Paying the Rent: languaging particularity and novelty

Issues of plagiarism and originality have been revivified by the internet in two distinct ways. First, the internet has provided new resources for both school learning and school cheating — raising values of individual responsibility, academic integrity and institutional policing. Second, the internet has heightened the tension between intellectual property and the cultural commons — raising values of economic reward and ownership versus those of cultural heritage, communal creativity, and critical comment. A Bakhtinian way of sorting through these two important sets of issues, without conflating the distinct sets of concerns, is to recognize how deeply we are always embedded in the language of others, using and responding to utterances that proceeded ours, while also recognizing the supplement of originality, freshness, or situational specificity expected in particular tasks. When we analyze academic and other situations from this perspective we find that the expected reliance on the cultural commons and the expected supplement varies from task to task, and a procedure which is considered cheating or a failure of originality in one situation is expected and appropriate in another. In educational settings we would do well to identify with greater specificity how students should use the cultural commons in each task and the specific forms of fresh or novel work we also expect them to accomplish. We should then calibrate our identification of plagiaristic cheating in relation to the specific expected originality appropriate to the task.