Part III, Collaborators: A Funny Thing Happened in the Forum (Part I)

Rebecca Moore Howard completes her tour de force with a patch-written consortium of suspect theories stated as fact, and strident conflations of copyright and plagiarism – one a criminal violation of a statute, the other a breach of ethical conduct outlined in academic handbooks. Her tortured (and torturing) logic, or lack thereof, often borders on the hilarious. In one instance, she avers: “Plagiarism-checking software excludes both authorial intention and reader interpretation in the construction of authorship. By automating textual purity, plagiarism-checking software naturalizes the increasingly embattled modern economy of authorship, even as the human factors that it elides would reveal that economy as a cultural arbitrary” (130). I would have paraphrased this passage, but in order to do so, I would need to know just what the hell she means. First, software designed to detect plagiarism can only do what it has been designed to do – detect instances of plagiarism. Suggesting that software is a soulless machine that cannot take into account current theories (and theories, not empirical truths – those could be programmed into the software) of authorship would be like complaining that the ATM would not give me a thousand dollars when it is only designed to dispense three hundred. Her second claim builds upon the false premise of the first to conclude that software designed to detect plagiarism has become an arbitrary guardian of “textual purity” at the expense of all these more modern theories of authorship (emphasis on theories, mind). At least, that is what I think it means. The phrasing is so convoluted that I have my doubts that one can reasonably discover any meaning. Nevertheless, this overture leads to an even greater leap of logic on the next page.

In a nod to the turbulent period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries – or the birth of modernism – Howard marshals all her metaphors and allusions to attempt to spin her “mess” (flap): mechanized plagiarism in the twenty-first century and the postmodern attempt to free authorship from cultural arbitrariness (all the while making it even more arbitrary as they go along) becomes a power struggle between the old guard (regime) of “originary” and “proprietary” authorship and the liberators of academic cheats (my interpretation) (131). Foucault’s panopticon might indeed be an accurate description of the way prison systems use surveillance to minimize the number of guards necessary to guard prisoners, or the way totalitarian states turn individuals into a fearful watching herd, but it hardly equates to plagiarism-detecting software surveilling student papers; software, in fact, that in many cases only works if students are willing to submit their papers. Now if Howard wanted to analogize the NSA’s current data-mining of all our internet activities (or Orwell’s telescreen and thought police monitoring the citizens of Oceania), then she might have a case. But such silliness only undermines her claim.

Because I would have exceeded five hundred words, and your patience, I have added a second post, which represents a broader response.