A citation is always a little arresting. Even when the quoted words do not appear in a language and a writing system other than our own, they depart, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, from the idiosyncratic lexical, stylistic, and tonal dimensions of the discourse of the text in which they appear. The words I quote depart from my text from the moment they arrive in it and take up a place among the words of my text; in this respect, the act of quoting is always a liminal act, one that builds into the text a discursive threshold charged with rhetorical and ethical energies. As the figure summoned into that vestibule, a quotation is always a kind of foreigner who does not speak the language of the territory to which she has been taken, a stranger who needs an interpreter, who requires a measure of respect and, for that matter, protection.
When we talk about the practices of scholarly citation, especially with students in university-level writing classes, how often do we represent the words of others as strangers to our own, foreign bodies in our texts that bear with them all the potential joys and perils of one of the most fundamental human encounters, the encounter of host and guest? Far more often, we talk about the quotation not as an other, but as another’s property. Our definitions of plagiarism, in particular, implicitly or explicitly cast another’s words as another’s personal property. Failing to recognize the property rights the other holds in regard to her words, “using an author’s ideas or words as if they were your own and neglecting to give the author credit” (McWhorter 691), is thus tantamount to a property crime, subject to the stiff penalties our culture metes out to those who do not confer upon private property the respect it is due. “That’s plain stealing” (151), as Lester Faigley succinctly puts it, and indeed, regardless of the circumlocutions we apply when we lay down the law on the subject, at base we tend to think of plagiarism as theft, as the burglary of words.
We do so despite the fact that our word plagiarism actually invokes a different kind of crime. “Derived from the Latin word plagiarius, (kidnapper)” the MLA Handbook for Writers somewhat quaintly reminds us, plagiarism refers to a form of cheating that has been defined as “the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind, and presenting it as one’s own” (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality 2). To use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source is to plagiarize. Plagiarism, then, constitutes intellectual theft. (30)
So it seems the plagiarist embodies a whole gang of offenders—the kidnapper, the imposter, the charlatan, and the thief. But what kind of crime is it, then? Does our conception of this misdeed, like the student essays in which it is often committed, lose its focus because it tries to make too many claims at once? How do we get from the gross imposition of a kidnapping—the taking hostage of another person’s physical being, a crime worthy of being taken seriously—to the filching of an ethereal “product of another person’s mind?”
This chapter tries to imagine what happens when we reverse that transubstantiation, not to increase the severity of the “crime” of plagiarism (or, for that matter, to downplay its seriousness), but rather to recover something of the profoundly social and ethical dimensions of our relationships with the words of others that are too often obscured by the routine, legalistic, and fetishistic terms in which we discuss and deal with the “unauthorized or misleading use of the language and thoughts of another author” (Hult and Huckin 201). By drawing out the implications of the plagiarism’s origins in the image of the kidnapper, I want to conduct an experimental reorientation of our concept of this form of cheating, casting it as a failure of hospitality rather than as a failure to respect property rights. Kidnapping is, in principle the obverse of hospitality; it is capturing a hostage rather than receiving a guest. If can we imagine taking another’s words as a breakdown in the codes that govern the guest-host relationship rather than an infraction of rightful ownership, we might also be able to imagine a non-propriety approach to our relations with the words of others within scholarly discourse, a way of writing and guiding our students’ writing that does not simply take for granted that expressions and ideas operate as commodities in the intellectual marketplace. The marketplace produces the thief; the logic of the market lends theft a flawless rationality. In the present-day market-bound world in which we write and teach writing (and which, apparently, has infected our vision of writing, words, ideas, and other people), plagiarism appears little more than a kind of intellectual outsourcing. If someone else has already done the work, why not take advantage of it? Arguments about honesty and fairness and giving due credit and the “pleasures of doing your own work” might quite possibly strike many of our students the way appeals to respect for the rights of American labor strike corporations who can save millions of dollars by having their products manufactured in maquiladoras. High-minded values deflate into naive assumptions. In the face of this crisis, and it is a crisis, I argue that we might get somewhere if we stop thinking about a marketplace of ideas through which pickpockets are constantly prowling and try to think of the kind of space that produces kidnappers. Out of what kind of world does the kidnapper come?