W222C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9CCC61: 2/DECEMBER 2009Arabella LyonYou Fail: Plagiarism, the Ownership of Writing, and Transnational ConictsResponding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of pla-giarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it offers a Daoist understanding of language.Ananecdote:February2005IwenttoAngkorWatinCambodia.Atan outlying temple, standing in the heat and humidity of the rainforest, I bought a travel book. I was aware that it cost less than the same book in Singapore, but at that sweaty moment, I was concerned with buying something from each of a dozen adolescents hawking souvenirs. After all, Cambodias per capita gross domestic product is US$453 (2006); the U.S. per capita GDP is US$42,000.1 Only later did I realize the book was a cheap knockoff, a black market item, a viola-tion of intellectual property rights. The next day I knowingly bought university press knockoffs about Cambodia from the pushcart of a landmine amputee; by then I knew no one owned Cambodias history more than its citizens. If anyone should prot from the countrys art and bloodshed, it should be its citizens. W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 222 12/14/09 5:42 PMCopyright 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved. W223L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N GThe ownership of a life-story or a national history scripts complex relation-ships involving indwelling, performance, and regeneration, relationships more complex than economic and legal precedent and allocation.Westernlegalconceptsofcopyrightseemlogicalinthecontextofthe university, but as so many have noted, the ownership of writing is not trans-parent.2 In fact, the possessiveness of the Western author is an anomaly, the product of a particular history that requires disciplinary apparatus from law courts to classrooms to maintain its status. After all, language functions not as a private enterprise, but rather as a shared human attribute, forming our identities and marking our memberships through conicts, escapes, tensions, claims to power, and demonstrations of control. The negotiated and relational aspects of language may be why the ownership of writing creates such irresolv-able tensions. The month after I was in Cambodia, Douglas Hesse delivered the chairs addressWhoOwnsWriting?totheConferenceonCollegeComposition andCommunication.Concernedwithpropertyrights,teachingconditions, pedagogical content and authority, and responsibility for assessment, Hesse suggested that those who teach writing must afrm that we, in fact, own it (459; emphasis in original). He responded to the U.S. commissions and forces who would take writing away from writing teachers, refusing to recognize their expertise. Still, inherent in his argument is a belief that writing can be owned, that it is some sort of commodity to be controlled, and that the ownership is in one place, a space for teachers. Similarly concerned with how forces outside of teachers and writers control academic writing in the United States, Bill Marsh, in Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education, examines the disci-plinary powers of U.S. higher education in the late twentieth and early twenty-rst century, looking at the ways in which faculty, administrators, journalists, policymakers,andsoftwareentrepreneursregulateplagiarismandstudent writing through a range of technologies and techniques. Ownership in the age ofInternet,desktoppublishing,andcorporatecapitalismisanincreasingly contested space. Conicts over ownership grow and will continue to grow as the ownership of wordsgiven our theories of discourse, ideology, historical contingencies,andidentityformationismorecomplicatedthananylaws, especially laws founded on a modernist, if not romantic, view of the author and teacher. Still, writing owned by a national history, authors, or teachers seems preferable to the growing claims, if not control, by software entrepreneurs and international corporations. W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 223 12/14/09 5:42 PMW224C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9In An Essay on the Work of Composition: Compositing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism, Min-Zhan Lu does not discuss the ownership of writing, but she examines the English language in light of the lived reality of people stratied by labels such as Native-Speaking, Educated, Developed Countries, or Democracy and their Others and the ways in which composition is used to police how peoples the world over use English (20). Describing the forcesthatwouldcontrolEnglishanditsmarketvalues,desiringlong-term changeinexistingstructureandorderofcompetinglanguages,englishes, and discourses (42), Lu argues that English is enlivenedenlightenedby the work of users intent on using it to limn the actual, imagined, and possible lives of all its speakers, readers, and writers, the work of users intent on using English to describe and, thus, control those circumstances of their life designed by all systems and relations of injustice to submerge them (44). Inherent in her view is an equalitarian sense of language use; speakers should use English to describe their experiences and not be controlled by those beneting from transnational capitalism, those claiming ownership of the standards of English. Lus acknowledgment of the porous borders of English, its diaspora, and the dissonance across language demands, in turn, an acknowledgment of the po-rous, diasporic, and dissented ownerships of English. Ownership claims grow.My purpose in this article is to question who owns writing in a world of international education, what global forces enter into discussions of interna-tional student writing, and how might we discuss cultural differences around ownership more productively. In this brief excursion, I am not asking who owns writing about Cambodia or who controls writing in a classroom or a countryfor the ownership of writing is always partial. Rather, using the discourse of plagiarism to control the breadth of my inquiry, I wish to examine how culture forces and assumptions about the nature of speaking and writing complexly interact in an international classroom. To do this, I examine the claims made fordifferencesbetweenChineseandWesternviewsofrhetoricandwriting and how those claims are then used to homogenize Chinese experience and to characterize Chinese students as decient and in need of remediation. In responsetoongoingfailurestorecognizedifferenceproductivelyandtoac-knowledge different forms of ownership, I offer two theoretical insights, and I argue that comparative rhetorics require an interrogation of the standpoints of both sets of cultural assumptions (Hum and Lyon).W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 224 12/14/09 5:42 PMW225L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N GChinese Rhetoric, Stereotype, and PlagiarismChinese rhetoric is too often too simply described as repetitive and formalist. Early in discussions of Chinese rhetoric and composition, in 1966, Robert B. Kaplan claimed that Chinese students texts are indirect, a characteristic that marks much of Oriental writing (6); in 1971, Robert T. Oliver claimed that originality was discounted (262). Even in 1985, in Contrastive Rhetoric: An AmericanWritingTeacherinChina,CarolynMatalenedescribedChinese students as repeating set phrases and maxims, following patterns, and imitat-ingtexts(804).WhileMatalenesoughttounderstandtherelativityofour own rhetoric (806), her essay focused on the students difculty in separating plagiarism from imitation and their concern with style and form over truth. Her argument for a different weighting of memory and invention in China is not invalid, but it leads to facile stereotypes and the dismissal of complexity. For example, one of her commentators recalled outrageous dishonesty when Hong Kong students memorized the answer key to the English competency tests (Thomas 845). In response to the early characterizations of Chinese rhetoric as imita-tive,lackingininvention,andevendishonest,therehavebeenaseriesof correctives.While,forthemostpart,theresponsesdrawparallelsbetween ChineseandWesternrhetoricalpatternsandthenargueformoreuniversal understandings of rhetoric, scholars are increasingly differentiating Chinese rhetoricfromWesternwhileavoidingcharacterizingChineseasdecitin basicrhetoricalvalues.3Forinstance,YamengLiurespondsspecicallyto Matalenes claims of insight into Chinese rhetoric, based on a small sample of student writing. He argues against essentializing Chinese rhetoric, a polyglot with several millennia of history, formed in dynasties ruled by ethnic groups as different as the Hans, Mongolians, and Manchus. He demonstrates that the act of generalizing either Western or Eastern rhetoric is deeply problematic. In discussing Matalene, LuMing Mao contrasts the description of rhetorical differences between cultures and the attribution of the differences to a lack on the part of one, a deciency model. He nds Matalenes characterization of rhetorical difference to a Chinese lack of individualism as continuing the traditionofholdinguptheWesterndiscourseasthepositive,wholemodel andseeingothermodelsasdecient,abiasbasedinOrientalism(40709). Continuingtocorrectsimpletheoriesbasedontheclassroomexperiences ofWesternteachers,XiaoyeYoudescribestheintersectionsofWesternand Chinese rhetorical traditions in the evolution of English writing instruction in W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 225 12/14/09 5:42 PMW226C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9Chinese colleges from 1644 through the early decades of the twentieth century. While modern writing instruction in China began in 1901, clearly colonialist and global inuences existed long before.Sincethe1980s,thinkinghasprogressedfromtheearlyOrientalistap-proaches.Scholarsinrhetoricandcompositionhavebeeneducatedbythe writingsofMaryGarrett,YamengLiu,XingLu,LuMingMao,andHuiWu, or maybe we have simply become more sophisticated in constructing differ-ences within composition. Still the stereotype of the Chinese student unable to produce his or her own words and ideas remains, even in the most sensitive ofwork.Ifrhetoriciansarelesslikelytomakeblanketclaimsforrhetorical traditions, case studies of Chinese students remain problematic. While David Alan Sapps description of teaching in China is particularly insensitive in its generalizations of student plagiarism, even careful case studies of plagiarism aretroubling.Forinstance,inherrecentarticle,KathrynValentinefollows the path of Rebecca Moore Howard and Lise Buranen, who also have analyzed plagiarism as a literacy practice, not an ethical failing, and she makes a serious argument for plagiarism as part of a practice that involves the participants values, attitudes, and feelings as well as their social relationships to each other and to the institutions in which they work (8990).4 Building on Howards ar-ticle The Ethics of Plagiarism, Valentine describes plagiarisms link to ethics and the acquisition of a discourse. She rightly claims, Given that plagiarism involves social relationships, attitudes and values as much as it involves texts and the rules of citation, I think that we can better recognize the work that our students present to us if we also recognize that this work involves negotiating social relationships, attitudes, and values (90). Therein, she links plagiarism toidentitynegotiation.Sheclaimsthatanethicsdiscourseregulatesand constricts the students identity while dening what constitutes work, hence the social role of honest student requires that one does not plagiarize. The text, and not the intention of the writer, is used to judge the honesty and so the identity of the students.5 Using Judith Butlers sense of identity, the doer is variably constructed in and through the deed (181), Valentine argues that we read the student off of textual features and, in interpreting the subject on the page, we regulate his or her identity through our interpretations. To evince theseclaims,shestudiesthecaseofadoctoralstudentinengineeringwho failed to use appropriate citation and is charged with plagiarism. The graduate student is Chinese, an outsider who needed to both trans-late and acquire a new discourse, one who used few of his own words in writing a literature survey and failed to use quotation marks. He had worked hard on W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 226 12/14/09 5:42 PMW227L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N Greading and arranging the material, but he did not think he needed to show . . . his opinion of this particular problem in the eld; rather, he thought the assignments purpose, the work of the assignment, was to show the professor his familiarity with these sources (Valentine 99). Valentine, clearly concerned withthestudentsplaceintheuniversity,helpedhimnegotiatethecharges andtheirmeaning.Believinghimselftobehonest,hewasunabletorealize that his literature survey was not in keeping with academic honesty and that it presented an opportunity for him to be recognized as dishonest.In the end, the administration recognized that the students intent was not to deceive, and though he failed the course, he only received a warning on his permanent record. Valentines narration tells us that initially the professor would not allow him to rewrite as she would have to allow two other Chinese students to rewrite, both also accused of plagiarism (but who, as far as I can glean, were judged fully guilty of dishonest intent). The student himself writes that he was shocked by the charge as were All Chinese students (102). One wondershereifthatallincludesthetwoofguiltyintent.Valentinespoint isthatafailedtextualperformance,aconictoverwhatistheworkofthe writing assignment, resulted in a conicted relationship between student and professor.I,however,cannothelpbutseethecommonplacesofaprofessor who imagines China as radically Other, the saved Chinese student, and the two corrupt Chinese students. In these commonplaces, I read Valentines analysis unintentionally in keeping with Matalenes response to Lius critique: Many of us from the West who have lived and taught in China realizedviscerallythat our encounters were being governed by cultural, linguistic, and, yes, rhetorical norms so different from our own that we were driven to search for whatever explanations we could nd (East and West 163). Valentines case study seeks to historicize and locate agency, but in presenting the case, she invites exten-sion and homogeneity. Case studies lead to a naturalization of a single insight that comes to have cross-cultural validity. Why is it so hard to describe these rhetorical norms? What are those extreme differences we cannot explain, but only viscerally intuit? What redeems one Chinese student but not the two who plagiarized and failed? The research on plagiarism across cultures is robust in TESOL studies, and its social science methodologies might help to nuance some of the cultural differences with which writing researchers have struggled.6 In the twenty-rst-century classroom, differences might better be discussed not as the difference between Confucius and Aristotle, but as the difference between students raised to write in different nation states with differing national histories.7 As I will W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 227 12/14/09 5:42 PMW228C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9show, however, even this shift to contemporary context over historical context is inadequate. In Cultural Values, Plagiarism, and Fairness: When Plagiarism Gets in the Way of Learning, British researchers Niall Hayes and Lucas D. In-trona examine practices of and views on plagiarism, focusing on four clusters of postgraduate management students at a United Kingdom university, students representingtheU.K.,China,pan-Asia(notChina),andGreece.Hayesand Introna nd that, outside of the U.K., students have little experience with writ-ing other than business reports or group projects; Chinese and Greek students write as little as one essay on average, which obviously does not prepare them for writing longer, more interpretive research. Hayes and Introna argue that this coupled with speaking English as a second language, a history of exams as memory tests, and, especially among the Greek students, a belief in the fun-damental unfairness of the educational system all contribute to signicantly different cultural attitudes about plagiarizing.8 Hayes and Introna suggest that faculty in transnational settings need to help students more with transition from a pedagogy of textbook-based teaching and recall assessments to one of critique, interpretation, and ownership of ones language. Hayes and Introna, in fact, do document statistically signicant different attitudes about copying texts, but the meaning of the differences is puzzling. Their claims for British students literacy and values are not supported by the data. Hayes and Introna discuss the nature of Others schooling prior to arriv-ing in a British university and its inuence on attitudes toward plagiarism, but they dont adequately address the degree to which British students accept col-laborating on a text or copying a text without citation. Yes, more Greek, Asian, and Chinese students were likely to receive help on work (50%, 25%, and 40%, respectively) and judge outside help as not cheating or trivially cheating (50%, 75%, and 50%) than British students (221). What are more interesting, however, are the percentages of the British students, who are held as the norm of ethical citation after years of instruction: 31% of them have received substantial help and 38% judge it as not cheating or trivial cheating. While British collabora-tors are in the minority of their group, they represent a signicant part of the student body. Furthermore, while 40% of Chinese students admitted to copying a paragraph or more, a percent double that of Asians, Greeks, and British stu-dents, still 20% of Asians, 21% of Greeks, and 19% of British students admitted the same. Students were not quick to judge copying as wrong; 40% of Asians, 30% of Chinese, and 25% of British students judged such lengthy copying as not cheating or trivial cheating (219). The British students were as likely to copy paragraphs as the Asian or Greeks; one wonders about the limited effects W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 228 12/14/09 5:42 PMW229L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N Gof teaching citation, the limited impact of more intensive writing instruction, and the signicance of national identity contrasted with student identity. Of furtherinterestisthattheGreeks,describedasalienatedfromtheeduca-tional system, copied as much as most other groups, but were harsher in their judgment of act: only 7% of them accepted it as not cheating or trivial. They copied with guilt. These numbers reveal just how difcult it is to understand the relationship between culture, educational experience, and plagiarism, and it suggests why student review boards may be helpful in ascertaining student perceptionsandintentionsinplagiarizing.Bythemselves,culturalexplana-tionsin the humanities and social sciencesseem to offer limited insights as to how students view textual ownership. On close investigation, dualities and divisions are fuzzy, their logics unclear, and generalizations problematic. Speech Act Approaches to PlagiarismWhile I do not offer speech act theory as the denitive insight into the owner-ship of words, I believe it provides a vocabulary for understanding the multi-plicity of ownership and, at least briey, escaping the legal and ethical claims of dishonesty, alienation, and failed ownership that surround plagiarism. I do not argue for the truth of any theory, but rather for its use value in explaining events and activities. Even though it is an Anglo-American methodology, it can help to disclose why some teachers and students, in the West and East, are so differently vested in the ownership of writing and the control of plagiarism. Speech act theoryas demonstrated in the writings of Jurgen Habermas, Lud-wig Wittgenstein, John Searle, Judith Butler, J. L. Austin, and Kenneth Burkeis concerned with how language has effect in the world, not truth or falseness (constative nature), not attachment to reality, but with what effects arise from theactionofwords.Speechacttheoryisnotneutral,butitshiftsthefocus from the identity and role of the student to the effect of language. Its theories vary on what authorizes a speech act and what is the source of its effects; still, theirconcernwithactionandeffectnotlawsandeconomiesmovesthe discussions of ownership onto relationship and performance. For purposes of this investigation, I look at J. L. Austin and Kenneth Burke. Both Austin and Burke emphasize the performative aspect of language, seeing words as formative deeds that both conform to a script and create or form an event. Performance is form and forming: cultural structure (form) and subjective agency (forming). Each scholar has a somewhat different theory of what autho-rizes a speech act and what its effects are. Burke argues this point in his review of Austins How to Do Things with Words (Words), and while he goes too far W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 229 12/14/09 5:42 PMW230C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9in differentiating between himself and Austin, going to the point of trivializing Austin, I will work with his sense of the difference because it helps us see the views of language inherent in different views of plagiarism. Even so, remember as I follow Burkes dichotomy that Austin himself observed, over-simplication is the occupational disease of the philosopher (Philosophical 252).While Austin acknowledges a great many uses for language (Philosophi-cal 234), he is most concerned with describing statements that do something: I do, I apologize, I christen thee. . . These performative utterances or speech actstendtobeinstitutionallyauthorized,conventional,andscripted.For example, the judgesupported by precedent, the great institutions of law, his robes, court ofcials, etc.says, as so many earlier judges have said, I sentence you to death. With that conventional and scripted performance, the speech act causes death not simply through the words of the judge, but through prec-edent, written law, the will of the society, and the apparatus of the state. The death sentence, while not one of his examples, is a quintessential Austin speech act in the conventional sources of its authority and worldly effect. Similar is the teachers pronouncement, you fail. Here the institutional regulations on plagiary, the history of copyright law, the technological apparatus that reveals plagiarism, the authority vested in a teachers credentials, the requirements of the syllabus, and the place of student all together allow the teacher to discredit a students prior productivity over a single act of copying. The student-teacher relationship, the actual words written, and the individuals claim to works are still less than the forces external to the site of utterance, and yet, amazingly, it takes all of these forces to control the ownership of writing.Emphasizing the forming, not conforming, aspects of speech, Burke char-acterizes speech acts as more constitutive or formative in their effects. He uses the term motive to signify the complex tension between an agent making or moving the world and being made by the world. The judge may still issue death sentences, but in Burkes approach, the motives of the cultural scene and the judge become signicant in understanding the agency and the act. For Burke, what is most signicant in the speech act is not ritual and convention, but the ways in which the death sentence forms the world of the court, the surround-ingculture,andthelivesofthedefendant,ofcialsofthecourt,andprison guards.Hisspeechactmodelisdynamicwithitsfocusonmotivecoupled withthemechanismofdramatismanditsveterms:whatwasdone(act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose) (Grammar xv). A Burkean speech act is formed in ratios of the terms. When the teacher writes F, how is she created in the act, how W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 230 12/14/09 5:42 PMW231L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N Gdoes the classroom scene change, what is the purpose of failing students for copying?Burkeunderstandsthesequestions,andothers,asinteractiveand generating ratios.Ifweimaginespeechactsonacontinuumfromtheinstitutionaland formaltodramatisticandforming,wecanimaginenewwaysofdiscussing the act of writing and writing instruction. In doing so, one is not necessarily theorizing writing outside of other cultural traditions. Within classical Chinese philosophy, there are implicit and explicit theories of the relationship between speechandactoreffect.IfoneturnstoclassicalChinesescholars,suchas Confucius or Han Fei, one nds a more malleable sense of how different kinds of speech can be acts in different ways: institutionally scripted, formative, or irrelevant to action (after the fact). Certainly the idea that speech is action is not limited to modernity in the West; thoughtful people throughout history have seen the effects of speech and formulated beliefs about causal relation-ships. The emphasis on speech as constitutive and forming, however, appears most consistently in late modernity and postmodernity. If speech acts exist on a continuum from formal, ritual, and institutional to forming, inventive, and individual, then where does plagiarism lie? Does it fail to achieve status as an act? Do aspects of it, such as Howards patch writing, exist as ritual or the learning of form?9 What is the nature of forming in the formal, disciplined essay? To which theory of speech act do faculty subscribe? Students?Icontendthatmanystudents,fromChinatotheUnitedStates, cluster around two beliefs about their essays as speech acts, or one might say that they cluster around two motives; they have nascent discourse theories of which teachers of writing should be aware. First, some students do not see the writing of a paper as a speech act with worldly effect, and so they are unlikely to be concerned about issues of textual ownership, authority, sources, or even quality. Plagiarism is trivial; it certainly isnt a crime, sin, cheat, or deviance as ithasntsufcientworldlyeffect(despitewhattheschoolmarmssay10).One might imagine many of Hayes and Intronas students expressing this view as an explanation of why it is not cheating to copy a paragraph or more. This is not to say that the students do not want to succeed, but that they see the act of writing well as removed from their worldly work and effects. Second, other students see their papers as conventional and scripted, dependent on author-ityfromcertaindiscoursesandsourcesthatmayormaynotbereferenced. Subscribing to something like Austins speech act theory, they see the activity ofwritinginschoolasaninstitutional,ritualizedact,onewitheffects,but more through form than through their agency. Like the judge who sentences W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 231 12/14/09 5:42 PMW232C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9a prisoner to death, their relationship to their speech act is so ltered through traditions, institutions, and formula that they do not have direct responsibil-ity as individuals. Their agency is muted, and while they desire to produce a good text, the writing is a formal act, one of reproducing genre, discourse, and disciplinary structure, not one of identity generation or textual ownership. For both groups of students, their writing is believed to be distant from the author as authority and owner and from the speech act as worldly action: hence the stakes of plagiarism are low in terms of ethics, identity, and responsibility. When Valentine writes of plagiarism and the difculty negotiating iden-tity, she is writing of a problem more typical of students who wish to enter the academy as intellectuals and researchers. The doctoral student who struggles with the implications of identity and plagiarism is specic to a studentEastern or Western, outsider or insiderwho wants to perform and have effects within a discipline, a career, and a world. Like many U.S. teachers of writing, potential intellectuals and researchers are likely to have a more Burkean perspective on what constitutes the speech act of the essay, who owns that paper, and what effects the paper has on others. For such writers, the act of writing constitutes signicant effects in the world (development of the writer, suasion, foundations of democratic speech, etc.). Writing teachers who share a Burkean perspective are most concerned with developing the authority of the students voice within the text. While many U.S. teachers would agree with Burkes claim that men arecapableofbutpartialacts,actsthatbutpartiallyrepresentthemselves and but partially conform to their scenes (Grammar 83), they emphasize the representation of the human act over the conformity to conventions, regula-tions, and traditions. Agenerativetheoryofspeechactmayextendtoallresearchersand intellectuals; it, however, does not extend to all writing teachers. Many of us remain concerned with forms and conventions, genre and grammar, modes and methods. Though such a pedagogy is not privileged in the eld of composition, the purposes of such a pedagogy can be as ethically driven as ones focused on inventionandprewriting.Onlyanethnocentric,universalisticethicswould imply otherwise. As we have seen, cultural models are incomplete, often cover-ing up colonialist assumptions. Still coupled with other approaches, cultural models help to achieve a thick description of who owns writing; potentially, they can give us diverse agencies and subjects, a richer means of discussing Valentines redeemed and condemned students and the similarities and differ-ences among the British students and their foreign peers. To understand why teachersmightfollowconventionalwritingassignments,textbookpedago-W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 232 12/14/09 5:42 PMW233L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N Ggies, and recall assessments, I want to examine briey one justication for the teaching of writing within a con(forming) frame. Pedagogy in the Authoritarian StateThoughnotall,someteacherstrainedinanauthoritariansystemsharethe commonstudentviewthatwritingisconventional,ameansofassessing competence, but in itself without signicant worldly effect and without con-stituting identity. Teachers in an authoritarian state may value honesty and the hard work of doing ones own writing; still, the inventive and generative side of writing is downplayed as a more vexed activity within states that do not support freedom of speech, public deliberation, and free exchange of ideas. Authoritarian states rarely brutalize their subjects, but rather rule through a comprehensive symbolic order, one that excludes other possibilities from being enunciated. Invention and action are problematic terms for teachers in regimes committed to cultural containment. Nation states that limit public speaking, regulate the press, control television and radio stations, censor lms and performing arts, restrict the dialects spoken in the media, and block websites do not foster the teaching of writing as the creating of public action. While, under authoritarian rule, teachers and students are not homogeneous, powerless, or docile, their historical situation is signicantly different from those in developed democra-cies. Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, resistance clearly accompanies all forms of domination (83); within authoritarian regimes, teachers and students have agency and political potential.11 Governments know, as we know, writing often becomes the context through which new political identities are forged (78).Withinstatescommittedtoregulatingpoliticalidentity(andtheyall are so committed to varying degrees), writing and the teaching of writing are subjectedtodifferenttensionsofownership,tensionsbetweenthepolitical state and author, educational institutions and the teacher. I have lived in Singapore and China, and I am sensitive to their signicant cultural and economic accomplishments. Still, in the Reporters without Bor-ders Press Freedom Index 2006 of 168 countries, Singapore ranked 146 and China ranked 163 (http://www.rsf.org). If writing teachers and students in the United States must struggle to own writing, certainly teachers and students strugglemoreincountrieswherebloggersarearrestedandspeechcorners must be applied for weeks in advance. Teachers in authoritarian states, such as Singapore and China, understand the struggle for ownership of speech in complex ways. If an authoritarian state is the scene, then the state-authorized curriculumandclassroomistheagencyandgoodworkersarethepurpose. W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 233 12/14/09 5:42 PMW234C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9Ethical,responsibleteachersinauthoritariansystems(agents)oftenhavea different pedagogy (act) than those in less authoritarian states. The tendency to teach student to see writing as formal and conventional is not a decient, but a logical pedagogy in their location. U. S. teachers may wish to intervene (Matalene 80203) and impose their theories of ownership, invention, speech act; they may express frustration with their students internalized restraints (Fox 56). When teaching abroad, however, teachers should not claim ownership of a writing pedagogy, but see it as a shared enterprise with their students; in doingso,theyavoidneo-colonialistmovesthatprivilegeexogenousvalues; create boundaries around the use of English; and privilege their values while barelyunderstandinglocalvalues,theperilsofthestateapparatus,andthe consequences of ownership. While overseas teachers may nod to the community values inherent in Sinocentric or other local pedagogies, true understanding requires risking their own foundations.In states that do not value freedom of speech (and few do12) theories of language are still multiple and diverse. If some of the communicative traditions of Chinaespecially in the context of the authoritarian stateencourage imita-tion, respect, and form, that is not all there is (X. Lu). While speech act theories provide possible ways of conceiving writing in the classroom, a Western lens, however perspicuous, is not the only lens. Daoism is another theory to bring to a global classroom, another way of explaining culturally different concepts ofownership.Inacomparativepiece,HaixiaWangapproachestherhetoric of Tiananmen Square through the writing of Zhuang Zi (370 to 301 B. C. E.) and his text Zhuangzi. Dao, referentially elusive, is often dened as way or path, but Wangs interpretation of Zhuang Zi is more in keeping with David L. Hall and Roger T. Amess vision of Dao as the incoherent sum of all names and forms (245). Like Hall and Ames, she sees Dao not as an object, a what, or a noun (The Way); nor as an approach to life, but as the multiple acts and processes that make the world. If Plato offers one best world, Zhuang Zi sees a world that is boundless, without a standpoint of critique, without a place to imaginebetterment.InDaoism,thereisnotcosmicunity,onlyprocessand becoming. When the Zhuang Zi recommends we become one with all things, Hall and Ames interpret this as not as dissolution into a united whole, but as recognitionofthecontinuousandintegratednatureofphenomenonwithin ones eld of experience. No atoms and no boundaries. Wang reads Zhuang Ziwho collapses similarity and difference, unity and diversityas acknowledging the worth of the acts of sorting, analyzing, evalu-ation, but resisting the xing of categories (167). Zhuang Zi would rather that W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 234 12/14/09 5:42 PMW235L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N Gwe understand difference as temporary and temporal and as having dynamic boundaries. In valuing ziran or spontaneity, a concept Wang contrasts with kairos or the propriety of timing and measure, Zhuang Zi places choice and new challenges above authority and rules (17273). Unlike Confucian rituals, hierarchies,andimitation,Daoismoffersadifferentwayofunderstanding textual integration and lack of boundaries in the writing of Chinese students. Rather then feigning a homogeneity of Chinese plagiarism, one based in Confu-cian imitation and limits, or a homogeneity of student plagiarism, one based inAustinsconforming,onemightacknowledgeaconceptoflanguageand ownership that values dynamism and continuity over boundary. Demarcations, such as quotation marks and footnotes, create categories and hierarchies of ownershipthatdenythedynamismofaDaoistworld.Dismissthecontain-ment of ownership: the sharing of multiple texts becomes the integration of language,andtextualrelationshipbecomesaspiritualpractice.Plagiarism claims an ownership for language, but language cannot be owned, only shared.In light of Daoism, I will resist closing discussion, limiting understanding and xing the boundaries of difference. Teachers and students may slide along the speech act continuum of form and forming, or they may cut in and out, ziran (spontaneity) deciding the tactic of the moment. No single theory of discourse, no single claim of ownership, and no single act of writing can lay claim to whole-ness or nality. Rhetoric and composition studies must consider the limits of the nation-state and citizen-subject as analytic tools and not ignore more the global forces shaping literacy (Hesford). In response to transnational capital-ism and its rigid claims of ownership, we must develop pedagogies across and within difference, a project fraught with tensions, competing goals, conicting economical and cultural assumptions, and unsettled questions of ownership.In the end, even Burke and Austin have more dynamism in common than Burke allows, differences being temporary and temporal, useful for a moments insight. After all, Austin wrote: Itmustberememberedthatthereisnonecessitywhatsoeverthatthevarious models used in creating our vocabulary, primitive or recent, should all t together neatly as parts into one single, total model or scheme of, for instance, the doing of actions. It is possible, and indeed highly likely, that our assortment of models will include some, or many, that are overlapping, conicting, or more generally simply disparate. (Philosophical 203; emphasis in original)Austins claim for theory is a bit like Zhuang Zis refusal of hierarchies and truths. As higher education becomes increasing transnational, our theoriestheories W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 235 12/14/09 5:42 PMW236C C C 6 1 : 2 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9of ownership, author, intellectual property, plagiarism, pedagogy, difference, act, and identitywill become more uid and tentative. Notes1.UnitedNationsstatistic:http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/snaama/resultsCountry.asp?Country=116.2. See Lise Buranen; Rebecca Moore Howard, Standing; Andrea Lunsford; Alastair Pennycook; Sue Carter Simmons; Candace Spigelman; and Susan Stewart for critical histories of copyright and authorship.3. For careful differentiations of textual borrowing, one might also see the critiques ofJohnFlowerdewandYongyanLi;RobertAndreLeFleur;AlastairPennycook; Amy E. Robillard; and C. Jan Swearingen.4. Amy E. Robillard also discusses the relational aspects of plagiarism that, in part, explain teacher anger over student acts. Plagiarism seemingly calls the teachers identity into question.5.Formorediscussionoftheroleofintention,seealsoRebeccaMooreHoward (Ethics 8081) and Arabella Lyon (Intentions).6. The gap between the writing expectations of the academic community and the discourses of ESL students is well documented. Ruth Spack offers a good, though early, literature review. For some more recent discussion see also Vivien K. G. Lim and Sean K. B. See; Fan Shen; Ling Shi; and Vivian Zamel. 7. Arguments about ancient Chinese rhetorical and literary practices are historically useful for context, but they tell us little about what current students experience. FordiscussionsoftraditionsofdiscourseseeBrigidBallardandJohnClanchy; Glenn D. Deckert; Andy Kirkpatrick; Xing Lu; Arabella Lyon, Rhetorical; Alastair Pennycook; and Xiaoye You.8. David Alan Sapp makes an argument that Chinese students are alienated from theireducationbecausetheybelievetheeducationalandbusinesssystemsare unjust.9.RebeccaMooreHoward(Standing)seeswriterlygrowthinpatchwriting; copying others words can be a step in developing intertextuality. Howard makes thekeydistinctionbetweenplagiarismandmisuseofsources.Shearguesthat, while plagiarism is a serious problem, difculty handling attribution of sources is symptomatic of poor or developing writing, not academic dishonesty.10.Donotdoubtthegenderedissueswithplagiarism.SeeHowardsSexuality, Textuality: TheCulturalWorkofPlagiarismonfemininityasacharacterization of plagiarism. It could be argued that concerns with East Asian plagiarism are kin to the Orientalizing that emasculates Asian males.W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 236 12/14/09 5:42 PMW237L Y O N / Y O U F A I L : P L A G I A R I S M , T H E O W N E R S H I P O F W R I T I N G11.IthinkofMin-ZhanLusresistantusersofEnglish,refusingEnglishinfavor of Chinglish (2122, 38), and of my Singaporean students and colleagues resisting government crackdowns on Singlish and the promotion of standardized English.12.OwenFissandStanleyFisharequitearticulateonthelimitsoffreedomof speech within the United States.Works CitedAustin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. . Philosophical Papers. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. 23152.Ballard, Brigid, and John Clanchy. As-sesment by Misconception: Cultural Inuences and Intellectual Tradition. Assessing Second Language Writing in Academic Courses. Ed. Liz Hamp-Lyons. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. 1935.Blink, Sharon Brace, and Mary Garrett. 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Her recent work on transnationalism has appeared in several collections, JAC: Journal of Rhetorical and Writing Studies, and Philosophy and Rhetoric.W222-239-Dec09CCC.indd 239 12/14/09 5:42 PMReproducedwith permission of thecopyright owner. Further reproductionprohibited without permission.