Repetition Without Difference

The following is a guest post by Elliott Prasse-Freeman.

The meteoric rise of comedian Louis CK’s show Louie reached its zenith during the infamous Dane Cook episode, in which the ostensibly-fictional narrative addresses a real feud: Cook’s alleged theft of CK’s jokes. The viewer can only suspect what kind of wrangling went on in the writing of the scene in which they confront each other, but it produces a remarkable economy of fame: in exchange for accepting that Cook did not intentionally steal CK’s jokes, CK gets to effectively destroy Cook as a comic:

You’re like a machine of success, you’re like a rocket, you’re rocketing to the stars, and things are getting sucked up in your engines, like birds, and bugs, and some of my jokes. I think you saw me do them, I know you saw me do them, and I think they just went in your brain, I don’t think you meant to do it, but I don’t think you stopped yourself either.

Seconds before CK delivers this devastating assessment, Cook complains about CK’s street cred against his own reputation as a sell-out—so one would think Cook would not stand for CK’s assessment.[i] And yet Cook allows the scene to happen. Perhaps being recognized as a “success” is more important than being called blind and amoral and willing to destroy all in your path. Maybe being called the latter only sweetens the appraisal?

I thought about this scene when 2012 Hot Plagiarism Scandal Summer[ii] descended upon us. Indeed, from Jonah Lehrer to Fareed Zakaria (and reportedly 125 Harvard undergraduates) it seems that people in positions of power, prominence, and prestige are lining up to take themselves down. What is going on? Besides temporal concentration, is there any connection between these events? Should we reflect upon plagiarism “as a society,” especially now that 98% of American college students admit to cheating?

The Scandal Conceals That There is None^[iii]

Our society is defined by endemic cheating and plagiarism. And yet every time this behavior emerges explicitly we perform the “scandal” again. Why do we get so upset? Perhaps insight can be gained through a look at what Lehrer and Zakaria are actually up to. As two of corporate media’s pundit-journalists they are geniuses of banality, rewarded for cultivating, channeling, and parsing the dominant messages of power, re-packaging them with minor variations (in various tropes and narratives), and regurgitating them back to one another’s eager mouths.[iv] Given this, don’t “scandals” over “plagiarism” seem incongruous, even ridiculous? After all, their tribe all borrow from the same mediocrity-machine, and so what's one “stealing” from another when they all know that the game is simply to produce this tripe, churn it out, and witness it flowing out of one mouth or another? How often can Friedman and Kristof write the same exact thing and hold any pretense that they are part of a creative enterprise? It’s repetition without difference.

As this blog’s host pointed out to me, the Harvard 125 got caught because of a repeated incongruity: a few of them put a space after the comma when writing the number "22, 500.” So, it was an empty space that betrayed their plagiarism. I would add that this emptiness sticks out; as such plagiarism is like stuttering—a form of speech that is empty in its repetition, breaking the expected and normal rhythms of communication, creating a sense of the uncanny,[v] that something isn’t right here.[vi] In contrast, it is telling that cheer-leading for imperialism, colluding with shadowy security agencies, degrading and victimizing Others, and just this past week undermining popular movements and calling a religion savage do not strike us as uncanny. Instead, this is what the U.S. media is designed to do: produce the smooth and effectively-uncontested narrative of hegemony.

Perhaps it is precisely because plagiarism causes a little rupture that the response against it has been so furious. In a system where the pretense of orginality must be retained at all costs so the symbols and affects of the status quo can be reproduced, it is exactly this crossing the line (plagiarism!) which cannot be tolerated. So when the host of this blog wrote to me, “[Zakaria] goes down for this? The prominent brown advocate of the Iraq war—and proud self-hating brown paradigmatic figure for the past decade—this?” she is precisely correct: being wrong about a brutal and stupid imperial occupation that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths is not a real mistake; the mistake rather is in not maintaining an air of professionalism, of being a Serious Person, when you are doing venal, praetorian acts.[vii] Hence the extermination of the plagiarists. There is a form of systemic corruption where everyone has to be in the compromise together; in the muck, but pretending that it's clean.[viii]

And so I’m inclined to say: leave those kids alone.[ix] Looking at the few details that have emerged in the case, their violation doesn’t seem like much, especially when compared to those they are forced to look to as role models. Indeed, those who wield material and symbolic power in America—the financial/political class—revel in institutionalized cheating. No bankers went to jail after swindling the world out of billions; Obama is rewarded by fawning hypocritical liberals for his lying (about drones), obscuring (about the gWoT in general), and eliding (whither hope, or change, or even the poor as an object of discussion, let alone intervention?) in a more artful way than the blunt George W Bush.

In response to their obscenity, it is tempting to paint bankers and the elite political class as actors conscious of their manipulation and malfeasance. Certainly many of them are. But most are probably more like Cook: sucking stuff up in their engines, churning up society in their wake as they secede to the stars.[x]