Literary Indiscernibles, Referential Forgery, and the Possibility of Allographic Art

Peter Lamarque, in chapter 4 of his 2010 book Work and Object, argues that certain art forms, like music and literature, are such that there can be no forgeries that purport to be of an actually existing work—what Lamarque calls “referential forgeries.” Put more clearly, any attempt at referentially forging a musical or literary work just results in making a copy of that work. Lamarque motivates this claim via appeal to another distinction, first made by Nelson Goodman, between “allographic” and “autographic” artforms. This article will evaluate Lamarque’s argument that allographic literary works are unable to be referentially forged and will find that it does not pass muster. In so doing, the distinction between allographic and autographic artforms will also be called into question. In section I, I will characterize referential forgery and Lamarque’s definition of allographic and autographic artforms. Section II will critically examine Lamarque’s argument against the possibility of referential forgery in allographic artforms. Section III will offer a case where it appears that a putatively allographic text’s type membership is sensitive to facts about its causal-intentional provenance. This case will serve as pretext for Section IV’s identification of this causal-intentional relation with the sanctioning relation of (Irvin 2005). On the basis of considerations treated in sections I through IV, section V will question the tenability of the allographic/autographic distinction.