{"id":620,"date":"2026-07-30T04:19:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T04:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=620"},"modified":"2026-07-30T04:19:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T04:19:19","slug":"on-plagiarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=620","title":{"rendered":"On plagiarism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The exam season has come and gone, and academics have been sniffing the air for the stench of plagiarism. In the 2024-2025 academic year, more than 2,000 students at Russell Group universities were punished for using AI to cheat, and these were probably only the most egregious cases. It could be that most students are in on the game, as some of their seniors have been: a member of the European Commission is said to have lifted a third of her doctoral thesis from other people\u2019s work. Even Cambridge professors are apparently not above it.<\/p>\n

Read more Gianni Infantino: ultimate ball-breaker<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a university teacher in the pre-AI epoch, a student presented me with an essay which was entirely plagiarized from a celebrated critic except for the outstandingly intelligent bits, which had been deleted. With becoming modesty, the student said he knew he wasn\u2019t up to much intellectually speaking and so dumbed down the essay he was hijacking. (\u201cPlagiarism,\u201d incidentally, comes from the Latin word for \u201ckidnapping\u201d.) I briefly considered giving him marks for humility. He\u2019s now a fairly well-known actor, who like all actors survives by pretending that someone else\u2019s words are his own.<\/p>\n

Around this time there was an outfit in the United States called Intellectual Bullshit Inc, which would write you an A-worthy essay on any topic you wanted, from water imagery in the later Shakespeare to the vaginal structure of the flea, but also a B or C-level one if that seemed more suitable to your capabilities. They would even churn out a whole doctoral thesis on your behalf, at the cost of thousands of dollars. No doubt they\u2019ve now been overtaken by AI, as one form of plagiarism yields to another.<\/p>\n

What counts as plagiarism, however, isn\u2019t easy to determine. The very word \u201cresearch\u201d suggests that you\u2019re working on materials which are not your own. It\u2019s also arguable that all uses of language are creative, even language which is stolen. You have to make sense of the stuff you\u2019re pilfering. Language is governed by rules, but as referees and umpires are aware, applying a rule is itself a creative act, involving tact, discretion, intuition, appropriateness and so on. There are no rules for following rules. Rules have to be interpreted, which is one reason why football crowds sometimes become irascible. We also have to know when to bend the rules or throw them away altogether. We do this when we say \u201ctaught\u201d rather than \u201cteached\u201d, but not these days when we say \u201cI was sat\u201d rather than \u201cI was sitting\u201d, which is ungrammatical but has become the norm.<\/p>\n

Even so, there\u2019s a sense in which what we say is always borrowed from others. \u201cI love you\u201d is always a quotation, however sincerely one may intend it. All language is second-hand, reach-me-down, off-the-peg, and clich\u00e9s are simply those bits of it where this is blatantly obvious. An entirely original utterance, like the message of an alien, would be incomprehensible. No writer before Shakespeare came up with the sentence \u201cMy salad days, when I was green in judgement\u201d, but it only works because we\u2019re already acquainted with the individual words. Much the same is true of human behavior. We become unique individuals by spontaneously imitating those around us. Identity is a matter of mimicry. We are all plagiarized versions of our parents, though we aren\u2019t of course identical with them. Two individuals being exactly alike, such as identical twins, is spooky, raising the mind-bending paradox of how something can be both itself and something else. The truth is everything is shop-soiled, tarnished, woven out of something else.<\/p>\n

The idea that there\u2019s nothing new under the sun, a thought which is an instance of what it claims, can be disturbing. This is because most of us are instinctive Romantics who believe in originality, and the idea of originality is closely bound up with individualism. The idea that all individuals are incomparable is built deep into the modern psyche, even though it\u2019s a highly dubious claim. Oscar Wilde, whose mission in life was to be that inimitable genius known as Oscar Wilde, could never be caught doing the same thing twice or filching a phrase from another author. He made himself up as he went along; and if he disliked Nature it was because it kept mindlessly repeating itself and was incapable of improvising. This is ironic, since the Irish Wilde spent most of his time imitating the British aristocracy \u2014 though one might claim that in his case imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. A later colonial writer, the novelist V.S. Naipaul, entitled one of his books The Mimic Men<\/i>, as though colonies like his native Trinidad could be seen as mere replicas or simulacra of the imperial homeland. In the same spirit, James Joyce called Ireland \u201can afterthought of Europe\u201d. On this view, colonies are botched imitations of the real thing. They are mistranslations, smudged offprints, faded facsimiles.<\/p>\n

Read more The abuse of a black teen\u2019s death<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard for us to think ourselves back into the neo-classical mindset that preceded the birth of Romanticism \u2014 a view of the world for which originality wasn\u2019t rated at all highly. What mattered was the collective wisdom of humankind, not an idea that some bright spark happened to come up with at 3 o\u2019clock in the morning. A belief which the great majority of men and women had held over many centuries wasn\u2019t necessarily true, but there was bound to be something in it. God wouldn\u2019t be so irresponsible as to allow us to get the world seriously wrong over vast tracts of time. (In fact, he allowed us to think it was flat for an embarrassingly long time.) Nor would he withhold from us the few fundamental truths essential for our salvation. What we held in common was what was truly valuable, whereas quirkiness and idiosyncrasy were morally displeasing. They were also for the most part trivial and tedious, whereas the normative and familiar could be fascinating. An imitation of Homer or Horace might be deemed far more precious than an artistic creation of one\u2019s own. Originality was the preserve of the Almighty, who could conjure his handiwork out of nothing as no mere mortal could. To usurp his privilege in this respect was a form of blasphemy. Human beings had their own form of eternity, to be sure, but it was known as tradition. The way to live well was to plagiarize what your ancestors did, a process which stretched back interminably into the past and endlessly into the future. Only the hubristic or dim-witted could imagine that their petty individual resources could outweigh this immense store of collective knowledge. Such was the neo-classical vision of the world, one which has now almost entirely vanished.<\/p>\n

A number of Irish writers in the 19th century came up with some ingenious solutions to the problem of their nation being a poor reproduction of Britain. The Cork poet Jeremiah Callanan produced a number of English translations of Irish poems, but we don\u2019t always know what Irish works they are supposed to be translations of. They are imitations without an original. His poetic colleague James Clarence Mangan writes \u201ctranslations\u201d from languages of which he had not the slightest knowledge, so that what seems to be derivative is in fact original. In any case, a translation can be as good as what it reproduces, or even better. The mellifluous \u201cVienna\u201d is an improvement on the terse \u201cWien<\/em>\u201d. Besides, an inaccurate translation might convey the spirit of the original more fully than an exact one. Some other Irish poets indulged in what they called \u201canti-plagiarism\u201d. This meant writing a poem modeled on an already published one, while maintaining that the published poem was stolen from the one you had just written. If the published work was in English and the new one was in Irish, this deftly reversed the colonial relation between the two nations, so that the larger island becomes a pathetic imitation of the smaller one.<\/p>\n

The question of originality applies to politics in another sense too. Whatever revolution may mean, it can\u2019t mean that everything we know stops and something entirely different starts. On the day after the revolution we would still need to pull up our jeans. Total social change would be inconceivable, since how would we identify it unless we retained some sense of what came before? We would simply confront an abyss between what we have now and a wholly different future, with no criteria to assess how the latter differed from the former. Besides, an alternative future has to be worked for, and it\u2019s that process of recreation which bridges the gap between what\u2019s present and what\u2019s to come. We couldn\u2019t speak of progress if there was simply one thing and then something completely different. The Boeing only represents progress over the Tiger Moth because both are aircraft. You can see Billy Connolly as an advance on Harold Lloyd because both are comedians, whereas the National Portrait Gallery isn\u2019t an advance on a prosthetic limb. In this sense, all change involves continuity. At the beginning of the 17th century in Britain, people still burned witches, whereas by the end of the century they had established the Bank of England and the Royal Society; but what intervened between the two was a civil war, not a void.<\/p>\n

All the same, the fact that there must be continuity in order to measure change doesn\u2019t mean that all change must be incremental. It\u2019s surely clear that modern capitalist nations aren\u2019t able to participate in the global market while at the same time guaranteeing a decent standard of living for their citizens. They can\u2019t, in short, sufficiently control the domestic effects of their own international operations, let alone adequately protect their people from the most devastating consequences of these forces. This is why they\u2019re peculiarly vulnerable to the challenge of Right-wing populism, which like all proto-fascist movements denounces the global dimension of capitalism while supporting those who reap profit from it. Purely incremental change is unlikely to change this situation. The nation-state, which served the ruling classes of capitalism extremely well in its day, has now entered into conflict with the international interests of those classes, and is seeking to grab back some power for itself. If Starmerism lacked direction, as everyone from Blair to Burnham seems to believe, it\u2019s because, given this contradiction, there\u2019s ultimately nowhere for it to go. What we have instead is self-plagiarism, as the system carries on reproducing itself on the very brink of an alarmingly steep cliff.<\/p>\n

Read more Will Zack Polanski ever grow up?<\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Terry Eagleton\u2019s A Death of One\u2019s Own<\/em> will be published by Yale in September.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The exam season has come and gone, and academics have been sniffing the air for the stench of plagiarism. In the 2024-2025 academic year, more than 2,000 students at Russell Group universities were punished for using AI to cheat, and these were probably only the most egregious cases. 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