Love and Theft

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." – T.S. Eliot

We tend to judge a person not by what he is conflicted over, but by what he takes for granted. His identity constitutes the set of core values that he assumes are impregnable. In our society, one of these core values, like the law of gravity or the color of the afternoon sky, is the concept of “property.” Like our lives and our liberty, our property is unalienable; it is the American belief that anything worth having can be bought, with time or money or both.

“Intellectual property,” like all property, assumes ownership. It is the struggle to claim our ideas as our own. We want each pieces of our “intellectual property,” the painting or the story or the scientific discovery, to be like our capitalist enterprises: autonomous and fiercely competitive; in America the individual reins supreme. We want the artist to be the Napoleon, conquering us with his uniqueness, dominated us with his intellectual empire, built with his own sweat and blood.

However, human thought is a commonwealth, not a marketplace. Thoughts cannot be like property because they cannot exist alone. One cannot define a word without other words: If you want the word “house,” then you need the word “wood” and then “tree” and then “forest” and then “land” and then you need the whole “earth.” You can only have one word with other words. Likewise, you can only have one idea in relation to other ideas: If you want to understand "love" then you need to have a meaningful understanding of "feelings" then "emotions" then "thoughts" and then on and on, through hundreds of concepts already developed in the mind, waiting to pounce. We can only have words with other words; we can only have ideas with other ideas.

We cannot own entirely our ideas because all thoughts are commentaries on the past, on what we already know. In writing a paragraph, the writer is synthesizing hundreds of years of thought, thousands of gallons of spilled ink on paper, millions of thinkers, with his own temperament and ideas. He is building on the edifice of his intellectual past. All photographs or paintings or stories, in this way, are plagiarism of reality – they steal, in the capitalistic understanding of the word, from a world we already understand. The thinker is not constructing an empire; he is placing one brick on top of the ever-growing wall of human thought; he is polishing or building or resurfacing or deconstructing a reality we already know. Human thought develops on the nexus between the past and mind. Restricting this interface – copyrighting our ideas – is the destruction of this human cultural and intellectual commonwealth. It is undemocratic because it hurts the artistic inspiration of the many, for the profit of the few.

Sure, there are pioneer achievements that reformulate the very frames we have to look at our world (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon might be one; the theory of relativity might be another), but these are starting lines, not the finishing lines. For the most part, insight does not reformulate our frames, like these pioneer achievements. It is just rearticulates what we already know. When we nod in approval, charmed by a nonce witticism, it is not because we have gained knowledge, but because we have gained a new tool to evaluate old knowledge. We nod because we are engaging in a dialogue with our past. Martin Heidegger called this process of reworking the obvious to create truth “enframing.” The Dadaist movement of the twentieth century was sustained on this belief, that art was a recontextualizing of common understandings. André Breton’s said that beauty is the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

If this is true, then the method for intellectual breakthrough involves the systematic examination of the obvious. And developing that organized method for thinking is your challenge as a sentient being. Good luck.