Language Ideology as Cultural Model

Ideology is a term notoriously overstuffed with connotations—cognitive, perceptual, emotional, ideational, practical, and institutional. It is one of many terms that refer to more or less informal, inconspicuous collective frameworks that orient human perception, thought, feeling, and action.Footnote ³ As Woolard (Reference Woolard1998, 5–9) points out, what especially sets ideology apart from its congeners is its critical flavor. It suggests a view from a particular location in social space, a partial, interest-laden view, one that reinforces, rationalizes, or mystifies the existing social, economic, or political power structures—indeed, a view that is downright false. Arguably, this connotation is inescapable and will arise even where it is unintended (Reference Woolard1998, 8). Without it, ideology seems rather generic. If we subtract the element of interestedness, we are left with the most familiar, foundational notions of anthropological culture theory (“folk beliefs or assumptions,” “culturally shared ideas and values,” “cultural representations,” “reflexive sensibilities,” “cultural conceptual schemata,” “invokable schemata,” “interpretive schemes,” “idealized models,” “models of/for,” among others).Footnote ⁴ This is unfortunate, as “interestedness” is a problematic criterion.Footnote ⁵

Furthermore, to distinguish concepts of ideology according to the presence or absence of the criterion of interestedness occludes an important distinction. In its neutral sense, ideology says nothing about the epistemic adequacy of a belief and nothing about its social function—that is, it implies neither the falsity of that belief nor the existence of power disparities that are perpetuated by its falsity. In its critical sense, ideology implies both. However, these two conditions are conceptually separable: a belief can be empirically inadequate without necessarily serving the interests of those in power. (Distortions in the perception of language forms and functions can also be caused by universal “cognitive limitations on human linguistic awareness”; Hill Reference Hill1998, 79.)

It is possible to accommodate this more nuanced distinction while at the same time integrating the notion of linguistic ideology explicitly within the larger domain of culture theory if we regard the central distinguishing characteristic of ideology as selectivity or bias that affects perception, emotion, memory, or reasoning. The cause of that bias may be self-interest, and its function may be to support social relations of unequal power. But the biasing of thought is a much more general phenomenon, within which interest-driven bias is only a special case. “Cognitive limitations on human linguistic awareness” are just one of many kinds of cognitive limitation.

Cognitive psychology has long had a sophisticated vocabulary to describe the mental chiaroscuro by which the mind foregrounds certain aspects of experience and backgrounds others. Most basic is the notion of “graded-structure concepts.” These are concepts whose instantiations vary in typicality. The most typical instances are the easiest to think of and the easiest to remember; the least typical hover at the dim edges of the concept, and people may be in some doubt whether the concept applies to them at all (Murphy Reference Murphy2002). We could say that a graded-structure concept draws a relief map of its field of reference or that it spotlights certain examples and consigns others to the shadows. For example, while ‘bird’ applies to robins and penguins alike, the former is more typical than the latter. (Thus ‘bird,’ as a graded-structure concept, is biased against penguins and toward robins, as it were.Footnote ⁶) We could say the robin is a focal example of a bird, and the penguin is a peripheral example.

What is true of concepts holds equally for more elaborate constructs such as schemata, models, or theories.Footnote ⁷ All of these are cognitively useful because they generalize and idealize, abstracting away from experience in one direction or another (Strauss and Quinn Reference Strauss1997). However, while they may streamline or filter reality, they do not censor it. They are biased toward certain aspects of experience and against others, but the latter are not rendered completely inaccessible. I shall refer to this effect of selective emphasis common to graded-structure concepts and cultural schemas by speaking of focalizing and peripheralizing.

Thinking of language ideology as an interpretive scheme or idealized model is not unprecedented (cf. Niedzielski and Preston Reference Niedzielski2000, 308, 322; Milroy Reference Milroy2001, 64). But it seems not to have been widely appreciated how naturally this formulation accounts for many of language ideology’s distinguishing characteristics. For example, it gives us an elegant way to understand erasure, which follows automatically from the graded structure of cultural schemas. For a phenomenon to become “unobserved or unattended to” (Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine2000, 38) is simply for it to be peripheralized, to be made less thinkable. What’s more, construing erasure as peripheralization has some advantages: for example, it encourages us to think of erasure as a matter of degree.

Similarly, a cultural-model account of language ideology nicely captures its multiplicity and internal heterogeneity (Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity and Alessandro2004, 503). Ideology, like any other cultural manifestation, is by definition shared, but sharing is never complete. While the epidemiological tendency of cultural schemas to spread through a population exerts centripetal pressure toward homogeneity and uniformity, it is countered by centrifugal forces that promote variation, mutability, divergence, and niche differentiation (Strauss and Quinn Reference Strauss1997, 130–34). The degree of sharedness of language ideology is thus a gradient, ranging from near-total uniformity to near-total idiosyncrasy. Hence this approach can accommodate ideologies that rest on widely shared, taken-for-granted cultural conventions, as well as ideologies of more restricted provenance, such as the professional ideologies I will discuss later. (There is even a notional “ideology degree zero” held by a single person. It may seem paradoxical to use the word in this context, but if a schema is cultural to the extent that it is shared, then any sharable schema is potentially cultural—an ideology-in-waiting.)

The availability to a single speaker of multiple, possibly mutually incompatible schemas accounts for another dimension of ideological multiplicity: the “fluid coexistence” and “interaction” of distinct language ideologies. A culture bearer may have access to more than one ideological model, which are selectively activated according to context. Further, their availability can also afford strategic use (Jourdan and Angeli Reference Jourdan2014, 282).

Cultural schemas can also mitigate the tendency to think of language ideology as propositional. Definitions of ideology are often couched in terms of beliefs, ideas, representations, or thought, even though we recognize that feelings can be as important as ideas (Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity and Alessandro2004, 498). Cultural schemas, since they play emotional and conative as well as cognitive roles, can accommodate the noncognitive aspects of ideology.

Similarly, they can also provide a more natural account of ideological influences on mental operations. As an example, let’s return briefly to the phenomenon of erasure or peripheralization. Consider the song “Happy Birthday to You.” This familiar meme is a song like any other, yet we do not usually treat it as such—in fact, we don’t often treat it as a cultural artifact. It is not merely that we are ignorant of its composer’s name; we don’t ordinarily think of it as having been composed at all (Cone Reference Cone1974, 49–50). This is clearly a lacuna of the sort we call ideological, but it’s not easy to capture it in propositional form. “The Happy Birthday song has no composer” is not accurate, since it suggests a negative belief rather than the absence of belief. By contrast, it’s more plausible to think of the song as part of a cultural schema (birthday party) that has no “composer slot,” unlike the schema for a classical music concert, where we expect to see the names of the composers in the program notes, or the schema for a popular music recording, where we expect to find them in the liner notes or the metadata. Thus we are unlikely to notice our ignorance of the composer’s name.

Finally, understanding language ideology as an interpretive schema also accommodates another of its well-known features: that it serves to explain or rationalize some aspect of language usage (Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine2000, 37). The explanatory potential of cultural models is one of their key features. When someone uses a cultural model to understand some aspect of language, it serves an epistemic role comparable to the role that the disciplinary resources of linguistic anthropology provide us as we try to understand some aspect of language behavior.Footnote ⁸ This parallel has often been noted; we are frequently reminded of the ideological nature of the linguistic sciences (e.g., Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, 203). Understanding language ideology as a cultural model allows us to further elaborate this parallelism, as I will show infra in my discussion of meta-ideology.

To summarize, ideologies are cultural schemas that screen perception, channel thought, and canalize desire. All of them focalize and peripheralize experience to a greater or lesser extent. Some of them are held in place by their conformance with a society’s prevailing distribution of power, but many are not. Their biasing effects are not crippling. Peripheralized aspects of experience are not rigidly shielded from conscious awareness; they just require more effort to bring to mind.

With these preliminaries settled, let us now return to the ideologies of plagiarism and copyright. These are ideologies of textuality focused on questions of origin, a concern relatively uncharacteristic of the language ideologies we are more accustomed to studying. I suspect that to some extent this focus is fostered by the nature of textuality itself. To show why, and to establish a context for the rest of my analysis, I will start with a general discussion of ideologies of textuality.

Ideologies of Textuality: Some Examples

Textual ideologies appear in a great variety of forms. Some ideological attributes attach to single text-artifacts. For example, conservative American evangelicals regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God, a constant guide to all of life’s challenges (Bielo Reference Bielo2009). By contrast, the Friday Apostolics of Zimbabwe view the Bible as a biased document of Christianity that is irrelevant to Africans (Engelke Reference Engelke2007, 5). In other times and places, other prestigious texts have been thought to have divinatory powers, which warrants their use in practices of bibliomancy such as sortes Virgilianae (Ziolkowski and Putnam Reference Ziolkowski2008, 829–30), in which one would open a book of Virgil at random in order to predict the future.

Ideology may stipulate the appropriate uses of texts or categories of texts. Sacred texts are often surrounded by norms dictating how they should be read, but other genres may also carry assumptions concerning proper and improper ways of reading them. Since at least the eighteenth century some commentators have distinguished “active” and “passive” reading and promoted the former over the latter (Woodmansee Reference Woodmansee1994, 87–102). One very widespread conception of the proper way of understanding and appreciating poetry and prose fiction concerns the role the author’s intentions should play in the interpretation of his or her text (the issue literary theorists have debated under the rubric of the “intentional fallacy”; Iseminger Reference Iseminger1992; Livingston Reference Livingston2005). The ideology of authorial intention may be an application or special case of a broader language ideology, the (usually implicit) ideology of personalism (Holquist Reference Holquist1983, 2), which considers the meaning of an utterance to depend on the intention of the speaker. However, when applied to texts, this relationship can be made explicit and even problematized without necessarily impugning the wider ideology of personalism—suggesting that ideologies of textuality may be more prone to explicitation and contestation than other kinds of language ideology.

Ideologies of textuality have some other features related to the specificities of text-artifacts as types of discourse. Many reported language ideologies concern entire languages or language varieties, whereas textual ideology concerns discourses formulated within a language. There are of course many more texts than languages, and the average speaker constantly encounters new instances of them. Thus one theme that may be more prominent in textual ideology than in language ideology overall is that of origin or creation (i.e., authorship). While there are occasional instances of ideological concern with the origin of a language (e.g., Woolard Reference Woolard2002), the creation of texts is likely to be much more salient to average speakers.

Ideologies of Authorship

The author’s relationship to his or her text is well-traveled ground in both literary criticism and linguistic anthropology. As Irvine has pointed out (Reference Irvine1996, 132), the Bakhtinian concern with multivocality tends to converge with the sociolinguistic interest in “footing” and participant roles. In both cases, the object of analysis is usually a specific segment of discourse that exploits culturally appropriate devices to assure proper uptake.Footnote ⁹ Similar frameworks allow an author to design distinctions of voice into a text-artifact.Footnote ¹⁰

Beyond such intratextual encodings of authorship, there are also assumptions about author-text relations encoded by extratextual features of the event. These assumptions often cover whole categories of discourse, as when a particular social status conventionally implies a special relationship between author and text. This is clear in the case of vatic authorship, when a certain class of creators is thought not to originate texts but to receive them from supernatural sources. For example, some composers among the Suyá/Kisedje of Brazil are said to learn their songs from the spirits of bees, birds, fish, trees, armadillos, or vaginas (Seeger Reference Seeger2004, 52ff.).

Of all the presuppositions about authorship that the recipient brings to the text, I will focus on the role and valuation of authorial individuality and originality. I range ideologies of authorship along a single axis, with ideologies that privilege originality at one pole, and those that efface it at the other. (I will discuss only explicit ideologies, mostly professional ideologies that circulate in scholarly communities, such as literary critics, folklorists, or poststructuralists).Footnote ¹¹

Ambiguities of Originality

Since ideological accounts of authorship vary greatly, in starting out it’s helpful to consider why this might be so. I suggest that ideological multiplicity is facilitated by interpretive ambiguity. The more ways there are to construe a situation, the greater the possibility for one’s perception of it to be ideologically skewed. In accounts of text production, the exact relation of the author to the work is a major site of ambiguity. Our judgment of the author’s contribution—her originality—is necessarily an interpretation of an inchoate situation; indeed, the author herself can’t be sure how much of her contribution is “really” her own. This is true for both psychological and conceptual reasons.

An individual author is never the sole point of origin for a text. Sometimes this is literally true, as when the author collaborates with others in the real-time creative process. But even an author who works in solitude does not work alone. Insofar as her work observes the conventions of a language and a tradition, she will necessarily use preexisting materials (vocabulary, syntax, collocations, registers, styles, genres, allusions, proverbs, etc.) of known or unknown origin. A text that respected no conventions whatsoever could not be recognized as a meaningful text: “An ideal originality would result in an incomprehensible idiolect” (Stewart Reference Stewart1991, 25).Footnote ¹² (The inevitable coexistence of old and new can be deduced from the nature of language itself. Any sign system that is more than a limited set of discrete, fixed signals—any system displaying productive compositionality—can generate an indefinite number of texts from a finite vocabulary. Since they are made up of the same components, all of those texts will resemble each other to some extent.Footnote ¹³)

Furthermore, an individual author can never be sure how much credit she deserves for her creative ideas, because the contents of the mind do not usually bear marks of provenance. When a thought arises, the individual has no infallible way of telling whether its origin is interior (a novel idea) or exterior (a memory). Through “source monitoring” (Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay Reference Johnson1993) he must use the thought’s contents and any available circumstantial evidence to infer its origin. When source monitoring fails, a novel idea can be misinterpreted as a memory, or in the case of cryptomnesia (Perfect and Stark Reference Perfect2008) a memory can surface with the feeling that it is a new idea. Both overclaiming and cryptomnesia render judgments of originality uncertain, even for the author himself.

But even if, per impossibile, we could trace the source of each and every aspect or component of a text, judging its originality would still require an act of interpretation. Originality is a criterion-relative concept. Since old and new coexist in every text, a new text will necessarily resemble existing texts to some degree. But similarity can only be judged with reference to a standard (Irvine Reference Irvine2005, 77). By choosing an appropriate standard, we can make any text look like either a minor variant of, or a major departure from, an existing text.

The relativity of originality can be easily illustrated with examples from the history of the language disciplines themselves. For researchers have taken a very wide variety of stances on the average degree of novelty in discourse, with some finding it everywhere and others nowhere. Notoriously, the rise of the generative grammar paradigm emphasized the radical originality of most utterances: “Virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe” (Pinker Reference Pinker1995, 22); “Every speaker of a language has the astonishing capacity to produce completely intelligible sentences that have never been uttered before in history, and every speaker pulls off this enormous stunt several times each day” (Peters Reference Peters2008, 22).

Yet in literary theory, the near-contemporaneous development of the concept of intertextuality emphasized the radical un-originality of linguistic productions. Barthes famously declared every text to be “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages … antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony” (Reference Barthes1977, 160).

These claims, antithetical in their emphasis, are not necessarily contradictory. However, they show that judgments of originality are perspectival and relational. (This fact has been discussed by Greg Urban in terms of “interpretative metaculture.” While there are affinities between his account and mine, I don’t adopt his terminology here since it seems to conflate aspects of the phenomenon that I wish to keep separate.Footnote ¹⁴)

In short, to the extent that standards of comparison vary, they offer some degree of latitude to ideological influence. To see how far that latitude extends in the realm of textual authorship, let us now take a closer look at the axis of authorial individuality and originality. I’ll illustrate it with a few highly contrasting examples taken from opposite ends of the continuum.

Ideologies of Focalized and Peripheralized Authorship

At one end of the continuum of originality is what is often referred to as a “Romantic” ideology, according to which texts are produced by a process of “solitary, ex nihilo creation” (Wilf Reference Wilf2014, 398). This ideology is said to be consistent with modern Western values of individualism, insofar as its exclusive focus on the isolated author discounts collective and traditional contributions to text generation. At the other extreme, the latter are emphasized and the role of the individual minimized. I will refer to these as ideologies of focalized and peripheralized individual authorship, respectively.

Explicitly focalized authorship is conventionally called “Romantic,” no doubt because late eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the publication of several vigorous defenses of originality (among them Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition [Reference Young1759] and William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius [Reference Duff1767]). Novelty, originality, and individuality were also praised by eminent contemporaneous writers, such as Wordsworth (the writer should “owe nothing but to nature and his own genius” [Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2007, 22]) and Shelley (“I am unwilling to tread in the footsteps of any who have preceded me” [Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2007, 30]).

Focalized (“Romantic”) authorship has been extensively discussed; much less attention has been paid to the varieties of peripheralized authorship. These can be roughly categorized into two types, depending on whether the texts concerned are nominally attributed or unattributed. The authorship of unattributed texts comes already peripheralized, as it were. In the Euro-American tradition, one key site for the discussion of the authorship of unattributed texts has been the anonymous products of oral tradition, such as folk songs. There is a long history of debate on this subject. At one extreme, anonymity was dismissed as an accidental gap in our knowledge, the mere forgetting of an author’s name. At the other extreme, anonymity was interpreted as an ontological, not merely an epistemic, condition: the fact that a folk song was unattributed was taken to indicate that it was a spontaneous product of group creativity exercised en masse (“planless, spontaneous poetry, offspring of the instant and of the need for expression, is likely to be the product of a throng”; Gummere Reference Gummere1897, xc). In between these extremes, some theorists allowed for individual composition but insisted the individual creator’s individuality was overwhelmed by the spirit of the group: “the individual personality … disappears in the general character of a People” (Uhland Reference Uhland1868, 4).Footnote ¹⁵

Alternatively, the thesis of individual creation followed by communal re-creation (Sharp Reference Sharp[1907] 1965) dispenses with any direct involvement by a group, but neither does it posit an individual who can ventriloquize the people’s feelings. Instead, we have a chain of successive individual revisions of an individual creation, gradually purging it of all idiosyncrasies unpalatable to communal taste. Under this theory, individual authorship is peripheralized by the multiplication of individualities.

In the case of attributed texts, there are two ways to peripheralize the role of the nominal author. One way is to emphasize the author’s debt to specific prior authors. This, it is said, was characteristic of the literary aesthetics of antiquity and early modern Europe, when authors were not expected to be wholly original but could “imitate” previous writers. Often signaled by the terms inventio and imitatio, this was an aesthetics of borrowing and appropriation, allusion and embellishment, the recasting, rearranging, and recombining of existing models.

In more radical peripheralizations, individual authorship can be dissolved into a generalized pool of prior texts. This is perhaps a more recent approach; in any case, its most extreme form is associated with poststructuralism and often described with the term intertextuality. Coined by Julia Kristeva in her exposition of the thought of Bakhtin, she used it to describe an inherent property of all literature: any text is “a mosaic of quotations,” a “dialogue among several writings.” Every text is “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.” Since “the ‘literary word’ is an intersection of textual surfaces,” the author’s intention cannot anchor her text; rather, its meaning emerges from its juxtaposition and collision with whichever other texts a reader brings to it. This evacuation of the author made intertextuality attractive to Barthes, whose famous thesis of the “death of the author” can be considered the ne plus ultra of poststructuralist authorial peripheralization.Footnote ¹⁶

From Ideology to Meta-ideology

One aspect of language ideology—its explanatory role—gives its study by linguistic anthropologists a reflexive dimension. As a scholarly discipline, linguistic anthropology is committed to accounting for, understanding, and explaining language in society. Language ideology, insofar as it too is used to account for, understand, and explain language, is thus the topic of linguistic-anthropological study that most closely resembles the discipline itself. We have repeatedly pointed out this correspondence between the conduct and object of our researches, between our own “theories” about the behavior of a language community and the “ethno-theories” held by the community’s members.

From the very beginning, we have treated “native ideological rationalization” and “so-called ‘scientific’ description” as coordinate terms (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1979, 193), recognizing that we ourselves employ “basic assumptions” that reveal the operation of “linguistic ideology in our current scholarly life” (Gal Reference Gal1998, 319). “Ideologically presented rationalization … function[s] … in the same metapragmatic semiotic mode as ‘real’ (social) science. … So we do just what the ‘natives’ do, schematically speaking, and we should not ever forget that” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, 203).Footnote ¹⁷

But we can go beyond this general parallel between what we do and what the “natives” do. When we write about language ideology, much of the time we are ascribing ideologies to certain people. Is there a “native” cognate to this business of ours? Do “natives” do anything resembling the identification and analysis of language ideologies? Is there a “lay ideology critique” to correspond to our own “accredited” ideology critique?Footnote ¹⁸

I suggest that there is. Laypersons, too, identify and analyze the presuppositions and value systems underlying various types of linguistic behavior. They don’t do it in many contexts, and they don’t necessarily call what they discover “ideology,” but it is easily recognizable as such from within our discipline. If the explanatory function of language ideology in general makes it a kind of ethnoscience (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, 203), we could call this particular variety of it the ethno-ascription of ideology. In other words, just as there is a “folk linguistics” (Niedzielski and Preston Reference Niedzielski2000), a lay counterpart to our “‘scientific’ statements about language” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1979, 193), there is also a folk ideology critique that serves as a lay counterpart to our own studies of language ideology.

The ethno-ascription of ideology is thus a cultural model that (like all language ideology) tries to explain or rationalize some aspect of a group’s linguistic behavior. It is unusual only in that it does so by attributing a language ideology to that group—to explain its behavior or attitudes as produced by certain taken-for-granted assumptions about language widely shared among group members. It is this ideological ascription of ideology that I call meta-ideology.Footnote ¹⁹

In the rest of this article I illustrate this claim by presenting various examples of meta-ideology. The subject of meta-ideology seems to have attracted little notice among linguistic anthropologists; in most published studies of language ideology, the only one ascribing ideologies to anyone is the anthropologist. However it has not entirely escaped scholarly attention. I therefore start with two examples of language meta-ideology, one made familiar by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, the other from one of the most famous works of Michel Foucault.

In book 4, chapter 16 of his Essay concerning Human Understanding Reference Locke([1689] 1979), Locke presents his influential doctrine of the “degrees of assent” as part of his larger campaign for proper epistemic hygiene. Bauman and Briggs (Reference Bauman2003) have described this as an attempt to discredit appeals to authority and to delegitimize tradition as a source of knowledge. Locke advocates decontextualization to extricate discourse from the passions of factionalism and deprecates indexicality in order to drive a wedge between a statement and its human sources. Besides attacking reliance on any named individual authority (an Aristotle or Cicero), he also finds it necessary to criticize the veneration of (possibly anonymous) claims distinguished only by their great age. He writes:

In casting doubt on the reliability of tradition, Locke passes judgment as well on those who trust it. There are “some men” who (he claims) put their faith in opinions whose main or only warrant is that they have been repeated often enough to survive the passage of time. Not only does the chain of transmission leave the validity of an opinion undiminished for these men, it actually seems to strengthen it. As Bauman and Briggs might put it, these are men for whom interdiscursivity itself bears epistemological weight.

Locke presents his view of language contrastively, positioning it “vis-à-vis opposing linguistic ideologies” (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman2003, 9). He attributes to vaguely described others an attitude toward inherited opinions—an ideology of traditionality—that Locke believes to be misguided. Notice that Locke’s own language ideology is quite explicit, but he does not treat it as ideological. He presents his degrees of assent as simply “out there” in the real world. The only assumptions he identifies as such are the mistaken ones he attributes to the deluded unfortunates he is criticizing. When he describes his view of the degrees of assent his discourse is ideological; when he attributes an “inverted rule of probability” to others, his discourse is meta-ideological.

Without knowing who those “some men” were (if indeed Locke had any specific people in mind at all) we have no way of judging the accuracy of Locke’s portrait of them. It is open to us to doubt its exactness. (Were there ever people who applied a truly inverted rule of probability, considering a thousand-year-old claim to be twice as credible as one a mere five centuries old?) But of course this tactic can be rhetorically effective without being empirically adequate.

Let us now look at a more recent example. Foucault’s treatment of language in The Order of Things is a veritable meta-ideological cavalcade. He famously presented there a vision of European intellectual history marked by deep discontinuities between successive “epistemological fields” that he called epistemes (Reference Foucault1970, xxiii). In the earliest episteme that he describes—that of the sixteenth century—language is supposed to be intertwined with the world; words and things are connected by similitudes and signatures. Humankind’s original language, lost after the Tower of Babel, was said to be not a collection of arbitrary signs but a set of true marks, necessarily linked with their denotata by resemblance (Reference Foucault1970, 37–49). Language, it was thought, did not merely “represent” reality but was itself “a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world” (Reference Foucault1970, 48).

This sixteenth-century episteme is not the only language ideology Foucault describes, but I need not summarize his account of the Classical age and the nineteenth century except to mention that he posits sudden, abrupt historical breaks between them. Each episteme is an internally consistent deployment of certain master “codes” set off by radical disjunctures from those that precede and follow it.

As is well known, historians were never convinced by Foucault’s interpretations, even as they backhandedly admitted the “oracular force” (Grafton Reference Grafton2006, 23) of the “rhetorical overstatement at which he excelled” (Wolin Reference Wolin1998, 722). A great deal of subsequent research has shown that the eras of Foucault’s periodization are far more internally diverse than he allows. The episteme of similitudes, for example, was only one strain of sixteenth-century thought, and by no means a dominant one; Foucault can make it seem characteristic of that era only by a highly selective use of sources (Huppert Reference Huppert1974). Likewise, his picture of the language ideology of the Classical episteme ignores the era’s internal tensions and contradictions (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman2003, 8–9). Nor are the details of his periodizations any more reliable (Aarsleff Reference Aarsleff1982, 22–23).

There is an aspect that is common to these two examples, one I wish to emphasize since we will encounter it repeatedly. What we may suspect of Locke’s meta-ideological analysis seems demonstrable in the case of Foucault. He exaggerates the integrity of each language ideology he discusses and overstates the differences between them. He overlooks—peripheralizes—the aspects of sixteenth-century language ideologies that can also be found in earlier and later centuries.

We are familiar with this discursive move, by which some complex heterogeneous phenomenon is treated as a self-consistent, self-contained, internally coherent whole. It usually involves focalizing some conspicuous aspect of the phenomenon, a strategy that in other contexts we call essentialism. The corresponding peripheralization—the pruning away of the details that would spoil the picture of uniformity and consistency—is familiar to us as erasure (Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine2000). This coordinated use of focalization and peripheralization to create a dichotomy out of a continuum of differences is common enough to deserve its own name. Borrowing a concept from social psychology, I will refer to the tendency to homogenize entities in order to exaggerate the contrast between them as accentuation. Accentuation—also known as the contrast effect (McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears Reference McGarty2002; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov Reference Brubaker, Mara and Peter2004; Chen and Hanson Reference Chen and Jon2004, 1160–63; Yzerbyt and Demoulin Reference Yzerbyt2010, 1035)—refers to the effect that categorization has on perceptions of social groups, whereby the perceived variability within each group is reduced and the perceived difference between groups increases. (It is accentuation that is responsible for the infamous they-all-look-the-same-to-me syndrome.Footnote ²⁰)

* * *

I have used the writings of Locke and Foucault as examples of the ethno-ascription of ideology for convenience of exposition. Of course, they don’t illustrate widely shared, taken-for-granted cultural conventions. They are the unique products of individual thinkers, and the ideas they contain may have never attained the broad acceptance and taken-for-grantedness of most language ideology. At best, they became professional ideologies shared within disciplinary enclaves, and the same could be said about most (though not all) of the other examples I am about to present. I suspect that most meta-ideology is like this.

Mapping Meta-ideologies of Authorship

The study of textual meta-ideologies is thus a study of the ways textual ideologies are discursively deployed: how people talk about them, how they populate the social world with them. To whom do they attribute them? Where do people locate them in geographical, chronological, and sociocultural space, with reference to what markers of identity? What, in other words, are the correlates of meta-ideological differentiation?

My examples are drawn from two different Euro-American professional discourses. One is a pedagogical discourse about how novices can acquire the skills of text creation; the other is a legal discourse that looks to the nature of text making in order to frame principles of intangible ownership. In each case I show how meta-ideological ascriptions of concepts of authorship support projects of Othering, constructing differences between groups according to an “orientalist” logic. This requires a good deal of accentuation in order to purify the terms of comparison, purging them of shared elements that spoil the desired effect of stark contrast.

I map the meta-ideological projection of peripheralized and focalized authorship using two sets of coordinates. Textual ideologies are sometimes aligned with sociocultural differences, located among distinct ethnic, racial, or national groups. But we also find chronological mappings, assigning different textual ideologies to different eras.

Two Examples: The Debates over Composition Pedagogy and Copyright Expansion

My examples come from two discursive fields with their own reasons for concern about ideologies of authorship: the teaching of college writing—“composition”—and the debate over the expansion of intellectual-property law.

Culturalizing Textual Ideologies

I start by showing how peripheralized authorial ideologies have been projected into distant places and Othered (sub)cultures. Peripheralized authorship is culturalized when it is ideologically attributed to a group—that is, when the culture of that group is said to attach little importance to authorial individuality, originality, or ownership (or is even said to lack those concepts entirely).

Such culturalization is a variety of accentuation that operates by the familiar binary logic of orientalism, in which the Other is described as the opposite of the Self. In the usual orientalist scenario, the valence of the Other is negative: “we” are “good” and “they” are “bad.” However, as Baumann (Reference Baumann2004) points out, the Self/Other dichotomy need not be one-sidedly Manichaean. In certain respects the Other may lack what we have, while in other respects we are thought to lack something valuable that the Other has. For example, the Self may be wealthy, powerful, and modern in contrast to the poor, powerless, and backward Other; yet simultaneously the Other can be seen as altruistic and deeply spiritual, while the Self is greedy, competitive, and materialistic.

The Romantic ideals of originality and innovation are often invoked in framing these dichotomies. Originality is associated with “our” individualistic culture and is contrasted with the creative ideals of “collectivist” cultures (Sawyer Reference Sawyer2006, 147–48):

The Other in these scenarios is variously located in non-Western societies or in oral traditions within developed countries. Some writers point to East Asia, where “there is little premium put on individuality and the expression of individual, personal feeling. In contrast to post-Romantic interests in the West, there is little mention of originality in the traditional discourse. Excellence resides in perfection of skills, mastery of principles of an art genre, and submission to the inner order of the world” (Dewoskin 1992, 69). Consequently, there is little stigma attached to appropriation: “Chinese artistic traditions are not so concerned with individual property rights as are our own, and have more relaxed conventions about borrowing and adapting the work of others” (Kraus Reference Kraus1989, 123).

Peripheralized authorship can be given either positive or negative valence. In the quotations above, “our” individualism is contrasted with “their” collectivism, and likewise with the binaries inspiration versus skill, private property versus common property, and innovation versus honoring the ancestors. Notice also how “they” are described as more spiritual, more attuned to the cosmic order (just as we would expect from Baumann’s reading of orientalist logic).

Discussion of the Other’s peripheralizing notions of authorship can be found in both the introductory English writing classroom and the rhetoric of copyright activists, so I will treat them both in turn. US English composition teachers are on the alert for signs of literary theft in all student work, but they are liable to stigmatize foreign students as especially prone to commit plagiarism. There have been many voices lamenting the latter’s supposed unconcern with creativity and disregard for intellectual property.

The projection onto the Other of a propensity to plagiarism could be an example of garden-variety orientalism, in which plagiarism (seen as an ethical deficiency or character flaw) distinguishes the moral Self from the immoral Other. In this context, the meta-ideological culturalizing of peripheralized authorship can actually assume a redemptive function, vindicating the Other by pitting one exoticization against another. To borrow the vocabulary of the courtroom, it is a sort of “cultural defense” of plagiarism: it’s not that the foreign student is cheating, it’s that she inhabits a different thought-world, one in which the relation of texts to authors is radically different from that in the West. Her culture has no concept of plagiarism, and hence she is not aware of doing anything wrong.

Many American writing teachers report that students from other cultures are initially confused by Western ideas of originality, attribution, and plagiarism (McLeod Reference McLeod1992, 12): “The notion of stealing ideas or words is … profoundly Western. Students from certain Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures are baffled by the notion that one can “own” ideas, since their cultures regard words and ideas as the property of all rather than as individual property.” East Asian societies are often singled out as especially Other. Their difficulty in understanding the concept of literary theft is sometimes attributed to the supposed supreme value they place on honoring the past (Buranen Reference Buranen1999, 66): “rather than seeing copying from books or other sources as ‘cheating,’ … Asians see it as a way of acknowledging one’s respect for the received wisdom of their ancestors.” Another common explanation invokes the supposed anti-individualist tendencies of these cultures (Dryden Reference Dryden1999, 77): “It may be hard for Westerners to imagine a culture in which personal opinions, originality, and the need to distinguish one’s own views from those of received wisdom might carry little value and, in fact, usually harbor the potential for social disharmony and personal stigma. But those conditions must be acknowledged if we are to understand Japanese attitudes toward the ownership of words and ideas—attitudes that differ widely from those in the West.” For these reasons, they argue, “plagiarism comes naturally to the Japanese” (Wheeler Reference Wheeler2009, 26).

This sort of Othering is not confined to faraway, exotic societies, but can also be applied to a disadvantaged minority’s folk culture. One of the most notorious plagiarism cases in recent American history illustrates the Othering of African-American textual ideology. It also shows how redemptive exoticization can be projected onto the plagiarizing subject, where it is interpreted as resistance to the majority culture.

In the late 1980s, the editors of Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers became aware that many of his writings from his graduate student days—including his dissertation on systematic theology—contained passages taken without attribution from other sources (Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project 1991). The many cases of unacknowledged textual debts, not only in his dissertation but also his sermons and later publications, quickly became bones of political contention, with right-wing commentators accusing King of plagiarism to discredit him and his supporters (e.g., Pappas Reference Pappas1998).

Scholars reacted in several ways to these revelations. Some saw King’s plagiaries as unfortunate blots on his reputation, but others argued that they had to be understood in the context of “African-American orality” and specifically a tradition of “voice-merging” practiced in the Black church (Miller Reference Miller1991, 121):

Thus for Miller, King’s plagiarisms were the result of his transposition of the textual ideology of the Black folk preacher into the White academy.

This sort of “cultural defense” is also found in the copyright debates, though it is not as prominent there. As we will see, the critics of copyright expansion have depended largely on a chronological schema, a European history in which an early regime of peripheralized authorship was followed by the reign of focalized authorship. However, some of them have ventured further afield. I will present one brief but revealing example that adds cultural distance to temporal distance. It was first discussed by a legal scholar familiar with Chinese history and later taken up by a writer closely associated with the “cultural environmentalist” movement dedicated to preserving the public domain.

Early in his “defense of the cultural commons” against the creeping advance of intellectual property rights, Lewis Hyde turns to distant times and places where our taken-for-granted notions of intangible ownership are absent. “Creativity in ancient China was not self-expression but an act of reverence toward earlier generations and the gods. … To honor the past was a consistent virtue for a thousand years in imperial China and thus to copy the work of those who came before was a matter of respect rather than theft. Said the fifteenth-century artist Shen Zhou ‘If my poems and paintings should prove to be of some aid to the forgers, what is there for me to grudge about?’” (Reference Hyde2010, 20).

Culturalizing Textual Ideologies: Patterns of Accentuation

In both of these cases, maintaining an us/them dichotomy requires a good deal of accentuation: a culturalizing meta-ideology must overlook considerable evidence of similarity between “our” ideas of authorship and “theirs.” As is well known, cultural value systems can rarely if ever be described in a few simple generalizations. But beyond this truism, there is evidence that the features of the orientalized ideologies that have been meta-ideologically suppressed are precisely those that would render them less Other. In what follows I’ll review some of the evidence for erasure in both the pedagogical and intellectual-property cases.

Surveys of students in Chinese (Hu and Lei Reference Hu2015) and Japanese (Wheeler Reference Wheeler2009) universities have uncovered little evidence of a culturally validated laxity regarding originality and attribution. Wheeler, for example, asked students studying English at Hokkaido University to evaluate sample paragraphs supposedly taken from student essays. The examples that appeared to be plagiarized were almost unanimously given lower grades, often with comments that the author should “think for himself” rather than copy another’s work. (Almost half of the students gave the “plagiarized” text the lowest possible grade.) These results, along with the strict disciplinary action Japanese universities take against researchers found to have plagiarized (Reference Wheeler2009, 26), lead Wheeler to conclude that the idea of Japanese culture as plagiarogenic has no factual basis.

Similar results have been found in studies of non-native writers from many other cultures. Buranen concludes that this meta-ideology is an urban legend, a by-product of the fact that dependence on published text is much easier to sense in writings by non-native speakers. In any event, it essentializes (Buranen Reference Buranen1999, 70).

Accentuation is equally evident in the story of Shen Zhou. Its transformation presents an especially interesting demonstration, since we can observe the process of Othering in operation. By following the anecdote as it is successively reproduced through the chain of citation, we can see the progressive filtering-out of contextual detail as meta-ideology reshapes the story into the expected form.

Hyde found the story of Shen Zhou in a book by the legal scholar William Alford, where it is used to support Alford’s claim that China’s traditional political culture, with its hierarchical organization and orientation to the past, was inhospitable to the development of intellectual property rights. Alford’s general argument has attracted much criticism (cf. Ivanhoe Reference Ivanhoe2005; Shao Reference Shao2005; Stone Reference Stone2008; Liu Reference Liu2009; Lu Reference Lu2009), but I will concentrate on this single example that Hyde found so evocative in his defense of the cultural commons.

As reported by Alford (Reference Alford1995, 29), Shen Zhou’s comment was a reply to a question: “Shen Zhou (1427–1509) is reported to have responded to the suggestions that he put a stop to the forging of his work by remarking, in comments that were not considered exceptional, ‘if my poems and paintings, which are only small efforts to me, should prove to be of some aid to the forgers, what is there for me to grudge about?’” Alford presents this as evidence of the kind of attitude typical in a culture where it was unthinkable to “exclude others from the common heritage of all civilized persons.”

But the anecdote is puzzling. It’s unclear why Alford thinks Shen Zhou’s answer was unexceptional, especially since—as he admits—the fact that the artist had a friend who was bothered by the forgeries indicates that some Chinese were concerned about unauthorized reproductions. Why wasn’t Shen Zhou concerned as well? As is apparent when we look to Alford’s source, Alford has omitted the information we need to answer this question.

Alford found the story of Shen Zhou in an article by Wen Fong (1962) on forgeries in Chinese art. Fong used it to illustrate “the general attitude of tolerance, or indeed willingness, shown on the part of the great Chinese painters toward the forging of their own works” (1962, 100). He gives the full anecdote as follows:

Fong (1962, 101) explains that Shen Zhou and his artistic colleagues were “prominent intellectual and social leaders as well as famous painters. As ‘gentlemen-painters,’ they were not supposed to accept any fee for their artistic work, and the demands made upon them were often a nuisance to bear. It was understandable, therefore, that, under certain circumstances, they would be only too glad to lend their distinguished names to imitations by lesser artists as a form of social amenity” (my emphasis).

Shen Zhou’s attitude does not seem to have been just a purely selfless display of beneficence and nonattachment, but was highly context specific.Footnote ²² Because of his elevated social status, he was not supposed to reap any material benefits from his art. Perhaps he sought immaterial reward in the satisfaction of entrusting his paintings to connoisseurs who could appreciate them properly, who would contemplate them with pleasure all their lives and bequeath them to their children as precious heirlooms. But the multitudes who clamored for his paintings were not of that sort. Their intent was purely mercenary: they had discovered a racket by means of which they could profit from Shen Zhou’s talent in ways that he could not.

Shen Zhou’s attitude was schematized as his story was condensed in successive citations in the secondary literature. It is Alford who leaves out most of the detail (including the important fact that the Chinese literati could not profit from their paintings). It is easy to suspect that this omission was tendentious, since the excised information would weaken the general point he wants to make about Chinese culture. Still, he at least admits (though only in a footnote) that some of Shen Zhou’s contemporaries objected to the unauthorized reproduction of his paintings—thus retaining a clue that there may have been heterogeneity or internal inconsistency in the ideology of the day. But when the anecdote is further abbreviated, even that faint clue vanishes. Erasure is complete, and Shen Zhou’s statement is left to stand for a thousand years of Chinese culture.Footnote ²³

Chronologizing Textual Ideologies

While my examples to this point have projected difference along the synchronic axis, the remaining ones project it along the diachronic axis. When different concepts of authorship are assigned to different historical periods, Romantic authorship is usually associated with modernity, and peripheralized authorship with the premodern (and sometimes the postmodern) period. The source of this periodization was no doubt English literary criticism. “Romantic” was not originally the designation for a historical era, but it came to be used as such in the late nineteenth century. The idea that the emphasis on original genius was a Romantic innovation was well established in the United States by the early twentieth century (e.g., Babbitt Reference Babbitt1908).

Chronologized peripheralized authorship played a role in the pedagogical debates, but it was relatively minor. Some of the educators trying to combat the demonization of plagiarism looked to the past, arguing that the dread of imitation was a recent innovation that had not troubled some of the greatest luminaries of English literature (McLeod Reference McLeod1992, 12): “The very notion of being able to ‘own’ words or ideas is after all a relatively recent one. Classical notions of art involved mimesis, or imitation: originality was not valued, nor was the individual artist; writers borrowed freely from one another. Few of Shakespeare’s plots were his own. … It is perhaps not by accident that our modern notion of plagiarism was born at about the same time as two other ideas: the romantic notion of the single, original author expressing his innermost feelings through art, and the capitalist notion of private property.” By contrast, chronological accentuation played a much larger role in the copyright debates.

When American jurists trying to hold back the rising tide of protection looked into history for an explanation of the increasingly stringent interpretations of copyright law that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they found it in the Romantic ideology of authorship (Umbreit Reference Umbreit1939; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1967; Jaszi Reference Jaszi1981). “This change of conception among authors as to what it is that constitutes ‘literary property’ was a result of the substitution of the canons of romanticism for those of classicism as the criteria of literature” (Umbreit Reference Umbreit1939, 947–48). As Kaplan (Reference Kaplan1967, 23–25) explained:

Thus the meta-ideological importation of Romantic authorship into the discourse of copyright law was tendentious from the start: legal scholars who were dissatisfied with the current state of the law “blamed” it on the influence of author-centric Romantic textual ideology.

Chronologizing Textual Ideologies: Patterns of Accentuation

The legal scholars’ meta-ideological periodization of concepts of authorship requires two levels of accentuation. First, in constructing a historical holding pen for focalized authorship, chronological boundary drawing must obscure the degree to which both originality and fidelity to tradition are values upheld in virtually all eras. Romantic authors did not consistently espouse the so-called Romantic ideology, and quasi-Romantic ideas of originality have been professed throughout Western literary history. Second, in promoting the idea that an epochal shift in textual ideology was a major factor behind copyright expansion, this periodization distracts attention from the many other (and perhaps more significant) historical forces conspiring to inflate intellectual property rights. I discuss these two levels of accentuation in turn.

As far back as the ancient Greeks there were writers who lauded originality. Isocrates, for example, felt it was important to “discover things to say that are entirely different from what others have said”; it would be “most disgraceful and painful” to write “just like what others had written.” Orators who seek fame confront a daunting task, “since most [topics] have been taken up. If they say the same things as their predecessors, they will appear to be shameless babblers, but those who seek novel topics … have great difficulty finding something to say” (Behme Reference Behme2004, 201). In the sixteenth century, Ludovico Castelvetro likewise denounced imitatio as theft and insisted that a true poet “neither follows the examples already set forth, nor does what has already been done … but makes a thing wholly different from anything that has been done before” (White Reference White1935, 26–27).

Moreover, ancient Greece and the Renaissance were not free from accusations of plagiarism, some of which look absurdly overblown even by Romantic standards. For example, Theopompos of Chios accused Plato of having stolen the idea of the immortality of the soul from Homer’s description of the death of Patrocles (Olcott Reference Olcott2002, 1051). Similarly, White notes that during the reign of imitatio, borrowing was “frequently attacked in a manner closely resembling that of the most captious modern demands for ‘originality’” (Reference White1935, 13).Footnote ²⁴

The theorists of inventio were not oblivious to the value of a personal style, and there were attempts to reconcile the imitation of esteemed models with the cultivation of an individual voice. Erasmus famously linked originality with the multiplication and diversification of models ([1528] Reference Erasmus and Izora1908, 123, emphasis added):

As this passage suggests, even under the rule of imitatio, derivativeness was stigmatized. When Petrarch discovered that in one of his writings he had inadvertently quoted literally from Virgil and Ovid, he modified his phrasing so that it suggested, but did not replicate, the originals (DellaNeva Reference DellaNeva1989, 449–50). Thus there was a permanently contestable boundary to be drawn somewhere in the gray zone between legitimate imitation and slavish copying.

Contrariwise, even the Romantic poets did not consistently espouse “Romantic” authorship. Textual ideology during this era was hardly univocal, but was a site of “important cultural tensions” (Mazzeo Reference Mazzeo2007, 750). According to Macfarlane (Reference Macfarlane2007, 29), “no unified or consistent doctrinal position toward originality and literary resemblance can easily be abstracted from contemporary Romantic documents. Undeniably, Romantic writers … can be shown to have coveted novelty and lack of influence as vital poetic criteria. However, they can also be shown … to have addressed with varying degrees of cynicism and disbelief the concept of originality as creation out of nothing. They did associate genius with originality, but they also perceived creativity as a function of description, assimilation, and arrangement.” In the second half of the nineteenth century this tension becomes increasingly visible, as British literary aesthetics embraced both a focalized authorial ideology and a strong reaction against it (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2007, 6). Thus Charles Dickens, the century’s “most convinced believer in art as the product of solitary genius” (Reference Macfarlane2007, 62), worked amid widespread skepticism about the paradigm of the heroic creator.

It is worth noting the great variety of specific, contingent social and intellectual developments that fertilized the growth of this skepticism. One stimulus was the scholarly “unmasking” of some of the reigning icons of exemplary authorship: for example, “Homer” was shown to label a process of cumulative creativity rather than to name an individual of genius, and Shakespeare turned out to have been heavily indebted to previous authors. On another front, the growth of the discipline of psychology diluted received ideas of secure, self-possessed individuality by exposing the social formation of identity and the role of the unconscious mind. Emerging philosophical notions of collective consciousness (such as Emerson’s “universal mind”) further eroded the atomistic view of society. Meanwhile, the new sport of plagiarism hunting “revealed” instances of unoriginality in some of the most esteemed classic and contemporary writers (Milton, Byron, Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alexandre Dumas père). Eventually these “literary detectives” provoked a backlash: their accusations of plagiarism were seen as the carping of vindictive, talentless hacks. In the last decades of the nineteenth century they were denounced by a growing chorus of writers who normalized plagiarism as a natural consequence of the inevitable interdependence of authors in a literary culture (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2007, 43–49, 67–73).

It’s true that the highly accentuated periodization embraced by Umbreit, Kaplan, and later jurists was borrowed rather than homemade. Literary critics and historians had spent decades building the image of a Romantic textual ideology, downplaying the common ground between Neoclassical and Romantic aesthetics, the internal heterogeneity of each era, and the ambiguity and relativity inherent in the notion of authorship; indeed, the work of accentuation may have started already in the Romantic period.Footnote ²⁵

But beyond the erasures of historical periodization, there is a second level of accentuation that was contributed by the jurists themselves, embodied in the thesis that a Romantic-period ideology of focalized authorship was a key driver of copyright expansion. As the critics of this thesis have noted (Lemley Reference Lemley1997; Bracha Reference Bracha2008; Lavik Reference Lavik2014), it highlights the role of aesthetics to the detriment of several much more powerful historical forces, such as economic factors, interest-group lobbying, international harmonization, neoliberal policies, and the changing role of government. Furthermore, they show that the thesis is unable to explain many of the actual provisions of copyright law that don’t put the author’s interests first (and indeed even subordinate them to a concern for the public domain).

In my two examples, the meta-ideological frameworks by means of which peripheralized textual ideologies were projected into distant times or peoples are frameworks shared within delimited social groups, and to that extent can be considered cultural. Among composition teachers and proponents of copyright reform there seems to have been fairly broad acceptance of the idea that associates peripheralized authorship with the distant past and distant peoples.

As a final contrasting example, let us look briefly at a recent case of meta-ideological projection, one that is not widely shared (at least, not yet). While it may exemplify nothing more than a single individual’s idiosyncratic attitudes, it might be a meta-ideology in statu nascendi. It’s also interesting in that it tracks neither chronological periods nor cultural groups. It illustrates how a textual ideology can be projected not just into other times and nations but also into other creative media.

Authorial Meta-ideology in the Making?

In 2004, the writer Malcolm Gladwell published “Something Borrowed,” an article about the British playwright Bryony Lavery, whose play Frozen was enjoying a successful run on Broadway. Lavery had copied several short passages, 675 words in total, from an article Gladwell had published in 1997. “Something Borrowed” is Gladwell’s account of his feelings about having been plagiarized. At first he accused Lavery of literary theft. But he started having second thoughts, and the more he found out about her play, about copyright law, and about practices of artistic borrowing, the more he was inclined to exonerate her. I find it noteworthy that many of those thought-provoking practices involved musical borrowing (Gladwell Reference Gladwell2004):

Gladwell seems to be comparing the literary world unfavorably with the musical world. Writers are possessive, they guard their turf and snarl at intruders, but musicians can rise above such pettiness. Gladwell seems to hold up their tolerant attitude as an example that writers should aspire to.

But it’s ironic that he uses the story of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in defense of “cribbing, tweaking, [and] transforming.” This is a singularly inappropriate example for an article designed to persuade writers to be more tolerant of borrowing. The song he attributes to Muddy Waters, “You Need Love,” though sung by that artist, was composed by Willie Dixon. Perhaps Gladwell’s friend was not upset about the band’s recourse to Dixon’s song, but Dixon was upset—upset enough to file a lawsuit against Led Zeppelin in 1985, which was settled out of court in 1987 (Inaba Reference Inaba2011, 192–97). (As a result, all subsequent reissues of the song have included Dixon’s name as one of the composers.) So much for musicians’ cheerful acceptance of the borrowing that is “at the very heart of the creative process.”

Like the composition teachers, Gladwell is seeking clemency for a writer accused of plagiarism. But where the teachers located difference in stereotypical places (the exotic cultures of foreign countries and minority enclaves), Gladwell—perhaps uniquely—looks for it in a nearby community of artistic practice. We could think of him as constructing a “nonce meta-ideology,” a schema in which the carping, jealous possessiveness of writers contrasts with musicians’ deeper understanding of the essence of creativity. It’s not a cultural schema (if he is the only one to hold it), at least not yet. However, it too accentuates, exaggerating differences between social identities and attaching opposite valences to them.Footnote ²⁶