Toward AnOther Rhetoric: Digital Technology and Ethics
My dissertation argues that digital environments and technologies call for a non-Aristotelian rhetoric more congenial to decentralized authority, transience, and flux. By placing rhetors in close proximity to heterogeneous audiences capable of almost instantaneous response., digital technologies prohibit rhetors from either commanding their own ethos or presenting their invented identifications with the assurances purported by Aristotelian rhetoric. I contribute to the growing body of scholarship linking the randomness and unassurance of postmodern, network, and complexity theory with the transience and plurality of digital communicative environments to produce such a non-Aristotelian rhetoric. Digital rhetoric fosters positive appreciation for flux, endorses critical awareness of the constitutive dimensions of context and locality, and preferences plurality over synthesis. It is not a rhetoric of persuasion; it is a rhetoric suspicious of the egoism inherent in much of classical and contemporary rhetoric’s emphasis on persuasion. Specifically, my articulation of digital rhetoric works toward co-habitation, positing tolerance and cooperation before (or, at least, alongside) egoist persuasion.
I ground such a rhetoric upon Levinas and Derrida’s articulations of metaphysical ethics as opposed to the classical and modern preoccupation with epistemology and ontology. Metaphysical ethics begin with a consideration of others and Otherness and thus offer a robust theoretical framework for a digital rhetoric concerned with co-habitation. Such ethics consider our contact with others (and with Otherness) as the foundation of subjectivity, knowledge, and human interaction. Such ethics prefer appreciation of difference over a desire for synthesis, conceptualize others as radically unaccountable, and recognize language as a violent but necessary imposition upon the Otherwise infinite. They extend other non-Aristotelian rhetorical projects, such as Kenneth Burke’s conceptions of identification and consubstantiality or Jim Corder’s framing of argument as emergence. With a radical preoccupation with distributed ethics as its foundation, digital rhetoric becomes more concerned with sustaining diverse relations than with fostering consensus.
My second chapter cites the need for a digital rhetoric by exploring contemporary popular discussions of the dynamic web, referred to as “Web 2.0.” I argue that the term, introduced by Tim O’Reilly in 2005, operates for the popular sphere much as the term “postmodern” operated for academia in the 1980’s and early 1990’s: both terms’ ubiquity and ambiguity signify cultural fields undergoing radical changes slightly beyond complete articulation. Looking at contemporary best-selling texts from a wide variety of fields including business management, web design, information architecture, and journalism, I detail how popular considerations of digital technologies endorse values we traditionally associate with academic theory rather than with the public sphere: Web2.0 is postmodernism going public. These authors endorse distributing power and control from corporations and creators to audiences, customers, and users, to recognizing the productive possibilities that such risks empower. Furthermore, these writers recognize the importance of fostering user interaction as a self-sustaining exercise—since the reputation of a person, company, or project is only as good as its current cooperative station in its community. This segment of the public sphere frames digital rhetoric as a balancing of the positive possibilities with the unavoidable risks attached to a world in perpetual beta.
The third chapter argues that the emergence of postmodern theory and the rise of digital technology are not unrelated events: both reciprocally feed off of each other’s inherent unassurances. Twentieth-century media theory has alerted us to the dynamic relationship that communicative mediums play upon content; I first follow media theorists such as McLuhan, Ong, and Havelock in tracing the mutually constitutive relationship shared between writing/printing and Platonic/Modern philosophy, especially as pertains to epistemology and subjectivity, a relationship clearly evidenced in Aristotelian rhetoric. In place of the relative isolation, universality, and assurance of writing, digital technologies, even before the recent rise of the dynamic web, engender the very different set of values evidenced in chapter one: cooperation, transience, and locality. The second part of this chapter stresses that, as we continue to move away from print as our dominant cultural medium (as Wikipedia replaces Britannica), we will, as a culture writ large, further come to question the dominant philosophical assumptions correlative to print.
The fourth chapter explicates how the core components of Levinas’ ethical metaphysics closely correspond to the emerging values of digital technology. First, there is a thoroughly cooperative element to his theory. Levinas posits the emergence of “self” through encounters with others—a self cannot exist in isolation, nor can self-awareness precede contact. In doing so, he rejects the fundamental essentialism of the Platonic or Cartesian subject; for Levinas thinking alone is never sufficient to produce an “I.” He also rejects the permanence of such a subject; for Levinas the self is in a perpetual process of becoming rather than in a permanent state of being. We might say, echoing our Web 2.0 analysts, that Levinas conceptualizes the self along the lines of perpetual beta. Connected to transience, Levinas theory maintains that the emergence of the subject as well as the possibility for ethics only exist in proximity to the face of others (which calls to us the non-face of the big Other—that which can never be known, our unending unassurance). It is only in light of the face that we experience our own trepidation and ignorance and, in turn, hospitably expose ourselves to others. A digital rhetoric of cohabitation builds from this risky exposure.
My fifth and final chapter integrates my articulation of a digital rhetoric to other contemporary non-Aristotelian movements in our field. I focus specifically on “Third Sophistic” considerations of the constitutive dimensions of locality, the non-rationality of affect, and the complex notions of the writer “muddled”—far more complexly related to and far less in control than Aristotelain schema would indicate. I also distinguish a my digital rhetoric from a Deleuzian one; while both oppose the objectivist rationalism common to Platonism and Modern Enlightenment, Deleuze offers us a radically individuated model. A Levinasian inspired digital rhetoric, in contrast, offers us a socially grounded model, one better relates to the lived experience of digital communication on today’s web. Rhetoric can draw upon its own sophistic roots in addition to postmodern theoretical perspectives such as the one offered by Levinas to help us, rather than to persuade each other or to change each other, to embrace each other as different and to respect each other’s right to be other.