It feels naïve to insist, long after writers first came to understand the full co-optive capacities of capital, that an avant-garde art should as a first order of business épater les bourgeois. What still scandalizes the sensibilities of the respectable classes? Not sex or drugs or hurling beefsteaks at the theatre (as the Dadaists were wont to do). All of this is funny, now, or worse: interesting.
Maybe we’ve been so focused on throttling bourgeois mores to within an inch of their lives that we’ve forgotten to attend to one of the more basic ideological fictions that has yet to disappear. Actually it’s so constitutive of capitalism that the demise of the one is unthinkable without the demise of the other. I’m talking about property. Okay, yes, writers have been debasing the sanctity of private property since before Marx. Even on the score of so-called intellectual property, specifically copyright, they have devised ways to reopen the commons, from early pirate printing presses, to samizdat, and to the wiser corners of the internet (including the Internet Archive).
But from the heady, green-fairied days of Baudelaire and Rimbaud it has been clear that the segment of the bourgeoisie we should care most about scandalizing — perhaps against our better political judgment — is that of its artists. And strolling through a Barnes & Noble, or a Waterstones, or a McNally Jackson today, cracking open one of a thousand “mid novels,” as Isabel Pabán Freed calls them, produced in all likelihood by an MFA graduate or a current resident of NYC, and realizing, as she says, “that things that are mid are fungible,” one discovers that the sameness of everything our culture produces is at least in part a symptom of the comforts guaranteed by copyright: you will have your (editor adjusted) title and your name on the cover, and there will be the little colophon, and inside will be sentences that, despite sounding like the sentences in every other book, will be, don’t you worry, your own. No one can take that from you. No one can take from you the process by which you have cupped the common pool of language (our only remaining commons) and imbibed it for your nourishment; and because of this, you are free, perhaps too free, to do nothing of note with that language, to reuse it twice over — once by imbibing, once by regurgitating cliché.
Only a bourgeois logic would find it counterintuitive to say that copyright makes people less original, not more. It brings them fear, pushes them to seek their little corner. That language could possibly be enclosed is of course an impossibility, and so we’ve come up with terms to mitigate the friction generated by the imposition of the property concept on words: reference, allusion, homage, borrowing. What could it possibly mean to borrow from Beckett? Do enough borrowing today and you’ll be slapped with a lawsuit. But wait another couple of decades, when the gates are flung open, and you’ll find the language bounding free and into the woods, yours to catch and kill.
Stealing from Whole Foods has never been more fashionable. Maybe it’s time we stole from publishers in the same spirit. Our fellow authors will, at first, feel as if we are stealing from them. They will be épatés. But soon enough they’ll see that all of us are being robbed daily by an institution that doesn’t care about language, one in fact that abuses metaphors long ago exhausted, beating a dead horse.
Our “plagiarism” series is a beginning in this spirit. Fair warning: if you’re clever enough to figure out how and on what grounds to sue us, you’ll find our coffers are empty, without property.
— Ben Libman, series editor. Paris, 2026.
minor literature[s] 