There is an old saying: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
In today’s world, is any thing original anymore?
There is a growing perception in the academic and scientific communities that a person’s actions and behavior can be traced to external influences. It’s the same logic that drives the theory of evolution in the face of seemingly useless adaptations. And it makes sense — just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean the reasons aren’t there.
And our post-modern, cultural self-consciousness has been reflecting these insecurities over our own creative authority.
In an excerpt from his recent book, “Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kenneth Goldsmith, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses this problem in the world of literature.
“I'm sensing that literature … is in a rut,” Goldsmith wrote. “(It's) tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and is unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time.”
That cultural discourse, Goldsmith said, is the result of technological innovations of the copy/paste function and of the Internet.
Artists in many other disciplines — painting, music, etc. — have been operating in an “open-source” environment for a long time, freely taking ideas, lyrics, etc. from other artists and weaving them their own “original creation,” be it a song or a painting.
However, Goldsmith notes that literature continues to obsess over authorship and “most writing proceeds as if the Internet had never happened.”
The new literary zeitgeist, he argued, should embrace this “patch writing” in their new methodology.
He cites Marjorie Perloff, a prominent literary critic, for use of the phrase “unoriginal genius” to indicate the artist with this new skill set: The idea is that “context is the new content.” Perhaps the decisions of what to steal and compile involves just as much skill as writing the original fragments.
Here, it is important to distinguish between academic and creative writing.
In academic writing, we use stolen ideas all of the time — it is an indispensable part of persuasive writing. Except, unlike with creative writing, we use citations. If not, it is called plagiarism.
And academic integrity desperately needs to be upheld. Especially today, when even academic figureheads like Harvard Professor Marc Hauser are caught in scandals manipulating scientific data, and while the relevance of the humanities are continually met with suspicion over more practical fields like engineering.
However, creative writers don’t play by the same ethical rules as scholars. Their work has always been, and will always be, a continual process of telling and re-telling. Inspiration does not always emanate from within; writers will continually look back to their dead predecessors for inspiration.
This is a good thing.
Certainly, there is intellectual and even artistic merit in creating a seamless rhetorical collage of emotional and stimulating passages.
But claiming that there is nothing original left to write in the English language is akin to a patent official claiming, “everything that can be invented has been invented” in the 19th century.
Of course, technology, like literature, builds upon itself, but that doesn’t mean that new and original ideas won’t be pursued rigorously, constantly.
Perhaps it just takes patience — the one thing the Internet doesn’t have.
Reach the columnist at djoconn1@asu.edu. Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
