I'll see your thesis and raise you one chapter from my dissertation:Luke wrote:Why we're posting our work, here's part of my thesis from two years ago (abridged due to 60,000 character rule):
EDIT: oh shit, I can't due to the character rule - I am well over 100,000 characters....so, I'll see your thesis and raise you about half of one chapter from my dissertation.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW
Purpose of Study
This project engages a form of political activism known as hacktivism, the practice of politically motivated computer hacking. Specifically, it is interested in how rhetorics of activism that are grounded in digital media are related to and/or different from other activist rhetorics.
There are a number of reasons why this study is an important one.
First, it is clear that while web-based forms of political activism are becoming increasingly popular (as evidenced by both the number of people involved in some form of digital activism and by the increased variety of methods for using digital technology as part of activist discourse) scholarly attention to this phenomenon, especially by communication scholars, is surprisingly lacking. That is, even though the field of communication studies (and rhetorical studies in particular) have occasionally considered the relationship between politics and digital technology (e.g. the internet), much of the focus of this scholarship has been on either mainstream political parties or grassroots organizations that rely on these technologies to increase their base and share their message. What is largely missing from the field is an engagement with more radical forms of political activism; this would include activist movements that do not have an “offline” correlative, activism that targets the digital infrastructures of government and corporate institutions, activism that uses digital technology to create new forms of political parody, etc. By focusing on the rhetoric of hacktivism, a form of digitally-grounded activism that represents many possibilities for web-based political action, this project is in part an attempt to begin that discussion in earnest.
Second, as I will show, there are significant differences between the rhetorics of either “social movements” or “new social movements” and those being produced by the groups I am interested in. In other words, the models, genres, and labels that rhetoricians have often assigned to the study of contemporary activist movements cannot be simply re-applied to the types of activism suggested above. I will argue that while certain hacktivist practices may initially appear to fit neatly into some of those categories, in the final analysis there are important aspects of hacktivism, both in terms of its practices and its textual production, that make it difficult to fix into any one of these categories. Key to understanding this difficulty, I will show, is coming to terms with the way that new media discourses are constructed and circulate. Thus, I believe that this project is important because it moves towards a theory of digital rhetoric that renders digital discourses more accessible to many forms of rhetorical criticism.
A third reason that this project interests me is because the research pushes against many disciplinary boundaries. It is rhetorical criticism that deals with a variety of disciplinary texts (and contexts) and is addressed to a wide range of readers in addition to the rhetorical scholar. In examining the rhetoric of digital activism, the study brings together a existing research that addresses web-based forms of politics (including the few that address hacktivism), internet subculture and identity, the use of language in digital contexts, spatial and temporal theories of new media, and existing scholarship on digital rhetoric. It encompasses rhetorical theory and criticism , philosophical writings, cultural studies scholarship, and criticism about the relationship of these disciplines to science and technology. Thus while the focus of this study is on constructing a critique of the rhetoric of a particular kind of digital activism, the research itself often diverges from the standard work done in communication or rhetorical studies. The result is a project that is both infused with scholarship from across the academy and potentially interesting to a variety of disciplines for a variety of reasons.
This first chapter is divided into five sections. The first two sections function together as a review of that literature which already addresses some of the important questions raised by a rhetorical study of hacktivism. The first review section sets up the need for an analysis of digital rhetorics by examining literature related to rhetorical theories of argument, activism, and identity; here I will show how rhetorical theory and criticism is already poised to engage new media. The second part of the literature review addresses how digital rhetoric has been theorized in both rhetorical studies and outside the discipline by scholars who comment on either unique features of digital discourses or on the relationship between digital technology and politics more generally. Third, I will provide a brief introduction to the digital discourses that will be the focus of the study – hacktivist texts – and discusses briefly how they have been taken up in research in the past. The fourth section explains how these texts will be analyzed by discussing an initial reading strategy for the project. Fifth, I provide an overview of the chapters to follow and discuss the questions addressed in each.
Literature Review Part I: Rhetorical Theories of Argument, Activism, and Identity
The emphasis of the study is on the analysis of hacktivist rhetoric. Thus the body of literature that is rhetorical theory and criticism is the starting point for any discussion of digital rhetoric. However, since one goal of this project is to consider the possibility of a critical framework for the study of digital rhetoric, it is important to first identify what the constitutive features of a digital (or any other) rhetoric might be. In the first part of this literature review, I hope to argue that any theory of rhetoric must be designed to engage discourse as contextual. That is, rhetoric is often best recognized and easiest to analyze when it exists in relationship to an identifiable situation. Rhetoric thus both responds to and produces audiences in the act of shaping attitudes and directing actions. These situations (or what Biesecker [1989] more accurately calls “events”) are symbolic exchanges; as such, rhetoric functions to shape the contours of both identity and subjectivity in this exchange. To build a “specialized” theory of rhetoric, then, one must identify and examine contexts in which the features of discourse are significantly unique as to require a close study of how this symbolic process takes place.
In other words, this dissertation is trying to move towards an understanding of a theory of digital rhetoric in much the same way work in the field has focused inquiry on “the rhetoric of science,” or “presidential rhetoric,” or even “visual rhetoric.” None of these sub-areas of the discipline are wholly independent of one another – they each draw on much of the same critical and theoretical rhetorical tradition that grounds this project – but each has identified a type of rhetorical discourse that has distinct boundaries. This study of digital rhetoric can be justified in much the same way: both the form and content of digital texts are significantly unique (and new) so as to necessitate close rhetorical analysis. Today, most rhetorical scholarship focuses on non-digital texts: public speeches, discourses that circulate on paper (books, letters, etc.), electronic media such as television, radio, and film, and so on. Just as the content and form of discourse varies across each of these mediums, so too does the introduction of digitality alter features of a discourse. For these reasons, it is important that this project provide a point of discussion for the study of digital rhetoric.
As suggested above, creating a “specialized” theory of rhetoric involves identifying locations where certain features of the discourse being considered are most salient, most amenable to analysis. One of the reasons I think that hacktivism is a productive site for thinking about the relationship of rhetorical theory to digital texts is that hacktivist discourses are already at the intersection of three traditional areas of disciplinary theory building: argumentation, activist politics, and identity. These three areas, for me, function together to provide the basis of any theory of rhetoric. In addition, they provide a useful framework for addressing some of the more perplexing characteristics of hacktivism; these characteristics are further discussed below.
By first thinking about how argumentation occurs across a selected set of discourses (e.g. digital texts), one is able to begin constructing a theory of rhetoric that considers the role it plays in shaping human reasoning, decision making, and persuasion. In addition, the great breadth of existing argumentation scholarship provides a strong foundation for considering the spatial and temporal aspects of digital texts. Focusing on activist politics adds another layer to a theory of rhetoric by emphasizing the political dimensions of a discourse. Again, the existing scholarship in the field on social movements and public advocacy is a strong foundation from which to consider how any specific form of protest discourse (e.g. digital activism) might reimagine the political potential of rhetoric. Finally, by combining the study of argument and activism with a rhetorical theory of identity, a framework for explaining the constitutive force of specific rhetorical texts is completed.
The first part of this literature review is designed to highlight how existing rhetorical scholarship in these areas might be productively appropriated for constructing a theory of digital rhetoric. As is always the case with surveys that consider a large body of scholarly literature, what is presented below is a set of texts that has been strategically selected. They are texts that demonstrate significant shifts in how rhetoricians have thought about and critiqued forms of argument, activism, and identity.
Argument
There have already been many essays and chapters published by rhetoricians who address the role of argumentation theory within the discipline of rhetoric. One question for this project is: how much of this argumentation theory, which concerns pre-electronic argument, is relevant to the study of digital argument?
Corbett (1986), interested in the “changing strategies of argumentation” (21) across “intellectual revolution” (30) traces argumentation theory back to its Greek roots. For him, all these changes – from the Sophists through Chaim Perelman – “could be broadly classified as being either Platonic or Aristotelian” (21). He writes his version of this history in order to come to terms with the trend towards the “reinstitution of courses in reasoning” (34); apparently the Academy has come “full circle” back to Aristotle and it is Corbett’s mission to show how this move was possible.
The tension between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of reasoning and argument that Corbett uses to structure his history also has been used by other scholars interested in related questions. In Joseph Wenzel’s (1993) discussion of how argument is theorized differently in modernity than in postmodernity, he is interested in the development of many of the same themes that Corbett was. If Corbett’s survey of argumentation ends at modernity, then Wenzel’s essay works to extend and preserve many of the Aristotelian themes Corbett identifies for argument in the postmodern context. For example, Wenzel’s “Cultivating Practical Reason” essay examines the state of reasoning in logic, rhetoric, and dialectic. He suggests, as does Corbett, that modernist argumentation (which has its roots in Aristotle) is alive, well, and able to tackle the problems of the postmodern condition; modernism functions as a complement to postmodern theories of argument. He writes
A modern theory and practice of argumentation has been, and will continue to be, our contribution to the cultivation of practical reason…And that will continue to be our task in postmodernity…A modernist theory of argumentation in postmodernity would look very much like it always has in its goals and its substance. (1)
Habermas…gives us powerful ideas for theorizing about the conditions for democratic deliberation. Foucault, Lyotard and their postmodern companions give us equipment to critique relations of power and oppression, and to struggle for autonomy. [The critic should] continue the work of argumentation theory in a postmodern world: cultivating practical reason. (6)
Wenzel’s essay should be read as a follow-up to an earlier piece wherein he traces these same “Three Perspectives on Argument” (1990). There he suggests that a perspectival approach to the history of argument theory helps one better understand the “moral” of this past: “human judgment depends on argumentation…since antiquity those domains of action and inquiry have been central to the study of argumentation” (25). Ultimately, Wenzel and Corbett are interested in how the history of argument is able to provide them with an understanding of how Aristotelian theories of judgment might still be applicable today, especially in what they might consider to be relatively homogeneous contexts.
Other theorists have drawn on much of the same history towards other ends. One example of this approach is the work of Thomas Goodnight. Goodnight also writes about the history of reason and rationality as they relate to argumentation theory. In “Controversy, Communication, and Argumentation: A Rationale for Critical Studies” (1991) he tackles the problem of the “advance of modern science…over what appears to be the increasingly fragmented conditions of political and ethical choice” (13). He suggests that argumentation is needed where science often fails – to navigate questions of ethics in “the volatile realm of controversy” (17). He writes:
If communication is bound to be engaged in controversy for the time being, then it becomes important to situate the study of Argumentation in a world of expanding disagreement. So situated, the aim of Argumentation is not necessarily to resolve conflicts or posit validity conditions, but rather to develop the self understanding required to learn form generational controversies of the past, to distinguish between trivial and significant debates in the present, and to foresee a future in which the capacities of communication are better developed in response to altered and alterable conditions; in short to learn from argumentative practices.
Because of this emphasis on controversy and the situatedness of argument, Goodnight needs a stronger theory of judgment than what is offered by Aristotle. Thus, he suggests moving beyond the disciplinary borders outlined by many rhetoricians. He explains in another essay (1991) that “argumentation scholars are in an excellent position to take up [controversy theory] by mobilizing the resources of various traditions of inquiry” (9).
Because of his own focus on the practical, everyday uses of argument, Goodnight’s theory of argumentation draws on Habermas’ writing on communicative action and thus brings Habermas (and by association the Frankfurt school) into the history of argument. The result is both a different theorization of argument as well as of rhetoric.
And though Goodnight pushes the boundaries of argument theory, other scholars could argue that Corbett, Wenzel, and Goodnight are ultimately all limited in their construction of argumentation history and theory because they are drawing primarily on the ancient Greek and Western humanist tradition. In other words, they are especially susceptible to the critiques such as those offered by Ron Greene, who offers a different perspective on both the history and contemporary function of argumentation. Greene (1998) is interested in how arguments function within these institutional constraints and writes that it is necessary to “investigate the organizational and historical dynamics of a governing apparatus. A governing apparatus exists as a complex field of practical reasoning that invents, circulates, and regulates public problems” (22). Greene explains that discourses articulate to one another; he understands arguments as both contributing to and drawing on certain discursive formations, a term he borrows from the French thinker Michel Foucault. Greene repeatedly positions argumentation studies within and against theoretical positions meant to challenge the assumptions made by the traditions that Corbett or Goodnight might identify with. Greene seems to pursue argument theory primarily for two reasons. First, he uses it as the fulcrum to reinvent the role of the rhetorical critic as one that can intervene in argument (rather than only critiquing from a distance). Second, he returns a pedagogical function to argument criticism.
Argument in a digital context is often disjointed both spatially and temporally. In addition, it occurs in a mediated environment. That is, unlike face to face argument, web-based argument often occurs on messageboards, over instant messaging programs, through response forms, etc. Digital texts are often highly referential (e.g. use a hyperlink structure), are copied into new contexts from whence they first appeared, are circulated virally, and are easily modified. Digital argument is also highly visual – digital technology makes the incorporation of images, videos, and graphics more accessible to a larger number of people. Individuals are often able to engage in argument anonymously through the use of avatars or, intriguingly, through assuming the identity of others.
I don’t highlight these features of digital argument to suggest that existing theories of argumentation are unable to account for new technology. Most argument theory can be reconfigured and applied to digital texts. But whereas the rhetoricians discussed thus far are focused on examples that highlight either the dialectical (Corbett, Wenzel) or the controversial features of argument (Goodnight), a theory of digital argument must emphasize the spatial and the referential. Most digital argument takes place through the circulation and manipulation of malleable texts within highly visual hyperspaces. The ordering of meaning and inference, in these contexts, are related to (though not determined by) the digital properties of the medium.
Rhetoricians already have generated some useful starting points for thinking about argument along these lines. For example, many argumentation critics already address the issue of circulation. Phillips (1999), for instance, refers to resistance when discussing the connection between the circulation of discourses in and around controversies and the constructions of public and private identity that emerge in this process:
controversies provide momentary opportunities to resist, change, and reform local practices of those involved. The fluidity of social meaning and identity provides only for the partial fixations of stability; controversies provide for the disruption of these fixations and the introduction of new systems of order. Some controversies are reproduced in various localities to encompass great swaths of social practices, others remain local and brief. (495)
Unlike Goodnight, who draws on a Habermasian notion of public spheres to theorize the contours of controversy, Phillips writes about argument as taking place within spaces that are less easy to define. His interest is in the “different dispersions of discourse [that] come into contact, disorient regular discourse, disrupt” (507). He dismisses criticism of “genuine argumentation” (ibid.) and cautions against an approach that limits argumentation theory to categories set up by the traditions of scholarship that are addressed above:
While one might argue that establishing a stable and singular ground upon which a certain counterpublic might form critiques of dominant institutions is an appropriate goal, such a goal may prove to be another orientation preventing a “reflective discussion of the controversial” (Goodnight, 1991, p.3). Polysemy and multiplicity necessitate recognition of multiple and divergent interpretations of social texts. (506)
Phillips’ theory of argument provides a starting point for thinking about the referential and malleable nature of digital argument. What Phillips seemingly lacks – a strong theory of space in which to think about where these discourses are disorienting, etc. – can be productively augmented by theorizing discourse circulation within cyberspace. This is the focus of Chapter Three, wherein I ultimately suggests that understanding the performance of argument within cyberspace is key to developing connections between rhetorical agency and resistant practices.
Biesecker (1992) writes that “practices that we will call ‘resistant’ are…gestures that defy translation, throw sense off track, and, thus, short-circuit the system through which sense is made” (357). If we think of digital texts as a potential site for the emergence of new forms of rhetorical praxis, then activities like hacktivism demonstrate how agency can be rhetorically constructed. Responses to hacktivism by government institutions, for example, show that one of the reasons for labeling all forms of hacking (including hacktivism) as “cyberterrorism” in public discourse is because they cannot make sense of the logics informing much of hacktivist practice. Biesecker continues:
Subjects who resist, who in doing things that elude sense can only be ‘recognized’ as the radically Other, must not be misunderstood as the origin proper of transgression…The ‘virtual’ or yet-to-be-materialized break is antecedent to those subjects who, in inhabiting that space, are the means by which resistance obtains the construction of practice. (357)
A rhetorical theory of digital argument that emphasizes the possibility for agency will focus not only on something like “controversy” or traditional forms of argument but also on the practices that are unique to and a result of a particular cultural and technological context. A corollary to this kind of critical emphasis can be found in the way that rhetorical studies has addressed visual argument.
To the extent that digital practices often have a strong visual component, certain theories of visual argument might be constructively grafted onto this framework. Blair (1996) take up the question of visual argument by assessing the levels of abstraction necessary to bring theories about persuasion in verbal or written argumentation into the visual. Focusing on the “function” of visual argument, he suggests that visual argument is often “one-sided, uni-dimensional” (38):
While visual argument can be concrete and particular, it can also, even simultaneously, be vague or ambitious. If suggestiveness is the aim, this is a virtue; where clarity or precision are desiderata, it is a disadvantage…visual argument has both the strength and the weakness of its form…Visual arguments are not distinct in essence from verbal arguments. (38)
Blair’s theory of visual argument, like Corbett or Wenzel’s theory of argument more broadly, seeks to understand the visual within a particular, traditional, epistemological framework (wherein argument is understood as persuasion). And though this perspective is not necessarily “invalid,” it does fails to address the possibility for visual texts to function as alternative forms of argumentative reasoning that are used contextually and as potential sources of agency.
Gronbeck (1995) takes up this challenge in an article dealing with what he calls visual argument’s “unstated propositions.” Gronbeck suggests that many visual images argue not through traditional rationality but rather through their existence “outside of the “discursive world” (541). He writes:
[Unstated propositions] advance sorts of propositions for which no proof is demanded because they have not been made a part of the discursive world. Rather, they are inexactly, vaguely, called up from the viewer’s experiential memories…they escape rational assessment and yet act to empower the reasonable discourse with which they are associated and to which they are bonded. (541)
Gronbeck’s essay ends with a call for further engagement with the visual for argument studies, and suggests that there are implications of this way of researching the visual for critiquing the “technologically mediated public sphere.” Gronbeck’s approach is one that would complement a theory of digital rhetoric.
Another rhetorical theory of visual argument that might help shed light on digital contexts is offered by Finnegan (2001), who suggests that different contexts render visual meaning differently; temporally and spatially located “visual cultures” determine how photographs might be “mobilized as an inventional resource for public debate” (148). Knowing how, when, and where visual texts circulate is crucial to understanding how they displace, modify, destroy, “reinforce or intensify” (147) certain beliefs about the ideological functions of specific types of visual texts. Because one of the features of digital argument is the frequent use of visual texts, Finnegan’s theory facilitates our thinking about how these texts articulate with both other digital images as well as with visual texts encountered in other contexts.
For example, the 1996 defacement of the Central Intelligence Agency website mimicked the look and form of the standard site, potentially making the user susceptible to clicking on links that they had not intended to pursue. Finnegan’s theory of visual argument explains the rhetorical significance of this defacement; the visual experience of the web has become naturalized in ways which can be productively exploited by those wishing to challenge how we interact with trusted sites such as http://www.cia.gov. However, Finnegan tries to avoid the trap of positing that the visual can be simply read as a form of resistance to some “dominant ocular regime” (141). Instead, the possibility for resistant practices like those she identifies always already exist, they require an agent or agents to occupy a space from which they can be performed. With a knowledge of both technology and political activism, hacktivism is a position from which these opportunities can be recognized.
Phillips’s theory of dissent, Biesecker’s theory of agency, and Finnegan’s theory of the visual are only one set of places where we might begin thinking about how rhetorical theories of argument might be applied to the web. Still unanswered in these approaches is the question of what might be gained from studying political protest on the web. Why might a rhetorical critic be interested theorizing digital argument?
This unanswered question brings me back to Greene’s theory of critical intervention. One question that recurs across much of argument theory is of the role of the critic in studying argument. Should critics simply be “observing” argument or should they be attempting to strengthen specific types of argumentation? Might critics help those who share political sympathies by analyzing and strategizing the most persuasive arguments for particular rhetorical situations? Is the role of the critic mostly pedagogical or judging, or is it theory building? As I hope to show, these questions pop up repeatedly not just in discussion of argument theory, but also in many other lines of inquiry in rhetorical studies. They are certainly pertinent to the study of the web – a medium that is interactive and holds the possibility for a critic to share his or her work with an audience that might be able to use it. Perhaps one of the areas of the field where these questions have been interrogated most rigorously is in the study of social movement and public activism rhetorics.
Activism
By now, there is an established tradition of “social movement studies” as a subset of rhetorical inquiry, though ideas about how and why to study or critique the rhetorics of activism and protest vary widely. It is my intention here to frame the ongoing dialogue about the relationships between rhetorical criticism and what Bowers et al. (1971, 1993) term the “rhetoric of agitation and control” in such a way as to explicate what I feel are the most important contributions to rhetorical theory coming out of a this particular subset of rhetorical scholarship. Towards that end, it is helpful to label certain trends in this body of criticism: studies that engage “old” vs. “new “ social movements, criticism that considers rhetoric as instrumentalist or criticism that understands rhetoric as constitutive, criticism that concerns itself more “traditional” rhetorical texts (speeches, pamphlets, etc.) vs. those engaging highly mediated texts (television, the circulation of symbolic images, etc.). This section traces these trends, which are closely related to other (historically situated) developments in rhetorical studies and the humanities more broadly, and ends by considering the relative importance of this scholarship for approaching the rhetoric of digitally based protest.
Of course, one immediate problem that confronts any study of social movement rhetorics is defining exactly what a “social movement” is in the first place. Can the American civil rights movement and work done by movements like Greenpeace be studied in exactly the same way? Aren’t there important structural and political differences between workers’ movements aimed at resolving labor disputes and the often solitary efforts of many hacktivists? One common answer to this definitional question is to distinguish between “old” and “new” social movements. That is, “old” social movements are often understood in terms of class struggle, economic division, prolonged protest; they are often based on Marxist frameworks of political action and thus stress the acquisition of material change. They work through dialectical, zero-sum processes and are often anti-institutional.
Old social movements employ tactics that work towards these goals: for instance both the labor strikes of union workers and the sit-ins of civil rights activists demonstrate the “old” social movement ethos that the system is vulnerable and able to redistribute its resources. This is the type of social movement Leland Griffin references when he argues the “point of focus in movement study” should be “isolating the rhetorical movement within the matrix of historical movement” (6). He explains the progression of these movements:
1. men have become dissatisfied with some aspect of their environment; 2. they desire change – social, economic, political, religious, intellectual, or otherwise – and desiring change, they make efforts to alter their environment; 3. eventually, their efforts result in some degree of success or failure; the desired change is, or is not, effected; and we may say that the historical movement has come to its termination. (6)
These types of social movements tend to follow a predictable pattern. Griffin suggests:
The reading in the discourse should be chronological, proceeding from the period of inception to the period of consummation; and the reading should also be analytical… concerned with discourses of both writers and speakers…the development and employment of media discourse…the development of audiences. (8)
This analysis results in criticism concerned primarily with the end effects of such movements; in addition, “the critic must judge the discourse in terms of the theories of rhetoric and public opinion indigenous to the times” (8).
Griffin’s 1952 essay proved influential for subsequent movement studies invested in the rhetoric of social change. Closely related are studies which, extending Griffin, emphasize the instrumentalist role of rhetoric in social movements; rhetorical critics such as Herbert Simons (1972) and Charles Stewart (1980) stress how different groups adopt specific rhetorical strategies in order to achieve desired effects. In addition, they argue that human intentionality is at the root of any social movement (as opposed to, for example, an approach that views movements as the result of historical conditions of emergence). Simons’ 1972 essay “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion of Social Movements” tackles these issues directly by questioning the rhetorical strategies used by leaders of social movements. He explains that “the disintegration of a movement may be traced to its failure to meet one or more of the demands incumbent upon it” (36) and argues that the critic is well served to look at the rhetoric of leadership to understand these demands. The essay traces different styles of leadership (labeled as moderate, intermediate, and militant). Simons explains that “by enunciating rhetorical requirements, theory identifies the ends in light of which rhetorical strategies and tactics may be evaluated” (34). This “rise and fall” approach to social movements is a hallmark of “old” social movements scholarship.
Stewart’s (1980) essay, “A Functional Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Movements” states that “for making significant strides towards Griffin’s vision [criticism] viewing rhetoric as the primary agency through which social movements perform necessary functions that enable them to come into existence, to meet opposition, and perhaps, to succeed in bringing about (or resisting) change” (166). While Stewart moves away from what he calls “a series of progressive stages” (168), he is still interested in many of the same questions that Griffin proposes (albeit with a focus on “functions” rather than “effects”):
How are essential functions performed by: (1) Different types of social movements – innovative, revivalistic, resistance? (2) Social movements demanding different degrees of change? (3) Social movements that encounter changing situations? (4) Social movements that confront different types and degrees of oppositions? (5) Social movements as they experience successes and failures or growth and decline? (6) Differing factions within social movements? (7) Social movements that face conflicting demands? (8) Social movements as they age and approach termination because of failure or institutions? (172)
According to Stewart, the role of the rhetorical critic in answering these questions is as an observer; one examines a social movement and points to instances where rhetoric is being drawn upon as the “primary agency available…for satisfying a variety of functions” (168). The goal of this type of criticism is twofold: an understanding of how social movements use different rhetorical strategies to “affect the perceptions of target audience and thus to bring about changes in their ways of thinking, feeling, and/or acting” (168) and to better “refine” (171) theoretical approaches that engage rhetoric as functional. Stewart explains in his conclusion that “[a] functional approach appears to be the best vehicle by which scholars may approach Leland Griffin’s vision of discovering ‘rhetorical patterns’” (171).
There are clearly some parallels between the “functional” approach to old social movements and the perspective on argumentation forwarded by Corbett or Wenzel above. Bowers and Ochs’ The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control (1971), which nicely summarizes and operationalizes much of the theoretical work on “old” social movements, highlights these connections. Bowers et al. theorize social movement as a style of persuasion that draws heavily on argument from pathos; they suggest one traditional approach to “agitation” is to view it as the “persistent, long-term advocacy of a social change, where resistance to the change is also persistent and long-term” (3). In addition, they write about the relationship between the “agitators” and institutions that are being protested in terms that Habermas or Goodnight might find comfortable. In a later (1993) edition, Bowers, Ochs and Jensen add a description of social movements that suggests an us/them distinction:
The agitators’ ideology and demands may be difficult for the establishment and the general public to understand. […] Members of the establishment may be incapable of understanding the behavior or language of such agitators. If they do not understand, establishment leaders will discover the explanations for the dissenters’ actions based on their own view of the world. (8)
With this binary in place, rhetorical criticism of social movements was about determining what strategies work best under what circumstances. And, in fact, Bowers et al. write a text that does just this – they present an Aristotle-esque taxonomy of when and why a movement would want to use certain rhetorical tactics. In old social movements, there is a commitment to meaning making through practices of argumentation.
Qualities of “old” movements are often put in contrast with those of “new” social movements. “New” movements are considered to be more concerned with identity, recognition, and local action. Sidney Tarrow (1998) explains that the tactics of “new” social movements are often understood in terms of “contentious collective action…the main and often the only recourse that ordinary people possess against better-equipped opponents or powerful states” (3). Laraña et al. (1994) add that these social movements often “transcend class structure” (6) and explain that “it is both the newness of expression and extension as well as the magnitude of saliency of such movements that constitutes a basis for needing revised frameworks of understanding” (9). Thus, scholars of “new” social movements are to presumably take lessons from “old” social movement theory and work them through a post-structural, post-modern framework that emphasizes the social construction of reality, collective identity, and what Melucci calls a “coexistence” with the past (115). Most contemporary activism, protest, and grass-roots demonstration is theorized through the latter perspective, while much of the pre-1968 protest is theorized in terms of old social movement theory. While these theoretical frameworks are necessarily overlapping and open to adjustment, they roughly provide the scholarly boundaries for research in social movement in many humanities departments, including scholarship in communication studies.
Two examples of “new social movement” scholarship are instructive for thinking about how it might be applied to digital activism. First, Kevin DeLuca’s book Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (1999) highlights how the image and the spectacle are now at the center of both “mainstream” and activist politics. Not content to view confrontation as only an instrumentalist process, he instead discusses the use of the visual image as a rhetorically-charged sign for moving those being confronted from their fixed ideological positions:
Working from an understanding of rhetoric as the mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures, I am exploring how radical environmental groups are using image events to attempt both to deconstruct and articulate [identities, etc.] in our modern industrial civilization. (17)
DeLuca’s emphasis is on the image’s ability to facilitate a gradual and unconscious change in meaning. For him, social movements should not be thought about in terms of public sphere theory; he challenges the privileging of reason, deliberation, and instrumentality over one of ideology, naturalized social relations, and a rhetorical theory of change that is more akin to Phillips’ discussion of argument above.
DeLuca’s book, like Cara Finnegan’s essay, offers a perspective on the visual that is easily applied in digital contexts. Specifically, DeLuca offers the possibility to think of hacktivism not only as activism that is seeking immediate radical change but also a form of protest that has the potential to shift ideological constructs, what McGee (1980) might call ideographs. DeLuca suggests that this can be done through transgression, by violating norms for the appearance and circulation of visual texts within the existing digital field. I address this notion further in the conclusions of this project
Second, Richard Flacks’ (1994) essay “The Party’s Over – So What Is To Be Done?” discusses how it has become increasingly difficult for activists to identity with “the Left” and helps illustrate how the relationship between political activism and personal or group identity has shifted with the adoption of new social movements. He explains that many of the Left’s “most potent symbols have been discredited” as a result of ideological confusion and “factional strife” (331); these symbols are what individuals were able to “pin” their identity to. And while most of Flacks’ essay focuses on alternatives to the party structure that once defined the Left, comments towards the end are telling about how identity might be rethought in today’s political climate. He writes “we have to make concretely realizable a vision of society organized so that people have some chance to directly express themselves as well as to hold those that speak for them accountable” (348). This is a process that he calls “democratic decentralization.” Though none of his suggestions directly implement the web or digital technology in this change, it seems that digital contexts wherein identity is always already up for grabs and in a state of flux might be a reasonable location to shape a new form of identity politics.
Recently, rhetorical scholarship has begun to address many of the questions concerning identity posited by the “new” social movement theorists. In other words, to consider social movements as closely tied to processes of identity formation is to open up the question of how rhetoric functions not only to argue, but to constitute subject positions. I turn now to some of the more fully developed conceptions of identity to consider what perspectives might elucidate this dimension of hacktivist action.
Identity
Michael Hazen and David Williams introduce a special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on the topic of “Argument and Identity” by explaining that the “constitutive turn” in rhetorical studies has refigured argument’s objective “not [as] ‘dialectical conquest’ in any eristic, analytic, jurisprudential, or sometimes allegedly male manner, but rather [as] symbolic appeal in the constitution or reconstitution of the self” (v). Following McKerrow and Bruner, they suggest that one role for the argument critic is to discern how identity and argument influence one another, effecting both argumentative practice and those processes of identification practiced by subjects who are engaged in argument. This section of the literature review briefly examines three rhetorical perspectives on identity to consider how they might be applied to the study of hacktivism; each of these figurations flow from the theories of argument and activism outline above.
(1.) Maurice Charland’s theory of Constitutive Rhetoric: Charland’s fullest treatment of a theory on constitutive rhetoric appears in his article on the “Pueple Québécois” (1987). In that essay, he confronts a situation where the “identity of the audience is clearly problematic” (134). Charland’s essay reads the White Paper, a document intended to explain the reasons for Quebec’s independence from Canada, as a constitutive rhetoric. His essay argues that this text does constitutive work because it assumes subjects whose identities are interpolated through an identification with an ideological narrative.
Key to Charland’s analysis is the description of how the text is taken up by the people of Quebec. He claims that the White Paper becomes the basis for an embodied ideology, a form of daily practice that relies on the text to shape certain aspects of both public and private identity. In addition, he explains that constitutive rhetorics are also material because they are always “oriented towards action.” Charland argues that the White Paper rhetorically creates a new subject position, one that has no material existence a priori the text. In other words, it provides a set of narratives that produces certain ideological effects: the subject becomes both historically situated and transhistorhical, and, most importantly, the subject has an illusion of freedom (139-41).
As an addendum to this carefully posited subjectivity, in a separate essay on constitutive rhetoric Charland incorporates Lyotard’s “postmodern prudence” into his theory. He explains Lyotard’s conception of phronimos, a figure who values phronesis, a prudence that is shrewd, intelligent:
[Phronimos] arises through a performative attitude in the face of the tragic recognition of our ontological (and linguistic condition)… Community is not a matter of presence or identification, of shared values or projects, but only a recognition of the continuity of life in the face of finitude, of the radical implications of the “ontology of the contingent” when carried into language itself. It might well provide the basis for pathos, but with distance. (281)
Thus, a text can only be “constitutive” when it is able to make sense within a community’s already existing perception of the potential of its own discourse.
(2) John Sloop and Kent Ono’s Out-law Discourses: Ono and Sloop’s conception of out-law discourses is especially appealing for a study of hacking and hacktivism. They explain that:
We see out-law discourses as loosely shared logics of judgment and procedure for litigation. […] Outlaw discourse communities posit their sense of justice as one that should properly be shared by the dominant community. (51)
Out-law discourses have implications for identity in that they “concern judgments made in the practice of everyday life” (60) and are deployed by “a being or group [to] preserve its identity – either through the creation of new ways to understand experiences… or through physical force” (63). Unlike Charland’s conception of rhetorically constitutive identity, which is focused on the ideological functions of discourse circulation, the study of out-law discourses help the critic understand how identity functions within specific argument contexts. These contexts are, of course, tied closely to the public sphere and dialogical models of argument discussed earlier in this literature review; they also match up neatly with the theory of social movement endorsed by Bowers et al.
Initially, hacktivist coalitions seem to fit this description. The theory of out-law discourses is closely tied to Ono and Sloop’s (1995) earlier work on “vernacular discourse.” A critical approach to vernacular discourses places “an emphasis on continuous discursive displacement…a critique of vernacular discourse strives to understand how a community is constructed and how that constructed community functions” (25-6). Important to their project is a theory of “conditional essentialism;” in the hacker community this is demonstrated in a belief in fundamental principles (e.g. the hacker ethic) that are continually reframed and renegotiated for contemporary concerns. They posit that the study of vernacular discourse is the only way to read the problems of co-optation. For Ono and Sloop, the critic should champion marginalized culture and subculture; they suggest that rhetorical critics might bring these discourses into the public imaginary, giving them attention through critique and “highlight the logics of particular out-law judgments” (1997, 64). In fact, rhetoricians are “uniquely positioned” to do this dues to their “materialist[ic] conception of judgment” (1997, 54). And though Ono and Sloop acknowledge the limiting potential in setting up this dialogic model, the critical move is justified as a form of strategic essentialism.
(3) Michael Warner’s Counterpublics: In an article that seems to (unintentionally) mediate the positions of Charland and of Ono and Sloop, Michael Warner addresses the phenomenon of counterpublics. Towards the end of “Publics and Counterpublics” (2002) Warner inquires about these counterpublics, publics that “make no attempt” (423) to ever present themselves as “the public.” Especially relevant for a discussion of identity is how he theorizes people who are “constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant public” (423). He writes:
a socially stigmatized identity might be predicated, but in such cases a public of subalterns is only a counterpublic when its participants are addressed in a counterpublic way…[for example] speaking in what is regarded in a racially marked idiom. […] Participation is one of the ways by which it’s members identities are formed and transformed. (424)
Warner, like Charland, puts a premium on the prudence of discourse; circulation alone does not guarantee transformation (of identity, ideology, etc.). Instead, one’s situatedness within an addressed audience is what facilitates identity construction.
David Wittenberg (2002) critiques this conception of the counterpublic by calling into question the theory of space in Warner’s work. Wittenberg notes the slippage in Warner’s use of this term (“discursive space,” “social space,” etc.) and recognizes that Warner’s public “abstracts itself out of space” (428). Instead, Wittenberg draws on Kierkegaard to remind us that appearance in the public is not only an appearance in space but is instead “tantamount to the danger of being removed from the public, not (necessarily) by being disappeared, but precisely by being made to appear too much” (432). This question of appearance is a very real one for activisms grounded in the digital contexts of cyberspace as well – Chapter Two explores this more fully – hacktivists are clearly concerned about losing something by engaging in certain forms of publicity.
While each of these conceptions of identity bear fuller attention than I’ve provided here, these snapshots collectively provide a more rhetorically sound alternative to the overwhelming deluge of critical scholarship addressing “online communities” or theorizing the “grassroots potential” of web-based politics. The second part of the literature review addresses some of the problems that are characteristic of scholarship in this vein.
I have split up the first part of this literature review into three sections so as to show the development of three specific lines of rhetorical inquiry: argumentation theory, social movement theory, and identity theory. In addition, in each section I have selected theorists who take positions within those discussions that – as I hope to demonstrate further in later chapters – have relevance to thinking through the problematics of digital rhetoric. And though I have presented these three lines of inquiry as divided and separate, it should be noted that there is actually a significant amount of overlap among the three. For example, Ono and Sloop’s scholarship suggests that critics should function as sorts of activist voices, making their work important not only for theories of argument or identity but also for social movement studies. In another instance, DeLuca’s emphasis on the role of the visual in contemporary social movements provides justification for the “aesthetic turn” that informs Finnegan’s work and is reflected in Greene’s “new materialism” and his use of Lyotard to think about argument within a post-modern framework. In other words, though I have divided these three areas of scholarship, they all share an interest in the status of both rhetoric and rhetorical studies. Collectively they function as both a “state of scholarship” in the discipline and as critical and pedagogical tools for considering how discourse functions in different contexts.
Furthermore, concerning digital rhetoric, arguments that take place in digital media can be read in the same ways as those that occur in other places. For example, regardless of whether someone analyzes presidential candidates’ website, listens to their campaign speech, or watches their television commercial, the Toulmin model can be applied to the text to figure out the reasoning behind certain claims offered in any of these contexts. Whether one reads an internet message board devoted to the legalization of marijuana or attends a town hall meeting where the topic is being debated, Goodnight’s theorization of controversy is useful to figure out how arguments are being communicated and judgments made. Two different rhetorical critics observing WTO protests in Seattle – one focusing on the action on the street and the other on concurrent hacktivist activities aimed at the same organization – both can draw on Warner’s conception of counterpublics to frame their understanding of the events. The point is that almost all of the theories I have emphasized above are potentially useful for reading digital texts.
Moreover, I have traced each of these three areas of rhetorical inquiry as they collectively provide a starting point of sorts from which it becomes possible to evaluate not just “digital rhetoric” broadly, but, specifically, the rhetoric of hacktivism. Can hacktivism be defined as a movement by any of the definitions above? Is it a movement at all? Do the arguments that one encounters when analyzing hacktivist texts correspond to any existing theory of argument? How are efforts made to rhetorically construct identities within hacktivist cultures? What happens to argument in digital contexts? In other words, the history of rhetorical theory already provides the critic with the necessary tools to make sense of hacktivist practices, the discourses about those practices, and the connections between the two. When one reconstructs this literature, what does it reveal about digital praxis? What this theory doesn’t already do, I suggest in the next section, is address how criticism might take into account the impact of digital technologies. For a more nuanced understanding of digital rhetoric, one must supplement this work.
Literature Review Part II: Theorizing the Digital
Although the web has been a significant part of American life for more than ten years, there has been surprisingly little scholarship addressing this medium in rhetorical studies. Especially since the web has had an impact on the aspects of life that rhetoricians are traditionally concerned with – politics, identity, discourse production and circulation, etc. – the lack of criticism directly addressing the internet is especially shocking. Part two of this literature review considers both what rhetoricians have said about the web (emphasizing scholarship that addresses politics) and what other disciplines may be able to offer to a theory of digital rhetoric.
Rhetorical Studies and Digital Contexts
In rhetorical studies, there are four significant book length pieces that specifically address the relationship between the rhetorical tradition and digital texts.
The earliest, Lanham’s 1993 The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts is one of the first texts to use the phrase “digital rhetoric.” Lanham explains that “the computer often turns out to be a rhetorical device as well as a logical one…it derives its aesthetic from philosophy’s great historical opposite in Western thought and education, the world of rhetoric” (31). Lanham’s key chapter on digital rhetoric explains how the computer is a medium which emphasizes play in all things – even in work. This characteristic makes it a powerful tool for the creation and development of the arts. He suggests that “we must explain…the extraordinary convergence of twentieth-century thinking with the digital means that now give it expression” (51). By tracing the movement in human culture from “the fixed and silent signal of the printed book to a richer but more volatile signal, writing + voice + image, of digital display” (127) Lanham’s book raises many of the questions that this study will hopefully begin to answer. And though his text is clearly located at the convergence of many early optimistic sentiments about the potential of digital technologies and the world wide web (see his chapter “Elegies for the Book”), the groundwork laid here is an important jumping off point for any later discussion of digital rhetoric.
The second, Barbara Welch’s 1999 Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, offers a perspective from a compositional approach to rhetorical theory. Concerned with what she understands to be the hegemonic position of screen technologies – the television and the computer – she turns to an “Isocratic-Sophistic construction of written and spoken articulation” (6) to understand how this hegemonic power is achieved within a democratic society. Of particular interest is the pedagogical force that an Isocratic theory of rhetoric lends to the study of electronic texts.
Isocrates’ linguistic/cultural/rhetorical power positioned him to enact a cultural/ideological/pedagogical agenda, an enkykilos paideia, that can help us in this era of profound change[…][it] is a powerful version of classical Greek rhetoric for the postmodern and after-postmodern world. (12)
In short, Welch views the computer as a potential tool for both political and personal change, but suggests that society’s engagement with the screen has been thoroughly uncritical. She suggests that we now stand at a moment of kairos, wherein a “revivification of the humanities” (27) might be possible if we can permeate the “electric consciousness” (104) that has emerged with the adoption of screens into the home and the “merger of written and the oral, both now newly empowered and reconstructed by electricity and both dependent on print literacy” (104). In other words, Welch is quite optimistic about the future of the screen: “electric rhetoric is an extension of literacy that will bring about many important changes and may bring about good changes” (157) if the humanities take a role in determining how these technologies are adopted and used.
Welch’s text is important for at least pointing out the Aristotelian, scientistic, and sociological approaches to the web have been the predominant mode of academic address. And while her text begins to think about digital technologies her real emphasis is on literacy of the “screen” and not the unique digital features of the computer discourses she engages. For example, she often collapses distinctions between television and computer technologies in her discussion of pedagogy, making her theory of “electric rhetoric” less than ideal for a starting point from which to engage digital rhetorics.
The other two full length treatments of digital rhetoric are Barbara Warnick’s Critical Literacy in a Digital Age: Technology, Rhetoric, and the Public Interest (2002) and her recent Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web (2007)....
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There's a LOT more to this chapter, and then four other lengthy chapters to boot
According to my open Word document, the whole thing is about 250 pages and 66,000 words.If anyone actually reads this and wants the rest of this particular chapter, I'll be happy to post it up.
