ARTicles

Ayreen -- Utopian Plagiarism -- by Critical Art Ensemble

http://www.coe.uga.edu/reading/faculty/dreinking/Utopian_plagiarism.html

Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production

by Critical Art Ensemble

from Critical Issues in Electronic Media edited by Simon Penny

Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural world. Typically it has been viewed as the theft of language, ideas, and images by the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige. Yet, like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation of representation and the privatization of language that are suspect; perhaps the plagiarist's actions, given a specific set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to cultural enrichment. Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch and call it his own. In accordance with the classical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly accept able practice. The real value of this activity rested less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared. The works of English plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne, Coleridge, and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this day.

At present, new conditions have emerged that once again make plagiarism an acceptable, even crucial strategy for textual production. This is the age of the recombinant: recombinant bodies, recombinant gender, recombinant texts, recombinant culture. Looking back through the privileged frame of hindsight, one can argue that the recombinant has always been key in the development of meaning and invention; recent extraordinary advances in electronic technology have called attention to the recombinant both in theory and in practice (for example, the use of morphing in video and film). The primary value of all electronic technology, especially computers and imaging systems, is the startling speed at which they can transmit information in both raw and refined forms. As information flows at a high velocity through the electronic networks, disparate and some times incommensurable systems of meaning intersect, with both enlightening and inventive consequences. In a society dominated by a "knowledge" explosion, exploring the possibilities of meaning in that which already exists is more pressing than adding redundant information (even if it is produced using the methodology and metaphysic of the "original"). In the past, arguments in favor of plagiarism were limited to showing its use in resisting the privatization of culture that serves the needs and desires of the power elite. Today one can argue that plagiarism is acceptable, even inevitable, given the nature of postmodern existence with its techno-infrastructure. In a recombinant culture, plagiarism is productive, although we need not abandon the romantic model of cultural production that privileges a model of ex nihilo creation. Certainly in a general sense the latter model is somewhat anachronistic. There are still specific situations where such thinking is useful, and one can never be sure when it could become appropriate again. What is called for is an end to its tyranny and to its institutionalized cultural bigotry. This is a call to open the cultural database, to let everyone use the technology of textual production to its maximum potential.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the
improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress Implies
it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his
expressions, erases a false Idea, and replaces it with the
right idea.

Plagiarism often carries a weight of negative connotations (particularly in the bureaucratic class); while the need for its use has increased over the century, plagiarism itself has been camouflaged in a new lexicon by those desiring to explore the practice as method and as a legitimized form of cultural discourse. Ready-mades, collage, found art or found text, intertexts, combines, detournment, and appropriation-all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism. Indeed, these terms are not perfectly synonymous, but they all intersect a set of meanings primary to the philosophy and activity of plagiarism. Philosophically, they all stand in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text: They all assume that no structure within a given text provides a universal and necessary meaning. No work of art or philosophy exhausts itself in itself alone, in its being-in-itself. Such works have always stood in relation to the actual life-process of society from which they have distinguished themselves. Enlightenment essentialism failed to provide a unit of analysis that could act as a basis of meaning. Just as the connection between a signifier and its referent is arbitrary, the unit of meaning used for any given textual analysis is also arbitrary. Roland Barthes's notion of the lexia primarily indicates surrender in the search for a basic unit of meaning. Since language was the only tool available for the development of metalanguage, such a project was doomed from its inception. It was much like trying to eat soup with soup. The text itself is fluid- although the language game of ideology can provide the illusion of stability, creating blockage by manipulating the unacknowledged assumptions of everyday life. Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning by appropriating and recombining fragments of culture. In this way, meanings can be produced that were not previously associated with an object or a given set of objects.

Marcel Duchamp, one of the first to understand the power of recombination, presented an early incarnation of this new aesthetic with his ready-made series. Duchamp took objects to which he was "visually indifferent" and recontextualized them in a manner that shifted their meaning. For example, by taking a urinal out of the rest room, signing it, and placing it on a pedestal in an art gallery, meaning slid away from the apparently exhaustive functional interpretation of the object. Although this meaning did not completely disappear, it was placed in harsh juxtaposition to another possibility-meaning as an art object. This problem of instability increased when problems of origin were raised: The object was not made by an artist, but by a machine. Whether or not the viewer chose to accept other possibilities for interpreting the function of the artist and the authenticity of the art object, the urinal in a gallery instigated a moment of uncertainty and reassessment. This conceptual game has been replayed numerous times over the twentieth century, at times for very narrow purposes, as with Rauschenberg's combines-done for the sake of attacking the critical hegemony of Clement Green berg-while at other times it has been done to promote large-scale political and cultural restructuring, as in the case of the Situationists. In each case, the plagiarist works to open meaning through the injection of skepticism into the culture-text.

Here one also sees the failure of Romantic essentialism. Even the alleged transcendental object cannot escape the skeptics' critique. Duchamp's notion of the inverted ready-made (turning a Rembrandt painting into an ironing board) suggested that the distinguished art object draws its power from a historical legitimation process firmly rooted in the institutions of Western culture and not from being an unalterable conduit to transcendental realms. This is not to deny the possibility of transcendental experience, but only to say that if it does exist, it is prelinguistic, and thereby relegated to the privacy of an individual's subjectivity. A society with a complex division of labor requires a rationalization of institutional processes, a situation that in turn robs the individual of a way to share nonrational experience. Unlike societies with a simple division of labor, in which the experience of one member closely resembles the experience of another (minimal alienation), under a complex division of labor, the life experience of the individual turned specialist holds little in common with other specialists. Consequently, communication exists primarily as an instrumental function.

Plagiarism has historically stood against the privileging of any text through spiritual, scientific, or other legitimizing myths. The plagiarist sees all objects as equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. All texts become potentially usable and reusable. Herein lies an epistemology of anarchy, according to which the plagiarist argues that if science, religion, or any other social institution precludes certainty beyond the realm of the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with as many categories of interpretation as possible. The tyranny of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high. Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited to the social conditions of a given situation.

It is difficult to believe that a method of production as simple as plagiarism could have revolutionary effects within the institutions of culture. Yet if one reflects on this issue for a moment, it becomes readily apparent that plagiarism challenges the stagnant paradigm of privatized and exclusive culture around which these institutions are structured. If plagiarism were to be recognized as a legitimate and inventive act, bureaucracies in general and the university in particular would have to completely rework their criteria for hierarchical mobility and their notions of cultural production and cultural management.

Cultural production, literary or otherwise, has traditionally been a slow, labor-intensive process. In painting, sculpture, or written work, the technology has always been primitive by contemporary standards. Paintbrushes, hammers and chisels, quills, paper, and even the printing press do not lend themselves well to rapid production and broad-range distribution. The time lapse between production and distribution can seem unbearably long. Book arts and traditional visual arts still suffer tremendously from this problem, when compared to the electronic arts. Before electronic technology became dominant, cultural perspectives developed in a manner that more clearly defined texts as individual works. Cultural fragments appeared in their own right as discrete units, since their influence moved slowly enough to allow the orderly evolution of an argument or an aesthetic. Boundaries could be maintained between disciplines and schools of thought. Knowledge was considered finite, and was therefore easier to control. In the nineteenth century this traditional order began to collapse as new technology began to increase the velocity of cultural development. The first strong indicators began to appear that speed was becoming a crucial issue. Knowledge was shifting away from certitude, and transforming itself into information. During the American Civil War, Lincoln sat impatiently by his telegraph line, awaiting reports from his generals at the front. He had no patience with the long-winded rhetoric of the past, and demanded from his generals an economy of language. There was no time for the traditional trappings of the elegant essayist. Cultural velocity and information have continued to increase at a geometric rate since then, resulting in an information panic. Production and distribution of information (or any other product) must be immediate; there can be no lag time between the two. Techno-culture has met this demand with databases and electronic networks that rapidly move any type of information.

Under such conditions, plagiarism fulfills the requirements of the economy of representation, without stifling invention. If invention occurs when a new perception or idea is brought out-by intersecting two or more formally disparate systems then recombinant methodologies are desirable. This is where plagiarism progresses beyond nihilism. It does not simply inject skepticism to help destroy totalitarian systems that stop invention; it participate in invention, and is thereby also productive. The genius of an inventor like Leonardo da Vinci lay in his ability to recombine the then-separate systems of biology, mathematics, engineering, and art. He was not so much an originator as a synthesizer. There have been few people like him over the centuries, because the ability to hold that much data in one's own biological memory is rare. Now, however, the technology of recombination is available in the computer. The problem now for would-be cultural producers is to gain access to this technology and information. After all, access is the most precious of all privileges and is there fore strictly guarded, and this in turn makes one wonder whether to be a successful plagiarist one must also be a successful hacker.

Many artists and writers exhibit a fear of new technology. For some, the fear is that the technology will functionally replace them, while for others it is the fear that they will be merged with the machine in an undesirable manner. These worries are difficult to understand. Humanity has been merging with technology for millennia, ever since the tool became an extension of the body. Inventive technology has always required an active agent, and still does. The real fear is that the sole variety of technology produced in the future will be a kind that reduces the agent to the role of passive spectator. To prevent this possible scenario, cultural workers must create a sensibility for active technological participation. This can not be accomplished by treating the use of technology as a sacrilege. To some degree, a small portion of technology has fallen through the cracks into the hands of the lucky few. Personal computers and video cameras are the best examples. To accompany these consumer items and make their use more versatile, hypertextual and image-sampling programs have also been developed-pro grams designed to facilitate recombination. It is the plagiarist's dream to be able to call up, move, and recombine text with simple user-friendly commands. Perhaps plagiarism belongs rightfully to post-book culture, since only in that society can it be made explicit what book culture, with its geniuses and auteurs, tends to hide- that information is most useful when it interacts with other information, rather than when it is deified and presented in a vacuum.

Thinking about a new means for recombining information has always been on twentieth-century minds, although this search has been left to a few until recently. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, a former science advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed in an Atlantic Monthly article a new way of organizing information. At that time, computer technology was in its earliest stages of development and its full potential was not really understood. Bush, however, had the foresight to imagine a device he called the Memex. In his view it would be based around storage of information on microfilm, integrated with some means to allow the user to select and display any section at will, thus enabling one to move freely among previously unrelated increments of information.

At the time, Bush's Memex could not be built, but as computer technology evolved, his idea eventually gained practicality. Around 1960 Theodor Nelson discovered something when he began studying computer programming in college:

Over a period of months, I came to realize that, although
programmers structured their data hierarchically, they
didn't have to. I began to see the computer as the ideal
place for making interconnections among things accessi-
ble to people.
I realized that writing did not have to be sequential and
that not only would tomorrow's books and magazines be
on [cathode ray terminal] screens, they could all tie to
one another in every direction. At once I began working
on a program (written In 7090 assembler language) to
carry out these Ideas.2

Nelson's idea, which he called hypertext, failed to attract any supporters at first, although by 1968 its usefulness became obvious to some in the government and in defense industries. A prototype of hypertext was developed by another computer innovator, Douglas Englebart, who is often credited with many breakthroughs in the use of computers (such as the development of the Macintosh interface). Englebart's system, called Augment, was applied to organizing the government's research network, ARPAnet, and was also used by McDonnell Douglas, the defense contractor, to aid technical work groups in coordinating projects such as aircraft design:

All communications are automatically added to the Aug-
ment information base and linked, when appropriate, to
other documents. An engineer could, for example, use
Augment to write and deliver electronically a work plan to
others in the work group. The other members could then
review the document and have their comments linked to
the original, eventually creating a "group memory" of the
decisions made. Augment to powerful linking features
allow users to find even old information quickly, without
getting lost or being overwhelmed by detail.3

Computer technology continued to be refined, and eventually-as with so many other technological breakthroughs in this country- once it had been thoroughly exploited by military and intelligence agencies, the technology was released for commercial exploitation. Of course, the development of microcomputers and consumer-grade technology for personal computers led immediately to the need for software that would help one cope with the exponential increase in information, especially textual information. Probably the first humanistic application of hypertext was in the field of education. Currently, hypertext and hypermedia (which adds graphic images to the network of features that can be interconnected) continue to be fixtures in instructional design and educational technology.

An interesting experiment in this regard was instigated in 1975 by Robert Scholes and Andries Van Dam at Brown University. Scholes, a professor of English, was contacted by Van Dam, a professor of computer science, who wanted to know if there were any courses in the humanities that might benefit from using what at the time was called a text-editing system (now known as a word processor) with hypertext capabilities built in. Scholes and two teaching assistants, who formed a research group, were particularly impressed by one aspect of hypertext. Using this program, they believed it possible "to peruse in a nonlinear fashion all the interrelated materials in a text. A hypertext is thus best seen as a web of interconnected materials."4 This description suggested that there is a definite parallel between the conception of culture-text and that of hypertext:

One of the most important facets of literature (and one
which also leads to difficulties in Interpretation) is its
reflexive nature. Individual poems constantly develop
their meanings-often through such means as direct allu-
sion or the reworking of traditional motifs and conven-
tions, at other times through subtler means, such as genre
development and expansion or biographical reference-
by referring to that total body of poetic material of which
the particular poems comprise a small segment.5

Although it was not difficult to accumulate a hypertextually linked database consisting of poetic materials, Scholes and his group were more concerned with making it interactive-that is, they wanted to construct a "communal text" consisting not only of the poetry, but also one that could incorporate the comments and interpretations offered by individual students. In this way, each student in turn could read a work and attach "notes" to it about his or her observations. The resulting "expanded text" would be read and augmented at a terminal on which the screen was divided into four areas. The student could call up the poem in one of the areas (referred to as windows) and call up related materials in the other three windows, in any sequence s/he desired. This would powerfully reinforce the tendency to read in a nonlinear sequence. By this means, each student would learn how to read a work as it truly exists, not in "a vacuum" but rather as "the central point of a progressively-revealed body of documents and ideas."6

Hypertext is analogous to other forms of literary discourse besides poetry. From the very beginning of its manifestation as a computer program, hypertext was popularly described as a multidimensional text roughly analogous to the "standard scholarly article in the humanities or social sciences," because it uses the same conceptual devices, such as footnotes, annotations, allusions to other works, quotations from other works, etc.' Unfortunately, the convention of linear reading and writing, as well as the physical fact of two-dimensional pages and the necessity of binding them in only one possible sequence, have always limited the true potential of the traditional type of text. One problem is that the reader is often forced to search through the text (or forced to leave the book and search elsewhere) for related information. This is a time-consuming and distracting process; instead of being able to move easily and instantly among physically remote or inaccessible areas of information storage, the reader must cope with cumbrous physical impediments to his or her research or creative work. With the advent of hypertext, it has become possible to move among related areas of information with a speed and flexibility that approach finally accommodating the workings of human intellect.

The recombinant text In hypertextual form signifies the
emergence of the perception of textual constellations that
have always/already gone nova. In this uncanny lumi-
nosity the authorial biomorph has been consumed.8

Barthes and Foucault may be lauded for theorizing the death of the author; the absent author is more a matter of everyday life, however, for the technocrat recombining and augmenting information at the computer or at a video editing console. S/he is living the dream of capitalism that is still being refined in the area of manufacture. The Japanese notion of "just in time delivery," in which the units of assembly are delivered to the assembly line just as they are called for, was a first step in streamlining the tasks of assembly. In such a system, there is no sedentary capital, but a constant flow of raw commodities. The assembled commodity is delivered to the distributor precisely at the moment of consumer need. This nomadic system eliminates stockpiles of goods. (There still is some dead time; however, the Japanese have cut it to a matter of hours, and are working on reducing it to a matter of minutes.) In this way, production, distribution, and consumption are imploded into a single act, with no beginning or end, just unbroken circulation. In the same manner, the on-line text flows in an unbroken stream through the electronic network. There can be no place for gaps that mark discrete units in the society of speed. Consequently, notions of origin have no place in electronic reality. The production of the text presupposes its immediate distribution, consumption, and revision. All who participate in the network also participate in the interpretation and mutation of the textual stream. The concept of the author did not so much die as it simply ceased to function. The author has become an abstract aggregate that cannot be reduced to biology or to the psychology of personality. Indeed, such a development has apocalyptic connotations-the fear that humanity will be lost in the textual stream. Perhaps humans are not capable of participating in hyper-velocity, One must answer that never has there been a time when humans were able, one and all, to participate in cultural production. Now, at least the potential for cultural democracy is greater. The single bio-genius need not act as a stand-in for all humanity. The real concern is just the same as it has always been: the need for access to cultural resources.

How much longer must we contend with the insufferable
condition of an oedipal culture? There is no reason to
measure success by the ability of the junior cultural
model to eliminate its senior. In fact, such standards
should be the measurement of catastrophe.9

The book has by no means disappeared. The publishing industry continues to resist the emergence of the recombinant text, and opposes increases in cultural speed. It has set itself in the gap between production and consumption of texts, which for purposes of survival it is bound to maintain. If speed is allowed to increase, the book is doomed to perish, along with its Renaissance companions, painting and sculpture. This is why the industry is so afraid of the recombinant text. Such a work closes the gap between production and consumption, and opens the industry to those other than the literary celebrity. If the industry is unable to differentiate its product through the spectacle of originality and uniqueness, its profitability collapses. Consequently, the industry plods along, taking years to publish information needed immediately. Yet there is a peculiar irony to this situation. In order to reduce speed, it must also participate in velocity in its most intense form, that of spectacle. It must claim to defend "quality and standards," and it must invent celebrities. Such endeavors require the immediacy of advertising- that is, full participation in the simulacra that will be the industry's own destruction.

Hence for the bureaucrat, from an everyday life perspective, the author is alive and well. S/he can be seen and touched, and traces of h/is existence are on the covers of books and magazines everywhere in the form of the signature. To such evidence, theory can only respond with the maxim that the meaning of a given text derives exclusively from its relation to other texts. Such texts are contingent upon what came before them, the context in which they are placed, and the interpretive ability of the reader. This argument is of course unconvincing to the social segments caught in cultural lag. So long as this is the case, no recognized historical legitimation will support the producers of recombinant texts, who will always be suspect to the keepers of "high" culture.

Who can excuse the nauseating self-importance of the
person claiming to have written a document in h/er own
words! Artist and poets do not steal the vitality of words;
instead they recognize and maintain the autonomy of
words. Compelling writing is liberating; it frees us from
convention. Now, whose words were they again?

The invention of the video portapak in the late 1960s and early 70s led to considerable speculation among radical media artists that in the near future, everyone would have access to such equipment, causing a revolution in the television industry. Many hoped that video would become the ultimate tool for distributable democratic art. Each home would become its own production center, and the reliance on network television for electronic information would be only one of many options. Unfortunately this prophecy never came to pass. In the democratic sense, video did little more than super 8 film to redistribute the capacity for image production, and it has had little or no effect on image distribution. Any video besides home movies has remained in the hands of an elite technocratic class, although (as with any class) there are marginalized segments that resist the media industry and maintain a program of decentralization.

The video revolution failed for two reasons-a lack of access and an absence of desire. Gaining access to the hardware, particularly post-production equipment, has remained as difficult as ever, nor are there any regular distribution points beyond the local public access offered by some cable TV franchises. It has also been hard to convince those outside of technocratic class why they should want to do something with video, even if they had access to equip ment. This is quite understandable when one considers that media images are provided in such an overwhelming quantity that the thought of producing more is empty. The contemporary plagiarist faces precisely the same discouragement. The potential for generating recombinant texts at present is just that-potential. It does at least have a wider base, since the computer technology for making recombinant texts has escaped the technocratic class and spread to the bureaucratic class; however, electronic cultural production has by no means become the democratic form that utopian plagiarists still hope it will be.

The immediate problems are obvious. The cost of technology for productive plagiarism is still too high. Even if one chooses to use the less efficient form of a handwritten plagiarist manuscript, desktop publishing technology is required to distribute it, since no publishing house will accept it. Further, the population in the U.S. is generally skilled only at receiving information, not at producing it. With this exclusive structure solidified, technology and the desire and ability to use it remain centered in utilitarian economy, and hence not much time is given to the technology's aesthetic or resistant possibilities.

In addition to these obvious barriers, there is a more insidious problem that emerges from the social schizophrenia of the U.S. While its political system is theoretically based on democratic principles of inclusion, its economic system is based on the principle of exclusion. Consequently, as a luxury itself, the cultural superstructure tends towards exclusion as well. This economic principle determined the invention of copyright, which originally developed not in order to protect writers, but to reduce competition among publishers. In seventeenth-century England, where copyright first appeared, the goal was to reserve for publishers themselves, in perpetuity, the exclusive right to print certain books. The justification, of course, was that when formed into a literary work, language has the author's personality imposed upon it, thereby marking it as private property. Under this mythology, copyright has flourished in late capitalism, setting the legal precedent to privatize any cultural item, whether it is an image, a word, or a sound. Thus the plagiarist (even of the technocratic class) is kept in a deeply marginal position, regardless of the Inventive and efficient uses his or her methodology may have for the current state of technology and knowledge.

What is the point of saving language when there is no
longer anything to say?

The present requires us to rethink and re-present the notion of plagiarism. Its function has for too long been devalued by an ideology with little place in technoculture. Let the romantic notions of originality, genius, and authorship remain, but as elements for cultural production without special privilege above other equally useful elements. It is time to openly and boldly use the methodology of recombination so as to better parallel the technology of our time.

Notes
1. In Its more heroic form the footnote has a low-speed hypertextual function-that is, connecting the reader with other sources of information that can further articulate the producer's words. It points to additional information too lengthy to include in the text itself. This is not an objectionable function. The footnote is also a means of surveillance by which one can "check up" on a writer, to be sure that s/he is not improperly using an idea or phrase from the work of another. This function makes the footnote problematic, although It may be appropriate as a means of verifying conclusions in a quantitative study, for example. The surveillance function of the foot note imposes fixed interpretations on a linguistic sequence, and implies ownership of language and ideas by the individual cited. The note becomes an homage to the genius who supposedly originated the Idea. This would be acceptable if all who deserved credit got their due; however, such crediting is impossible, since it would begin an infinite regress. Consequently, that which is most feared occurs: the labor of many is stolen, smuggled in under the authority of the signature that is cited. In the case of those cited who are still living, this designation of authorial ownership allows them to collect rewards for the work of others. It must be realized that writing itself Is theft: it is a changing of the features of the old culture-text in much the same way one disguises stolen goods. This Is not to say that signatures should never be cited; but remember that the signature is merely a sign, a shorthand under which a collection of interrelated Ideas may be stored and rapidly deployed.

2. Ted Nelson, On the Road to Xanadu, Personal Computing 11, no. 12 (December 1987): 169.

3. Paul Saffo, What You Need to Know About Hypertext, Personal Computing 11, no. 12 (December 1987): 169.

4. James V. Catano, Poetry and Computers: Experimenting with the Communal Text, Computers and the Humanities 13 (1979): 269.

5. Ibid., 269.

6. Ibid., 270.

7. George P. Landow, Changing Texts, changing Readers: Hypertext in Literary Education, Criticism, and Scholarship, in Reorientations: Critical Theories & Pedagogies, by Bruce Henrickson and Thais E. Morgan (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 134.

8. If the signature is a form of cultural shorthand, then it is not necessarily horrific on occasion to sabotage the structures so they do not fall Into rigid complacency. Attributing words to an image, i.e., an intellectual celebrity, is inappropriate. The image is a tool for playful use, like any culture-text or part thereof. It is just as necessary to imagine the history of the spectacular image, and write it as imagined, as it is to show fidelity to its current factual structure. One should choose the method that best suits the context of production, one that will render the greater possibility for interpretation. The producer of recombinant texts augments the language and often preserves the generalized code, as when Karen Eliot quoted Sherrie Levine as saying, Plagiarism? I just don't like the way it tastes.

9. It goes without saying that one is not limited to correctlng a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of these fragments in any appropriate way, leav ing the constipated to their slavish preservations of citations.