Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web

Abstract

Propriety, and Appropriation Our comments extend our mutual scholarly interest in the articulation of discourses of in contemporary capitalist culture and how these are deployed in the narrative conjuring of as salvific moral virtue in global neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). We are interested in how narratives of and propriety, ownership, and entitlement come to be embodied and performed as moral stories in digital environments (Coombe and Herman 2000, Coombe and Herman 2001). As Marx argued capital a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical and theological niceties (Marx 1976[1867]:163). Capital strange for Marx because can apparently morph into so many different forms-as commodity, as debt, as labor, as knowledge, as brand image, and, underlying these, money as the universal, impersonal standard of value that makes these commensurable. Yet these strange and magical qualities of rest upon a foundation of metaphysics and theology-a particular set of ethical values that construe lifeworlds into monetary forms and human beings into autonomous individuals. We offer here a small slice of our ongoing work on the rhetorics of intellectual in the age of digital media and information-based capitalism.1 We use in the strong, Nietzschian sense of the term-as the act of ordering the chaos of life (Witson and Poulakis 1993:16). In this reading, a social and material practice of the pragmatics of power that punctuates the world with meaning and thereby renders social action possible. To use Barbara Biesecker's words, it in that the social takes (Biesecker 1997:50). Indeed, that makes the social a place of meaningful habitation. We do not mean rhetoric in the vernacular, pejorative sense as when someone says, Oh, that's just mere rhetoric, thereby connoting a fount of frothy words without real consequence (McGuigan 2003:1); nor do we restrict to discourse with persuasive force or intent. One of our favorite moments in teaching when we ask students to explain what the word property means. Given that the word a fixture of our everyday language and speech, students are remarkably perplexed when this question posed. Their reticence to give voice to their understanding of clearly doesn't have to do with their lack of knowledge of the word or the concept. Rather, rooted in the seeming obviousness of the answer. Property, one student will venture after an uncomfortably long silence, is when I own something. This rhetorical statement what legal scholar Jack Balkin (1998) calls a hegemonic meme in an argument that transports the concept of the meme from evolutionary biology to a critique of legal and political ideology. In brief, a meme an idea or rhetorical construct-a packet of coherent information-that passed on from generation to generation through the cultural transmission of communication, imitation, and replication called memesis (which should not be confused with the anthropological concept of mimesis). Cultures (Balkin shares none of the anthropologist's qualms about using the term as a noun) integrate such memes into quotidian ideologies because of their pragmatic utility in making sense of the world and allowing human groups to adapt to changing social environments. Through the memetic process of informational replication, to paraphrase Balkin, human beings become information made flesh. We have many reservations about Balkin's evolutionary theory of ideology. Aside from the conceptual overlay of evolutionary biology and the language and tropes of information science and technoculture, there not much in what Balkin has to say that hasn't already been said by Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Karl Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann, Foucault (especially), and even Marx himself. But the idea that the social power of ideology resides in its corporealization, in how embodied and performed, and how its makes the world habitable in the Heideggerian sense as an ethos, one worthy of further exploration when the location of this embodiment and performance takes place on the World Wide Web (the Web). …