Wednesday, October 18, 2006
(3:15 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
For a return to the spurious
Nothing points to the cultural impoverishment and flat-footed literalism of the modern era more than the decline in spurious attribution. In past eras, spurious attributions flourished, ranging from the high-flown speculations of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to the improbable claims underwritten by the Donation of Constantine. Indeed, one must go back even further: the Bible itself, the foundation of religious, cultural, and intellectual life for centuries, is mostly a work of spurious attribution.Our forebears were aware of the power of a well-placed name for settling disputes and advancing important causes; their imaginative, and therefore also argumentative, resources far outstripped our own. Today, true spurious attribution lives on only in the hollowed-out form of celebrity ghost-writing, reducing a long and glorious cultural institution to simply one commercial transaction among others.
Worse than that, we have now completely reversed the process. Our characteristic practice is plagiarism -- we steal someone else's words and attach them to our name, hoping the quality of the content will gain us personal advantages. The contrast between plagiarism and spurious attribution is the measure of our decadence.
