PXVI. Ethos Move

To what can we best attribute the ongoing and curiously disproportionate allure of the market libertarian imaginary, especially to so many American technophiles? And why would so many technophiles who would otherwise disdain the moral premises of the libertarian project, nevertheless dismiss or disavow the political themselves in ways that will reproduce many of the terms of the libertarian imaginary in any case?

Perhaps it is a matter of technical-minded people who prefer the clarity of reproducible results to the ongoing and unpredictable reconciliation of contending ends among the multiple stakeholders to social problems. Perhaps it is an expression of a generic elitism of “early adopters” –- that is, individuals drawn to take up new technologies, usually before enough time has elapsed to lower the price of their purchase and often before safety and other regulatory standards have definitively stabilized the features to be associated with the new technology. Perhaps it is simply the commonplace disavowal by lucky or privileged people of the extent to which individual accomplishment inevitably depends on the maintenance of social norms, enforced laws and material infrastructure beyond itself. Perhaps it is a matter of the privileged deployment of terms like “innovation” in an effort to stealthily signal a concern with freedom or creative expression, but in a more instrumental and hence presumably more “neutral” register that it is hoped will be less contentious.

Lately, I have begun to wonder whether at the temperamental core of the enthusiasm of many technophiles for especially the "anarcho-capitalist" dreams of a sweeping re-invention of the social order is not finally so much a craving for liberty in its common civil denotation, but for a reimagination of liberty as the facilitation, quite to the contrary of conventional liberty, of individual agency figured as a kind of total exhaustive control of circumstances.

This helps account for the fact that many libertarian technophiles often seem less interested in discussing the proximate problems and promises of emerging nanoscale manufacturing, materials, and medicine, for example, and the radical but scarcely transcendentalizing benefits they will likely confer, but prefer to barrel ahead to overheated paeans to the "total control over matter" a superlative nanotechnology will presumably bring.

Market libertarian technophiles sometimes seem spellbound at the prospect of superlative enhancement biomedicine conceived as a transition From Chance to Choice (the title, as it happens, of a fine, nuanced, and quite moderate bioethical accounting of benefits and quandaries of emerging genetic medicine), as if genetics and biotechnology are about to eliminate chance from our lives altogether and substitute the full determination of morphology -– when it is much more likely indeed that genetic interventions will expand the chances we take along with the choices we make.

You know, behind all their talk of efficiency and coercion there often seems to lurk within the market libertarian a rather weird micromanagerial fantasy of an idealized private person sitting down and then actually contracting explicitly and exhaustively the terms of every public interaction in which they might take part, all in the hopes of somehow controlling its terms, getting it right, dictating the details. It is as if one imagined that communication would somehow proceed more ideally were we first to re-invent language ab initio in each encounter with another. But it should surely go without saying that the public life of freedom can scarcely be compassed in a prenuptual agreement.

Again and again I find that I grapple with variations on this theme in the technocriticism that preoccupies my blogging, and the same is true in the pages that follow. I have come to think that there are few forms of the discourse of privacy at once more prevalent and yet scarcely documented and theorized than privacy mobilized by those whose monomaniacal preoccupation is with individual agency figured as superlative control, and for whom such agency is either uniquely facilitated or threatened by technology. And I have devoted my energies here primarily to registering what I take to be the many limitations of this problematic of privacy, and to proposing my own alternatives to it. Even so, I will happily grant that documenting the conversational vicissitudes among some of the chief contemporary advocates for these positions, many of whom have received scant scholarly attention especially considering the scope of their provocation and influence, and conjuring up some of the flavor of their unique and neglected milieu, has not been without its fascination and real pleasure.

For Aristotle, persuasive rhetoric has three dimensions, which he describes by the terms logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos denotes those aspects of discourse that render it more compelling through their clarity and their coherence, for example consistent definitions of terms, claims following well-established premises, and forceful substantiations of conclusions with evidence. Pathos denotes those aspects of discourse that render it more compelling through the mobilization of emotions, for example, appeals to sympathy, loyalty, fear, pity, greed, or self-righteousness. Ethos denotes those aspects of discourse that render it more compelling through the conjuration of an appealing character in the writer or speaker, for example, the establishment of an author’s special expertise or credibility in the matter at hand, a presentation of authoritative credentials, a performance of congenial personality that elicits sympathy or ease or a desire for emulation, cultural signals of membership in a community that solicits identification, and so on.

While scholarship tends to privilege the logos dimension of rhetoric, especially in those moments of cultural anxiety in which the academy would want to cultivate a self-image of conspicuous scientificity and readily communicable social utility, it is interesting to note the discursive spaces that emerge nonetheless at the margins of logos.

I am especially fascinated by the ethos spaces that remain intelligibly scholarly within the scene of academic writing. Among these are prefatory comments in which scholars are expected to acknowledge their debts, will regularly offer up more colloquial accountings of their projects, connect their work to their personal and social lives, and sometimes will really let their hair down, taking the chance to tell jokes, express their political commitments, or otherwise reveal themselves as more idiosyncratic and fully-fledged personalities.

In its character as a space of argumentative writing outside of logos, but still connected to logos –- that is, “before-the-logos,” in both the sense of a precedent to and a beholden to and a beholding of the more logical case to come –- the Pro-Logos, the Prologue, this preliminary prological material reminds me of nothing so much as of the argumentative space of blogging. And this similarity seems especially relevant for those forms of blogging (of which my own is conspicuously an example) that are predominately argumentative and often described as “academic” blogs.

And to the extent that in some genres of scholarship footnotes likewise properly function not only as a space of substantiation but as an ethos space of qualification, confessions of befuddlement, launching pads to more provisional explorations, opportunities to offer up more anecdotal substantiations, and the like, I think that George Landow’s classical point that citational practices of scholarly writing prefigure hypertextuality can now be supplemented with the point that these practices likewise prefigure blogging practices as a kind of argumentative writing.

Certainly I have sought here and now to render such a collision as conspicuous and as compelling and as intimate as I can. In so doing I have sought to register in some small way the powerful juxtaposition of scholarly practices to which I have been devoted over the course of this writing over these many months and the meaning for which remains for me, at least for now, an open question and ongoing provocation.

It is difficult for me to try to distinguish the ethical commitment to scholarship expressed in the moments of my more solitary devotions before my desktop, clarifying the formulations of my dissertation, from the commitment expressed in moments in which I propose a new article or edit the language of an existing one pseudonymously for the Wikipedia. It is difficult for me to comfortably distinguish the validating force of peer-review from the extraordinary responsiveness I have encountered peer-to-peer via social software. It is difficult for me to find the ways to render intelligible the role blogging has assumed in my own inhabitation of the academy, from the creation of collaborative blogs to facilitate discussion and research outside the classroom in my teaching practice to my ever more frequent assignment of textual material available only on blogs, especially in classes devoted to media criticism and technocultural theory. It is difficult to work through all of the ways in which blogging as a practice of rigorous argumentation and popular publication has transformed my sense of what it might mean to be any kind of public intellectual in America today. It is my hope that these more private quandaries of mine, which I will not register again in any kind of explicit way in the formulations that follow, can now nonetheless reverberate into your reading of the account to come and so better bespeak the complex texture of urgencies that made this project such a source of perplexity and, finally, pleasure for me.

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