Resisting the Rhetoric of Science

Abstract

Paradoxically, the era of Digital Humanities has lent language usage more freedom as well as greater constraints. This is the era of compilation, copy-and-paste and downloading as well as a period of unprecedented freedom of speech through Internet communication; simultaneously, this is an era that is dominated by a scientific rhetoric based exclusively on rational language. This article focuses on Alphonso Lingis’s travel philosophy and William Gibson’s cyber fiction and contrasts their alternative strategies for resisting the rhetoric of science. Both authors regard the rhetoric of science as leading to an exclusion of the body from human experience as well as to a reduction of the material quality of language. Therefore, the rhetoric of science hinders humans from experiencing embodied transformation. Whilst Lingis experiments with new ways of writing philosophy, Gibson employs a dystopian genre in order to perform a sustained critique of the rhetoric of science. Lingis’s and Gibson’s work bring embodied and virtual forms of travel into contrast. The article examines the two authors’ writings through the concept of ‘the chronotope of the road’ to show how they reveal the possibilities of multivocal and multilingual explorations of time and space.