Unformation

Reading a recent article in the New Yorker[1] got me thinking about plagiarism. It’s a very interesting concept because it asks us to understand the difference between fair use of another person’s idea, and stealing.

I’m not interested in a moral or legal discussion of plagiarism. I’m more interested in understanding what’s behind the word.

Fair use

Fair use could be two things; the unquoted use of other pieces of work or quoted citations.

Unquoted use is tricky. Every word in this post has been used by another person in the past, but not in this order. Whole phrases, perhaps even sentences have been used before. But this is obviously (I hope!) an original piece of work.

Fair use is using an idea or a small piece of text but how much text can you use before it becomes plagiarism? It would clearly be plagiarism to lift a block of 400 words from a book. But the wholesale copying of a single, tight, well-turned sentence may also be plagiarism. If I start a poem with the words:

“Once upon a midnight dreary”

…then I’d have plagiarised Poe. On the other hand if I begin a story with:

“Once upon a time”

…then I might be accused if using a terrible cliché but we all know that it’s not plagiarism.

Somewhere between the two is the fair use boundary. Where?

An original idea

Sentences express ideas that may or may not be original.

So what’s an original idea? Originality is a troublesome concept because if you subscribe to the idea of memes evolving as they spread between human brains, then any new idea is fashioned from the ideas out of which it is built. Nothing, therefore, truly comes from nothing. But I think it is more useful to think of an original idea as the pattern of concepts weaved together by the author.

Take that line from the Raven, setting the scene in the past on a gloomy night in a style archaic even by the 1840’s. We could say that this is the structure of concepts behind that line; put another way, the memetic DNA.

But the actual line in the poem is a very specific, contingent pattern of information used to express the meme. I could express the meme a thousand other ways:

• “Time ago, on a dark night”
• “T’was a miserable evening”
• “Midnight was a dismal hour”

Poe I ain’t. But the point is that the same idea is expressed, using a different combination of words to do the same job. That’s just writing. Once we accept that true originality is impossible then we’re left with the skill of weaving ideas and concepts into new structures.

Representing ideas

In previous posts [2] [3] we’ve looked at how ideas underpin text. A piece of text might come from an idea but different words or different combinations of words could also come from that same idea. So there’s a distinction between the idea and the sentences that represent the idea. It’s a one-to-many relationship.

Riffing

Of course it wouldn’t really be The Raven if we re-wrote it in our own words, even if we used the same conceptual map. And truthfully it wouldn’t really convey the same ideas. Each word we use imparts subtle meanings and sounds. They contribute to a unique conceptual symphony in every document which cannot be transduced by different language.

This is why I’d argue that Seamus Heany’s translation of Beowulf for example, is primarily his work and not that of the 11th Century scribe. Poems like Beowulf and The Raven are as much about the way they sound as the words they use. Poe’s rhyming couplets flow beautifully and his choice of words is seamless. But the constituent bits of text that make up the full work stand on their own too. Lifted from the work and placed into another a block of text and the ideas behind it might do an altogether different job.

In this post I lifted a line of poetry wholesale into my work but I’m not asking it to do the same job. I’m using the line to illustrate a point. I’m not trying to set a scene.

Comics do this all the time, riffing off lines, songs, pictures or videos; using the energy of the original idea to make a subtly different point. The act of using the same, or very similar language to make a different point is kind of self-referential. It’s not funny unless you know where the line came from. This is valid creativity and it seems to me, not plagiarism.

Fractals

The implication here is that the relationship between ideas and the text that they spawn as like that between a fractal and the formula that yields it. A simple mathematical formula creates a shape of great beauty and complexity. But these shapes vary. Even though the ”instructions” for creating the shell are identical in each Nautilus, no two shells are exactly alike. The gene does not wholly predict how the phenotype is going to appear.

So what is plagiarism?

With this in mind, plagiarism is the wholesale lifting of both the idea (unmodified by deliberate parodies or changes in context) and its precise expression in text.

Out of the thousands of ways to express an idea the plagiarist uses the exact one used by the original author. The plagiarist doesn’t “splice” an idea and create new work from it. Rather, like Frankenstein he lifts out a whole limb of text and transplants it into his own work. He nicks both the gene and the phenotype.

This definition is useful because it allows us to exclude clichés and clauses as they are a part of language, by definition no longer containing original ideas.