Foucault and the Third Scenario

Since we never got to discuss the third scenario that Dr. Powers gave to us in class, I thought I would make a blog out of it.

So in a nutshell, this third scenario is about a writer who achieved great success, and after his death, scholars found out that he plagiarized his plots, some of his actual language, and that some of his passages were products of collaborative exchanges with other artists.

My instinctive reaction? Well, he plagiarized, so the ideas were not his own and his language was copied. Based on this, he should not still receive credit for those works which include those violations. But for his passages that were products of collaborative exchanges, I do not think those should be discredited, because learning happens from collaboration all the time. If someone else’s idea caused him to write more of his own ideas, then write on (no pun intended).

But what about Foucault’s reaction to this scenario? Well in the text, Foucault offers the example of texts that we have deemed “literary” such as folk tales and epics that never even had an author’s name pinned to them. They “were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity” (1628 NA). With that example, I think Foucault would argue that since some texts that we consider literary don’t even have authors pinned to them, why should it matter about what this writer did? His ideas were still important, they are even used in schools.

To stem from the fact that his ideas, whether original or not, are still important in schools and within culture, Foucault would still say that the fact that he plagiarized doesn’t matter simply because the ideas on which he wrote were worthwhile. Foucault states “the author is a particular source of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity…” According to these criteria, the writer is still an author because even though he expressed other people’s ideas, he still expressed them. Although the language was not original or his most important passages taken from collaborations, they were still manifested equally well, and each work was valid.