the necessary or logical form of aesthetic production available to an author who has been deprived of the attributes of subjecthood: as we have seen, only 'non-authors' plagiarize."
221. "the self-conscious display of the absence of subjecthood in postmodern artistic productions, the absence of authorship, originality, and authenticity, as well as the flagrant contestation of the institutional and legal apparatus for determining the nature of art and authorship, are intentionally subversive expressions of conceptual precepts which demand to be recognized as such" = guerilla plagiarism
228. "aesthetic negation enacts a kind of permanent pre-revolutionary moment whose goal is the examination of the negative condition of the subject, rather than the positive transformation of social, political, or cultural conditions. these efforts could be more properly seen as subversive rather than revolutionary"--to her, the "value" of these efforts "lies in its pure oppositionality to dominant power--in other words, whose importance lies in the pressure it exerts against the institutions it attacks, but without which it could not exist"
229. "gaugin's distinction between plagiarists and revolutionaries entails that the only true revolutionaries are plagiarists, for only they will ever escape the fate of becoming official in being taken over by the state"
250. "the internal contradictions in their positions make it clear that acker and levine both are and are not the 'authors' of their works. to the extent that they hold copyright on their productions, and avoid criminal suits for their copying, they are clearly authors. but clearly, their appropriations situate their work in an arena where 'originality' and 'authority' are not only explicitly contested, but no longer have the kind of currency that allows them to stand as criteria for authorship"
251. "in the end, guerrilla plagiarists are not real plagiarists, but they might be real revolutionaries. the question in this dangerous game remains: who is being had by whom?"
253. "appropriation art" is our other word for the stuff acker etc. produce; it "has now become fully institutionalized as a form of contemporary art"--& "the commodification of art is generally considered to be the fundamental point of the critique enacted by appropriateive art; the right of artists to appropriate images from the world around them in order to perform their social-critical function is an element of the autonomy of art that its commodification can be argued to jeopardize"
259. "authors may or may not be dead, but the space of authorship is impossible to maintain as a vacuum: a signature will always fill it up....plagiarism posits a non-subject as the non-author of non-art; the institution of postmodernism aestheticizes the gesture of subversion, re-creates authorship as a condition of negativity, and authorizes a signature in the place of the absent subject"
262. the shift of sci-fi into reality: "is the electronic form of the postmodern era about to introduce another 'post'--the era of 'post-authorship'? 'appropriation' appears to be neither theft, opportunism, nor plagiarism; it is simply the inevitable consequence of the convergence of technology and ideology. as such, it is seen by some to be a natural evolution, only threatening those species already on the road to extinction"