The genius, the grist, and the plagiarist

E.D. Huckerby 

Come autumn, I will teach in the rooms that framed my undergrad experience. It is curious to be back, as if I have illicitly jumped the fence between student and faculty. To soothe my imposter unease, it helps to recall the worst instructional moments I experienced back then.

I’ll make different mistakes, but hopefully less egregious.

An episode: I’m in an old, small auditorium, surveying the parking lot, the docks, and the Norwegian fjord behind to avoid looking at the man up front. He’s pacing, his long, thinning hair bopping as he gets more animated. The topic of the class was, possibly, The Divine Comedy, but what stuck is how the professor got across that “text” comes from textere, that is to weave, or fabricate, braid: “What is”, he barks, “the meaning of ‘text’”? He stops pacing, looks cannily at us, and asserts: “No student has ever answered this question correctly…”. When he smiles, taking on the look of a cat toying with mice, we all look at our feet. None of us ever spoke in his classes again.

While his question induced silence, the answer resonated. It felt meaningful to me to think that weaving and writing were the same activity. I have since come to add layers to the analogy: the ceaseless production of popular culture, journalism, academic articles, conjures Dickensian scenes of women in the textile factory. When I query ChatGPT, I envision gears trundling, spinning wheels revolving, spindles whirring – and then the algorithm is cast to pull threads together and forge me a formulation from all the text that is.

I find it hard pinpointing any essential difference between AI (still hypothetical) and us, because I believe what we all do, all the time, is to make an output in response to some input, roughly following the contours of what’s been encoded in us. Perhaps I’ve read too much Richard Rorty, who says some startling things about the nature of writing and thought using the image of the mill.

He says, for instance, that literary theory is a form of philosophy happy to “weave together texts of all sorts: a practice of “splicing together your favorite critics, novelists, poets and such, and your favorite philosophers”. It is a use of “raw materials” that sees philosophical and literary texts as “grist for the same mill”. But it is not only texts that are raw materials for our weaving and splicing: “As I see it”, Rorty says elsewhere, “the rocks and the quarks are just more grist for the hermeneutic process of making objects by talking about them”. Granted, he continues, “one of the things we say when we talk about rocks and quarks is that they antedate us, but we often say that about marks on paper as well”. We don’t make rocks, but what we do when confronted with either rock or text is to “react to stimuli by emitting sentences containing marks and noises such as 'rock', 'quark', 'mark', 'noise', 'sentence', 'text', 'metaphor' and so on”.

This is a sticky moment. It’s easy to get stuck in the constructivist mud and think Rorty rejects “the world” when he is instead working to re-embed language wholly into human doings and dealings in the world and with it. He would have been better off talking about everything as grist for the mill – all noises and marks uttered or written, all non-linguistic artefacts, everything not-humanly-made. All of this is fodder for our perception and imagination. In response we continually make and remake selves, friendships, communities, societies, institutions, theories (of love, of quarks), forms of government, and futures.

That’s some mill.

The textile factory, as opposed to the image of a weaver at a handloom, carries the vision of a process that keeps going in perpetuity. And what is lost in this industrial haze is the individual artisan. It is in artisanship the potential for genius, or at least autonomy, lies. Rorty talks of the “strong poet”, but let’s stick with our weaver. Machines reproduce, but the artisan has the will and skills to make-new. Despite recognising her indebtedness to tradition, seeing the “traces” (or threads) that go “from poem to poem” (says Rorty with Bloom), the artisan self-consciously forges something original, something independent, something with the potential to alter the(our) programming.

Yet some weavers/writers merely copy. Plagiarists attempt to pass off someone else’s original work as testament to their own autonomy. Hermann Broch defined kitsch as imitation without ethics; as artefacts mimicking a direct predecessor, copying superficial beauty but not the good, what is of quality – artefacts missing that vital element of virtuosity, or genius. In that sense, plagiarism is akin to kitsch rather than art.

Recently Norway’s minister for research and higher education had to step down because she had plagiarised large chunks of her master’s thesis (in law!). This happened after her department appealed a case against a student accused of self-plagiarising to the supreme court, to “clarify principle”. It was painful to watch. It was not simply the copying. She revealed herself as never having attained the degree of autonomy, of artisanship, we trusted her to have – as a leader elected to create change, make-new. As it happens, the prof with the impossible question has been one of the staunchest defenders of the student and the minister’s harshest critic.

That we are makers defines us as humans, but what sets us apart is our capacity for art – for rising above kitsch, above plagiarising, above casting about for formulations fitting a pattern in order to spit out an appropriate response to a query.

To write is to weave, but when writing is industrialised and the mill runs at increasingly high speed, there is only time to pile grist on grist before feeding it back into the hungry machine. Yet what we truly need in the age of emerging AI, is to raise artisans rather than kitschy copyists.

This requires room and time. For selecting threads and colours, for getting to know the warp and the weave, honing technique, and developing individual style. Education in the age of AI must train poets, not simply writers.

I’ll keep that in mind come autumn.