|
a matter of
grammatical joys
– complete with
definitive, mathematically-precise formula –
featuring, too, an Open Letter to
the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
When we
quote others, we may be doing much more than simply
quoting. The very act of going from one's voice to
another's also invites the stir of human themes – ours
linked to theirs – percolating multiply in all of us.
The realm of quoting bids touch upon this underlying
life. We do it (directly quote, indirectly refer to
others) through those vehicles of looping and linking
called grammar – the arts for all transitioning.
Crossing
over to touch on and perhaps enter into another – or,
others – may be physical, as in sex (scoring, joy, or
religiosity). It may be non-physical, too, as in
essaying or storytelling. Either way, in private sex or
public prose, technique keys all – all connections – and
best: the transitioning grammars that locate us
vis-à-vis others.
Before looking at
actual techniques, we can digress for a question: how
much intercourse with "others" do we really want? The
"others" part of this question matters for how it
differs from the "we getting it" part. That is, to the
degrees we may not see "others" except as enablers of
ourselves, our intercourse serves colonizing, not
connections. For those who see "others" mainly as
extensions of ourselves, such reductions translate in
our personal lives as solipsism, in larger public
affairs as militarism (our imposing-our-U.S.-corporate-hegemony-on-the-world).
The two connect. Private and public intercourse may
help in seeing others; they may in symbiosis also reduce
to the narcissism of our larger culture – from corporate
academe and its promises for its mutually-isolated
specializations, to corporate marketing and advertising
and their consumerism entitlements. These systemic
exploitations of our most malleable selves everywhere
similarly incant related promises and entitlements,
reducing all to one thing: to the satisfaction of "me"
– "me" fused with my tribe of similar "me's." Empire
U.S.A. teaches the religion of accumulation, not
connection. Though we may do it unwittingly, we learn
to expect life to be ever adding up – always more
rewards for "me" – "me" and the tribes of my fellow
"me's." Life by corporate ethics beckons as a forward
progress, so long as we learn to keep to our correct
lanes, our flow-chart niches. In corporate culture,
"others" collapse as any meaningful category, except as
adjoining linked-fellow units, all in our
similarly-mutual isolations, from our demographics in
consumerland to our drivers in parallel tunnel-vision
lanes. Though as humans we're all "others," corporate
culture teaches us the banalities for when we meet at
water coolers, vending machines, elevator lobbies, and
shopping lines. In cubicle culture all are the same.
We've no intercourse with "others" except for emotion
for the odd fool who tries to line-jump us or cut us off
in traffic. Except for such brief altercations, we've
few abilities to see, let alone quote them.
Even then, communication comes typically in standardized
rage and stereotype categories.
Safe otherwise as we
are, or expect ourselves as entitled to be in the
niches, lanes, lines, and cubicles of our corporate
culture, it all the more entertains how, every year this
time of year, we have from our usual school and other
corporate types the same predictable hand-wringing about
plagiarism.
Entertaining, because
here the issue of "others" nettles more.
Simply put, plagiarism
occurs when we quote others (directly, indirectly) as if
things from them proceeded not from them but from us.
In plagiarism, "they" cease to exist – or never
existed. If you listen to our genteel pious bemoaning
from corporate academe, you can see how few regret
plagiarism for human reasons – for the missed joy of
more intercourse with "others." They whom Richard Rorty
called "ascetic priests," they who most model the
manners of poising impersonal, neutral, "objective,"
instead most often in lamenting plagiarism lament the
fact that they who quote without attribution are
cheating "us." That is, those who pass off the words of
others as their own are misrepresenting their abilities
and deceiving "us," their teachers, fellow students, or
whomever the niche public may be.
When I
hear these, the perennially "shocked, shocked" about
plagiarism, I'm reminded of the drivers in sprawl
America ever stressed-out and quick to road rage:
"they" are passing "me": "they" are blocking "my" way –
maybe doing it idiotically, or deviously, but "they"
should know better. In academe, those passing off
others' material as their own may also and thereby be
getting unfairly ahead – passing "me" in the
flow-chart terrain of corporate-land – that
lane-changing, line-jumping rat race of grade grubbing,
admissions procuring, and promotions, tenure, and
sinecure competing.
Some in
the plagiarism debates may do a more sincere job in
their finger pointing. They may feel sorry for
students, particularly for those who may plagiarize in
response to the too-many instructors who every year give
the same rote assignments. Some may deprecate
plagiarism, too, out of the professional respect they'd
like to see more of us have for the specialist rungs
they have learned to climb. They would like us to
emulate, or at least honor them for the personal
sacrifices that got them where they are. Too many of
these, however, all-too-obviously show no love for any
"others" but, rather, for the greater narcissism,
eventual pensions, and abiding 401K's of their own
careerism – for the step-by-step methodologies they as
specialists have learned mark out their turfs. We as
drones may validate them if we all similarly turn to the
same manuals, hand-outs, and charts where they got their
proprieties for APA, MLA, and other referencing
formatting.
Theorem #1:
Those,
by contrast, who love people – real "others" – are those
who love grammar: the arts of transitions. As
Essaying Differences Theorem #1
puts it:
Love of People =
Love of Transition Grammars
The
techniques of transitioning into quotes, like those of
transitioning from one paragraph to another, best
involve some subordinate clause hinged unto the main
clause. Relative clauses work well for this – syntax
beginning with "which," "that," "who," and "whose."
These let us look at some noun we've just met, to see it
in new context we want to introduce for it. Thus we
summarize identity and add identity to it. We allow it
to turn another facet for additional sparkle not seen
before.
Although
relative clauses work well to show other dimensions to
any noun, adverbial phrases may do this even better,
above and beyond their chief job, citing and locating
time factors. We may start a phrase with "when,"
"while," "before," "after," "during," or "since," or
other such terms, and yoke one period of time to
another. But we may do something more, as the subject
noun at the beginning of each phrase may close with a
statement at the end recalling that earlier-mentioned
identity; or with a very different noun, moving things
in a very different direction ("When I was fifteen, and
still believed such ideals," "While her words told me
one thing"). It's at this point we arrive with evolved
expectations at a next paragraph. For a transition into
a quote, we may not only introduce words or ideas from
another person, but may put their context
alongside the one our own words have been establishing.
For transition into quotes, the "other" may get key
emphasis. Above and beyond our prose, somebody
else's matters for perhaps some other
perfectly good reasons (even if not originally exactly
our reasons).
Similes
may work for transition grammars. Gerundives may, too.
We've many choices but the fact remains: through them
we can enjoy "others." Even while yoked to the
machinery of corporate culture, as all are in America,
we also have links to other culture which in song, film,
book, and other forms can let us rise above and, for
awhile, to some extents, let us shed our corporate souls
(even while the forms of popular culture, simply in
being marketed and sold, may ride their own corporate
conveyances, too).
No need
to be ashamed that we all, to some extents, inhabit
evil. "They" do, too. But in the proportion that we
get good at seeing and quoting "others," we can set off
in subordinate clauses the various evils we also
inhabit. Or, vice versa, we can keep elements of
other culture alive in negotiating the main, perhaps
more potent clauses – as Henry Adams located "the
Virgin" and spiritual sides of life alongside "the
Dynamo" and robot-making industrial life. To the
degrees we learn to relish the arts and acts of
transitions, we can see more generously through our
mortal complicities, not to deny them, but to elevate
and relish more precise, more true, more subtle
intercourse.
All humanity lives in
a tension with each culture's larger myths, promises,
and lies. All inhabit the primary facts of clothes,
food, landscape, buildings, and transport, so that while
main grammars may track these things in their
utilitarian functions, additional grammars – thanks to
all those transitions – may simultaneously track the
other levels of reality in their styles – may cite, too,
the many levels of "others" in so many ways
interconnected with and affected by us, as we are with
and by them.
To wit, the open
letter, below:
Part Two >>
|
