"We are concerned," writes Michel Foucault, "with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed ... to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse within a society such as ours" (84). Like Foucault, or, perhaps, because of himI share this concern, and wish to trace some of the functioning of academic discourse, as it is taught and practiced, back to the effects of the dominating powers that now threaten to complete the total subjugation of all knowledge to the rules of an overbearing, overweening marketplace. I am concerned because, despite my every effort to the contrary, I have failed to produce here discourse that is not merely a collection of trademarks, derivatives, pay-to-say and rent-to-write slogans; indeed my every effort to refrain from writing anything valuable may have the unpleasant effect of itself becoming yet another example of the very thing I feel is threatening the integrity of academic prosecopyrighted expression, writing that is subject to copyright, writing that could not be used without my permission--and even then may constitute an unforgivable act of plagiarism.

Most professors who teach courses requiring writing are conscious of the problem of plagiarism. University catalogs and student handbook all warn of extreme penalties for students caught "plagiarizing," which means either falsely representing another author's "expression" or "ideas" as one's own. While plagiarism has seemingly always existed, the Internet, with its swarms of "term-paper mills" and freely available essays, has made it extraordinarily easy for students to "copy and paste" either whole or portions of other's work and represent it as their own. Turnitin.com, perhaps the world's most popular web-based plagiarism detection service, states that "approximately 30 percent of all students may be plagiarizing on every written assignment they complete" (iParadigms, "The Problem"). Students seem to have about as much guilt about "stealing" other's ideas as they do about stealing commercial music and movies via peer-to-peer networks like Napster or Kazaa; indeed, one may imagine a future in which plagiarism is so rampant and well-disguised that even the most tech-savvy teachers and administrators will have a difficult, if not impossible, task in prosecuting plagiarists. Surely, if engines can be built like Turnitin.com to search the entire Internet and return a percentage of how much of a text is "original," another can be built to subtly scramble a word, a phrase--wipe away a mere digital footprint; perhaps with such a tool authors might achieve originality like never before. I am not trying to make light of plagiarism, which is certainly not what one does in the face of such a threat. Plagiarism is characterized by most handbooks and catalogs as a very serious, if not the most serious, type of academic offense. Undoubtedly, some professors would rather have students walk out of their office with a stolen book than walk into it with a copied paper; plagiarism is a shameful and embarrassing crime for everyone involved. Defining what writing practices constitute plagiarism varies from handbook to handbook, but the University of South Florida's policy seems to be the norm:

Harvard's "Writing with Sources" goes a step further, arguing that "Plagiarism is passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them, an act of lying, cheating, and stealing" (3.1 Plagiarism, online). From a critical perspective, the italicized sections of the University of South Florida's policy are difficult to take seriously. The obvious problems are how one determines whether a fact is "well known," and what criteria can we use to evaluate the "first-handedness" of a thought or observation. A fact "well known" in suburban California (such as on which street a family-managed restaurant is located) may be quite rare knowledge in a small Alaskan village. Following this policy to its logical ends results in absurdities like tracing all thoughts back to the man or woman in whose brain they spontaneously generated. Indeed, some professors declare that even non-published works like lecture notes or even casual conversations can be sources of plagiarism if not properly cited; even cave paintings require proper citation.

My purpose here is not to praise dishonesty or dismiss it as harmless. What I am arguing is that a student who downloads a paper and submits it as her own is not so much guilty of "literary theft" as she is of lying about the type of work she performed. I am drawing a subtle distinction here between the wrong of lying and "stealing ideas," because the "wrongness" of using other people's ideas without citing them is what I intend to criticize in this article. Note also that I am not saying "stealing expressions," an act which is at least more tangibly defined and realistically prosecuted than the theft of ideas. I want us to reconsider our notions of authorship until we recognize that "the threat of plagiarism" is merely a projection of our own failings as authors and inability to come up with a single original thought. While I perhaps cannot speak for all writers, I can honestly admit that I have never yet suffered an original thought, and, were I to, would be totally unable to communicate it with the language that has been handed down to me.

One may well wonder if a critique of plagiarism policy is either necessary or desirable. I hold that such a critique is necessary as long as we consider the teachings of post-modernist, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism to have any relevance in our teaching practices. For, as I will be demonstrating, current notions of plagiarism are hopelessly naive in the face of certain texts many of us hold dear in our own theoretical work. In fact, not only are our plagiarism policies incompatible with a post-modern perspective, this perspective suggests that enforcing such policies helps maintain and reinforce the same oppressive capitalist ideologies which constitute the target of our most critical theory. What I am writing about here is a certain form of myopia that takes place between the horizons of our theory and practice--after all, one must know the faith to be hypocritical. What I call for is a serious revision of current plagiarism policies and a re-thinking of naive attitudes towards the personal ownership of ideas.

In his discussion of power and discourse, Michel Foucault argues that "we need to see how mechanisms of power ... have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful" (101). For Foucault, discourse is inseparable from power. He writes:

One of the most important roles a university performs, of course, is teaching students to enter the discourse communities of their chosen field. Since the best and most relevant scholarship takes place in the form of indelible marks upon thin layers of dead trees, university "core curricula" place great emphasis on the development of good writing skills and often institute policies to ensure that students, especially first-year students, produce a considerable bulk of "original academic writing." Foucault's suggestion that power relies on the medium of discourse is nowhere more clearly seen than in academic writing, where key figures rise to power and achieve influence chiefly on the frequency that other scholars cite their names; indeed, often whole movements or ideologies get summed up under one name: Marxism, Kantianism, Nietzscheism, even Foucauldism--the list is infinite and extends in all directions. Postmodern and post-structuralist thought leads to the simple conclusion that all these names attached to writings are always already pseudonyms. What Foucault challenges us to ask is whom this powerfully-enforced "nominalism" truly serves. How has this system become economically useful?

Jean-François? Lyotard argues that knowledge is rapidly becoming a commodity, to be produced, bought, and sold much like ordinary products in a capitalist economy. In the Postmodern Condition, Lyotard writes,

We clearly see this transformation occurring in the academy regarding "plagiarism." Nowhere, not even in the most far-reaching intellectual property law, are ideas more solidly and fixedly conceived of as private property than in the academy, where even using quotations or material from one's own previously published works may require gaining permission from a publisher and, more and more often, even paying a steep fee for the privilege.

What I want to suggest here is that our current concerns about plagiarism are reflected in a broader economic imperative to convert ideas into objects of exchange. Academics feel this pressure to conform to late capitalist modes of production from two sides. On one side is the "publish or perish" imperative designed to eliminate "deadwood" university professors who fail to "produce." A large part of the tenure and promotion process for many professors depends on the authoring and publication of a number of scholarly articles or books. The influence of any of these articles or books on the field can only be gauged by the frequency by which they are reviewed, cited, or referenced by other members of that field. On the other side, professors are pressured to inculcate within students a deep phobia about "stealing" expressions or ideas from other writers and a virtual paranoia to account for every statement with a citation; for the same reason that students must be "busted" for sneaking glances at notes during an objective test, illicit copying and pasting must be punished as a vile effort to cheat the system.

Outside the academy, the transformation of ideas into objects of exchange is having even more dramatic effects than the traumatizing of a few "suspicious" students. Lawrence Lessig points out in his book Free Culture that some 17 million Africans have died of AIDS without the benefit of life-prolonging anti-retroviral therapies. He writes,

The reason these drugs are so expensive is not the price of their components or manufacture. Rather, the high price is set by the owners of the patents, who, as such, will enjoy a 20-year monopoly of the therapies. Here is a case where intellectual property law, and the "protections" it affords, has resulted in the untimely death of tens of millions of Africans. We can only wonder what future generations will think of such policies, and how they will judge those who sat idly by as a tyrannical government gave profit priority to human life.

This is a rather extreme case of the injustice inherent within intellectual property law. Compared to this tragic consequence of intellectual property law, mere infringements of copyright seem petty. Nevertheless, any comprehensive system of intellectual property law leads inevitably to such lamentable ends. Just as millions of Native Americans died as white Americans claimed and forced them off their lands, millions of Africans are paying the price for our "ownership" of intellectual property. The notion that an individual can own an idea, set of ideas, or even the expression of an idea should itself be questioned, and has long been questioned by postmodern scholars whose work informs so much contemporary scholarship. Why, then, is "plagiarism" so zealously persecuted in the academy, especially, even, among those faculty who ought to know better?

Clearly, the motive to convert ideas into exchangeable commodities can be traced to economical developments. Perhaps the movement of most forms of manual labor and production to "Third-World" countries has left a vacuum in American culture that can only be supplied by converting thought and expression into marketable products. The term "information economy" has become cliché, and the metaphor of the Internet as the "Information Superhighway" is in no case more accurate than when it is visualized complete with cargo-laden, smoke-billowing semis carrying intellectual property to and fro across it. American industry must continue even in the absence of the manufacture of tangible products; there must be some type of production still occurring in America even if its products are nothing but organized collections of words (spoken or written) or, increasingly, the ideas thought to underlie them.

We can perhaps place parallel to the growing neuroticism regarding plagiarism to the rapidly increasing and encroaching extensions in the scope and duration of copyright law. In 1790, authors had the right to secure, through a formal registration process, copyright for their works for a period of 14 years, after which they could renew for another 14 years. These rights were only extended twice from 1790 to 1909. In 1909, authors held a legal monopoly on their work7 for up to 56 years.

After the 1976 amendment, Congress abandoned the formal copyright registration process and declared that copyright is granted to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device" (Title 17, United States Code, Sec. 102). Significantly, the authors of this act saw fit to keep in the same section a specific limitation to copyright, which still exists in the most recent updates:

The point that needs to be made here is that our current plagiarism policies are even more drastic than copyright law. The result of this disparity is a gradual conditioning of people passing through higher education to think of ideas, as well as expressions, as property. Late capitalist ideologues would undoubtedly see this as perhaps one of the few truly "progressive" tendencies in higher education, and hope that these students will emerge from their educations completely unable to fathom why copyright laws should not extend to ideas, procedures, processes, systems, concepts, language, or even thought itself. By enforcing unreasonable plagiarism policies, universities are effectively preparing students for life in a world where ideas are commodities to be bought and sold.

Perhaps we should now find some irony in the fact that the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) has targeted most of its attention on college campuses. This is partly because, at least according to a FOX News poll "the 18-34 age group is the group most likely to take part in file sharing" (Hipp, online). Furthermore, they are the group least likely to vote (U.S. Census Bureau) or have substantial income. We might also reasonably suggest that they have the least knowledge of their rights or the law. Many universities, like the University of Alabama, have taken a "preemptive strike" approach to keeping its servers free from illegal activity:

This "cracking down" consists of requiring all owners of personal computers on the network to register their machines and disable all peer-to-peer file sharing--a measure designed to stop the unauthorized dissemination of information across the university's networks. Traffic on these networks is carefully monitored for signs of illegal activity. Rather than uniting to take a formal stand against the RIAA, universities have clamored to demonstrate their fealty to these feudal lords of popular thought and expression.

If university students are being sued for illegally exchanging their favorite pop songs, university professors are growing ever more wary of exceeding the ever-narrowing "fair-use" exemption in modern copyright law. In the early 90s, textbook publishers realized that the large "course packs" professors were building for students were reducing some of their profits and decided to take action. In 1991, Basic Books sued Kinko's Graphic Corp., with the result that Kinko's settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum of money (Johina, "Daily.") A wave of such suits followed, and several professors discovered that their own publishers were suing copiers for works they had desired to photocopy for their classes. The result of these suits has been the rapid formation of "copyright clearance centers" at most copy centers; the publishers may ask whatever price they want for the copyright to the works they control, and more often the price matches or exceeds the cost of the entire book. It is also possible that the holders of copyright can now charge enormous fees to copy works that are no longer in print--thanks to the many extensions to copyright, photocopying any work printed after the Great Depression could result in litigation.

Another "copyright dilemma" for writing scholars concerns the "fair use" exemption for quotations from other authors. As I described before, citing other authors and being cited by them are utterly vital accomplishments for professors trying to secure tenure or promotions at major universities. The right to reproduce small sections of texts for the purposes of criticism or scholarly argument, however, are becoming hazier and less-secure; left relatively undefined in the fair use exemption of the Copyright Act, the percentage of a text that may be reproduced without permission of the copyright owner is left to court precedent. Thus, authors are left in the unpleasant position of not knowing how much of any given work they can reproduce without fear of costly litigation. This has led many authors to seek permission and paying fees for very short quotations "just to be safe."

This practice, coupled with the tendency Congress has displayed in the past fifty years in extending the scope and reach of copyright, will undoubtedly lead to the inevitable situation where any citation of a work will require formal permission (and the fees acquiring that permission entails). Horkheimer and Adorno, authors of "The Culture Industry," write that "the universal criterion of merit in capitalist societies is the amount of "˜conspicuous production,' of blatant cash investment" (124). Surely this is what we are seeing in the last days of the multinational corporations' siege of public universities, as whole departments are replaced by two or three "superstar" scholars and swarms of underpaid adjuncts or graduate teaching apprentices. Scholarship as a whole will suffer as the costs of printing a standard academic book soar; conceivably, only the most influential, marketable, or richest scholars will be able to afford publication at all. Fair use becomes fare use, and nobody wins but the publishers--a victory only in the eyes of late capitalists.

These frightful legal and economic developments are taking place at the same time when much critical theory seems at last ready to dispel forever the ghosts of authorship and authority. At the same moment when countless journals in the humanities deal with "otherness" and "listening to other's voices," the looming giant of "information capitalism" threatens to shake all but the most secure scholars from their fragile perch atop the ivory tower.

In an age where having one's name attached quite securely to influential ideas is critical in rising to power in the academic world, an academic should probably not scrutinize the very notions of authorship which make such power possible. Yet this is exactly the approach taken by "big names" like Jean-François? Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes. All irony aside, some of the most scathing critiques of authorship and the stable self come from some of the most frequently-cited authors in all of contemporary scholarship. Perhaps the time has come to criticize these critiques of authorship, or at least to do something with them besides demonstrate, through our persistence in diligently citing their work, our complete ignorance of what they are saying.

A deconstruction of the concept of plagiarism reveals a naive conception of a stable self and the even more naive belief that authors are capable of spontaneously producing original ideas. To say that these concepts have been challenged by critical theory seems almost to be a comedic understatement. One can only wonder how many times Foucault's discussion of authorship,

has found itself reprinted in a "seminal works" compendium just below a short biography of his life. Some thirty years after Foucault asked, "What difference does it make who is speaking?" we continue, assiduously, to locate those very passages which, when accurately cited and reprinted among our own, will lend our work that certain authority by which it may be accepted by anonymous academic reviewers and published (899).

George Landow, a well-known hypertext theorist, claims that book technology is what is chiefly responsible for "exaggerated notions of authorial individuality, uniqueness, and ownership that often drastically falsify the conception of original contributions in the humanities and convey distorted pictures of research" (108). Statements like these, said in the context of a printed book by a frequently-cited scholar like Landow, seem to drift from simple irony to outright absurdity. How can book technology be to blame for the exaggerated notions of individuality arising as an obvious consequence of the ease with which students may copy and paste materials from the Internet? Landow is, of course, not alone in his conception of the Internet as the very force that will finally overturn such notions. Jay David Bolter states that his purpose in exploring electronic writing is to "oppose standardization and unification as well as hierarchy" (206). I have tried to point out that the line of thinking which has led so many professors to condemn plagiarism is what is threatening to prevent such overturning. Insofar as we consistently refuse to embrace the new conceptions of authorship and authority that the Internet imposes upon us, we can only serve as ruthless henchmen for the late capitalists; perhaps the dirtiest such cronies yet assembled by the multinational corporations in their quest to "globalize" the world.

What is called for is a new conception of text capable of valorizing the kind of writing the Internet makes possible; necessary; even inevitable. This conception is not the romantic conception of the artist as genius or divine receptacle, but the artist as always already a plagiarizer, but only in the sense that Homer "plagiarized" those stories of gods and glory; only in the sense that Shakespeare "plagiarized" those stories and poems he turned into plays. We must instruct students not so much in the little that we do "know" about Homer and Shakespeare, and only emphasize the utter absurdity of trying to use these names for anything other than convenient place-holders for a group of associated expressions we ought to encourage students to imitate, to cherish, to claim as their own. What this means practically speaking is that students ought to appropriate materials willy-nilly into texts; to think of writing not as an act of creation but an act of composition; not to invent new elements but to find useful and insightful ways to compound them. Attaching names to these elements ought rightly to be censured as "apple polishing." Students should feel free to copy and paste whatever they like from Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida--provided that they fail to cite them.

Should we give students permission to download a paper from the Internet and submit it as their own? Certainly--however, such acts lack imagination and effort and will not be rewarded as highly as, say, downloading a hundred papers, perhaps a few copyrighted images, and certainly a few "protected" bits of popular music, then hashing them together in an effective and provocative collage. This is composition truly understood; those who doubt it may listen to hours and hours of classical symphonies or operas in which a whistleblower constantly interrupts the performance to provide oral citations explaining where the composer intentionally or unintentionally stole, borrowed, or derived patterns, rhythms, and chord progressions from the entire corpus of classical compositions. I doubt the audience would linger for the second movement.

Computers and composition scholar Michael Day establishes quite effectively in his essay, "A Meshing of Minds," the ethnocentrism of our war on plagiarism. He writes of Japanese students that "they have a tendency to view ideas, especially published ideas, as being in the public domain, as opposed to being private property, off limits" (255). Japanese students in his upper level English literature class thought nothing of "reading Wayne Booth, then using his critical approach on a short story without so much as mentioning Booth's name or putting anything in quotes" (255). Day also observes this trait in much Japanese scholarly writing. "I can recall countless times when I came to an idea or statement that I knew came from some other, often Western scholar, but in many cases the author would not be named" (255). Day's own perspective on the issue is not that we ought to level trade sanctions against Japan in order to coerce them to adopt our own strict laws of intellectual property. Instead, he argues that change is inevitable; the Japanese "laxity" with sources must become the norm if scholarship is to survive in the Internet age. He writes:

The term "virus" here is perhaps unfortunate. Professors, whose job it is to spread ideas, should not be likened to plague carriers. Still, the word does resonate a certain truth in this context. As Barthes puts it, text is "that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder" (905). Where there are no pathogens one must be content with sterility--safe, perhaps, but numb.

I have tried to make the case in this article that the war on plagiarism is simply a manifestation of the multinational corporations' war on the public at large. The ideology such practices proliferate do nothing to promote freedom and everything to strangle it in its crib. Lyotard tells us that our leaders "allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performanceefficiency," (xxiv). Only terror, writes Lyotard, "whether soft or hard," allows us to maintain such criteria (xxiv). For now, the threat of being accused of plagiarism is a "soft terror," students are not yet being executed for this "worst of all possible academic violations," but a few years ago they were not being sued by the RIAA for millions of dollars, either. Lyotard is probably right to worry that "nation-states will one day fight for control of information" (5). This fight is limited now, of course, to the dean's office or the courtroom of an "intellectual property" infringement case. As the United States and its allies strive ever more to force other nations to adopt "intellectual property laws" as draconian as their own, even at the cost of tens of millions of liveswho is so blind as not to see the global conflict on the horizon, so deaf to fail to hear the not-so-distant drum?

If we cannot save the world with our prized knowledge of so many French philosophers, can we at least use some to inform our own scholarly and pedagogical practices? The reader may rightly point out that I have myself liberally quoted sources and cited authors. The reader may object that I have affixed my name to this pale collection of thoughts and expressions and have thus claimed my ownership of them. The reader may foresee that far from hiding my identity and denying my originality I have in fact shown all evidence of being distinctly proud and boasting of them, even going so far as to write in the first-person. The reader on all these accounts is correct, though I humbly ask not to be quoted on the point.


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