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Each One of Us is Precious, but All of Us Will Die

Kenneth Goldsmith

In today’s digital era, students have constant access to nearly endless amounts of scholarly information. While this leads to a higher level of education than before the advent of the internet, the threat of students stealing information and claiming it as their own is ever-growing. Conceptually, plagiarism has always been incredibly frowned up in academic circles, but to some, repurposing already existing material is a perfectly valid way of crafting new works. Kenneth Goldsmith of the University of Pennsylvania has published several work detailing his views on plagiarism and “uncreative” writing. In his essay published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Goldsmith talks about how unnecessary it may be for us, as a society, to continue producing new information as frequently as we do.

Douglas Huebler 

In his work, “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing’.,” he quotes conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, citing “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more” and reworks the expression to fit his view of literature. Goldsmith, in the spirit of re-purposing, alters Huebler’s statement to fit literature, claiming, "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more,” which he means to take existing information, ideas, and concepts and rework them into new or parallel forms.

Female KISS cover band

The idea of repurposing isn’t anything new. Musicians, for example, tend to take inspiration from other musicians; so much so that musical influences wind up listed on a plethora of Wikipedia pages. Other artists sample others’ music, some cover songs (their version can end up becoming more famous than the original), and some bands form entirely for the purposes of honoring older musicians. This sort of re-purposing also applies to mimicking visual arts and film.

Mark Sample

Goldsmith addresses that re purposing texts and pieces of literature, in a similar fashion to music and visual arts, is sneered at, whereas music and visual arts encourage that kind of creativity. Considering the similarities in expression between literature and other arts, creativity should not be stifled by something like plagiarism. Mark Sample, also of the University of Pennsylvania, talks about this lack of creativity in one of his own essays, “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays.” In this work, Sample describes the way collegiate essays are currently written as though mimicking the professor who taught the class; considering the strict form and content that must be adhered to by students.

Sid Meyer's Pirates transferred onto driftwood

Furthermore in his essay, Sample talks about the way he had some of the students in his video game studies class take games and design a new representation of that game. One of his students took the plotline and screenshots from the game Sid Meyer’s Pirates! and transferred them to a piece of wood; a “captain’s log” that excelled in capturing the “static nature” of the game.

This sort of abstraction is what Goldsmith is looking for when he mentions re-purposing and new creative works. Goldsmith mentions that he had taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In this class, he shames students who create original works and insists that they take pre-existing material and convert it to being something new, which led students to rewrite texts, alter audio files, and transcribe chat logs.

In our own Digital Humanities class, we also were asked to create a piece of “uncreative” writing. Our class’s assignment was to work with our tribes using a group chat (Google hangout) and watch a random assortment of YouTube videos, that featured Ellen Degeneres, a honey badger, Kanye West, Mr.Rogers, Donald Trump and Game of Thrones. During these clips, we were asked to type anything we heard, then take those lines of text and copy the chat into a single document, where we removed all the time stamps and names of the members in our group. The result was a poem made up of random lines our group had pulled from the videos, which we eventually titled, “Each One of Us is Precious, but All of Us Will Die.”

Like the previous “uncreative” works our class viewed and discussed over the past few weeks, our tribe was also asked if the poem we created could be meaningful. Ultimately, we believe that our work does having meaning because the meaning of our work ultimately resides in the person that is viewing the work, which makes the meaning subjective. Without knowing how the poem was created, a person can still examine the lines and derive their own meaning from it, much like any other body of text they might view. Our group did not intend for the poem to have meaning, but meaning still exists within the reader.

Just as if a person were to break down a shed, into pieces of wood, there intent to provide shelter goes away. In a similar fashion, breaking apart language takes away from the works original meaning. Just like wood, when the pieces of literature are reworked and organized with new intent, they are reconstructed with new meaning. For the sake of the metaphor, it is like taking the re-purposed wood from the shed and constructing a cart. The cart is made from pieces of the shed, but the new purpose for it is intended for it to carry things around. Similarly the text from the YouTube clips no longer carries the same weight, but is now intended to be poetic, reflecting the nature of clips by randomly selecting and repeating commonly said phrases. Regardless, intent of creation may give something meaning. Even if randomized, the intent was that was random and the nature of it adds to its meaning.

Another question we were pressed to ask is who owns our poem. Our tribe took multiple video clips from YouTube, re-purposing the dialogue we overheard, into a poem. This makes the question of who has authorship tricky because, on the one hand it is property of the various clips we listened to, but on the other hand, the four of us were the ones who are took the lines, utilizing and combining them together with the intention of creating something new. Since our tribe wrote what we heard simultaneously, the lines of the audio clips were mixed around and formatted in the text in a sort of random way. These actions left our tribe with a work that connected seemingly unrelated lines of text together, repeating the same lines, and repeating the same lines with slightly different variations, without our intention to do so. Much like the works we looked at in class previously, our own work also began to resemble a self-generating poem. The only thing that was different was the process of how we generated the text.

Lines from our "uncreative" work that we combined to form a meaning of life and death

Above all, our “uncreative work” ended up pretty creative when we were finished. Even though our tribe had no intention of making that was truly meaningful. We wound up finding value in lines that examined life and death, Donald Trump, a bad ass honey badger, and Mr.Rogers. We may not have had the intention of ever creating a work like this in our lives-ever-but we came together and produced a work that was originally plagiarized, re-purposing words that spoke to us into something of true value and meaning.