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February 16, 2005
The Web is words
Weinberger’s project to contrast the Web to what he calls our “default philosophy” of realism and modernism (154, 181) reminds me of similar projects within the realm of rhetorical theory. I’m thinking of Burke’s assertion that rhetoric’s concern is with “the state of Babel after the fall” (think the voices and languages of the Web); of Toulmin’s reaction against analytic logic by developing a theoretical framework for understanding practical reasoning, along with Rorty’s emphasis on the social justification of belief over the accuracy of representation (think the cases for knowledge made by Web users); of Kuhnians and sociologists examining science as a collective human enterprise; and of rhetoricians’ interest in the social construction of knowledge and community-based proof over absolute truth. In another sphere, I’ve just been reading articles in which tech comm scholars argue for social praxis (centered in shared human values) over the pure, objectivized techne of technical writing.
In short, Weinberger is using the Web as an argument for “richer and better human activity” (Rorty, “Science as Solidarity”) in exactly the same way that scholars have appealed to rhetoric to argue against modernist values in favor of a richer, more situated human enterprise. And much of the
vocabulary is the same. For instance, here is Michael C. Leff in 1987 describing the new strain of “neosophistic” rhetoric:
Sophistic gives priority to the unity of concrete experience as it is filtered through our interests rather than to the theoretical coherence of the varieties of experience as they are ordered according to an abstract, rational calculus
This is almost an exact counterpart of W’s claim that the “bodiless Web reminds us of the bodily truths [concrete experience] we have always lived” (142) combined with his idea that the space of the Web is defined by interests (55). Similarly, without saying as much, W speaks in many places of the Web as a locus of rhetorical activity. He alludes to its fundamentally textual character (163), to its purposiveness (52), to problems of ethos and credibility (121-124) and probabilistic argument (140), and to the shared construction of moral values (190).
So I think we can add to his conclusions that the character of the Web is rhetorical. And perhaps one of the reasons it seems so familiar to us, and feels like a return, as W . claims (180), is that it returns us to our rhetorical sensibilities as symbolic animals, and in that way, too, makes us feel more authentically human.
Posted by hjjankie at February 16, 2005 12:45 AM