Plagiarism,Kinship and Slavery

Unauthorized Fathering, not Unauthorized Copying

As melodramatic as Galileo’s representation of plagiarism as the taking and killing of an author’s children may be, it is remarkably well aligned with the genealogy of the concept. ⁷ Whether or not he was aware of it, Galileo’s images replayed analogies between plagiarism and kidnapping inscribed in the very etymology of the term: plagiarius is Latin for kidnapper – especially the kidnapper of children and freemen to sell them as slaves (Merriam-Webster, 1991: 367).

The figure of the kidnapper encapsulates a key feature of plagiarism, namely, that it involves appropriation but also displacement. ⁸ It also highlights the specificity of its form of appropriation. Plagiarism is conceptually very different from copyright violation despite the fact that some of its specific expressions may overlap with those of piracy (when plagiarism amounts or is close to verbatim copying) and may be thus prohibited by copyright law. Piracy may hurt the author financially, but does not take away her authorship. Pirated Lady Gaga music is still attributed to her because keeping that association intact is crucial to maintaining the market value of the copies. Plagiarism, instead, severs the link between the work and the name of the original author, and then reconnects it to somebody else’s name. ⁹ It concerns unauthorized fathering, not unauthorized copying. ¹⁰ Copying may be an effect of plagiarism, but not its goal. Unlike piracy, plagiarism is unrelated to technologies of reproduction. The concept emerged in antiquity (not after Gutenberg) and could apply to works that were not reproduced through writing but simply delivered orally. Today, any misrepresentation of the work-author kinship counts as plagiarism, no matter the medium or technology through which it happens.

The definition of plagiarizable subject matter is equally capacious, and for the same reason. Because it focuses on the relation between author and work rather than on the work itself, plagiarism may apply to anything an author has ‘conceived’. This is by no means limited to the objects of intellectual property (personal expression, inventive step, etc.) but may include abstract ideas, techniques, instruments, information, and data. ¹¹ And, like children, the objects of plagiarism do not need to be fully actualized or stabilized yet. Hypotheses, insights, and other embryonic works may be claimed to have been plagiarized too.

Copyright’s notion of copy and plagiarism’s notion of appropriation are significantly different, and not only because the former concerns objects while the latter focuses on relations. The difference may in fact be traceable to the specific location where the plagiarist inserts himself in the chain of authorial agency. Piracy operates downstream, affecting the production, circulation, and sale of some copies of the work. Instead, because the author is construed as the origin of the work, the name swap performed by the plagiarist has the effect of appropriating the whole work. (Galileo lamented the complete loss or ‘death’ of his work, not its copying.) Perhaps it is the scale of the appropriation resulting from the name swap that makes plagiarism feel ‘personal’: not so much the symbolic affront of seeing your name erased and substituted with that of somebody else, but the fact that, through that simple elision, you have indeed lost your whole work. ¹² Plagiarism may thus be seen as the most upstream form of piracy – so upstream that it ends up becoming something qualitatively different from piracy.

This has an intriguing effect on the distinction between tangibility and intangibility as construed by copyright law. Because plagiarism concerns the whole work, not its copies, it makes metaphorical sense to talk about the work as one, that is, not as the name of a species made up of various individuals or copies but as a single unique individual – a ‘child’ with a first and last name, the first being the title of the work and the last being the name of its author. The plagiarist, then, does not kidnap a copy of the author’s intangible ‘personal expression’ that is or may be replicated in various other material embodiments of the work. That would be a non-rivalrous good: if you copy my intangible idea or personal expression I still have it. Plagiarism, instead, treats the work as a tangible and thus rivalrous entity: if you kidnap my child I don’t have that child anymore. In this view the work is one, and he who takes it takes it all. But being one and not intangible does not mean being tangible. Copyright law introduces the tangible/intangible dichotomy so as to construe copies as containing the same immaterial authorial form as the work, and thus infringing on the author’s right in it. But because that concept of ‘copy’ has no structural role within the discourse of plagiarism, the tangible/intangible dichotomy is deactivated altogether. The work is neither tangible nor intangible, or both.

Children and Slaves

The first reported use of the term plagiarism (as distinct from theft) is in an epigram by Martial, the first-century Latin poet. ¹³ In it, Martial asks for a friend’s ¹⁴ help to reclaim the authorship of some of his works appropriated by Fidentinus, another poet:

To your charge I entrust, Quintianus, my works if, after all, I can call those mine which that poet of yours [Fidentinus] recites. If they complain of their grievous servitude, come forward as their champion and give bail for them; and when that fellow calls himself their owner, say that they are mine, sent forth from my hand. If thrice and four times you shout this, you will shame the plagiarist. (Martial, 1919: 63) ¹⁵

Martial equates the writer’s act of lifting his hand from the page upon the completion of the poem to the master lifting his hand from the slave’s shoulder in the praetorial court to signify the slave’s release to freedom. His poems are literally manumitted – ‘sent forth from my hand’. The legal analogy is confirmed in Martial’s call on his friend Quintianus to ‘come forward as their champion’ and free these texts from Fidentinus’ unlawful re-enslavement. The Latin term rendered as ‘champion’ is assertor – that is, assertor in libertatem or assertor libertatis – the official who testified to the master’s act of manumission and could therefore assert the free status of the former slaves. ¹⁷

Martial’s narrative is thoroughly framed by the topos of property – the work/slave as property of the author/master – but mobilizes it to achieve the exact opposite effect. Martial no longer asserts his work as his property – ‘if, after all, I can call those mine’ – but claims to retain some link to his former works/slaves like the Roman ex-masters who typically became the patrons of ‘their’ liberti. ¹⁸ It is as their custodian, not owner, that he speaks on their behalf and in their interest. Actually, if we were to take Martial’s argument literally, his works were never his property because they became free the same moment they became a work. They were freed by their very birth, by the act of manumission performed by Martial’s hand when it delivered them from his mind to the page – a surface that Martial casts as a public and non-proprietary space. Similarly, his last line – ‘If thrice and four times you shout this, you will shame the plagiarist’ – indicates an awareness that he can only shame Fidentinus. ¹⁹ He cannot press theft charges because, according to his own argument, Fidentinus has not appropriated something that was Martial’s property. The real victims are the poems themselves, as persons.

While freed, the works were not free. They had never been captive (except when confined to Martial’s mind in their ‘gestational’ stage) and yet, like freed slaves, they maintained patronage ties and other obligations with their former master – ties that could be quasi-parental in nature (Bradley, 1984: 81). Martial expected his works to continue to be associated with him through his name – not as the name of their owner but as that of the person who made them free. The poems were no longer his, and yet Martial remained their origin – the origin of the work as a free entity, like the father who is the origin of a child who will grow into a free individual. ²⁰ That is why Fidentinus was a kidnapper rather than a thief: he had appropriated a free person, not someone’s property. Still, Martial’s claims suggest that while the kidnapped person is first and foremost the victim of kidnapping, his/her kin are affected as well. (That’s of course the point of most kidnapping – to extract a ransom.) But what is it that allows an author or former slave master to have some kind of claim in the thing or person s/he made free?

One possibility is that, despite the freedom it received from Martial, a poem is rendered powerless by the specific consequences of plagiarism. Sequestered by Fidentinus, it cannot speak up, testify to its freedom, and regain it. The work needs to be saved because it cannot save itself. ²¹ A second, related point is that the figure of the work as freed slave overlaps with that of the work as child in that both stand for an individual who is free but only potentially or incompletely so and that, therefore, has only limited powers to resist its appropriation. ²² Freed slaves, for example, did not necessarily hold all unrestricted rights of Roman citizens. ²³ Works and liberti need a parent, an adsertor libertatis, or a patron even when they are not kidnapped. They are always already dependent.

It is this relation of dependence that allows, or even mandates, Martial’s intervention, not just out of quasi-parental responsibility or liability but also in the sense that an injury to the work also injures the person the work is related with. ²⁴ In this specific case, Martial’s intervention may be also motivated by the fact that Fidentinus violated Martial’s dignity by undoing what was in his power to do: to free his slaves. Like the plagiarist who took not only Galileo’s children but his ‘righteous power to generate and reproduce’ (Galilei, 1607: 2), Fidentinus deprived Martial of a faculty, not just a thing.

While this casts plagiarism more as a crime of kinship than one of property, it also destabilizes the divide between kinship and property as construed in European culture, as Marilyn Strathern has suggested we do. Plagiarism is not about property, but also questions what non-property is, and their relation. The child and the freed slave are not figured as property but as free persons, and yet only potentially or incompletely so. Plagiarism always casts the work as a child, not a spouse, friend, sister, or brother. The work is always a person of limited agency who needs a parent or a ‘champion’ to look after it so that its personhood and freedom may be achieved or maintained. And the person to properly occupy that caretaking role is, according to Martial and Galileo, the father or former master – the person who does not own the work/slaves and yet remains their ‘point of origin’ as ‘free’ works or ‘free individuals’.

The work sits uneasily between property and kinship, but also between object and person. It is cast as a child and yet one that cannot communicate in any manner. ²⁵ Martial’s plea to Quintianus to intervene and free his works ‘if they complain of their grievous servitude’ is, I believe, a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that they will not complain. Not only is it the case that the works cannot report that they have been plagiarized, but it is not even clear that they could be easily recognized as Martial’s if somebody were to investigate their allegations. Martial wants to say that ‘his’ work carries some mark of being ‘his’, but in fact ends up making a rather different argument:

There is one page of yours, Fidentinus, in a book of mine a page, too, stamped by the distinct likeness of its master which convicts your poems of palpable theft. So, when set among them … a black raven, perchance wandering on Cayster’s banks, is laughed at among Leda’s swans; so, when a sacred grove is afire with the varied notes of the Athenian nightingale, an impudent jay jars on those Attic notes of woe. My books need no title or judge to prove them; your page stares you in the face, and calls you ‘thief’. (Martial, 1919: 64)

The plagiarized status of the page remains a matter of judgment, not self-evidence. Modern textual similarity algorithms map correlations, but even the existence of two identical works does not automatically mean that one is a plagiarized copy. Even copyright law allows for the infinitesimal probability of two works being identical and yet original to two different authors, thus requiring further evidence about access or motive to be brought in to establish the copying (Merges et al., 2009: 367). Two thousand years ago Martial was in no better position. He states that ‘my books need no title or judge to prove them’ but stops there, most likely because he does not have the reliable judges or titles he claims not to need. ²⁸

Martial wants us to believe that his works carry his ‘distinct likeness’, but in fact the only robust empirical claim he can make is about time of delivery, not form and style. Unlike modern copyright and its logocentric assumptions, Martial’s notion of authorship hinges less on conception (the emergence of an intangible form) than on delivery (the production of the tangible work). ²⁹ Consequently, the appropriate evidence for Martial’s authorship claims is that he did physically write those poems on a page, or that he delivered them with his voice. ³⁰ That evidence, however, is not inscribed in the work itself but can only be produced through an act of witnessing – third party witnessing. ³¹ By itself, Martial’s word that he wrote or delivered the poems would not suffice against the alleged plagiarist’s response that he, not Martial, did. By opening the epigram with a call to Quintianus, and then casting him as the adsertor libertatis, Martial implies that his friend could testify to the fact that those works were Martial’s not on stylistic grounds but because Quintianus had been, so to speak, just outside the delivery room. ³² He probably did not see those poems come out of Martial’s pen, but saw them right after ‘birth’, presented directly to him by Martial well before Fidentinus started claiming them as his own. What mattered was evidence of delivery, not whether the little poems did or did not look like Martial.

‘A Most Dreadful Pun’

Kinship metaphors about authors and children have also been played the other way around, mobilizing the discourse of authorship to conceptualize surrogacy disputes and decide who can lawfully give his or her name to the child – a child who, like a work or a slave, cannot speak for him/herself.

Early in 1990 Mark and Crispina Calvert entered into a contract with Anna Johnson who, for a $10,000 fee and a $200,000 life insurance policy, agreed to have a zygote from Crispina’s egg and Mark’s sperm implanted in her uterus and to carry to term what was stipulated to be their baby. ³³ But things soured up between Johnson and the Calverts later in the pregnancy, leading to suits and countersuits over who was the mother of the baby born on 19 September 1990. This was a complex question because both Crispina Calvert and Anna Johnson met the legal definition of ‘natural’ mother – one by virtue of consanguinity with the baby, the other by having given birth to that same baby. A technologically-enabled baby was born to two natural mothers.

When the case reached the California Supreme Court in 1993, the justices did not try to move beyond notions of ‘natural mother’ or ‘natural parent’ to entertain an openly collaborative model that acknowledged a variety of parental functions associated with different individual contributors, each with different rights and responsibilities. ³⁴ They sought, instead, to hold on to a unitary notion of parent and break the ‘tie’ that the intersection of reproductive technology and California law had set up between Anna Johnson and Crispina Calvert. Calvert won.

If the justices resisted more collaborative and extended notions of ‘parent’, their decision was also forward-looking (perhaps unintentionally so) in its attempt to bypass the opposition between nature and nurture or genetics and gestation – an opposition that had framed the dispute between Johnson and the Calverts as it moved through the lower courts. Those courts had already ruled against Johnson, deeming her gestational role secondary to that of the genetic mother. ³⁵ The California Supreme Court did agree with the lower courts that Crispina Calvert was the natural mother, but not because of her genetic link to the baby: she was the mother because the baby would have not come to exist without her acted-upon intention to become a mother: ³⁶

Although the [Uniform Parentage] Act recognizes both genetic consanguinity and giving birth as means of establishing a mother and child relationship, when the two means do not coincide in one woman, she who intended to procreate the child – that is, she who intended to bring about the birth of a child that she intended to raise as her own – is the natural mother under California law. ³⁷

One may be puzzled by the tension between the justices’ apparently progressive attempt to bypass all sorts of fundamentally traditional dichotomies and the distinctly traditional manner in which they did so, that is, by invoking good old human intentionality. ⁴⁰ The surprise only increases when we see that the Court framed and specified its ‘intentionality test’ by drawing from the logic of intellectual property. A law review article cited approvingly in the Court’s decision argued that: ⁴¹

[t]he mental concept of the child is a controlling factor of its creation, and the originators of that concept merit full credit as conceivers. The mental concept must be recognized as independently valuable… ⁴²

Martial Meets Calvert

Metaphors of authors as fathers of works were mobilized in 18th-century debates over the changing relationship between work and author brought about by the printing press. The reverse metaphor about mothers and fathers as authors of children found in Johnson v. Calvert emerged in reproductive scenarios reshaped by technologies that complicated the definition of the relationship between child and mother and, to a lesser extent, father. ⁴³ IVF and the printing press have nothing in common as technologies, but have some specifically comparable legal effects relative to their areas of application.

Before IVF and surrogacy, the mother was taken to be the woman who delivered the child, with her own body. Before the printing press, what characterized the author was the physical act of writing, with one’s own hand, a work on a piece of paper, parchment, or papyrus. (At least that is Martial’s view, which differentiates the original act of authorial writing from subsequent scribal copies for commercial purposes.) ⁴⁴ Mothers and authors were defined by the fact that they materially delivered children and works by themselves and from themselves. These acts could be witnessed, thus connecting mother to children and authors to works without the need of further blood and DNA tests, or literary or bibliographical analyses.

Surrogacy disputes – Johnson v. Calvert being one of them – emerge from the fact that reproductive technologies have rendered delivery inconclusive to the definition of mother. Witnessing a delivery still means witnessing the birth of a child, but not necessarily witnessing that child being delivered by his/her mother. The presence of an uninterrupted chain of bodily production – one body emerging from another – is no longer sufficient to link mother and child. In the case of literary works, the printing press had separated the producer of the physical printed text from the author of that text. The printer delivers the work, but she is not necessarily its author.

Several people contributed to the production of a printed text (papermakers, font designers and cutters, typesetters, proofreaders, etc.) and several people (egg donors, sperm donors, gestational mothers, doctors, nurses, etc.) may now be involved in baby-making. Both the materials and the products are different, but what is comparable are the discursive moves to construct the author or parent in these differently collaborative settings in which the material act of authorial/maternal delivery of the work/child has ceased, for various reasons, to determine the relationship between work/child and author/mother.

In Johnson v. Calvert, the Court, on its way toward making an explicit analogy between reproductive and intellectual conception, stated that:

While all of the players in the procreative arrangement are necessary in bringing a child into the world, the child would not have been born but for the efforts of the intended parents … [T]he intended parents are the first cause, or the prime movers, of the procreative relationship. ⁴⁵

Both the Court of Johnson v. Calvert and copyright law define the crucial feature of parenthood and authorship in immaterial terms – intention and personal expression or originality. Paradoxically, these immaterial parameters of identification are invoked or introduced in response to the arrival of new material technologies that change the rules of the game, redefining both authorship and motherhood. The Court developed the ‘immaterial’ intentionality test because other material tests (blood, DNA) or material evidence about the birth (who delivered the baby) no longer sufficed to define ‘mother’ in the age of IVF and surrogacy. Similarly, the modern copyright notion of the author as the person who contributes an intangible ‘personal expression’ to the work emerged, I suggest, in response to the problem of identifying the literary work in the age of mechanical reproduction, where the material act of writing the manuscript no longer sufficed, by itself, to link the author to the printed copies of the work.

Parallel Universes of Authorship

Marilyn Strathern has looked at early modern patriarchal metaphors of authorship and at Johnson v. Calvert as discursive clusters articulating analogies between reproductive and intellectual creativity, sketching out how these analogies fed each other in a discontinuous and partial fashion, and may continue to do so in other forms in the future. Metaphors of fathers generating works helped the articulation of modern notions of intellectual creativity, which were then fed back, a few centuries later, into the conceptualization of new forms of reproductive creativity.

By the time the constellation of reproductive metaphors reaches Johnson v. Calvert, however, the initial figure of the author as father has virtually disappeared from copyright law – the law it arguably helped conceptualize. One possibility, Strathern argues, is that the tangibility of the figure of the work as child no longer matches the logic of copyright law and the crucial role it confers on intangibility. In particular, the new post-copyright rhetoric of immaterial conception may have ‘allow[ed] one to take the child’s view’ (Strathern, 2003: 60):

If ‘conception’ and ‘creation’ retain kinship echoes, they seemingly displace the idea of an interpersonal relationship with more immediate but at the same time more abstract evidence of connection: the work itself informs one about the author. Does creation become a kind of procreation without parenthood? If so, this would be consonant not only with the emerging originality of the author but also with the emerging uniqueness of the literary text. (Strathern, 2003: 61)

I believe that Strathern’s hypothesis about the disappearance of figures of authorship based on inheritance and descent can help to explain the simultaneous and conspicuous permanence of these figures in a parallel universe of authorship: plagiarism. The discourse of plagiarism has never experienced (and, I would argue, cannot experience) a shift to ‘the child’s view’. It is not written from the point of the view of the work but from that of the author or, more precisely, the injured author. Focused on the severing of the kinship between author and work, plagiarism is not a discourse of appreciation but of grievance and accusation – a discourse whose focus on kinship is constantly renewed because that’s where the ‘crime’ has happened, or may happen. ⁴⁶

Post-copyright discourse of authorship has indeed come to privilege immateriality of creation and the immaterial aspects of the material work, but there has been no such change in the discourse of plagiarism, whose logic has remained unchanged at least since Martial. That is because, unlike copyright-based authorship, plagiarism has never moved into an intellectual property framework. In this discursive regime, the author remains a father and the work remains a child, never to become property. Also, because the work never really grows up, it also never dies. It never goes back into the public domain, from where it could be eventually lawfully appropriated. You can be called a plagiarist even if you copy an ancient author.

But what can we say that is taken by the plagiarist if property is not it? In the Symposium, Plato has Diotima claim that, ‘to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality’, but that literary works may be an even better means to immortality than flesh-and-blood children:

Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? (Plato, 1994: 32) ⁴⁷

This is not merely metaphorical talk. Data by the Office of Research Integrity in charge of misconduct investigations at the US Department of Health and Human Services shows that the majority of cases of plagiarism in US biomedicine between 1992 and 2006 involved manuscripts and grant applications, not printed articles (Price, 2006: 1–11). A report by the NSF’s Office of Inspector General describes a typical scenario:

Our inquiry into a significant allegation of plagiarism confirmed that a proposal by a professor at an Oregon university contained extensive sections of text and multiple figures duplicated from an earlier proposal that NSF had asked the professor to review. (National Science Foundation, 2007: 29)

What is taken, therefore, is not a work but the potential of making one (or the potential to actualize the proposal’s potential). What the plagiarized researcher loses is time, not property. Had it not been for the plagiarist’s intervention, s/he would have probably received the grant, done the research, published it, and would have had a professional (and perhaps personal) life different from the one s/he had after missing the grant and seeing his/her project credited to the plagiarist. In metaphors of authorship as fatherhood, time does not affect the work as it is cast either as an eternal child or a permanent monument to the father. But the appropriation of time does affect the flesh-and-blood author who, unlike the work, does have the possibility of a life and a career.

Conclusion: What if the Work Was a Girl?

The authorship metaphors discussed here are openly patriarchal in nature, reify the figure of the individual author, and are strongly committed to a discourse of authorial victimhood and a corresponding criminalization of the borrower. Those are not agendas I share. I hope to have shown, however, that these metaphors provide important windows on fundamental and perhaps unsolvable tensions between person-based and property-based constructs of authorship. As a conclusion, I want to further probe the heuristic potential of these metaphors by developing them in a direction that they do not seem to have been articulated before, for reasons that I hope will become apparent as my little kinship experiment unfolds.

Rooted in the figure of the father, these parental metaphors cast the author as male, no matter what the sex of the actual author may be. They are also quite general, perhaps suggesting that a finer articulation might produce tensions rather than strength. When the work’s conception and gestation is described with additional detail, the metaphors do in fact get substantially tangled up. The Aristotelian model of reproduction involving form and matter (a template that continues to structure, in different ways, both copyright and patent law; Pottage and Sherman, 2011: 271–4) is traditionally gendered: form is male and matter female. But metaphors of authorship as fatherhood reconfigure Aristotle’s model into a single-gender scheme in which both form and matter are rendered male, though never quite completely. For instance, gestation is typically reframed as a male activity by casting the female womb as the male authorial brain. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare has Holofernes claim:

This is a gift that I have … a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. (Rose, 1996: 621)

Displacing a heterosexual reproductive framework into a male body ends up producing an assemblage that, for lack of better terms, may be labeled a ‘mental male hermaphrodite’. The author is explicitly cast as male (not hermaphrodite) through its identification with the figure of the father and yet it has both organs of mental/sexual reproduction (thus a hermaphrodite). Further ambiguity is then added to the author’s hermaphroditic features – the fact that it carries both the male imagination/form and the female womb/matter – because these are no longer coded heterosexually but recast as male. ⁴⁹ This complex arrangement strives to achieve male autogenesis – boys producing boys – through a process ‘in which the [male] author impregnates the womb of his brain with an emanation of his own spirit’ (Rose, 2002: 4). ⁵⁰

What is then left unmentioned in these metaphors, but emerges very clearly if one follows their logic, is that the work is not simply a child but a son. ⁵¹ But what would happen if one were to play these reproductive metaphors more literally and thus contemplate the very serious possibility that the work could be a girl? And why has the possibility of the work/daughter been obscured through intricate figurations that start by analogizing authorship to heterosexual biological conception but then proceed to erase anything that those processes cast as female and thus produce works through something resembling male cloning? ⁵²

The patriarchal nature of these narratives does not, I believe, account for the erasure of the daughter/work. Patriarchy subordinates and objectifies women and daughters but does not typically pretend they are not born and do not exist. So why do patriarchal metaphors of authorship go the extra distance? For argument’s sake, although these narratives are single-mindedly concerned with the patrilineal propagation of the name of the author (fathers/authors passing their name to sons/works, grandsons/works, etc.), what would prevent them from positing, for example, that the author’s name is transmitted only through sons/works, not daughters/works? They could, as many patriarchal kinship systems do, treat sons and daughters differently and yet acknowledge the existence of both.

Stepping back for a moment and considering the features that have been attributed to the author before and after the emergence of copyright may help to clarify what may be played out through the exclusion of the girl/work. Obviously what is being erased is sexual difference, but that may be a symptom of a broader attempt to suppress difference in general.

These metaphors promote and try to naturalize a male mono-gender view of authorial creation and, therefore, a homogeneous and monocausal view of the work’s production. In the traditional ‘romantic’ discourse of authorship the author is figured as one, according to several meanings of the term. ⁵³ Not only is the author an individual entity (the work has only one father, or at least does not need more than one) but also – and this is what I think is most at stake here – an entity that has no differences or multiplicities within itself. The author is cast as one unitary cause, not an assemblage of agencies. The author may use a variety of cultural inputs to produce the work, but those are cast as materials, not agencies – matter, not form. What matters to copyright law is that the author, by applying one specific expressive form unique to him/her – the so-called ‘personal expression’ – reshapes those various materials into a work that is one and as original as its author.⁵⁴

At times there is an attempt to convey the author’s unity and singularity through figures of spatial and temporal compression, as by reducing authorship to a creative flash or by presenting the author as the work’s point of origin. One effect of such compressions to an infinitesimal scale is to make difference and multiplicity invisible. There is much heterogeneity in a map of a given area, but none of that is left if, after an extreme change of scale, the map is collapsed into a point. Similarly, while there is much heterogeneity of agency in the protracted process of cultural production, none of that is left visible when compressed into the so-called flash of genius. In sum, what the flash of genius or the author’s representation as the work’s unique cause or point of origin share with the exclusive maleness of authorship celebrated in these metaphors is that they are all forms of essentialization aimed at stabilizing the construct of ‘work’ by stabilizing and purifying the construct of ‘author’.

But such essentializations quickly come apart once we recognize some of the obvious implications of these metaphors. For instance, if works are produced like children, there should be, then, a 50–50 probability that the work will be a girl. What immediately follows from that acknowledgment is the presence of a mother, and her role in the production of the work. More than simply adding some ‘gender balance’ to the picture, the presence and role of a mother inserts a disruptive difference in an otherwise purely male line of descent (so linear, in fact, that it would be a misnomer to call it a family tree). The existence of a mother and/or daughter would refute the male gendering of the author, but it would also make the more important point that the author cannot be one. Authorship can only be co-authorship – an inherently collaborative process requiring at least two authors, and often, as Johnson v. Calvert shows us, more than two.