How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age

Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Aaron McKain

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2012

Dissertation Committee:

James Phelan, Advisor

Cynthia Selfe

Wendy Hesford

Copyright by

Aaron McKain

2012

Abstract

This dissertation begins with a question that sits – obstinately – at the crossroads of 21st

century American politics and 21st century scholarship in rhetoric and composition: How do we

make judgments about rhetoric when new media (social-networking, web 2.0, ease of

audio/visual production) have rendered our long-standing public norms of ethos untenable? This is the dilemma lurking behind the daily parade of new media acts that we, as citizens, are expected to judge: From co-workers caught mid-kegstand on Facebook to politicians trapped in the YouTube minefield of decontextualized and mashed-up gaffes. But ethos points to a larger concern as well: At the precise moment where technology has given us, as a citizens, unparalleled power to act as rhetorical critics -- when anyone with a laptop and dial-up connection can effortlessly remediate, remix, and repurpose rhetorical acts from one context to another – we are uncertain about what the new rules of rhetoric are? How do we rethink ethos – in terms of character -- for a heavily surveilled, socially-networked age, where the distinctions between public and private are nebulous and all of our previous public performances are always only a

Google search away?

Concerned that our current, mass media age, standards for judging ethos as character

(e.g., as authenticity, as the search for the “real” person) are both deadlocking our politics and providing no vocabulary of resistance to the new media era’s twin industries of information- gathering and surveillance, this dissertation proceeds in three stages in order to present a solution.

First, using U.S. presidential campaigns in the new media era as a canonical political and pop cultural text, it zeroes in on two particular crises of ethos: the impossibility of maintaining a ii

coherent public persona (e.g. Gov. Mitt Romney versus the internet archive) and the erosion of

the line between what is public and what is private (e.g., Sen. John McCain). Second, it turns to

an underexplored area of American politics – aesthetics – to consider how the continued embrace of now forty year old, postmodern political aesthetics (e.g., metafiction, the New Journalism) prevents us from updating and re-conceptualizing our notions of political ethos. Finally, drawing on these observations, Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era proposes a heuristic to rethink our judgments of ethos: A critical updating of the “Chicago School” narrative model of communication. Arguing for this narrative model academically (via debates within the digital humanities on the issue of posthumanism), politically (using Stephen Colbert as a test case of ethos and new media era American politics ), and pedagogically (as a method of teaching ethos in rhetoric and composition classrooms), this project lobbies for a rethinking of our judgments of ethos that (1) better navigates the complexities of our new rhetorical landscapes; (2) is more in sync with the post-postmodern aesthetics of the digital media age; and (3) triangulates, as a pedagogy of resistance for citizens and students, the legal, political, and ethical values of ethos that new media – through our judgments of even its most mundane acts – invite us to acquiesce to.

iii

To Jim, Cindy, and Danielle for, well, everything.

iv

Acknowledgments

Wendy and Nan, Scott and Michael, John and Joy, David and Brian (and Paul), Gordon and Kate,

Jan and Teemu, Jill, Bartley, and Karl: Ten years is a very long time. I owe you all more than you will ever know.

v

Vita

1998 ...... B.A. English, B.A. Political Science,

University of Nebraska

2004 ...... M.A. English, Ohio State University

2011 ...... Assistant Professor of English, Hamline

University

Publications

“Rhetoric.” In Peter Logan, Ed. Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011.

“The Rhetoric of Narrative: What the Law as Narrative Movement Can Teach the Rest of the Narrative Turn.” In Deborah Journet, Ed. Narrative Action/Narrative Knowledge. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010.

“New Media, New English.” In Cheryl E. Ball and James Kalmbach, Eds. Reading and Writing New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. With Jason Palmeri, Cormac Slevin, and Scott Lloyd DeWitt.

Commonplace: A Citizen’s Guide to Persuasion (for an Age that Desperately Needs One). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. With Michael Harker and Scott Lloyd DeWitt.

“Re-Learning How to Argue.” In Cynthia L. Selfe, Ed. Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.

“Made Actual Through Pain: A Literacy Documentary.” In Cynthia L Selfe, Ed.

vi

Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. With Michael Harker and Cormac Slevin.

“Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show.” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (2005): 415-430.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...... ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...... iv

Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………………...... v

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………...vi

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..ix

Introduction: Welcome to the New Media Era…………………………………………………….1

Chapter 1 (Exhibit B): Mitt Romney: Grey Flannel Martyr for the New Media Ethos?……...... 39

Chapter 2 (Theory Interlude): A Cyborg, Wayne Booth, and a Dissertation Walk Into a Bar...... 63

Chapter 3 (Exhibit C): Losing to Win: Interpretive Restraint, McCain and Colbert……………105

Conclusion: Commonplace: Character, Community, and Agency in the Classroom…………...159

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….178

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Narrative Model of Communication…………………………………………………...81

Figure 2. Ethos as Producer/Produced…………………………………………………………....85

Figure 3. Narrative Model Redux………………………………………………………………...91

Figure 4. Narrative Model With Audiences……………………………………………………..135

Figure 5. Experiential Axis: Character………………………………………………………….139

Figure 6. Experiential Axis: Agency and Community…………………………………………..157

ix

INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO THE NEW MEDIA ERA

“Lester stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “God damn!” he said. “What a bummer. Why would anybody want to get hung up on a pile of shit like Politics?” – H.S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘721

We, the People, are really we, the rhetorical critics.

This doesn’t sound like the familiar slogan of high school civics teachers and junior

Congressmen, but it is true: American politics, at its best and worst, is the constellation of millions of rhetorical judgments. We are asked to decide whether to get angry when Rev.

Jeremiah Wright rallies his congregation with “God Damn America,” or whether to get angry at our fellow Americans who got angry about it. We cry or cringe or cheer or hiss when we hear

Sen. Obama tell 80,000 at Mile High Stadium that we are “the hope we’ve been waiting for,” or listen to Sen. McCain reveal, to another 45,00 in Minneapolis, the story of his captivity and torture and most private, in extremis moments. We laugh and groan and stare in slack-jawed disbelief when Chuck Norris endorses Mike Huckabee, or at Will.i.am’s YouTube oh-so-earnest- it-might-be-sickening celebrity sing-along. We nod or yell at the biases of Fox News and MSNBC and The Huffington Post, and screech or scratch our heads at the ideological clowning of Rush

Limbaugh and Jon Stewart. At protests and rallies and town hall meetings, we fear the collapse of civil civic discourse, except when we are heartened by the resurrection of civic activism. And, at some point during the proceedings, we all feel proud and stupid and dumbstruck and awed all at once for having ever watched or participated in (or participated in by watching) a single second of the scary magnificent banal spectacle in the first place.

1 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1985), 31. 1

These are the moments – silly, powerful, stupid, momentous, and insignificant – that, for better or worse, comprise our political rhetoric, and, in particular, collated into the presidential campaign of 2008 (and we are watching it again, reanimated and with a different cast of characters – like a TV spinoff – in 2012). And Campaign 2008, for better or worse, is a fair measure of what constitutes and symbolizes political life in our representative democracy – a democracy in which we have (as commentators from Chomsky to Agamben to Glenn Beck take pains to point out) a fairly circumscribed and attenuated role. As citizens, we are typically neither asked nor expected to weigh in on the intricacies of micro-finance or the IMF, nor to lend a hand in unraveling the mysteries of municipal water lines or credit-default swaps. Rather, our assigned role – blueprinted in the Federalist Papers and, once upon a time not so long ago, perhaps an inevitable consequence of our mass-mediated democracy – is to periodically weigh-in on our representatives’ rhetoric and decide if our elected officials are persuading us of the things we want to be persuaded of, and in the ways that we want to be persuaded of them.2 In other words,

if Aristotle saw rhetoric as the art of seeing the available means of persuasion in a given

situation, who better than us – so the logic of our representative system goes – to decide whether

our leaders are leading us in the way we want to be led?

Except, and here’s the problem: What if we don’t know what it is we want anymore?

What if something were to come along and suddenly, after decades of fairly predictable political

performances, change the game? And what if, like refs calling fouls when they no longer quite

know the rules – and shouting their calls in a foreign language so the players are equally confused

2 Madison, fearing the demos, argues, as we know, for leadership by those chosen few who can “refine and enlarge the public views” and “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” See, James Madison, “Federalist Papers No.10,” in The Federalist Papers (London: Penguin, 1987), 57. Jurgen Habermas regularly provides the critique of mass-mediated representational democracy. See, for instance, Jurgen Habermas, “Political Communication in the Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?,” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 411-426. 2

– we are sort of, and to risk a technical term from political science, making a giant goddamn mess

out of things.

This is the thesis that this book pursues. And let’s start by discussing the aforementioned

goddamn mess, since it is a sentiment that virtually no one reading – regardless of being on the

Tea Party Right, the Occupy Left, or the 99% relatively indifferent and in-between – will disagree

with. Because, really, what else do you call a political climate in which the United States is

engaged in multiple wars (the number varying depending on whether you count the covert

[Iran?], the nebulous [War on Terror?], the hypothetically over [Iraq?], or just the good, old-

fashioned never-ending, quagmire-flavored [Afghanistan?]), unemployment hovers around 8%,

22.8% of mortgages were underwater in the fourth quarter of 2011, and while the unemployment

rate for college graduates is down (from 9.1% in 2011 to 7.2% in 2012), when you add in the masses of underemployed graduates, the number shoots up to a shocking 53% (and good luck paying off that average $27,200 in student loan debt waiting tables).3

This book offers no solutions to any of those problems. What it does offer is this argument: American politics is a mess because, somewhere in the first decade of the 21st century,

American politics jumped the shark.

Admittedly, juxtaposed against all the misery we recounted above, “jump the shark” seems to lack a certain gravitas, let alone helpfulness. But our argument is, in some ways, both smaller and bigger, because it gets at the fundamentals of our political system. Because it doesn’t

3 For current unemployment rates, see “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed May 27, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/cps/. For the percent of mortgages underwater in the fourth quarter of 2011, see Kathleen Madigan, “Housing Still Drowning in Underwater Mortgages,” The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2012. For the unemployment rate for college graduates, see Alan Farnham, “Job Prospects for New Grads Best Since Recession,” ABCNews, May 15, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/jobs-outlook-college-graduates/story?id=16345862. For unemployment and underemployment rate, see Jordan Weissmann, “53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed – How?,” The Atlantic, April 23, 2012. For 2011 average student loan debt per student, see Lynn Asinof, “Attacking Student Loan Debt,” The Boston Globe, May 27, 2012. 3

matter how many good ideas, or bad ideas, get put forward until we deal with the seeming

insanity of our political theater, the daily diversions and distractions, the endless parade of bad behavior, and misstatement, and childish snark, and ideological hysteria, the never ending scandal after scandal after scandal that has come to define our politics. And the reason for all of it – ok, that’s not quite true; the reason for most of it – is simple: digital media has, on the one hand, transformed the theater of our politics and, on the other, left us with little guidance on how we should now, in this new post-mass media age, judge political performance.

This is, of course, the supreme irony of the digital media revolution. Given the technological advances of the last decade, we have gained unprecedented power – as citizens and rhetorical critics – to set and frame the rules of the game. Considered as a whole, the common thread that connects the disparate technologies of digital media – from Twitter to blogs to podcasts to one touch YouTube uploading on IPhones – is their ability to democratize rhetorical production, transforming audiences from static, couch-potato consumers of media to active producers of it. 4 The result, as seen in Campaign 2008, is arguably a Golden Age of American

Rhetorical Criticism, with every John and Jane Q. Public a nascent H.L Menken or Daily Show

contributor, armed with a cheap laptop that comes standard with more AV production equipment than the Beatles had to record Abbey Road, and with an internet connection that lets them disseminate information as far and as wide as any major media corporation. 5 There’s only one problem: At the moment when citizens hold unprecedented rhetorical power, the new digital media landscape has created unprecedented rhetorical uncertainty. While some of us are more

4 P. David Marshall, New Media Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5 There is a glaring digital divide issue here, which needs to be addressed directly. Insofar as this book’s analysis is dealing with the mythmaking about technology and Campaign 2008, there is an almost analytical – and editorial – necessity to “play along” with assumptions about global and universal media access. That said, the class and generational divides between the technological haves and have nots – both in terms of economics and technological know-how –need to be acknowledged. See Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, eds., Literate Lives in the Information Age (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 2004). 4

actively organizing (and using social-networking and other digital media tools to do it), most of us are just doing what we usually do: Judging political rhetoric. Except now we do it more and more often and to (potentially) bigger and bigger audiences. And here’s the rub: We’re not very good at it. And the proof is the proliferation of that little studied, but terrifyingly potent, thing we use to keep rhetorical political score: The gaffe.

Gaffes – Webster’s definition: a faux pas, slip-of-the-tongue, or minor transgression of

social mores (which is good enough for the moment; we’ll wonk it up soon enough) – are

essentially rhetorical mistakes. And, in a terrifyingly not-quite hyperbolic way, “gaffe” may turn

out to be one of the most powerful words in American politics, able to end careers, seat someone

in the White House, and decide who is taxed, jailed, married, granted health care, allowed their

first amendment rights, and/or warred upon. Basing so much of our politics on gaffes seems like a scene out of Dr. Strangelove, if Dr. Strangelove starred in Idiocracy. But, like all worthwhile fantasies and false consciousnesses, it is precisely the ridiculousness of gaffes that keeps us from confronting the truth and value behind them. Thumb through any history of Campaign 2008, and you are all but guaranteed to find gaffes as the central, if not only, plot points used to map the twists and turns of McCain versus Obama or Obama versus Clinton or Mitt Romney versus himself.6 And during the heat of Campaign 2008, any random glance at the news-stories, blogs, candidate ads, cable-pundit chatter, and A.M. talk-radio rants that constituted the daily play-by- play of the election revealed gaffes to be the métier of American presidential politics: the minefield of bittergates, lipsticked pigs, and bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Irans that our candidates must navigate, the gears upon which our news cycles turn.7 Any way you slice it, gaffes are the sin qua non of our campaign politics. If your still doubting the premise, just

6 Case in point, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). 7 For the most complete list of Campaign 2008 gaffes, see “This.Fucking.Election.com,” accessed May 27, 2012, http://thisfuckingelection.com/. 5

remember: the Vice Presidential debate of 2008 was effectively declared a tie because Joe Biden

and Sarah Palin were both so gaffe-prone as to be virtually gaffe-proof, and we have – you guessed it – no other ways to keep score.

So how do we fix this?

We start by recognizing that just because there is an epidemic of gaffes, that doesn’t mean that politicians are making more mistakes. What it does mean is that they – or we – are still playing by a set of rules that, developed in the mass media age of politics, don’t really work anymore. Rather than lament the infotainment spectacle of American politics (which, despite conference presentations and stern op-eds, likely won’t go away), we can then start to think about how to better align our rhetorical expectations with the reality of our new technological era and to confront how our current system grants us power – sometimes more than we think, sometimes less than we would hope – via our rhetorical judgments. This will not be terribly easy. As digital media scholars such as Lev Manovich and Mark Nelson tell us, the digital media revolution is no longer confinable to – or worth studying as just – the screens and phones and data and .gif we associate with it. Because really, and to touch on some of the subjects this book with consider, it has changed everything: The value of representative versus deliberative government and our role within it; whether (or when) elected officials are people; whether (or when) we are still people (or whether we have become posthuman, whatever that is); the public/private/professional divide; what knowledge is; what postmodernism is (whatever it was) and how its aesthetics (once cool and edgy) are trapping us in outdated ways of thinking about rhetoric and politics (we’re going to deal with that one a lot); when (and whether) political factions are allowed; how (and why) ideology matters; and how we still teach our students (in rhetoric and composition classrooms) when all of this is going on.8

8 Mark B.N. Nelson, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2004. 6

Considering any of that stuff – let alone all of it at once – would make anyone freak out.

And yet we desperately need to change the rhetorical rules of the game and recalibrate our

judgments of ethos, and to do so we first need to understand the rules we’ve inherited, and why

they may no longer fit. It’s precisely to keep from freaking out that we’ll start small, with the

gaffe. And then get just a little bigger, with the central rhetorical concept that creates and referees the rules of the game: ethos. But throughout, we will keep a fundamental rhetorical truth in mind: Regardless of how ridiculous the political landscape may appear on face – and, as a minefield of bittergates, and lipsticked pigs, and bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Irans, it does indeed appear ridiculous – our rhetorical judgments matter, even when the rhetoric we are judging might not. And it is through our rhetorical judgments – at least until Occupy or the

Birthers grow a pair and take up arms (what are you waiting for, anyway?) – that politics, big and small, occurs.

I. Hail to the Gaffe

“The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian9

Looking back, it isn’t hard to remember the voila! moments that helped end the careers of the last forty years of presidential candidates: John Kerry voting for the Iraq War before voting against it, Nixon’s sweaty jowls juxtaposed against JFK’s camera-ready telegenetics, Dole falling limb-over-geriatric-limb off a Kansas stage. These are the “It” moments of modern electoral politics: the greatest hits highlight reel of rhetorical snafus we trot out every election season to remind us of when We the People discovered the truth about once-promising politicians, and then

9 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1992), 85. 7

– and rightly – ran the chumps off. It doesn’t matter that these rhetorical mistakes are often not

the real reason we bailed on these candidates, any more than it matters that a number of these

slips – the so-called “Dean Scream,” or Ed Muskie’s career-ending crying jag back in ’72 – didn’t

even really happen.10 What matters is that when the ballots are cast and the history books are

written, these mistakes – these gaffes – become our collective political folklore, campfire stories-

cum-civics lessons we tell each other about would-be leaders who were out of touch (Bush I looking at his watch during a town hall debate), congenital liars (Al Gore inventing the Internet), or just hopelessly, utterly, Darwin-damningly useless (Michael Dukakis poking his scrawny, lefty, Massachusetts-y neck out of a Sherman tank).11

Given the critical role that gaffes play in our politics, it is somewhat surprising how understudied they are, but political scientist Lance Bennet helps us begin to understand the connections between gaffes and rhetoric in our electoral politics. For Bennet, gaffes are neither meaningless trifles nor distractions from “real,” capital R, politics, but, rather, they are the substance of our politics: the keyholes that allow us – John and Jane Q. Citizen – to peer in, and thus participate in, the world of our representative politics.12 Jimmy Carter dribbling his heartlust onto the pages of Playboy and Dan Quayle wrestling, unsuccessfully, with the phonics of

“potato” may be inconsequent events – they may even be goddamn silly – but, from a practical perspective, they are the water cooler moments of our democracy: our chance to gather together to deliberate, debate, haggle, shout, and reaffirm the standards that we want our representatives

10 On Muskie, see David Broder, “The Story that Still Nags Me: Edward S. Muskie,” Washington Monthly, February 1987. 11 For a broad view of news coverage of presidential elections in the 20th century, see Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12 W. Lance Bennett, “Assessing Presidential Character: Degradation Rituals in Political Campaigns,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 67 (August 1981): 310-321. 8

(and citizens) to uphold. Which, of course, begs the question: what are the standards and values that gaffes tell us we want our representatives to uphold?

It is at this critical question that Bennet’s methodology – rooted in the empirical conventions of political science – hits a dead end. (Bennet just calls gaffes our “collective frat hazing,” calls that a good thing, and calls it good enough.)13 Certainly, behind our judgment of

every insignificant but election changing (and, dare we say it, world changing?) gaffe lies a

sophisticated set of political and rhetorical assumptions: Should Barack Obama be allowed to tell

voters in California that voters in Pennsylvania cling bitterly to guns and religion? Does it

disqualify Mitt Romney that he changed his position on abortion in the mid-90s? Does it matter

if Hilary Clinton was only pretending to cry in a New Hampshire diner, or if Sarah Palin, contrary

to her folksy, down-home, small-town image, gets caught in a $100,000 shopping spree? And certainly these judgments – which we proffer and mull over individually and collectively in our role as citizen-critics – lead to a host of ethical rhetorical questions: Should you pander? Can you flip-flop? When is it ok to hide your personal life, your affairs and real-estate deals and pro- choice legal clients and love-children and proclivities for wide-stance bathroom stall

shenanigans?

These are huge questions. Especially since our rhetorical judgments do not happen in isolation, nor are their impacts isolated. One by one, each of these gaffes opens up a multitude of rhetorical and political considerations, and then – via our judgment or acquiescence to others’ judgments – contributes, in an often imperceptible but sublime way, to the rhetorical fabric, the rules of the game, that create the possible in our politics. This is precisely what makes studying gaffes – whether by developing a heuristic from which we can better deliberate upon them, or by exploring the rhetorical significance of a political moment so beholden to the gaffe – difficult. As

13 Ibid. 9

Janet Atwill tells us, rhetorical criticism is an almost ethnographic process, insofar as it maps out

a community’s understanding of its “pragmatic possibilities”: the arguments and modes of belief

that are available to (and may even come to define) a particular group of people.14 In other words, our individual judgments of political rhetoric are not only declarations and affirmations of our rhetorical values, they – in very tangible ways – set the standards of our rhetorical climate, the rhetorical rules of the game. To apprehend all of these choices and understand how technological innovations necessarily modify them, we need to cast a bigger net. Classic rhetorical theory gives us one: Ethos.

A. This Is The Definition of Ethos, Trust Me

Our explanation of ethos, like most academic arguments about rhetoric, is going to begin with a citation of ancient texts. But unlike most academic arguments, this citation is at least going to explain why we have citations to ancient texts in the first place, and the reason is ethos.

In its purest definition, ethos is credibility. For Aristotle, for whom ethos is one of the three critical components of a persuasive argument, it is “persuasion through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence.” 15 For Quintilian,

ethos is the essence of the effective rhetor, and the oft-celebrated, and oft-maligned, humanist ideal of political leadership: the “good man speaking well.” Less wonkily, for author David

Foster Wallace, ethos, or the “Ethical Appeal” amounts to: “a complex and sophisticated ‘Trust

Me.’ It is the boldest, most ambitious, and also most democratic of rhetorical Appeals because it

14 Janet Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 130. 15 The other two means of persuasion, or pisteis, are logos (appeal to logic) and pathos (appeal to emotion). On ethos, see Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 37-38. 10

requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his [sic] intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensibility to the audience’s own hopes and fears.”16

In any rhetorical exchange, then, ethos is paramount.17 (Why, after all, do you believe anything we are saying about ethos?) And for citizens in a representative democracy, it is nearly everything: Not only our highest measure of character and rhetorical strength, but also our best buttress against rhetorical power, our fear that the rhetor with enough credibility—enough ethos – can do whatever they wish. This potential for the rhetor with carte blanche to upset the political order by inflaming the masses is precisely the reason why political theorists, starting with Plato and continuing on down through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, have tried to debase the legitimacy of rhetoric in order to defang rhetorical power.18 But, ironically, this fear of rhetoric is what, in many ways, screws up our thinking about representative politics. 19

16 David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 77. 17 Ethos is so paramount, in fact, that it puts a necessarily ironic spin on academic debates about the meaning of ethos, since the more scholarly debates over distinctions about ethos matter, the less, via the concept of ethos, they could. Case in point are the unstated disagreements within James S. Baumlin’s excellent volume Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Cultural Theory, wherein scholars cite the same ancient sources – Isocrates and Aristotle – to support what are ostensibly opposing versions of ethos: one attributing it to the speaker’s character prior to rhetorical exchange, the other seeing it as character created via rhetorical exchange. James S. Baumlin, ed., Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Cultural Theory (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994). 18 See Bryan Garsten’s account of the centuries long banishment of rhetoric: Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 19 In Talking Democracy, Benedetto Fontana, Cary Nederman, and Gary Remer provide an excellent primer on the distinctions in 20th century democratic thought and the role of rhetoric (if any) within them. In the simplest terms, fault lines break down as follows: On the one side, we have liberal theories of democracy which argue that politics is not about coming together in order to arrive at, implement, or understand the “common good” (since such a thing does not exist) but, rather, politics is the competitive struggle among private interests for personal and economic advantage. In contrast to this, we have the critiques of liberal democracy, political theories that presume and pursue politics as a search for a common and collective good. These, for our purposes, can be divided into two camps: civic republicanism and deliberative democracy. And these two camps can be further sub-divided on their stances towards rhetoric: deliberative democrats believe that legitimate political decisions and power can only arise from “rational” and “reasoned” discussions, and see rhetoric – with its wide-ranging modes of persuasion -- as antithetical to this aim. Civic republicanism sees a role for rhetoric, provided liberty and equality are maintained (in the form of nondenomination; of one faction not wielding indomitable control over another) and as long as public, political life is, in some measure, made distinct, or demarcated, from the private. For a general 11

Since the mass-mediaization of politics in the early 20th century (a change in American presidential politics that can be traced, anecdotally, to the election of 1920, the first to involve

Madison Avenue public relations firms20), political theorists (most notably Jurgen Habermas) have tended to advance and rehearse classical critiques of ethos and rhetorical power: Rhetoric is monological; it furthers asymmetrical relations between the speaker and audience; and it bedazzles and manipulates the masses.21 Recent scholars of political theory, however, have begun to acknowledge the value of classic rhetorical theory. Still in their infancy, however, even these positive accounts of rhetoric don’t fully account for the nature of rhetorical power. (Case in point, rhetoric convert Simone Chambers’ positing of ethos as the “crafted image” versus the

“real thing.”22) Nor do they fully account for the power of rhetorical judgment. Ethos is a prime example of this critical myopia. Ethos is not monological, and it helps demonstrate that rhetoric is not one-way communication from leader to led (a conceptualization that empirical models of communication – even in this remediated era of viral marketing and user-generated content – still often assume); instead, it is a mutually-constitutive circuit between speakers and audiences. For discussion of these competing theories, see Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). For the liberal critique of democracy, see Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942). For the, canonical, pros and cons of deliberative democracy, see, in addition to Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy” in Democracy and Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 20 Herbert Lasker, the mastermind of Warren Harding’s candidacy, was the pioneer in merging modern advertising with presidential campaigning, which, at the turn of the century, was still a relatively primitive and localized event (case in point being McKinley’s 1896 “front porch campaign” in Marion, OH). See John A. Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). 21 The classic texts here would be Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press, 1991); John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954); and Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). For a recent articulation, see Jurgen Habermas “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research,” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 411-416. 22 Simone Chambers, “Rhetoric and Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?,” Political Theory 37, no. 3 (June 2009): 323-350. 12

both Aristotle and the sophists, ethos cannot be limited to only the character of the speaker but

must also – and necessarily – refer to the character of the community the speaker is speaking to, a community that educates the speaker (ethos as “the process of character formation through learning to speak to the interests of the community”). Through this circuit, the community comes to understand its own character – and may even hail itself and come into being as a community – precisely through the process of articulating, evaluating, and participating in the creation of the speaker’s ethos.

Thus, not only is the orator’s rhetorical power restrained by, as Cicero puts it, the “sense of the community” and its “established customs and conventions,” but speakers and audiences are always knee-deep in their own ethos.23 Audiences are not only not inoculated from considerations of ethos, they actively embody them in their own everyday rhetorical practices and habits. Which is why gaffes, for both academics and the public, provide a superb context to correct and nuance our thinking about ethos. And what gaffes make unmistakable, because they are simultaneously so insipid and important, is that rhetorical judgment is hard. And technological change – the shift from the mass media age to the new media era, and the

Herculean task of moving from the new media era to a digital media age – only makes judgment harder.

B. Moving From a New Media Era to a Digital Media Age (and Why we Are All Knee Deep in Each Others’ Ethos) As Atwill argues (because, for a dissertation, we need her ethos) echoing a host of ancient faces from Isocrates to Cicero (even better), rhetoric is best thought of as a “technology

23 Cicero, de Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), qtd. in Gary Remer, “Cicero and the Ethics of Deliberative Rhetoric,” in Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy, eds., Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 13

for reinterpreting received beliefs to make sense of changing situations.”24 And as Campaign

2008 makes plain, the changing situation of the early 21st century, the ground constantly shifting beneath the candidate and citizen’s feet, is communications technology. Facebook, the ubiquity of remixes and mash-ups, a blogosphere that gives cable and print news a run for its money: these technologies – specifically, the triumvirate of social networking, digital media production, and the self-publishing revolution of web 2.0 – were just a blip on the radar in 2004. Four short years later, they constituted the seismic shift of “new media” and, in what may be the defining story of

Campaign 2008, represent the new rhetorical and political landscape that citizens, candidates, and news-organizations scrambled (and are still scrambling) to grapple with. 25 Each new technology, even each individual brand and iteration of a technology, opened up new questions of ethos.

How, after all, do we evaluate candidate (or co-worker) credibility when anyone’s any utterance can now be re-contextualized, remixed, and re-broadcast with the touch of an iPhone? How do we evaluate a politician’s arguments – geared toward specific audiences and specific exegetic moments – when the archive of the Internet freezes all prior rhetorical performances in an eternal present? And what are the rules of engagement on MySpace and Facebook anyway?

A lot of scholarship and public intellectual effort has been spent tracking down the ways these specific technologies have, in some way, changed our relationship to rhetoric, or to each other (The Facebook Effect), or to knowledge (The Googlization of Everything), or have, in broader terms, tried to argue that “digital media” – whatever it is, and whatever it encompasses – is, in broad strokes, good or bad for American democracy (The Net Delusion), or good or bad for

24 Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed, 144. 25 As a shorthand signifier for the rhetorical technologies we are dealing with, “new media” is a useful, if self- anachronizing, term. We will deal more with the specifics of new media technology, its definitions, and its theories of production, as we work more closely, in the chapters that follow, with particular remediated rhetorical acts. Within the context of American politics, however, for one of the many celebratory, if hyperbolic, tales of new media technology, empowered citizens, and 2008, see Eric Boehlert, Bloggers on the Bus (New York: Free Press, 2009). For the same story, but set in 2004, see Dan Gilmore, We the Media (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2004) or Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (New York: Regan Books, 2004). 14

people (You Are Not A Gadget).26 Some of these efforts are good, some are bad (some, like

Lanier’s, are exactly right). But our approach is different. Rather than isolate a particular piece

of technology or phylum of similar technologies – and thus play Silicon Valley man-to-man – ethos provides us a zone defense: Thinking about what principles of ethos, what rules of rhetoric, feel out of step – or “locked in,” to use Lanier’s phrase – in the new media era, given the technologies that have already come, already gone, or are not yet here.

“Locked in” seems like a nebulous phrase, but it is actually one of easiest ways to measure whether a rule of ethos is keeping up. And, again, our easiest indication is the gaffe.

Political scientists and communications scholars – John Tullis in particular – have long warned us

about the “rhetorical presidency,” the transformation of the White House into a communications

headquarters and the blurring of distinct election cycles into one continuous, forever campaign.

(E.g., Did Campaign 2008 start when Obama declared his candidacy in 2007, Hilary Clinton took

her senate seat in 2006, or Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992?)27 But thanks to the gaffe and our outmoded standards of ethos in the new media era, there is a decidedly new and troubling sense of epic sameness, of stagnation, of impossibility, of the same gaffes, the same alleged violations of ethos, the same rhetorical mistakes and scandals happening over and over, again and again on endless loop, never allowing the campaign to end.

So what are these rhetorical mistakes and how do we begin to recalibrate our thinking about ethos to deal with them? This is the intervention this project makes. Considering the most common gaffes as a whole, we begin by separating out three types of ethos: ethos as character, ethos as agency, and ethos as community, which correspond, respectively, to the classic notion of

26 See David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkley, University of California Press, 2011), Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Philadelphia: Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group, 2011), and Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). 27 See Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 15

ethos as “trust me,” to an accounting for the power to pull off a rhetorical act, and to ethos’

epideictic function. 28 All three variables are always in play, but isolating them helps us to (1)

organize and subdivide this project (which, submitted for the purposes of completing the Ph.D.

requirements at Ohio State, will focus on ethos as character) and, more importantly, (2)

strategically locate more particular gaffe-types within the phylum of ethos.

Case in point is ethos as character. A general question of what we should do with credibility and conceptions of the self in the thoroughly surveilled, socially-networked, and digitally archived new media era, the crisis of ethos as character has manifested itself in a society- wide hysteria about control over our public image (e.g., seen in our increasing infatuation with both political and professional gaffes: the daily parade of candidate misstatements, bikinied mayors, and students and co-workers caught mid-kegstand on Facebook), as well as the well- documented, ever-steady erosion of the public-private divide. Looking more closely, however, we can identity two critically distinct gaffes that point to unsustainable criteria for character given the affordances of digital media: Public-private fidelity (gaffes that trigger our desire for authenticity, for a closer connection between “real” people and their personas, e.g., sex scandals) and public coherence (gaffes which vex us because of competing presentations of self, e.g., the rhetorical sin of pandering.)

So how do we evolve out of the new media era of American politics and into the digital

media age? How do we get beyond the new media era and its endless Campaign 2008 – our

shorthand terminology used to signal the pop-culture belief that Campaign 2008 marked the tipping point between the mass media age and the new media era of American politics, and our

28 Chaim Perelmen and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca: “The speaker engaged in epideictic discourse is very close to being an educator. Since what he is going to say does not arouse controversy, since no immediate practical interest is ever involved, and there is no question of attacking or defending, but simply of promoting values that are shared in the community.” Chaim Perelmen and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IA: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), 52. 16

argument that, until we change the rules of the game, America politics is in re-runs in perpetuity – and embrace a digital age where we understand, critically, the shifts in our thinking about ethos that will be required?

We begin with this: If our job as rhetorical critics and rhetorically productive citizens is to assess available and desirable means of persuasion, we need a better sense of how the affordances and limitations of twenty-first century communications technology refract and reflect our political, aesthetic, and rhetorical norms. To gain a handle on this process, it may be beneficial to look more closely at a slippery example from an – arguably – simpler rhetorical time, a time when new media – and its modus operandi: remediation – was novel enough that its morphing of rhetorical pathways seemed, albeit quixotically, traceable. This takes us back to the event that, in many ways, announced the technological, rhetorical, and political world of

Campaign 2008 and may be the Archduke Ferdinand moment of remediated American politics: the granddaddy snafu of presidential campaign gaffes, Gov. Howard Dean’s “Dean Scream.

Exhibit A: Gov. Howard Dean …If a Scream Fell in the Forest

“Nobody wants to know. Nobody cares. No sordid details. No political assassination. Accident. This guy’s dead for Christ’s sake. None of this shit’s gonna do him any good now.” – Brian DePalma, Blow Out29

Iowa is a weird place to start the story of the endless Campaign 2008, a story that will probably always be remembered as the historic (and, for some, heroic) tale of Sen. Barack

Obama’s rapid ascension from relatively unknown author and academic to Illinois Senator to

President of the United States of America. Iowa’s an even weirder place to start the story of how

2008 is – or might be; or could be, if we want it badly enough – the beginning of the end of the

29 Brian DePalma, Blow Out (1981; MGM Video and DVD, 2001), DVD. 17

American era known to professors and literary critics as the “postmodern.” And what’s perhaps

weirdest is that these two stories might be connected, and that the story of Barack Obama’s rise,

and postmodernism’s possible fall, actually begins back in 2004, back in Iowa, and begins

because Howard Dean was standing outside of a barn in Des Moines, and he just didn’t know

what the fuck he was supposed to do.

It was math that had Governor’s back against the wall. Six-odd hours earlier, he had lost

the Iowa Caucus: that first and – through an entrenched (read: bizarre, perhaps undemocratic,

perhaps insane) quirk of the American primary system – most important contest in American

politics. But he didn’t just lose: he lost badly. 2,082 Iowans (which, for the record, translates to:

69.4% of Democratic Caucus goers, way less than a tenth of a percent of the total population of

Iowa, and a completely statistically insignificant percentage of the total population of the United

States) had decided they’d rather have John Kerry or John Edwards as their President. This

wasn’t supposed to happen. Dean was the candidate of the grass-roots left, the de facto candidate of suburban liberals furious about the war in Iraq, a pioneer in – the goddam Magellan of – the then-nascent enterprise of Internet fundraising.30 He was darling of the Washington Press Corp,

the dot.com savior of the Democratic Party, and all but coronated as the new Democratic nominee

for president by a genuflecting congregation of Congressman and ex-Vice Presidents. He was

supposed to win the Iowa Caucus. But he didn’t. And now what he was, was screwed.

Third place was the problem. A second place loss could be spun. Second place was, in

fact, extremely spinnable: We never expected to do so well here in Iowa, the Governor heard himself saying, my opponent ran a fantastic campaign, and I look forward to a robust discussion and debate in the days ahead. He could do that. Hell, any goober running for dog catcher could

do that. But third place? Third place? What was he supposed to do with that? He couldn’t hear

30 Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, xii. 18

third place. Third place sounded a lot like fucked. And not just third place. Third place behind

John Edwards and John Kerry. Third place in the state where you just dumped forty million

dollars and sent out 3,500 volunteers. And now, one loss, one goddamn minor setback – ok, fine,

a 20 point setback – and it’s done. Everything’s over. Money, gone. Momentum, gone. Press,

gone. Gone before this thing even started. And now what? Win in New Hampshire? We’re

supposed to win New Hampshire. We’re from Vermont. We win, who gives a shit? But lose?

Oh, jesus. Then that’s it. For forever, that’s it. Game. Over. And for what? 540 votes in Iowa?

For John Kerry? The same John Kerry who no one even fucking likes so can get his ass handed to

him by George Bush? And now these kids. All these goddamn kids standing out in the snow all

night waiting to hear something. What, exactly? “Thanks for quitting school and coming out

here in the middle of goddamn nowhere and freezing your ass off for giant goddamn pile of

nothing.” For the love of Christ, John Kerry wouldn’t even vote for John Kerry! A joke. It’s a

joke. What the hell is he going to tell these kids? What the fuck is he supposed to do?

And with that, Howard Dean opened the door and walked out onto the stage. 3,500 of

his supporters were there on that cold morning in Iowa. 3,500 supporters who, as we imagine the

governor imagined, were young and passionate and, as only the young and passionate and yet

undefeated can do, had poured their hearts and lungs and legs and everything out to win. But

everything they were and had was not enough. Mathematics and the mysteries of Midwestern

party politics had prevailed. And it stung. And they were hurting. And it was cold. And they

were looking to him to tell them what to do. And with that, the Governor grabbed the mic…and

what happens next is up to you.

19

II. Representing the Political Power of Rhetorical Judgment

“I was onstage when Howard Dean did his famous yell. It was completely blown out of proportion. The press couldn’t even get the emotion right. They were saying he was angry. No, he was effervescent.” – Joan Jett31

Where does the “Dean Scream” exist? Does it exist? And for who?

These are the questions which Gov. Dean’s Iowa Caucus speech – almost inarguably the

most famous of all political gaffes and, as we will contend, the symbolic beginning of the new

media era – forces us to confront. And it starts with a simple disconnect which, if we are to have

a prayer in re-calibrating the rules of rhetoric, we must deal with: If you were like us, sitting on

the living room floor in Columbus, OH, watching, with anchor Peter Jennings, the live ABC News

broadcast from Iowa, you, like Jennings, listened to Dean’s speech, found nothing was out of the ordinary, said nothing, and went to bed. And yet, by the next day, Dean’s speech had taken on a life of its own. If you were walking to school, and listening to Howard Stern, you heard

Dean’s speech spliced and remixed on top of AC/DC riffs, and Nazi rallies, and farts. If you watched The Today Show, you saw that Dean’s speech was the subject du jour, cited as evidence of the Governor’s whispered about, but never journalistically confirmable, instability. You saw experts brought on to weigh in on Dr. Dean’s “meltdown,” and every time “meltdown” was mentioned, you were shown video of the Governor delivering oafish uppercuts and looking about exactly like what you’d think a meltdown would look like. By dinner time Tuesday night, you’d already heard – and been emailed – one of dozens of remixes and mash-ups and goofs on Dean’s speech, putting the candidate into conversation with Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, and the rudimentary techno beats that come pre-packaged with discount DJ software. By that night, you will see David Letterman treat his audience to the same thirteen seconds of Dean’s speech that we’ve been hearing all day, as will The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, and, more or less, everyone else with a talk show. By Wednesday morning, The Columbus Dispatch, the biggest newspaper in Columbus, OH (population of almost 800,000, center of the American Electoral Universe, ultimate decider of the 2004 presidential race), will

31 A.J. Jacobs, “Joan Jett: What I’ve Learned,” Esquire, November 9, 2009, 138. 20

have front-page stories in which Ohioans respond to stories they’ve read about Dean’s aberrant performance, commentaries on commentary that are not only deemed news-worthy but will, of course, become the basis for the commentaries on the front page of the Thursday edition of The Columbus Dispatch (What do you, Ohio citizen, think about what other Ohioans think about what pundits are saying about what people think about what Howard Dean said?).32 By Thursday night, Dean will have made on-air apologies for his “anger” on Letterman, and USA Today will show him contrite on its cover, right next to a smaller story, something about increased troop deaths in Baghdad. Days later, Howard Stern will offer his apology, saying that Howard Dean had gotten “a raw deal” by the media.33 Then video and audio will begin circulating on the net showing that Dean’s voice was actually drowned out by the gathered crowd. By January 28, about a week after the January 19 caucus, ABC News correspondent Diane Sawyer will go on World News Tonight to show how the type of microphone Dean used artificially isolated his voice from his congregation’s roar.34

How do we explain this mutation: From a speech in the middle of the night in remote

Iowa to our television screen to what Gov. Dean’s speech to his supporters will forever be – The

Dean Scream, the granddaddy of all campaign-slaying, career ending, political snafus,

irretrievably part of popular culture for years to come, born (spinning and spun) out of a

multitude of invisibly humble origins (particles of data, gossip, meme, chatter, soundbyte, and

user-comment), constellated into an impossible togetherness within a communicative locust storm of websites, blogs, coast-to-coast call-in shows, and water cooler comedians?

Let’s start with what doesn’t help: Paragraphs like that. (And not only because they are incredibly self-indulgent.) Once upon a time, we could at least pretend to catch a glimpse of the sublime complexity of the Dean Scream’s pathway, or quixotically fictionalize such an account.

Today, in the new media era, where any and all rhetorical acts are potentially put through these paces, these trajectories are so ephemeral as to be beyond even aesthetic gestures. And so we

32 Joe Hallet, “Eye Opener in Iowa,” The Columbus Dispatch, January 20, 2004. 33 Stern’s quote: “Unfortunately he [Dean] was painted by the media to have had a serious meltdown.” Howard Stern, The Howard Stern Show, January 26, 2004. 34 “World News Tonight Preview,” ABCNews, January 28, 2004, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129241&page=1 21

need another strategy that starts with this. The Dean Scream didn’t happen. We happened to it.

Either by conscious judgment or sluggish acquiescence, we brought it to life. What is needed

now are ways to grapple with these gaffes even after they’ve blown up. This requires re-thinking

what, as the Dean Scream proves, digital media has extinguished: The rhetorical situation. And

this requires that we consider the digital media affordance most hard-wired into digital media:

Remediation.

Rhetorical exchanges are immeasurably complex processes. Pinpointing particular

moments when communication – let alone assent, compliance, the fruition of belief (whether

regarding presidential candidates, partial-birth abortion, or the New England Patriots) – occurred is not merely mercurial, but willfully make-believe: the hindsight concretization of an impossible- to-untangle conglomeration of symbols, experiences, encounters, Thanksgiving dinner arguments, long forgotten classroom discussions, and/or adolescent infatuations with Nietzsche and The

Dead Kennedy’s. The very real effects, yet ephemeral (and, in a strict sense, unrepeatable) catalysts, of persuasion are what make rhetoric, in the parlance of Kenneth Burke, magic, and what makes its practice an art, not a science.35 So in order to trace out hypotheses of how persuasion happened, or could have happened, or didn’t happen, rhetorical theorists have always employed heuristics to lasso diffuse communicative variables into a comprehensible framework.

A classic so-called “rhetorical situation” is laid out simply as “Speaker – [Message] – Audience” with “Context” hovering around, well, somewhere.

There is an easy temptation to see the Dean Scream – which comes to us passed from satellite feed to radio broadcast to mash-up to remix to news-story to newspaper article to late night comedian (and then back again, ad infinitum) – as exploding the rhetorical situation out of coherence; its every remediation spinning and altering the Governor’s utterance and erasing any

35 See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 30. 22

presumption of stable speakers, messages, and audiences. The danger, however, is in forgetting

that rhetorical frameworks are always fictitious, never able to capture, in any objective sense, the

full panoply of complications and recursive relations in any communicative exchange. Rather,

rhetorical situations are always, to use another of Burke’s phrases, “molten,” able to be

approached, studied, and articulated from a multiplicity of perspectives. 36 And given this protean liquidity, the prima facie question for a rhetorical critic is: what values and processes do we presume – or want to presume – are operating within a given rhetorical exchange? In contemporary rhetorical scholarship, this question is typically distilled down even further: Where, and to who or what or what degree, do we want to ascribe (or imagine) agency, the rhetorical power to make things happen?

With regard to remediation, this question of agency is particularly tricky. As media theorist David Marshall explains, the defining principle of new media (and the variable that groups together the disparate technologies hiding under this umbrella term) is built-in interactivity: audiences are not presumed to be static consumers, but producers, a design principle at work in everything from MyBarackObama.com (“be part of history”) to 2008 marketing trinkets such as SpongeBobSquarePants.com (“design your own Sponge Bob adventure!”) to

NBC’s Heroes campaign (“design your own mutant!”).37 If audiences are now presumed to be users of media – and remixing and mashing-up and personalizing and recontextualizing are now encoded and expected elements of audience interpretation/participation – then any presumption of a unidirectional relationship between speakers and audiences, or even a separation between speakers and audiences, becomes, at best, suspect, and, at worst, nonsensical.

The question for rhetorical criticism then becomes: how do we deal, methodologically, with remediated rhetorical reality? And this is a question that currently divides, and subdivides,

36 See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 37 See Marshall, New Media Cultures, 10. 23

the academic disciplines of rhetoric. Given new media’s definitional blurring of speakers and

audiences in favor of encoded interactivity – creating “new social spaces which are nothing like

Ancient Greece” – Byron Hawk proposes an ethos of “complexity,” one that recognizes that the

default decontexualization of digital media destroys the rickety old heuristic of the “rhetorical

situation” and requires, in its stead, a series of “complex adaptive systems.”38 M.J. Braun turns our attention to the question of the new media’s emerging democratic subjectivities and explores how we should work toward – and resist – them accordingly.39 Within the Rhetoric Society of

America, the interpretive dilemma imposed by new media has re-opened longstanding fault lines

between the “post-structuralist” accounts of agency that, in many ways, helped to herald the age

of new media (e.g., post-humanism or the now old-school continental theories of Deleuze or

Derrida, all of which deny the know-ability of context or intention), and a burgeoning traditionalist school (the proponents of civic humanism who now want to return to the notion of stable authorship as a political and pedagogical statement).40 And within composition studies –

the heart of humanities scholarship on digital media – the embrace of “remix” (as an aesthetic,

pedagogical, political, legal, and hermeneutic mode of thinking and being) has almost reached the

level of official dogma, or, at least, the official mantra/title of its conferences.41

None of these approaches, however, provides much guidance on how to interpret and orient our judgments of particular remediated acts. This is where thinking through the motivations behind remediation, and the motivations driving an event like the Dean Scream,

38 Byron Hawk, “A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity,” Rhetoric Review, 29.2 (2010): 209-212. 39 M.J. Braun, “Democracy Hope,” in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Crestkill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008). 40 Two recent articles offer an entry point into the debate: Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, “’Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2005): 83- 106; and Cheryl Geisler, “Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2005): 107-113. 41 Case in point, the 2010 CCCC Annual Convention: "The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew.” 24

becomes helpful in situating a new heuristic model for rhetorical judgment. And what media

theorists Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s insights point out is that the interpretive challenge of

remediation – the challenge that any rhetorical model of remediation must account for – is ontological in scope.42 Remediation is not a matter of Dean’s scream getting filtered through various mediums; it’s a matter of the Dean Scream only existing by virtue of these remediations.

As a function of the drive for authenticity, of pushing “past the limits of representation…to achieve the real” (not “the real” in any metaphysical sense, but a closer – more authentic, more actual, more mimetic – representation of reality), remediation asks that we read the Dean Scream not as a cumulative act of empty parody, or obfuscation, but an attempt – by citizens, by Howard

Stern, by mainstream news outlets – to assert a more representative sense of what we should think/feel/believe actually happened, even if what actually happened is best represented by stripping away the actual context (and audio feed) of a Governor’s stump speech and tangling it up in a gaggle of fart jokes and AC/DC riffs. 43

For rhetorical critics, the question then becomes: which is Dean’s “real” rhetorical situation? The “original” rhetorical situation Dean was in – that barn in Iowa, which we can never have access to, but where the scream was merely a scream (and may not even have been that)? Or in the remixes that gave birth to the Scream, which are now irretrievably part of our

pop and political culture? The answer – the decision about which reality is real – necessarily

determines the question of which of our rhetorical norms Howard Dean violated, thereby

catalyzing the Dean Scream, thereby ending Gov. Dean’s candidacy, thereby destroying his

supporters’ presidential candidate. Was he ineloquent? Indecorous? Intemperate? (Some other

word from an eighteenth-century parlor novel?) Did he just seem unpresidential? Was the

42 Further quoting Bolter and Grusin: “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can by taken as reality.” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1999), 53. 43 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 58. 25

message too angry, too rowdy, too pitched to the roar and rising energy of the crowd? Or is it simply that he made his case to the supporters in the room, his “live” immediate surroundings, rather than all of us (whoever we are) behind the cameras, some indeterminate number of miles

(or years) away, watching – or listening or actively remixing – what was going on in that cold, crowded barn in Des Moines, Iowa? Which situation should we be judging? Which one(s) are

we judging?

Taken as a genesis moment of remediated politics, the Dean Scream helps us understand

these new rhetorical contexts and their consequences. For what must be understood is that the

Dean Scream, no matter how silly it might feel to treat it seriously, stands symbolically – and,

within the annals of American presidential politics, practically – as a manifestation of, and

testament to, rhetorical judgments we have already made (or, at least, judgments that we have already collectively, albeit perhaps quietly and anonymously, assented to). A series of judgments which, even in Campaign 2008 and likely far beyond it, turn Dean’s Scream into a jack o’ lantern: a signal sent out every election cycle to remind us, and our elected officials, of our remediated rhetorical norms, even if it never shines a direct light upon the political values these norms of remediation commit us to, namely:

• Ethos as character: The valuing of the “real” person behind the persona, the continued

search – via gaffes, misstatements, inconsistencies (in Dean’s case, allegedly telling

expressions of anger) – for clues that get past rhetorical performance.

• Ethos as community: The valuing of the unknown mass audience over the local (with all

the attendant consequences for diversity, pluralism, and federalism) and/or the valuing of

the universally-remediatable message over the immediate and particular one

26

• Ethos as agency: The value of the gaffe itself as a means to assign or remove rhetorical

power, and the power of gaffes to control elections through the “narrative”

of the campaign.

There is no coincidence in the connection between the Dean Scream’s remediated norms

and these political values. Nor can these sets of values be divorced from a holistic understanding of Howard Dean’s rhetorical situation. For it was not just technology that allowed for the remediations that transformed the Dean Scream from stump speech to pop culture phenomenon: its metamorphosis traveled along established aesthetic circuits of communication as well.

Specifically, it rode along the aesthetic principles of news as parody, acontextual surveillance of candidates, mash-ups, and general unease with emotional display and affect – all part and parcel of the stylistic phylum of the postmodern. The same phylum of tropes that came to dominate political rhetoric in the new media era of Campaign 2008, the same tropes that came into existence (nearly forty years ago) as a critique of the mass media era of American politics, and the same tropes that – if we choose to read them this way – may have to finally extinguish

themselves if we are to make the journey to the digital media age.

A. Pomo, R.I.P.?

So what is – or what was – postmodernism, why should we care, and what does it

possibly have to do with new media or contemporary American politics? 44 Before we begin, we need to acknowledge that there is something superfluous – if not downright silly – about even talking about postmodernism in the context of 2008. On the one hand, postmodernism is, to an

extent, already everything. On the other, postmodernism, as even its chief champions tell us, is

44 As tropes of the postmodern, these are fairly uncontroversial. See, for instance, Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989) or Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). 27

already long over, even if no one was really quite sure what it was in the first place. And no one

bothered to tell mainstream American politics.45

Artistic movements and cultural moments – zeitgeists, spirits of the times – are ghost

stories: you see them, and believe in them, if and when you need to. And as an aesthetic style,

postmodernism was always a fairly easy specter to spot. So just as Cahiers du cinema conjured

French New Wave, and Lester Bangs lent tangibility to the intangible ethic of punk rock, so a

group of critics – John Barth, Linda Hutcheon, Larry McCaffery, and Brian McHale among them

– were able to point out the shapes and shadows of the postmodern style (e.g., parody, pastiche,

and the collapsing of high and low culture; the celebration of inauthenticity; of affective

“depthlessness”) and were able to make its – now four decades worth of – artists easy enough to

capture and canonize: in literature, Barthelme and DeLillo and Danielewski; in art, Warhol and

Duane Hansen and Corey Archangel; in music, Zappa and Zorn and Girl Talk, and so on and so

on.

So as a style, as a museum piece or swatch of cultural wallpaper, postmodernism as a

phenomenon is fairly straightforward. But here’s the rub: postmodernism was always supposed

to be something much bigger – and much more mundane – than an artistic style. It was, to quote

Fredric Jameson, an “inescapable condition of being” in the late 20th century: an attitude to deal

with our globalized, post-industrial consumer culture; a philosophy to account for the data- tsunami of the information age (Jean-Francois Lyotard); an articulation of reality within the simulacra of a media society (Jean Baudrillard); and an armor against all the ways that technology actively reconfigures not only time and space, but the very flesh of our bodies as well

45 See Brian McHale, “1966 Nervous Breakdown, Or When Did Postmodernism Begin?” Modern Language Quarterly 69.3 (2008): 391-413 or, for the sort of nonchalant but condescending end to the story of postmodernism we are trying to argue against, see Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 28

(Katherine Hayles, David Cronenberg). 46 These are, by design, overwhelming and terrifying prognostications (albeit in an 80s sci-fi dystopia sort of way). But then a funny thing happened: the world stepped into the world that postmodernism predicted.

Success is the bitter reward for any successful avant-garde, as what was once sharp and arresting sinks comfortably into a sorry-assed status quo.47 And in the case of pomo, what was once a tough and menacing account of advertising’s invidious televisual absurdism, or the solipsism of belief at the end of history, becomes, in 2008, the scary-clown surrealism of Burger

King commercials or the ingrained relativism of a Kansas school board meeting. In other words, postmodernism got its wish: it became the banality of official, everyday culture. The question is: what do we do with it now? What is the role of Cindy Sheehan and Judith Butler when Lady

Gaga and Hannah Montana spew performance theory all over Entertainment Weekly and

Nickelodeon? What use is Baudrillard ten years after The Matrix becomes part of the average suburban teen’s philosophical equipment for living? And how do critiques of surveillance culture

(whether Deleuze’s or Foucault’s) work when John and Jane Q. Citizen carry a 007-caliber spy- kit in their cellphone, and the founder of Facebook makes sure that his copy of Archeology of

Knowledge is on proud desktop display during his 60 Minutes interview?

Glib anecdotes, to be sure. And none of them persuasive enough to make the case for either the end, or continuing vitality, of the postmodern project. But our true interest is a bit more directed. Though one of the “canons” of rhetoric, style – or, more broadly, aesthetics – is something of a stepchild in rhetorical study: an underexplored aspect of both American political

46 See, since they will all come up in this investigation, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 47 See, for example, Roman Jakobson, "On Realism in Art," Language in Literature. eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987), 19-27. For a classic account of the tectonic shifts of aesthetic movements, see Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 29

communication and the contemporary production of new media. 48 And yet, as Campaign 2008 again makes clear, aesthetics are often an essential part of our accepted “patterns of reasoning.”

And so our rather specific question about the intersection between postmodernism, digital media, and our judgments of ethos in the context of American politics (and the eternal Campaign 2008) is: How does the continued reliance on particular postmodern tropes – metafiction, remix, and narrativity – lock us into conceptions of ethos (as character, as community, as agency) that are no longer viable in the new media era, but are blocking our ability to see a path forward to the digital media age. For rhetorical critics, the question becomes: How do we evaluate the aesthetics of postmodernism – and the politics it commits us to – as we re-cast and re-orient our judgments of remediated rhetorical acts?

This rhetorical approach to remediation’s aesthetics inevitably leads us to a story behind

the stories of Campaign 2008: How did postmodern aesthetic tropes that were developed to

anticipate and critique 21st century remediation technologies come to be adopted by candidates, and citizens, and news-organizations at the precise historical moment when new media came to dominate American politics? (Or, if you prefer: how did these aesthetics, to put it colloquially, jump the shark: supernova-ing out of their original political agenda and coming to enable the very politics they were designed against?) The point, like all the points of this dissertation, is not to complete the story of Campaign 2008. Rather, it is to see how the story of the possible end of postmodern aesthetics – our third story, along with the story of the rise of new media, and the story of Campaign 2008 itself – can help us rethink and revise our rhetorical understanding of

48 The methodological disadvantage (or advantage) of style has historically been that it pushes rhetorical scholarship into the realm of aesthetic criticism (the domain of the humanities), where it is more difficult to feign objectivity and scientific detachment. Recent scholarship has, however, begun reclaiming stylistic inquiry, most notably Robert Hariman’s Political Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Paul Butler’s Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2008). 30

remediation, and to create, from these intersections of aesthetics, technology, and politics, a new model to grapple with our new rhetorical terrains.

B. Re-Capturing the Rhetorical Situation: The Narrative Model of Communication

“Rhetoric must be viewed formally as operating at that point where literature and politics meet, or where literary values and political urgencies can be brought together… Perhaps this explains why the successful user of rhetoric is sometimes in bad grace with both camps. For the literary people he is too ‘practical’; and for the more practical political people he is too ‘flowery.’ But there is nothing illegitimate about what he undertakes to do…” – Richard M. Weaver, “Language is Sermonic”49

So how do we grab hold of the Dean Scream – and all the other gaffes of the new media

era – before they get away from us?

Laura Dean, one of our better digital media theorists, provides the best starting point: slowing down. Digital media has progressed at hyperspeed in its short decade and a half, and what has been lost is that critical virtue of criticism: patience and reflection and praxis, versus technological acquiescence. Just as television and the printing press – and that most-ancient and revolutionary technology: writing – fundamentally transformed rhetoric over the centuries, it is intuitive and inevitable that new media will open up and close down new means of persuasion and necessitate new marriages of rhetoric and politics. The trick, however, is not tracking these changes in hindsight (and having our politics pulled along by the string of technological determinism), but guiding this relationship as it plays out in the political here and now. This is the job of rhetorical criticism, and this job – figuring out, to quote Susan Jarratt, the “ways patterns of

49 Richard M. Weaver, “Language is Sermonic” in The Rhetorical Tradition, eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 1360. 31

reasoning came to be accepted” so that new avenues of reasoning can be anticipated – requires a

more holistic approach to the connective tissues between technology, rhetoric, and politics.50

With regard to ethos as character, and how the new media era has confused our judgments, one thing is clear: After two decades of research in digital media, scholars aren’t short on diagnoses of the problem. Our efforts have produced ethnographic accounts of how teenagers fail to understand MySpace’s blurring of the public/private divide, numerous recountings of the radical performativity of identity lurking behind our avatars, and a veritable cottage industry of experts weighing in on how legal regimes of privacy (and Fourth Amendment search and seizure protections) have been compromised by our digital identities.51 It is hard to disagree with any of

these accounts. But what these all-too-correct diagnoses of the rhetorical condition of digital

media point to is what the bulk of our academic work in new media has still failed to adequately

address: guidance on how, exactly, to rearticulate or resituate our judgments of ethos as character

in new rhetorical environments that are “characterized by their ability to remove, or at least

rearrange, the boundaries between public and private spaces…changing the situational geography

of social life” and thus producing no “sense of place.”52

Amidst this avalanche of scholarship, rhetorical theorist Kristie Fleckenstein’s work stands out, as does her theory of how we should begin rethinking character in digital media, a concept she christens cyberethos. Fleckenstein’s starting point is straightforward: “If we have no

50 Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 74. 51 On the issue of youths and social-networking, Danah Boyd has, rapidly, emerged as a, if not the, leading expert. See Danah Boyd, “Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life," in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 119–142. On the issue of online privacy, see Daniel J. Solvoe, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (New York: New York University Press, 2004). For a recent example of the postmodern performance of subjectivity in online environments, see Stephanie Vie, “Technology as a Site of Struggle: The Interplay of Identity, Morality, and Power in Four Popular Technologies,” Review of Communication 8, no. 2 (April 2008): 130 –145. 52 Z. Papacharissi, “The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life: Characteristics of Personal Home Pages,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2002): 645. 32

stable boundaries, no stable reality, and no stable subject, how do we judge whose ‘voice,’ as well

as whose reality, resonates with the greatest ethical authority, the greatest ‘good character?’”53

And, cutting through the vast volumes of descriptive work on the complexities and material

conditions of new media, she finds three standards of character that any new “definition of ethical

judgment” or “ecological ethics” must comport with:

• the need to recognize the material and temporal constraints imposed on and

enacted by any cyberethos

• the need to discern the fluid, dynamic, and constructed nature of ethos and identify new

media contexts in which we are both producer and produced

• and the need to ensure the continued fluidity of those boundaries by

taking responsibility for them

As premises, Fleckenstein’s standards seem airtight, making clear the complexities of ethos and judgment that our immersion in a new media age makes a daily part of our political, professional, and personal life. But they also beg the same question: How? If the goal is a new ethics of judgment for digital media, how do we operationalize, or methodologize, these insights and make them into teachable, and portable, criteria of judgment for our students and fellow citizens?

Our proposed solution is the narrative model of communication. Something of a current buzzword within academia (as evidenced by the “narrative turn” in psychology, medicine, law, and cognitive science), and a virtual mantra of pundits during Campaign 2008, the explanatory power of narrative has long been heralded by rhetorical critics and theorists. Yet what these

53 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, "Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: the Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly," in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 325. See also, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, “Aristotelian Ethos and the Author Position in Digital Poetics,” Kairos, 11.3 (Summer 2007). 33

enthusiastic embraces of narrative often lack is a method or model for figuring out how narratives

work.54 Within the political context of remediated discourse, an upgrade and modification of the

so-called “Chicago School” model of narrative as rhetorical communication could help advance our understanding of the rhetorical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of 21st century remediated

communications.55

Made famous by Wayne Booth and later fleshed out by James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and other second and third (and now fourth) generation Chicago School critics, the narrative model, designed to reintroduce considerations of the complex ethical and affective relationships between authors and audiences within literature, has – once properly re-tuned – an even more salient application in allowing rhetorical critics to see the interrelated rhetorical and political consequences of their judgments within the contextlessness of remediated discourse.

Specifically, by offering a six-variable model of rhetorical communication – i.e., speaker-implied speaker-narrator-narrative audience-implied audience-actual audience – the heuristic acts as a rib- spreader, opening up a remediated communicative situation to reveal not only its multiple ontological layers, but also the complex play of agency (residing in neither speaker nor audience) that is inherent to digital media. As for the model itself, what is of interest is not the particular variables (which are, to some degree, self-explanatory) but their entangled and interlocking inter- relations, which allow one to see what is at stake – rhetorically, politically, and aesthetically – in

(1) how rhetorical critics position themselves in relation to speakers and audiences, and (2) how they choose to – hypothetically – designate, calibrate, and align the relations between speakers and audiences across and along multiple ontological levels.

54 See Aaron McKain, “The Rhetoric of Narrative: What the Law as Narrative Movement Can Teach the Rest of the Narrative Turn,” Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge, eds. Debra Journet, Beth A. Boehm, Cynthia Britt (New York: Hampton Press, 2011), 37-48. 55 For a quick history of the Chicago School, and its connections to contemporary rhetoric and composition studies, see Aaron McKain, “Rhetoric,” The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011), 692-698. 34

As is, there is no reason for you, the reader, to buy into this slightly unorthodox (or, maybe, overly-orthodox) narrative approach; after all, proving the heuristic value of the model is what the next 150 pages of this dissertation are for. But our argument is this: In the case of remediated political discourse, narrative theory becomes an invaluable tool. It acknowledges the protean nature, and fluid complexities, of remediated speakers, messages, and audiences, while helping to magnify an awareness of the political implications of how we articulate these complexities: articulations that orient our individual rhetorical judgments, which then constellate into our rhetorical norms, and which ultimately circumscribe the parameters of our persuasive rhetorical practices.

This is the intervention this dissertation makes, focusing on our judgments of ethos as character. And, following Fleckenstein’s lead, we’ll proceed in three stages to capture the technological, political, and aesthetic complexities of ethos and identity for digital environments.

First, Exhibit B will use Gov. (and presidential hopeful) Romney as our guide to examine

Fleckenstein’s first standard for cyberethos, the material and temporal restraints of digital media.

Focusing first on technology – and the most dominant affordances of digital media: interactivity and The Archive – we will pursue how the discursive regime of privacy, currently seen as both the prevailing harm and solution for our problems of ethos as character – misrecognizes, legally and existentially, the actual rhetorical situation of ethos that is most affected by digital media: Not

“privacy,” but public coherence among our public acts, which we re-articulate (through analysis of recent Supreme Court cases on digital media and privacy) as our ability to self-narrate our character.

Second, Theory Interlude I will explore fluidity to argue for an odd theoretical partnership with which to re-articulate the theories of interpretation we use to judge ethos in the new media era. This partnership unites: (1) the long-reigning (particularly in rhetorical and 35

composition scholarship) academic embrace of posthumanism and its romanticization of the

“cyborg” identity and (2) the narrative model of communication. Taking seriously how the

posthuman enacts fluidity – and how it articulates ethos in our technological realms – I will first

investigate whether its tropes are rendered superfluous, if not invisible, by the aesthetics inherent

in the materiality of digital media itself, a proposition (inadvertently) made clear by Jeffrey

Rice’s recently celebrated assessment of the style of new media: The Rhetoric of Cool. Second,

recognizing the need for a new heuristic for judgments of ethos as character that preserves

fluidity and is in keeping with the actual material and aesthetic rhetorical conditions that (thanks

to the digital media revolution) we now must participate in, I offer what may seem like a

supremely unlikely, and technologically out-of-step, counter-solution: literary scholar Wayne

Booth’s concept of the implied author. Though, on the surface, a firmly literary theory of

interpretation – and one that has been challenged by both the postmodern and poststructuralist

turns that proceeded it – Booth’s heuristic (and the narrative model of communication it

develops) offers a version of posthuman ethos that offers a mode of resistance against the

“information empire” ushered in by digital media.

In Exhibit C, we turn to Fleckenstein’s third standard: responsibility. Turning more

explicitly to Campaign 2008, and specifically to the candidacy of John McCain, I investigate the

familiar question of privacy in new media (i.e., ethos as public-private fidelity) not only politically, and not just rhetorically, but aesthetically, considering the inherent contradictions at work in discussions of rhetoric, authenticity, and the presentation of the self. The focus here is stylistics: namely, the seemingly very stale postmodern tropes that both new media and mainstream political journalism (still in the thrall of the “New” Journalism of the 1960s) continue to use to juggle the paradox of rhetorical authenticity, tropes that may well have jumped the shark in Campaign 2008. This is all the more apparent when considering one of the more ironic, if not 36

outright bizarre, partnerships in contemporary American politics: Sen. McCain and postmodern

wunderkind David Foster Wallace. Our solution, or contention, is that the shift from the new

media era to the digital media age of American politics requires shedding the skin of postmodern

stylistics of metafictional self-presentation. And this process is catalyzed via the narrative model of communication, which captures the correct recalibration of the materiality and fluidity of ethos, and is thoroughly in keeping with the avant-garde strategies of rhetoric and judgment that are now emerging to supplant the new media era: Strategies that venerate craft, author-audience partnership, ontological complexity, and which are nowhere more apparent than in Exhibit D’s primary case study, the quixotic presidential bid of Stephen Colbert

Finally, in our Conclusion, we turn away from American politics to consider how easily

(or not so easily) the narrative model of communication can be used as a guide to triangulate our judgments of ethos in the new media era. Using students in professional writing courses as a stand-in for citizens, and focusing on the Tiger Woods scandal and the emerging new media era re-conceptualization of ethos known as Brand You, we consider how, as a heuristic and pedagogy, the narrative model calls attention to the economic issues of ethos that surround public-private fidelity and public coherence gaffes.

What we have, then, is a nexus point: the convergence of American presidential politics

(Campaign 2008), technology (new media), and aesthetics (postmodernism). And through this nexus, we reach the simple but vital question at the heart of this dissertation: how do we, as citizens in a representative democracy – as critics and producers of rhetoric – evaluate remediated rhetorical acts (including our own) in our new, interconnected political, aesthetic, and technological environments? How can we develop a model of rhetorical criticism that helps update our rhetorical standards from the Beta Max to the Blu-Ray era, and that helps us to

37

triangulate – and excavate and demonstrate – the often hidden aesthetic and rhetorical values that status quo judgments of remediated political acts are committing us to?

38

CHAPTER 1 (EXHIBIT B): MITT ROMNEY: GREY FLANNEL MARTYR FOR THE NEW MEDIA ETHOS?

"He's not pro-choice or anti-choice. He’s multiple choice.” – Sen. Edward Kennedy, on his former opponent, Mitt Romney56

“[Y]ou can go up on YouTube and see the governor himself speaking…” “Eh, consider the source.” – Gov. Mitt Romney responding to Sen. Sam Brownback, August 2008 Republican debate57

In another age, he probably would have been a contender. But in the new media era,

Gov. Mitt Romney – millionaire CEO, fiscal savior of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, picture- perfect candidate for the White House (complete with Superman-square jaw and perfectly lacquered teeth, hair, wife, and kids), and commander of a historically unprecedented battalion of image consultants and public relations gurus – gained another, more dubious, distinction:

Campaign 2008 and 2012’s premiere poster child/sacrificial lamb for the public’s continued insistence on authenticity within digital media environments that make authenticity, as a standard of ethos as character, all but impossible to maintain. 58 An experienced political executive with a long lineage of votes cast and debates argued and interview answers given, Romney has been

battered, over and over and again and again, for the seeming incoherence of his public statements:

on abortion, on the war in Iraq, on gay marriage, on gun control. And, if pointing out those

incongruities gets old, he is battered – over and over and again and again – about whether he has

56 Edward Kennedy, interview by Chris Matthews, Hardball, MSNBC, January 1, 2007. 57 “August 2008 Republican debate,” ABC News, August 5, 2007. 58 Ken Silverstein, “Making Mitt Romney: How to Fabricate a Conservative,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2007. 39

changed his mind about changing his mind about any of them. His crime? Waging pre- emptive war on a sovereign nation? Leaving a co-ed to die in a river? Impregnating his slaves?

Even worse: The flip-flop.

Punishing a politician for changing her political positions to adjust to shifting political winds is, of course, nothing new. But, like all things rhetorical, success is a matter of degree. If, as political scientist Lance Bennet tells us, gaffes are our watercooler referendums on the values we debate to determine what we share (ok, that’s actually more our definition than Bennet’s), then the flip-flop is perhaps the most American gaffe of all: Marking the outer limit of our tolerance for politicians politicking, whether that means actual doubt about their ideological sincerity or simply annoyance that their lack of savvy forced us to watch them get caught. Put into layman’s terms so helpfully by his fellow Republicans, Romney’s problem is that he is a

“fucking phony” (Sen. John McCain), a “guy [who] will say anything to get elected” (Mayor

Rudy Guiliani), a “well-oiled weathervane” (Sen. John Huntsman), and an “asshole” (McCain again).59 As data-crunched by Slate.com – summarizing “almost all the [news]papers” (in and of

itself a tellingly hilarious bit of web 2.0 journalistic fact-checking) – Romney’s “fundamental

problem…[is] summarized with one word: ‘authenticity.’”60

Given that ethos – as David Foster Wallace tells us, boiling down Aristotle and a millenia’s worth of rhetorical scholars – is ultimately the imploration/question “Trust me,” and given that gaffes are – to quote reporter Michael Kinsey’s formulation – a “politician telling the truth by accident,” it is easy to see why the equation of ethos as character to authenticity seems inevitable.61 Given this inevitability, whether and how much one cares about the flip-flop is itself

59 All quotes taken from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change (New York: Harper Collins) 2010, with the exception of Senator Huntsman’s quote, which is found in Catalina Camia “Huntsman Slams Romney as ‘Weathervane,’” USA Today, October 28, 2011. 60 Daniel Politi, “An Authentic Fall,” Slate.com, February 8, 2008. 61 Hendrik Hertzberg, “Laffs and Gaffes,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2008. 40

a referendum on one’s political philosophy of authenticity as ethos: Is it the coalition-building

calculations of a statesman (or MBA), or the rude machinations of the Mephistophelean

Machievelli revealing themselves. We’ll table this for the moment because the immediate

problem is that, given the materiality of digital media, authenticity – i.e. public coherence – isn’t

undesirable or unobtainable or some other version of Holden Caulfieldesque sensibilities. It is, as

a technological matter, impossible.

This brings us to materiality, Krista Fleckenstein’s first criteria for reconfiguring ethos for the digital age. Materiality starts simply enough: Any reconfiguration of ethos must take into account the “material and temporal ways” in which our technologies change our notions of character.62 And, as any freshman poli sci student can attest, Gov. Romney – martyr for the new

media era – makes this new materiality very clear. Once upon a time (that time being the earlier

21st century), even a high-profile candidate’s rhetorical past was, relatively speaking, sequestered away: moldering on old news reel footage (owned, in all likelihood, by some multi-national media conglomerate – owned, if you are Romney and have any luck, by some subsidiary of your venture capital firm), disintegrating from the collective memory of one-time constituents, reduced to rumor and half-remembered conversations among policy wonks and politicos and AM talk radio junkies. As we learned in 2008, however, it is now all viscerally, materially, accessibly there: Past statements, soundbytes, and out-of-context one-liners all resurrected from the rhetorical grave, playing daily on YouTube, brought back to life on nearly instantly-produced remixes and parodies, and putting all the Governor’s past remarks up front in the eternal present of the Internet.

62 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, "Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: the Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly," in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 340.

41

And so we reach the subject of this Exhibit. It may be hard to care about the flip-flop and hard to care too much about a millionaire’s public relations problems (and it may be a Herculean task of empathy to care about Mitt Romney at all), but what must be realized is that today, in the new media era, Romney’s image problems are ours as well. It is precisely the crosshairs of the flip-flop and authenticity that not only trap us – politically, legally, and existentially – in the grinding gears of the new media era, but eradicate the very divisions of public/private, professional/political that ethos as coherence was once based upon. And the key term here – despite its tendency to misdirect us – is privacy.

Why Public Coherence Trumps Privacy

Privacy.

If there is a single term that encapsulates our fears about ethos in the new media era, privacy is it. From the, now de riguer, NPR, New York Times, and 60 Minutes exposés on the end of privacy, to Mark Zuckerberg’s warnings/prophesies/IPO statements that “privacy is over,” to the frantic efforts by private companies (Reputation Defender) and government agencies (FCC,

FTC) to put the genie back in the bottle, privacy is the rallying cry for what is changing – and what is lost – in terms of ethos as character.63 But privacy, as a rubric for understanding the

changes that the materiality of digital media have brought, not only misrecognizes the harm that

the new media era presents to our ethos and character, but blinds us to the solutions – realigning

our criteria for judging ethos as character – that are, in fact, available. The issue – which the

flip flop gaffe makes clear – is that the standards of ethos as character that the materiality of the new media forces us to re-arrange are not about privacy (that which is hidden from the public,

63 For Marc Zuckerberg’s claims that ‘privacy is dead’ see, for just one example, “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says Privacy No Longer a Social Norm,” HuffingtonPost.com, March 3, 2010. For general mainstream press reactions to the crisis of privacy, see Erin Moriarty, “Did the Internet Kill Privacy?”, CBS News, February 6, 2011; Linton Weeks, “Google And Privacy: Is It Time To Give Up?” NPR.org, February 29, 2012; and Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” New York Times Magazine, July 21, 2010. 42

with public-private fidelity, though this will be dealt with in Exhibit C), and are even less about

authenticity; instead, they are about coherence among our public acts.

Mitt Romney, our new media era martyr, once again, offers us guidance. In this case, in

the following prayer/plea, offered up in the 2008 New Hampshire Primary Debate to fend off

attacks from all of his Republican rivals regarding his refusal to take a stand on any issues

(specifically Iraq and health care reform) and, in particular, in response to Sen. McCain’s solar

plexus stinging bon mot that “My friends, they say this is a change election. And Sen. Romney:

You are certainly the candidate of change”:

“Is it not fair / to have the person who is accused / of having a position that he does not have / be the expert on what his position is? / How is it that you are the expert / on my position / when my position / has been very clear?”64

In a word, no: We are no longer the experts – the final words – on our positions. But if we

were looking for a single encapsulation the crisis of ethos in the new media era and how clinging

to authenticity as a measure of character offers us no solutions, we could hardly do better than

Gov. Romney’s quote. Attempting to defang the phalanx of flip-flops he was confronting by

attacking new media technology itself, Gov. Romney’s weird, exasperated haiku speaks directly

to the threat – existential and political – that the materiality of digital media presents: constant,

eternal threat of rhetorical crucifixition, of flip-flopping, via the twin technological materialities of digital media: The Archive and interactivity. And as the Governor – battered daily via YouTube and out of context clips of past speeches – knows better than nearly anyone, what he has lost (and

64 Gov. Romney at the January 29, 2008 ABC News debate, quoted in David Chalian, “Sparks Fly Between McCain and Romney Over Iraq,” ABC News, January 30, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=4219498&page=1#.T8MTocX4LqA. 43

what we all have lost in terms of ethos as character), what the materiality of digital media really strips away from us, is the ability to self-narrate, to perform, to tell our stories in the order that we

see fit for whatever rhetorical situation we confront. To stitch together our public acts into a

coherent narrative.

To see what Romney’s problem is – and why, as a matter of ethos, it help us see the true crisis of ethos we confront – let’s consider what, in terms of ethos as character, Romney did right. Romney’s phone wasn’t hacked to reveal whatever passes for Mormon pornography. He wasn’t caught by paparazzi skulking around a flea-bag motel to check on his baby-mama (Sen.

John Edwards), or snaking off for a rendezvous in Buenos Aires (Sen. Mark Stanford). There are

no weird craigslist ads (“sexy, fit, fun Congressman”), no crotch-shot Tweets sent to college co- eds (and hacked by blogosphere impresarios, a la Con. Anthony Weiner). There wasn’t even a

Marilyn or a mistress (as in the case of JFK, Harding, or even George H.W. Bush), or an alcoholic wife (Dukakis and Ford), or a history of shock treatment, or a not terribly well-hidden wheelchair.

There weren’t even drunken revelations/pontifications about “the blacks” inability to “govern themselves” (Nixon), or the need for the CIA to steal, and then reconstruct, computer records of trading arms with the Contras (Reagan). Romney – the cartoonishly milquetoast, Leave it to

Beaver, family man Mormon – passed all of these tests of personal virtue (of keeping a layer of

dirt off the divide between private self and public persona, of keeping one’s self squeaky clean)

with flying colors and in ways that few have the character to pass. Romney’s problem instead –

the more common problem in the era of new media, and the problem that privacy mistakes – is

that he was outed for the things he had intentionally put into public life (speeches, press releases,

op-eds, public political positions), which now, thanks to digital media technology, are forever

frozen in the cybernetic amber and forever playing for some future anonymous, forever

dumbshow audience. His crisis is coherence among his public acts. And this crisis is the crisis

of The Archive 44

Long the prophesized problem for the new media era – even back in the .dot com 90’s when Wired magazine could predict a utopian digital future with a straight face – The Archive,

whether we link it to Derrida’s “archive fever,” the banality of the Google search, or the more

spiritual “Singularity,” is what we have to confront when the majority of our human interactions –

not just online searches and social-networking profiles, but use of a GPS, a credit card, etc. – are

transmogrified into permeable permanence of data and bytes.65 But since our interest is in crossing the chasm from the new media era to the digital media age – i.e., seeing how we can upgrade our standards of ethos to better confront the challenges of materiality – our go-to source on The Archive, to see how utopia becomes dystopia, is Lev Manovich’s seminal, and even pre-

Language of New Media, essay, “Database as a Symbolic Form.”66 Addressing the database as a

“cultural form” – and the dominant technology of the new media – Manovich rightly argues that

as “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other

data records,” it is obvious that we “would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this

database.”67 True and true, but here’s the rub, and what Manovich, still apple-eyed and still saying “Web,” gets exactly wrong, and what we, as a matter of ethos, have not yet put right:

The open nature of the Web as medium (Web pages are computer files which can always be edited) means that the Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. The sites always grow. New links are being added to what is already there. It is as easy to add new elements to the end of a list as it is to insert them anywhere in it. All this further contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?68

What Manovich is gesturing to is the second defining technological DNA of the materiality of digital media: interactivity. If digital media is, by definition, anything (and here

65 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression,” The Library Quarterly 68, no. 3 (1998): 347; Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadet: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf) 2010, 47. 66 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence, 5, no. 2 (1999). 67 Ibid., 2. 68 Ibid., 4. 45

we will take guidance from media scholar David Marshall’s definition), it is a set of technologies

wherein once stable designations of author and audience (or producer and produced) are smeared

into a blur of encoded interactivity. 69 This is a rhetorical truth as apparent as the nearest multi- authored Facebook wall or Montessori school remix assignment. But what Manovich gets exactly backwards is precisely what allows the doctrine of privacy to continue to roadblock our thinking about ethos in the new media era. The Archive is inherently protean and able to be- reassembled.

But the logic that re-assembles it – the way in which interactivity catalyzes The Archive and creates the crisis of ethos – is not “anti-narrative,” it is precisely narrative, the result is precisely not “a collection,” but a story. And the standard that drives interactivity – because we, as the keeper’s of each other’s ethos, no know other standard of ethos – is coherence.

The question then becomes: What sorts of stories are we allowed to tell? And why does storytelling – as a matter of ethos (and given our attempt to move from a new media era to a digital media age) matter? And so, this Exhibit will proceed to examine materiality by looking at the legal regime of privacy to see how it leads us astray in articulating the harms that the materiality of digital media, specifically interactivity and The Archive, cause to ethos. We then go on to argue that, by reframing ethos as character not in terms of public/private but in terms of narrative, we can rebuild standards of judgment.

I. To Each Their Own Wiretap: The New Media Era’s Legal and Existential Crises of Ethos (Or, Why The Archive Short-Circuits Storytelling)

“Please keep your privacy out of our public space. Turn off your cell phone.” – Sign at Rittenhouse Square Market, Philadelphia, PA

That privacy, as a legal doctrine, is a hard fix for privacy, as a social concern, has been clear from day one. Laws, let alone Constitutional doctrines, are always reactionary, playing catch-up with change in society, but privacy, in particular, has from the start been in an especially

69 P. David Marshall, New Media Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10. 46

tortoise and hare pursuit of technology. As the – now de riguer in legal treatises on the subject – story of the birth of privacy doctrine tells us: It is the emergence of the Kodak camera in the late

19th century, and Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ disgust with the culture of gossip and

papparazi that rose with it, that leads them, in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, to discover a

right to privacy (the “right to be left alone”) hiding in the Fourth Amendment.70 No surprise, given the shaky genesis of the doctrine, for the next 100 years privacy as a Constitutional concern could never quite catch up with our (and our government’s) aptitude and ability for surveillance, allowing the wiretapping of bootleggers (20s), eaves-dropping on Communists (40)s, and bugging of subversives (60s) to all get a Constitutional pass. Oddly – or not, considering its own

contested legal history – privacy’s only major victory was Roe v. Wade.

Today, in response to public panic in the new media era, a cottage industry of legal scholars – some of the best and brightest – now try to re-crack the code of applying privacy to the voracious and protean technological materiality of digital media. Daniel Solvoe, the field’s emerging figurehead, in The Future of Reputation (2007), taxonomizes the potential harms to ethos as character (though it is telling that today, a mere five years later, he implores us to “get over” these harms). Helen Nissenbaum attempts to put “privacy in context” (hence the title of her book, Privacy in Context) via a fairly-byzantine indexing of how to re-situate our seemingly endlessly repurposed and remediated communications. (A laundry list that resembles, more than anything, an Aristotelan index of rhetorical situations; a non-coincidence [that she doesn’t notice, or see as worth mentioning] given that her ethical framework is hung on that neo-Aristotelean,

Martha Nausbaum). And Lori Andrews, to bring in one more text in a sea of dozens, continues her war on Zuckerberg by arguing that since Facebook is now a nation-state with 750 million members, a currency system, and a – semi-official, semi-secret – seat at the G8 summit, it

70 For this history see nearly any book-length account of privacy doctrine in the last five years, but, especially, the excellent contributions in Saul Levmore and Martha C Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011). 47

requires a liberal democratic Constitution for privacy rights in social-networking.71 These are all noble efforts. But they are all – ironically – unworkable precisely because they are too small, and stuck in the realm of pragmatic, and legal, possibility. There will never be a law, or Supreme

Court decision, that catches up to the constant innovations of Silicon Valley (which, as

Facebook’s $16 billion dollar IPO makes clear, feeds itself on eradicating previous distinctions of privacy). The only solution is the bigger one: Not a laundry list of hypothetical harms suffered – or labyrinthine constellations of competing ethical proscriptions and statutes – but an overarching rearticulation of the potential harms and possibilities that the materiality of digital media presents. This requires updating, or overhauling, the discourse on privacy to its logical next level:

Ethos.

And, strangely, although they never do so by name or nomenclature, this need to think bigger – and to think in terms of ethos, narrative, and how we must re-align our judgments of character beyond the new media era – is precisely what the Supreme Court, in Jones v. U.S.

(2012), calls for in their most significant foray into the pitfalls of privacy and digital media.

Using the opportunity of Jones – a relatively easy case, as evidenced by the Court’s unanimous opinion that a defendant cannot be tracked via a GPS device placed on his vehicle without a warrant – Justice Samuel Alito writes the majority opinion he likely had playing in his head since his 1970s Yale law school days (where he first established his reputation as an

“electronic privacy” wonk). Alito takes the occasion to explain how precisely useless applying privacy is – as a doctrine of harm or remedy – in the face of the material reality of The Archive.

He starts by rejecting – correctly – two premises that control case law on privacy. First, Alito removes materiality, here defined as the “18th century standards” of privacy as unlawful property

71 See Daniel J. Solvoe, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Finally, see Lori Andrews, I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (New York: Free Press, 2012). 48

violation (standards that his Framer’s Intent fetishizing fellow justices insist on applying), as a consideration. Instead, he correctly argues that it is precisely the virtuality and omnipresence of digital media (versus particular instances of wire-taps, bugs, and pre-Revolutionary War

surveillance tactics) that makes physicality, and physical contact, irrelevant. Second, and more

importantly, Alito recognizes that even 20th century notions of “secrecy” – seen here as the harm that privacy protects – have no bearing in the new media era, precisely because “privacy” harms in this technological context are really harms of public coherence vis a vis The Archive and are built upon the, to paraphrase the Court, phone numbers, texts, emails, grocery lists, book orders, and prescriptions that we make readily available to companies in the “course of carrying out mundane tasks.”72 If the Court continues to cling to the dogma of privacy as secrecy, Alito argues, and its legal rule that “an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” then privacy, as a legally protected concept, ceases to meaningfully exist in the new media era. 73 (“I would not assume that all information

voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone,

disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.”)74

Uniting Alito’s rejection of fundamental privacy premises is an understanding that, above all, what must be reckoned with, by both the Court and the American people it lords over, is the recognition of how the materiality of digital media is changing, consciously or via acquiescence, what the public thinks is private. Which introduces the real problem: Whether “the public” has the tools to think about privacy at all. After all, Alito argues, if all the Constitution can, or should, protect is the citizenry’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” a judge’s decision can no longer rest upon

72 U.S. v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), slip op., Sotomayor concurrence at 5. 73 Ibid. 74 U.S. v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), slip op., Sotomayor concurrence at 6. 49

the assumption that this hypothetical reasonable person has a well-developed and stable set of privacy expectations. But technology can change those expectations. Dramatic technological change may lead to periods in which popular expectations are in flux and may ultimately produce significant changes in popular attitudes. New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy, and many people may find the tradeoff worthwhile. And even if the public does not welcome the diminution of privacy that new technology entails, they may eventually reconcile themselves to this development as inevitable.75

What Alito is framing, of course, is a classic question of ethos: What standards about character – here the line between the public/private divide – does our community hope to uphold

(and to hold the individual accountable for), and what standards do we actually uphold in our daily judgments and unthinking acts of acquiescence? (And, as a sidebar: This silliness of the terminology – Alito arguing that privacy is no longer a meaningful term, legally or sociologically, yet still framing his arguments in terms of privacy – is yet another reason to reject the nomenclature of privacy in favor of ethos.) Judgment is all that matters, but the Court’s is but one, and perhaps the one that matters least. Every judgment we make – whether to use that CVS card on our key-chain or to turn on our GPS – is unavoidably larger than itself, and an epideictic declaration of our values. But the question is: If we do not see the bargain we are making – if we cannot understand, or articulate, the “trade-offs” between “convenience” and whatever legal/social/technological notion of privacy we are sacrificing – how do we know what our actions are costing us, and how can we build frameworks to protect each other?

What is needed, then, in lieu of privacy is a rubric – a heuristic, a set of guidelines – to build an ethic of ethos. Half of which (the former half) has already become something old hat in the academic discussions of privacy in 2012. But the latter half – how do we design such rubrics and heurisitcs – is a question that has been, conspicuously, neither answered nor much asked.

Industry funded scholars, such as Danah Boyd (Microsoft), and public intellectuals, such as Jeff

Jarvis, may call for a rethinking of privacy as an ethic, versus a right or legal standard, but when

75 U.S. v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), slip op., Alito concurrence at 10. 50

push comes to shove, their ideas about implementation are either (1) non-existent (e.g., Boyd,

perhaps owing, methodologically, to her ethnographic roots, i.e.: the MacArthur Foundation’s

Margaret Mead of MySpace) or (2) suspiciously, as in the case of Jenkins, exactly in line with the

strip mining of privacy that the new media industry funding his research profits from in the name

of a utopic, open society. 76 Lucky for our broke ass, we have no such strings attached, and a proven track record of no corporate potential. Which is why we can actually posit an articulation of what we have lost in the materiality of the new media era, and what an ethic of ethos can replace the discourse of privacy with – which is, ironically, the very thing we never had: the ability to self-narrate.

A. Who Sartred? Reconfiguring Ethos as Narrative Agency/Allowance

“All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas.” –Barack Obama77

“Remember, Jerry: It’s not a lie if you believe it.” – George Costanza78

“I am not going to apologize for being pro-life.”

If there is a single thing that Republican primary voters seem entirely unlikely to make a

candidate do, this is it. And yet, over and over, again and again, Gov. Mitt Romney has had to

apologize for not apologizing for supporting the right to life. The problem, of course, is that this

is the same Gov. Romney who supported the right to choose when it was politically advantageous

to tack to the left. Romney’s explanation for this policy shift – this so-called “flip-flop” – was,

76 See Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011) and Danah Boyd, “Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life," Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 119–142. 77 Marianna Cook, “A Couple in Chicago,” The New Yorker, January 19, 2009. 78 Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, “The Beard,” Seinfeld, season 6, episode 15, directed by Andy Ackerman, aired February 9, 1995. 51

simply, that he changed his mind. Which seems like a thing that people do. In fact, he even had a

story for it:

I was always personally opposed to abortion, as I think almost everyone in this nation is. And the question for me was, what is the role of government? And it was quite theoretical and philosophical to consider what the role of government should be in this regard, and I felt that the Supreme Court had spoken and that government shouldn’t be involved and let people make their own decision. That all made a lot of sense to me. Then I became governor and the theoretical became reality. A bill came to my desk which related to the preservation of life. I recognized that I simply could not be part of an effort that would cause the destruction of human life. And I didn’t hide from that change of heart. I recognize it’s a change. Every piece of legislation which came to my desk in the coming years as the governor, I came down on the side of preserving the sanctity of life.79

On a basic level, changing one’s mind – this minimal indicator of incoherence – seems

like the very essence of being human, or a grown-up. Or maybe Romey’s weak sauce admission of a “mistake” is indicative of a lack of character. Who cares? Because beyond these easy jabs about Romney and ideology – and even beyond the new media era’s standard of ethos as coherence that insists upon ideological rigidity – Romney’s problem, once again, telegraphs larger problems with ethos in relation to digital media’s technological materiality, The Archive, and interactivity, and it indicates why authenticity and the flip-flop are false starts. The problem

– spelled out by rhetorical theory and Supreme Court opinions – is narrative.

We’ll start with the once revolutionary thesis that is now an academic and pop-scientific banality: Humans are, to use Walter Fisher’s terminology, homo narrans, narrative using animals. The sin qua non of ethos as character with self-narration is a fundamental building block to an ethic of self, even if its rhetorical workings, and thus the workings of ethos, are often misunderstood. As literary theorist Paul John Eakins – echoing an array of theorists from the philosopher Paul Ricouer to the psychologist Jerome Bruner to Oprah and a phalanx of child developmentalists and cognitive scientists – tells us, self and story are “complementary, mutually

79 Mitt Romney, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, NBC, December 16, 2007. 52

constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation” because “narrative is not merely an

appropriate form for the expression of identity; it is an identity content.”80 In other words, self is story: our lives are a cacophony of discrete, interconnected, and smeared together moments spread out through time, and we create meaning by knitting these moments together into some sort of narrative coherence. As Richard Rorty, quoting Phillip Larkin, tells us: A good life is one

where you can lay in your deathbed and tell a good story about how you got there.81

All of this – as any good existentialist, let’s (why not?) pick Sartre, will tell you – is bullshit (in philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s sense of statements that we make with no concern about whether they are true or false).82 And the sticking point is coherence. Narratives are precisely fictions: the imposition of meaning on a random series of events. And for Sartre, it is precisely the illegitimacy of narrating our lives – of telling ourselves the story of our story – that is the creep of nausea: the falseness and discombobulating disreality of situating ourselves in a fabricated non-reality; a storybook version of our self wherein we are always and necessarily the hero, in which there is always a beginning, middle, and end, plot points, rising tensions, protagonists, antagonists, etc.83 This “retrospective prophecy” – to use literary and legal theorist

Peter Brooks’ term for Sartre’s critique of narrative epistemology – is the false linearity inherent in narrative causality: we wait for the end of the narrative and then give ourselves an account of

how we got there.84

So the debate goes on and on. For the existentialists, this procrustean smooshing of the complex atomized moments of our lives into coherence promotes living in perpetual disreality; the quicker we can understand this, the faster our path to whatever, for the beret-wearing French

80 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 100. 81 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 82 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton UP) 2005. 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964). 84 For the narrative implications of illegal searches, see Peter Brooks, “Inevitable Discovery: Law, Narrative, Retrospectivity,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (2003). 53

in 1940, passes for phenomenological enlightenment. For those we will call the narrative-

humanists (a term we will morph and complicate in the next section [Theory Interlude I] into

“narrative post-humanists”), the existentialist critique (which we have done no justice to in one slight paragraph) is much ado about (being and) nothing(ness). No theorist of narrative – versus, say, the queasy pink medicine show daytime TV therapists [see Oprah, Dr. Drew, Dr. Phil] who endlessly promote narrative as the panacea of “personal truth” – ever equated narrativity, or self- narrativity, with a phenomenologically accurate/authentic/Real projection of a true identity/ethos/character. Rather, they demand that we attend to the constructed (i.e., rhetorical) nature of these narrations. (Because, really, why the hell else study them?) Moreover, far from a monological exercise, critics like Eakin tell us that narrative never presumed autonomy: we never construct our “self” alone but only via others, if only because “reporting on one’s memories is engaging in a socially sanctioned (and created) form of telling.”85 To which, and here this

endless debate continues endlessly, philosopher Galen Strawson (extending Heidegger’s critique

of narrative) would likely insist that a psychological issue is being mistaken for an ethical one.

By perpetuating a “narrative” conception of the self (a self based upon narrative coherence), we

necessarily restrict the possibilities for more “authentic” self-awareness, disallowing certain

“incoherent” but perhaps accurate ways to view one’s own life.86

Strawson is right that our lives, and our conceptualizations of our lived reality in the world, are held hostage to the narrative norms that are deemed coherent within a given culture.

But what he fails to do is consider how these narrative norms work rhetorically, how they come to be deemed coherent within a given culture, how they are a society’s politically, aesthetically, or ideologically “available means” of narrative persuasion. And this last point, which doubles down on Walter Fisher’s observations on narrative coherence and verisimilitude – helps us to

85 Eakin, Touching the World, 107. 86 Gale Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (2004): 428-52. 54

understand why, given the materiality of digital media (The Archive plus Interactivity), this

existential debate has become irrelevant. Whether as a harm for the humanists, or a moment of liberation for the existentialists, we have lost even the pretense of the ability to self-narrate, to

organize the plot-points of our life, to understand not when we change our mind, but when our mind – to our mind – has changed.

Surprisingly – or not, given her academic pedigree – Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in

Jones skirts close, but no cigar, to this notion of narration as an articulation of privacy harm.

Keeping her opinion rooted in the fact that, above all, U.S. v. Jones is a criminal case – i.e., prosecutors and defendant’s assembling and telling opposing stories of guilt and innocence –

Sotomayor sees the surveillance of Jones for what, stripped of Alito’s paeans to a new media age, it really is: A case about collecting, excluding, and allowing evidence. Despite voting for Jones on the narrow grounds that the police, by affixing the GPS to his car, violated his privacy via his private property rights, she still opines, widely, that it was not only Jones’s ability to mount a defense – his ability to tell the story of his innocence – that was necessarily compromised, but his ability to tell a plethora of stories (or, as we would argue, any story) about his self that was taken from him. “GPS monitoring,” Sotomayor tells us, “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” Moreover, and more to our point, she gestures – gesticulating to Alito – towards a bigger picture understanding of the potential harm that the

Archive causes: “’Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips, the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on.” The

55

Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the

future.’”87

Which self is my self? Who is me? We have, then, arrived at precisely the harm of the

technological materiality of digital media, the nexus of The Archive and Interactivity, and the

starting point to rebuild an ethic of post-privacy: the endless potential for re-narration. Narratives

are never innocuous – they are, as narrative theorist James Phelan tells us, always “somebody

telling someone on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened” – and so the

question to ask is: What stories does the materiality of digital media allow, and not allow, us to

tell?88 The easy answer, as we think about the ethos and ethics and potential for harm that these digital selves present, is that what is lost is that most critical aspect of life and self-narration:

Forgetting, or the radicalization of memory. Certainly, trauma theorists (and here we’ll pick

Leigh Gilmore) explain that counter-narrative, counter-memory – acts of “remembering the past differently, through rogue confessions, scandalous memoirs, and an unofficial archive of protest”

– is a critical element of self-definition.89 But that the Archive is all about not-forgetting – and the temporal re-arrangement of the narrative elements of our lives – is obvious. What has been considerably less explored, and is lost in our understanding of these digital selves, is the other aspect of new media materiality: the economic.

The bulk of profitable, user-content driven technologies in the new media era – Twitter,

Facebook, and Gmail, to state the most obvious – are, in the end, coherence making machines.

And they make money by providing – to employers, schools, credit card companies, insurance consortiums, divorce attorneys, etc. and so on – proof that we are being (behaving, living, buying)

87 People v. Weaver, 12 N. Y. 3d 433 (2009) cited by U.S. v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), slip. op. Sotomayor concurrence at 3. 88 See James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1996). 89 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 34. 56

incoherently.90 As sociologists Negt and Kluge explain – helpfully cutting through the interminable historical and theoretical debates – the public versus private sphere tension is better analyzed economically: By considering the “contradiction between the pressure exerted by production interests and the need for legitimation.”91 And what the industries of digital media – social-networking being the most apparent, but certainly not alone – depend upon is not just the eradication of the private – which it enlists us to do – but the (self) policing of the coherent human subject. (Moving targets can neither be monetized nor marketed to.) The irony is that it is precisely authenticity that eradicates the public-private divide in the name of coherence, paving the way for the all-encompassing monetized sphere. The double irony is that it is we who enact it, and thus act – not just existentially, but economically – against our (narrative) self-interest.

Sartre famously lamented the hell of other people. What the new media era – in the name of preserving coherence – presents us is the hell of our self: Our former selves, frozen in digital amber, and played back for all time. Media attention necessarily falls to the most gory examples

– the pregnant teen outed by Target to her father, the Google search for a family name that keeps bringing up pictures of a dead daughter maimed in a car accident, the criminal records, the bad high school photos, the fumbling way in which Facebook assumes you want to be “friends” with the people your ex is having sex with – but this mistakes two critical elements of materiality and new media: (1) The mundane ways in which we are captured and reconfigured as data and (2) that it is not just a question of being endlessly confronted by “past” selves, but future selves as well, selves we do not yet acknowledge or know. Consider: The GPS device on the cell phone that tracks when you are in proximate distance from LinkedIn connections in order to determine who your “real” contacts are, the motion-capture software on the Kinnect that, via analysis of

90 Lori Andrews, I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (New York: Free Press, 2012). 91 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14. 57

your movements and rhythms, knows before you do, that you have MS or ADHD, the purchase

history at the grocery store that tells you whether you are headed for divorce, the Google search

algorithm which understands that, because you search for guitars, you are a credit risk.92

We have, in essence, allowed the economics of digital media to technologically settle the most fundamental existential issue: What it means to be human, what sorts of people do we allow ourselves, our own self and others, to be. Law returns us to the existential importance of what we have lost in our storytelling. Moving beyond the all-too easy realm of criminal defense, we see that the relationship between law and story always has an ideological dimension, with authenticity as the sticking point. Critical legal studies – specifically those scholars interested in issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality (more broadly, those scholars associated with the

1990s “narrative turn” in legal scholarship) – has long recognized power-relationships inherent in the conflict between self-narration and the law: between the stories we want to tell and the stories that the law lets us recognize. Authenticity – as an amorphous virtue of self-expression – logically emerges as the point of resistance, specifically in the cases of defendants, welfare recipients, ADA applicants, and psychiatric patients all forced, in the name of legal strategy, to tell square peg/round hole versions of themselves that they themselves don’t recognize, or even actively resist.93

As a clarifying example – because we think we need one – there is perhaps no clearer case of the nexus of ethos, authenticity, money, and narrative than the issue of gay marriage.

Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, wherein the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the right of same-sex partners to marry, is an easy starting point. While, from a pragmatic perspective, a victory for equal marriage proponents, the rub is that Court premises (here, 14th

92 All examples from Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 93 For an overview, see Aaron McKain, “The Rhetoric of Narrative: What the Law as Narrative Movement Can Teach the Rest of the Narrative Turn,” in Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. eds. Debra Journet, Beth A Boehm, and Cynthia E. Britt (New York: Hampton Press, 2011). 58

Amendment) protections of privacy (and thus gay rights) on the preservation of authenticity as

the sin qua non of the liberal right to self-definition: “whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition”; “the central role that decisions whether to marry…bear in the shaping of one’s identity.” The irony, however, is that in the Court’s judgment, and the justices’ judgments – which are, in terms of ethos, both literal legal pronouncements as well as epideictic pronouncements of community values – the Court necessarily must define these authentic experiences and human relationships for us: Marriage (again quoting Goodridge) becomes the

“ultimate expression of human relations.”94 The same logic carries over at the Supreme Court in

Lawrence v. Texas, wherein – in order to strike down Georgia’s anti-sodomy statute – sodomy, in

order to be upheld as constitutionally protected, is no longer anal or oral sex but, quoting Justice

Kennedy, “acts of love” that “cannot but be…a personal bond that is more enduring.”95 The irony is hard to miss: Why uphold a Constitutional right for citizens, in the name of privacy, to define their own lives authentically – which means, presumably, the right to assign your own symbolic value (or non-value) to your sexual and interpersonal relationships – and then have the

Court not only define these relationships, but codify them in law? The echoes of Foucault are deafening: “We live in a legal, social, and institutional world where the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely simplified, and extremely poor.”96 The assertion, by queer theorists such as Michael Warner and Judith Butler, is that gay partnerships are legitimated (under the rubric of authenticity) precisely because – in their authentic unwieldiness, their incoherence – they are too politically powerful to remain private, unregulated, illegitimate, and un-normalized.97

94 Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003). 95 Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 538 (2003). For more on this critique of Kennedy’s decision, see Marc Spindelman, “Surviving Lawrence,” 102 Michigan Law Review 1615 (2004). 96 Michel Foucault, “Social Triumph of the Sexual Will” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997): 42. 97 For a broader discussion of implications for legally legitimating same-sex marriage, see Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 59

Fran Lebowitz’s bon mot, as usual, makes the academic double-talk not just clear but sparkling:

‘Wasn’t the whole point of being gay that you didn’t have to get married or join the army?”98

That intrusions into the private lives of others are, well, intrusive is a pedestrian point.

But these legal judgments on gay marriage help us think in different terms about what exactly is being intruded and trampled upon when our considerations of ethos, couched in authenticity, ask us to pierce the skin of the public and private. And rather than think in terms of the privacy rights of autonomous individuals that are being violated, perhaps it is useful to think in terms of the rhetorical relationships between humans that are being compromised. Thinking back to Burke, and his view of rhetoric as the constant search for the right symbol to make interpersonal communication work, we see how our judgments and definitions (even well-meaning ones like

“love” or “marriage”) can stagnate and potentially fray the fragile rhetorical bonds of others’

“authentic” human connections, the fine rhetorical webs we spin and re-spin every day to negotiate the marriages of convenience, divorces of decided inconvenience, needful sexual drives, dying spouses, friendships, and dissertation committees that constitute our daily rhetorical lives.

Considering a schematic that respects the protection of these ongoing relationships, rather than the protection of the sanctity of the public/private divide, might be a step toward a new standard of ethos for a new media era when, given the materiality and the surveillance realities of technology, the public/private divide is increasingly irrelevant.

So how do we update our judgments of ethos given the interworkings of the materiality of digital media, the Archive and Interactivity, and the loss of our ability to self-narrate? How do we upgrade from the new media era to the digital media age and figure out how to enact incoherence as a way of understanding our digital – political, professional, and private – lives?

Mitt Romney – existential and economic embodiment of the crisis of ethos as coherence

– helps us to see where we are headed, by looking at back and what, for him, didn’t work.

98 Martin Scorsese, Public Speaking, New York, HBO Documentary Films, 2010. 60

To begin, there is the irony that Romney – self-made captain of the venture capital industry – is still unable to control his own narrative. Despite his fortune, despite the arsenal of

Super PACS and the RNC, Romney still cannot escape the brute fact that, while Facebook and

Google (and surely some app hiding in your Droid) markets our selves to others, the materiality –

economic and technological – of the new media era makes it impossible for us to coherently

market ourselves. This is the true irony of Romney’s market based approach to politics. The

MBA candidate, the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Romney is inherently, as David Brooks has dubbed it, “other directed”: He is interested, instinctively, in what will sell to a particular audience, and what that particular audience wants.99 (If 51% of voters in Massachusetts want gay marriage, he is for gay marriage; if 49% of Republican primary voters don’t want gay marriage, he doesn’t want it.) Ignoring the question of whether such an approach to politics is ethically desirable (which is seemingly a referendum on direct versus representative democracy), what is clear is that the coherence gaffe makes market politics impossible. And so, through both of his primary seasons (and with the Tea Party lurking on the sidelines), Romney finds himself confronting candidates who have embraced what has emerged as the primary defense against the incessant incoherence of the Archive and interactivity (but which the materiality of the new media era makes impossible): Ideological purity.

Moving beyond the issue of how American politics deals with ethos (which we will pick up again in Exhibit C), there is the existential – the human – element to attend to. Romney – regardless of how much we actually believe or do not believe his conversion on abortion (and gay marriage, and the Detroit bail-out, and so on and so forth) – becomes an interesting case if we elect to believe, for the sake of argument, that he did believe these things. If he did believe that he formerly supported the murder of unborn children – for if you are “powerfully pro-life,” what other conclusion could you draw – wouldn’t it be traumatic to be confronted with the horrorshow

99 David Brooks, “The Crowd Pleaser,” New York Times, February 9, 2012. 61

of your former self? What Romney, unsympathetic as he is, helps us to see is how coherence, by eradicating the distinctions between the public/private/professional/political spheres – has metastasized, and left us trapped in, one omnipresent monetized sphere of information that increasingly makes any non-economic consideration of ethos impossible. To begin to figure out how we resist this regime, and begin supporting an ethos of allowed incoherence, we turn to our next Chapter, and to Fleckenstein’s second criteria fluidity, to compare two unlikely competitors

(or are they partners?): posthumanism and the narrative model of communication.

62

CHAPTER 2 (THEORY INTERLUDE): A CYBORG, WAYNE BOOTH, AND A DISSERTATION WALK INTO A BAR

“I’ve got this fear that one day the computers are going to be hooked up to the phones are going to be hooked up to the stereos are going to be hooked up to the appliances and at that point we’re not going to be individuals anymore: We’re just going to be that part of our home entertainment system that shits and eats.” – Marc Maron100

Who is the Aaron McKain that is – or rather, which of the Aaron McKains are – speaking to you right now?

Within the niche genre of digital media scholarship – or even digital media pedagogy – it’s hard to imagine a more hack premise with which to start a chapter. After all, we have just explored, in Exhibit B, and with the help of Mitt Romney, how the technological materiality of digital media multiplies our “selves” that are living, forever, in The Archive while simultaneously, thanks to the inherent interactivity of digital media, eradicating our control

(political, existential) over them. But this chapter – a “Theory Interlude” (a.k.a., a more or less inside-baseball academic exegesis of disciplinary debates within the digital humanities) – will begin to articulate how, via a narrative model of communication, we can begin to realign our judgments of ethos as character so as to dodge the new media era’s reliance on authenticity (the perils of which were detailed, once again, in Exhibit B) and ground our standards of judgment in a critical stance more appropriate to a digital media age. (It will also, just as a head’s up, and in an attempt to keep your reading, reckon with posthumanism, the academy’s prevailing account of ethos in the new media

100 Marc Maron, “Out Technologize, Over Informatised, Time Vats,” in Tickets Still Available (Comedy Death Ray Records, 2007). 63

era, and use the occasion to bridge complementary conversations in narrative theory and

composition studies on the contemporary status of ethos.) Given all of this, the hack premise –

‘Who is this guy trying to convince you to buy any of these arguments about ethos?’ – works about as well as anything. Because, and of course, if you wanted to figure out who “Aaron

McKain” is, you – 21st century new media citizen – would head to said internet Archive, and, via the omnipresent Google search, you would find (lo and behold and gasp!) a collection of incoherent (another key word from Exhibit B) selves. So which me is me?

Is it this Aaron McKain, the one who (apparently) writes overly precious academic self- descriptions on English Department websites (“works in the forgotten crossroads of rhetorical production, technology, and democratic theory” – this is a grown man, right?)? Or maybe this

other Aaron McKain, the one that, somehow, was grabbing Ohio taxpayer loot – according to

public interest watchdogs – for being an “Executive Communications Specialist” (whatever that

is; some Aaron McKains still aren’t so sure)? Is it that jackass in purple vinyl pants parading

around on MySpace and Lincoln Journal Star articles in half-baked art-rock bands (Johnny

Rocket Science? [“like watching Pere Ubu, Rocket From the Tombs, and the Patti Smith Group

all retardedly play Sun Ra,” says the only good review.] and B.O.K.A.R.R. [“The Business of

Kick Ass Rock and Roll”])? Tell me our Aaron McKain isn’t the jackass singing Christina

Aguilera karaoke on YouTube? Tell me it isn’t the one whining about corporate welfare at the

Nebraska State Legislature, or bitching about property taxes and Senator Mike Johanns? Is it the

high school state debate champ Aaron McKain (or is it the rugby playing Aaron McKain)? Let’s

hope to Christ, since we are already sixty-some pages into this book, that it’s not Google’s second

hit on 3/26/12: The Charles Manson-looking asshole writing sub-par proto-conservative Dennis

Miller rants for The Daily Nebraskan. (Which, while we’re at it: if it’s the “Beatle-booted

hipster” whose such a snob that writer Joe Oestrich compares his party-foul carousing of a CD

64

collection to “watching him have sex with my wife,” then I think we just have to stop reading, if

not throw up.)

And so on and so on and so on. And this list (and as we learned in Exhibit B) is absolute

100% bullshit, in both an existential and technological sense: Precisely the sort of self-selecting,

self-serving – and putridly cutesy – self-narration of ethos as character that the materiality of

digital media no longer allows. Which brings us to our new question: given that we are no longer

in control of our own ethos, but – via our judgments – in control of each others’, how do we

determine a new standard of thinking about this relationship in terms of power, ethics, and

possibility? This brings us to Krista Fleckenstein’s second standard for reconfiguring ethos to

kick us out of the new media era: fluidity.

An attempt to acknowledge “the need to discern the fluid, dynamic, and constructed

nature of ethos and identity in new media contexts in which we are both producer and produced,”

fluidity is a means to reckon with the materiality of digital media. 101 The interactive

technologies of digital media point to certain obvious “new media contexts in which we are both

producer and produced” – Photoshop, rudimentary remix software, etc. – but, thanks to The

Archive and interactivity, fluidity actually occurs infinitely more often in a more under the radar and low tech way: via judgment and interpretation. In other words, “new media contexts” make inescapably true – and as apparent as a post to a frenemy’s Facebook wall – what was always true about the Chinese finger-cuff logic of ethos: We are all in charge of, and symbiotically responsible for, each other’s ethos and character. Which raises a much larger question (also of ethos): What sorts of people do we want to allow each other to be?

101 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, "Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: The Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly," in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 340.

65

In a practical way, this brings us back to our original question: Who is this Aaron

McKain speaking to you know? Because You, the reader, can make Aaron McKain into whoever you want him to be. You can buy the bullshit self-presentation poorly articulated three paragraphs above, or you can creep just a bit more on Facebook pages and blog posts and find decidedly hyper-politic remarks and decidedly impolitic jokes (particularly when Irish bartending brothers and high school mook friends are involved), or dig just a bit deeper on Google’s public algorithm and find arrest records and weird geographic re-locations, or if you are an employer, an insurance company, a bank and so on – you can just say screw it, go whole hog, and find those

Aaron McKains lurking behind credit histories, anything written in Gmail, cookies that Amazon throws on all purchases, and browser searches, which inevitably reveal medical histories, marital statuses, so on and so on and so on, yet again. There is no end to these ostensible bits of data and history – forever frozen in The Archive’s protean juxtaposition of narrative past-present-future – which you can choose to re-arrange and re-tell into a version of coherence that makes my presentations of self – even now, in this dry academic treatise – incoherent, a gaffe, a marker of unreliability, a failure of ethos as character.

That’s the practical way in which fluidity binds you and I – producer and produced – in a series of choices (unthinkingly ad hoc, or painstakingly thought-out) and judgments. And this is the problem in the new media era. All acts of interpretation, to repeat English Studies’ favorite chalkboard mantra, are acts of politics. And, as we have already seen, digital media inherently provides no guidance on how you should choose your interpretations, while the materiality of digital media and American politics (hung up on authenticity) certainly do. But you don’t have to follow these rules of ethos as coherence. And so our question of ethos – and how to update it – becomes necessarily a question of should. Which in terms of ethos and the presentation of “the” self, is a question of coherence, and who gets to determine it. What principles of ethos should

66

guide our judgments of each other? If we are inextricably responsible for each other, what sorts of people should we aspire to be, and what sorts of people have we become?

To which the academy – particularly those corners of the campus now congealed under the umbrella “digital humanities”– have provided an answer: We are posthuman. And to which, and this is the crux of this Theory Interlude, we have a question – if we agree with the posthuman, how do we enact it? How do we incorporate it’s insights into a heuristic of rhetorical judgment that is both in keeping with the actual material and aesthetic realities of digital media and that allows us to see the values our judgments of character commit us to? Our answer: via the narrative model of communication. Which brings us to our advocacy for a very unlikely candidate for a posthuman model of judgment, Wayne Booth’s implied author.

Wayne Booth, the Posthuman, and the New Media Era Walk Into a Bar…

All acts of interpretation are acts of politics. And all acts of politics – like all conceptions of ethos – have to change with the times. And back in 1961, Wayne Booth – rhetorical critic, committed Aristotelian (and disciple of committed Aristotelian R.S. Crane), and unflappable humanist champion – faced a dilemma. His interpretive method was being overshadowed by the age’s dominant paradigm: New Criticism.

Teaching literature and argument at the height of this theoretical orthodoxy – which, in order to lend literary analysis a quasi-scientific method, severed both the author’s intention and the audience’s reaction from the study of texts – Booth saw that his own rhetorical approach to literature, which used a reader’s reactions to a piece to trace back the stylistic and narrative elements that the author put in place to evoke them, was increasingly marginalized in the face of a dominant methodology that pinned poems and novels to the blackboard like butterfly wings,

67

applied analytic formaldehyde, and dissected the formal structures that lay beneath. 102 But what

Booth contributes to our investigation of ethos in the new media era is his typically overlooked – and, when looked at, typically misunderstood – approach to authorial intention.103 Mindful of what the New Critics got right (namely, their claim that intention was both impossible to divine and, even worse, led to scholarship as private detective work, with students and professors rooting around authors’ diary pages, discarded drafts, letters to mistresses/gentlemen callers, and other literary garbage pails for scraps of evidence), what Booth found was a way to dodge the intentionalist fallacy while still preserving a rhetorical inroad to the study of texts. Rather than attempting to untie this Gordian knot, he tried to split it with a theoretical construct – a method of interpretive imagining – he called the “implied author.”

What the implied author is – how it works, and how Booth responded to the (many) arguments against it – is one part of the larger argument this chapter will make. But, first, we must address the, admitted, strangeness of our approach. Presented with the problem of accounting for the fluidity and materiality of ethos in the new media era, it is odd to claim that a solution lurks in perhaps the most un-new, un-digital debate imaginable: a sixty-year old argument in literary studies over the status of intention and the politics of authorship. But our contention is that Booth (or at least his method) was a man (and method) perhaps out of its own time. All acts of interpretation are, again, acts of politics. And while at odds with the New

Critics (and equally at odds – as we will see in a moment – with the post-structuralist revolution

102 The primary texts here are, of course, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468-488 and William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” Sewanne Review 57 (1949): 31-55. The history of the New Criticism has been recounted (and recounted, like a hanging chad in Broward County). For two of the best recountings – in terms of the contemporary study of rhetoric – see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) or James Berlin, Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996). For a brief overview of how Booth, and the Chicago critics, figure in contemporary rhetorical studies, see Aaron McKain, “Rhetoric,” Encyclopedia of the Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011). 103 For a history of the reception of Booth, and the implied author in particular, see Tom Kindt and Hans- Harald Mueller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). 68

that followed them), Booth’s narrative as rhetoric approach to interpretation may now be oddly

prescient as digital media begins to unravel debates about intention and agency that were long

thought over and won within the humanities. 104 The punch line is that Wayne Booth, committed humanist and Aristotelian, may have developed a toolkit to enact the posthuman.

So what is the posthuman?

The posthuman starts with a simple story: People don’t use machines – and machines don’t use people – people and machines use each other in a symbiotic ballet of mutual, and recursive, construction. This, given the materiality of digital media, is a hard premise to deny, doubly so since it is the foundational premise of fluidity (i.e., and remember: discerning ethos in digital media contexts where we are “producer and produced”). What gives posthumanism legs, however, is that it quickly lends itself to a reconfiguration of agency that amounts to a rethinking of everything we think about knowledge and humanity. And so, rather than paraphrase, we may as well present it pure and uncut, and go to the posthuman’s most-cited mothership, Katherine

Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999). In one fairly spectacular paragraph, Hayles presents a virtual mini-manifesto on the project of virtuality:

But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self. When Moravec imagines ‘you’ choosing to download yourself into a computer, thereby obtaining through technological mastery the ultimate privilege of immortality, he is not abandoning the autonomous liberal subject but is expanding its prerogatives into the realm of the posthuman. Yet the posthuman need not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor need it be construed as anti-human. Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the

104 For just one of the, increasingly popular, rollbacks, see Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 69

articulation of humans within intelligent machines [emphasis mine]. 105

Since we are in no position of ethos to argue against the posthuman – Assistant Professor of English at small liberal arts school trying to finish their dissertation doesn’t grease many intellectual palms with publishers or the MLA – we’ve caught a lucky break: Rather than standing terrified before Hayles’ paragraph, we think it’s true. For twenty years, scholars in the digital humanities have been writing about ethos in the shift from a mass media to a new media era and arguing that it requires a fundamental re-making of, to quote the New London Group from way back in the 1990s, “new kinds of people.”106 Taken seriously, this necessarily entails, no matter how hyperbolic it seems put into stark black and white, a reconsideration of the nature of the human, the Enlightenment, the role of technology in human subject-ization, every attendant epistemological, ontological, and ethical paradigm that leans upon the autonomous liberal humanist subject as its bedrock premise, and that’s just on Day One. Which brings us two, very strange phenomena: First, the ease with which academics are willing to commit the most anachronistic literary artifacts (i.e., The Office, depictions of disability in The Faerie Queene) and

the most practical pedagogical strategies (i.e., the teaching of technical communication) to the

radical paradigm shift toward the posthuman. Second, the undeniable lack of scholarly attention

to how, if you buy the posthuman, you are supposed to teach or enact it.

Our contention is that a narrative model of communication provides such an understanding, and an obvious place to begin updating our standards for ethos. But our advocacy also involves a different mode of argument: Approaching theory not in terms of philosophy or hermeneutics, but – acknowledging that interpretation is politics – as a question of aesthetics, of what understandings of the world an interpretive heuristic makes more and less available.

105 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 287. 106 The New London Group, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review 60, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 60. 70

This is an argument that – in practice – is less odd than in looks on face. And so, spelling out the arc of our argument, we see two big picture moves: First, given that fluidity begins with the premise that the distinction between producer and produced (artist and critic, speaker and audience) are collapsed, we start by interlinking two corners of the digital humanities, currently standing too far apart (even if they are often housed in the same English Department):

Composition studies and narrative theory. Second, using the IA as a lens, we will examine how the posthuman has been conceptualized in order to see if there are alternative ways to enact and envision its articulation of ethos in a digital age and then, vice versa and using the posthuman as a lens, we will intervene in debates about the implied author, both to clarify the device itself and to argue for its value given the fluidity and materiality of digital media. Organizationally, we will proceed along the three trajectories, the three primary standards for the posthuman that Hayles establishes, and our contentions are (put into quick and dirty shorthand) as follows:

• The digital divide: The “end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may

have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure

to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings.” Our argument: The predominant

conceptualization of the posthuman – the cyborg metaphor – is counterintuitive and

misdirecting given the emerging understanding of the materiality of digital media in

ontological versus technological terms.

• The liberal humanist subject: “What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the

grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self.” Our argument:

Given the inherent fluidity of digital media – where we all are at once producers and

produced – merely enunciating the “decenteredness” of the human is not enough, and the

posthuman currently leans too heavily on the already accepted post-structuralist and

deconstructive articulations of the post-liberal humanist subject.

71

• Aesthetics of enaction: “Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and

grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the posthuman

offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans within intelligent machines.”107

This last point is trickier, and bears some explanation. We agree with Hayles that

“articulation” is the key word. Aesthetics, as James Berlin and Kenneth Burke have long told us, create the fabric of the reality – the sensibilities – that we live in and respond to.108 Or, more helpfully for our immediate purposes, aesthetics create, for Jacques Ranciere, the “distribution of the sensible”: the “ways of doing and making” that create a shared, common sense of “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.”109

There is a larger argument here about the relations between aesthetics and rhetoric, but – since we will ultimately be working toward a synthesis we dub “rhetorical aesthetics” that takes into account the blurred role of critic/artist that fluidity demands – let’s table this complication for the moment.)

We thus stumble upon a strange problem: The posthuman isn’t wrong, it – along with the other descendents of Foucault and Derrida – is now too right, so exact in its diagnosis of digital media’s affordances of agency that it is, from a critical perspective, invisible. If the purpose of critical theory is to illuminate new ways of seeing the world, new avenues of praxis – to cite

Shklovsky’s useful, if overused, maxim of defamiliarization: to show how our reified understanding “devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war” – how do we construct a new model of ethos that respects fluidity while also critically engaging with it?110

And if our articulations of the posthuman aren’t meaningfully updated and adjusted – if, in the

107 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287 108 See James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996) and Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkley: University of California Press, 1966). 109 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum Press, 2004). 110 Victor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 12. 72

status quo, they don’t meaningfully differ from the articulations of fluidity that have dominated

literary and pedagogical theories for the past two decades, nor differ from the articulations of fluidity inherent in the material reality of digital media – could the new media era become the beginning of the end of the story of the critical turn in the humanities?

I. None of Them Knew They Were Robots: Materiality, Metaphors, and the Posthuman

“My cyborg was not a celebratory, blissed out wired bunny.” – Donna Haraway111

Given its longstanding status as a campus pioneer in technology-augmented communication (not simply in its advocacy of multi-modal and non-alphabetic composition, but, as commonplace as it might be in 2012, in its insistence in installing computers in the classroom), it is little surprise that Composition Studies became an early adopter of the posthuman. As

Cynthia Selfe tells us, extending her longstanding (anti-utopian) argument about technology and pedagogy, “[m]any young people – although certainly not all of them – are already reading, composing, and exchanging multimodal texts in digital environments, although not always with a critical understanding of the implications and consequences of their own literacy values and practices.” 112 Dealing with students directly, and thus bearing the brunt of the digital divide and

developing pedagogies for those students born digital but lacking critical literacy, it only makes

sense that fluidity –- ways in which digital media always encodes the brute fact that we are

always, in terms of ethos, “producer and produced” – became a pedagogical imperative.113 And if

111 Quoted in Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills, The Politics of Information (Alt-X Press, 2003), 5. 112 Cynthia Selfe, “Paying Attention to Digital Media,” in Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities Pedagogies, and Social Action, eds. Kristine L. Blair, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley(New York: Hampton Press, 2008), 256-257. 113 See Cynthia Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); The New London Group, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review, 60, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 60. See also, Barbara Warnick, Critical Literacy in a Digital Age (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002). 73

– as Danielle DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe tell us [via a sprinkling of Brunto Latour]

– we compose in a “living” technological ecology wherein “human and non-human actors, people

and machines, interact in a dynamic way—each influencing and changing the other,” we have a question:114 What does the posthuman look like? To which composition studies, emblematic of posthuman adopters across the campus, have a clear answer: The cyborg.

If there is a central metaphor that has come to dominate discussions of the posthuman, it is almost certainly the cyborg. Catalyzed by Katherine Hayles’s conceptualizations (to wit the

“Life Cycle of Cyborgs” or My Mother Was a Computer) or Donna Haraways’s “Cyborg

Manifesto,” the cyborg, as anyone combing through the syllabi and journal articles of composition studies can tell you, is now everywhere: Interfacing with MySpace and IPhone; interfacing – to further time-stamp the metaphor’s longevity – with MOOs and MUDs; coming at us racialized, differently-abled, bionically-politicized, and, above all (a tribute to Haraway) gendered.115 As Selfe herself summarizes, in her introduction to Plugged In: Technology,

Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age, the cyborg-as-posthuman connection is now so firmly

soldered that all we can see is “[t]he cyborgs we always were and that we always are.”116

That the cyborg would emerge as the predominant metaphor for the posthuman makes a certain bit of sense. As we make the shift from the new media era to the digital media age, however, and attempt to update our standard of judging ethos as character in our networked environments, the question arises: How do we best articulate the posthuman as a critical rubric for students and citizens? How do we ensure that the posthuman, a giant concept, occupying an immense swath of intellectual landscape, is translatable to students and citizens? And it is here

114 Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, eds., Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2009). 115 N. Katherine Hayles, “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York: Routledge, 1996). See also: N Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subject and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 116 Cynthia Selfe, “Foreward,” in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age. eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (New York: Hampton Press, 2008). 74

that the cyborg perhaps falls short. If, as Cynthia Selfe warns us, our pedagogies and critical orthodoxies must avoid myths of technological panaceas, we need to consider a new possibility:

Given the posthuman’s stated goal of dealing with the digital divide, and of keeping alive the spirit of “technological non-mastery,” the cyborg may zig precisely when it should zag, focusing our attention on technology when our emphasis, given our new ontological understandings of the materiality of the new media era, should be critical literacy.

Our first step is to crack open the chassis of the posthuman’s prevailing metaphor – the cyborg – to ask the obvious question: As a way of thinking about ethos and digital media, does the cyborg still make sense?

A. Would Electric Sheep Really Still Dream of Androids?

On the one hand, it isn’t hard to see how the cyborg conceptualization of the posthuman originally took hold: Part and parcel of the sci-fi playbook put in place by William Gibson and

Blade Runner, the self-actualized robot/human (isn’t the point that we no longer know the fluid distinction?), following the revolutionary script, rises to rebel against the pernicious (to quote

Marc Bousquet, quoting Haraway) “expanding informatics of domination.” 117 And while all tropes and articulations – even good ones – eventually grow cold, die, and reify, in the case of the cyborg-posthumanism connection, this is not – in the new media era – a case of small-potatoes or academic nomenclature-sniping. As Jaron Lanier – Silicon Valley .dot com guru turned post-new media critic – warns us (in the, not surprisingly, titled You Are Not a Gadget), “lock in” – acquiescence to a particular conception of human life rendered invisible by the omnipresence and seeming inevitability of a given technology (i.e., the “file,” the procrustean MIDI-ization of all music, the lag-time between human reflex and programmed keyboard response) – is the primary

117 Bousquet and Wills, The Politics of Information, 25 75

fight in a critical digital media age.118 And the problem with the cyborg metaphor is that, while it

was once an illuminative image anticipating the new media era, today, economically and

ontologically, it articulates the needs – the needed ethos – of the digital media age exactly

backwards.

The digital divide issue is the easiest place to start. After all, if the problem of ethos in the

21st century is the inhumanness of the corporate/capitalist/consumerist regimes of data and digital debris and their, for Mark Poster, “agglomerations of power,” why insist on the cyborg as the main mode of resistance? 119 This is what was always so peculiar about Hayles and co.’s embrace

of the cyborg, given posthumanism’s stated mission of “moving beyond an information economy

that only enfranchises that “fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to

conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency

and choice.”120 Why tie agency to gadgetry – why hinge, even by association, praxis on the quixotic accumulation of gadgetry and built-in obsolescence (G2, G3, G4, the Flip-cam, Flash,

IPhone ver. 2-4 [just to name a few technologies that have died in the course of writing this dissertation])? Stanley Harrison, while pontificating on his daily classroom confrontations with students covered in electronic appendages and appliances and doo-dads, nails this connection, demanding, with all appropriate piss, vinegar, and punk-rock grace, that we must “begin immediately” to “teach [our new] student cyborg writers how to intervene in their subject formation at the level of software so that they might learn to participate in the counter-hegemonic manufacture of a cyborg self that is not, at one and the same time, a living commodity.”121 An

excellent point, and one we applaud. But one that begs an obvious question: Why the hell not

start by not calling them cyborgs?

118 See Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadet: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). 119 Mark Poster, “The Information Empire,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 317-334. 120 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287. 121 Stanley Harrison, “Our Cyberbodies, Our Selves,” in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 41. 76

We see two reasons. The first is that, in the absence of an alternative metaphor for the posthuman, bailing on the cyborg runs the risk of resurrecting the non-viable option: Pretending that “mastery” over technology, a stubborn embrace of autonomous “humanness,” is a path of resistance – a fix for our commodification – in the new media era. The more compelling reason

is predicated on a better understanding of how the materiality of digital media has, in terms of

ethos, moved beyond the materiality of the digital divide: There are, in the posthuman sense, no

longer any techno-have’s, just those still operating under the illusion of technological autonomy.

The major failing of the cyborg, and the reason why (as we shift from the new media era to the

digital media age) its moment has past, is that, while ostensibly about not venerating technology,

it unavoidably does so, and in such a way that it does not recognize (or make recognizable) the

shift from a material understanding of digital media to an ontological one.

As Lev Manovich told us long, long ago – in “The Database as a Symbolic Form,” the

precursor to Language of New Media – the “general principle of new media” is the “projection of

the ontology of a computer onto culture itself. If in physics the world is made of atoms and in

genetics it is made of genes, computer programming encapsulates the world according to its own

logic.”122 More recently, Mindy Fenske makes the same claim, arguing that we must move from

“virtuality” to more holistic, “embodied” understandings of the performance of the self in digital media 123 An argument that is echoed by Hayles and Haraway. The point is: new media isn’t

new anymore: It is precisely the fetishization of particular technologies and texts (the screen, the

circuit, the cell phone – versus the body, the book, the graffiti tag) that is indicative of a false

consciousness about how digital media affects ethos. All elements are implicated together in a

new understanding of the world. When MySpace is really all space, when new media and old, the

virtual and the real, are knit into one cultural political reality, then it is time to take the next step

122 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence 5, no. 2 (1999). 123 Mindy Fenske, "The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (January 2004): 6. 77

in the posthuman project: Making good on the posthuman’s critical insight that the digital realm

is no longer separable from the “physical” realm, that they are implicated and imbricated into a

porous media-ecology, an aesthetic fabric of the sensible, one that new media is now an indelible, but not separable, part of.

So what might a new aesthetic of ethos – of posthumanism – look like? Twenty years later, Hayles’ advocation that the posthuman

offers resources for thinking in more sophisticated ways about the virtual technologies… as long as the human subject is envisioned as an autonomous self with ambiguous boundaries, the human-computer interface can only be parsed as a division between the solidity of real life on the one side and the illusion of virtual reality on the other, thus obscuring the far- reaching changes initiated by the development of virtual technologies remains a revolutionary insight into the cyborg logic that technology was asking us to inhabit.124

But today, her prescription that “extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways…would be impossible without electronic prosthesis [emphasis mine]” seems out of step and misplaced as a counter-hegemonic strategy of the sensible. What if our infatuation with the materiality of the machine (an investigative instinct that carries over from

McLuhan and Bolter and Grusin and Lev Manovich and is cryogenically encased in the self- anachronizing term “new media”) now stands in the way if we are interested in operationalizing the posthuman, and thus finding new ways to negotiate our selves in the cyber-society that the posthuman gave birth to?

Utilizing the criteria of aesthetics of enaction allows us to not only make comparisons between competing theories of the posthuman, but to do so in a way that makes impossible the severing of theory from practice, of once upon a time politics from current possibilities. And it brings us – finally – to our experiment. What if the posthuman ethos is not the cyborg, but – in keeping with posthumanism’s sci-fi predilections, Neo, the human who has become more than human, able to negotiate the multiple, interconnected ontological fluidities that the Matrix of the

124 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 291. 78

new media era throws our way, all the while emerging as a more-enlightened, post-Enlightenment

entity. And what no one probably saw coming – and I’m guessing few are going to buy – is that

perhaps this new ethos doesn’t lie in a post-Marxist encomium to networked, simulacric complexity, or in a Pynchon-esque pile-up of synonyms for circuits and cyborgs, hardware, and wetware, but, perhaps, we can find it in a dusty old rhetorical concept, born of an age of typewriters and mimeographs, conceived as an aid to Jane Austen and Henry James: that catalytic convertor of the narrative model of communication, Wayne Booth’s much beleaguered implied author.

B. Ghosts in the Machine: Us and The Implied Author

So what is the implied author?

After forty years of debate and fluctuating levels of critical acceptance, explaining the implied author, and what we, in 2012, can do with it, is more easily managed by explaining what the implied author is not. It is not the “flesh and blood author,” the pile of sinews and skin and twitches of fingers and cerebellum that sat down at a typewriter or quill to bang out The Tempest or Beloved. Nor is it the Shakespeare who may or may not have written The Tempest, the Philip

Roth who presumably checks his mail for sexual harassment lawsuits, or the Aaron McKain that is typing this sentence right now. It is also, within the realm of fictional texts, not the narrator of the story: neither Holden Caulfield, nor Humbert Humbert, nor the omniscient, proselytizing, chatterbox connecting the scenes of Middlemarch or The Dukes of Hazard. In fact, although

Booth called it a “second self,” the implied author is not a person at all.125 It’s a dialogically constructed agentive entity created by the sum of the author’s choices and the audience’s interpretive practices.

125 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 83. 79

Ok, fine. But let’s say we want to use the thing – or even want to believe that the IA exists, or want to see whether or not the IA is a useful heuristic for interpretation. We then have a new question: Where, or how, do we find the implied author?

This is the question that has infuriated three generations of literary critics, many of whom

see the implied author (IA) as something of a shell game, a Rube Goldberg device designed by

Booth to slide his readings of canonical texts under the ropes of intentionalism and reader-

response theory.126 Is the IA the same as the flesh-and-blood author, and thus just a deferral to the author’s presumed intentions? Or is it merely a product of the text, and thus solely the product of the reader’s interpretive projections? The answer is neither. (Or both, which, as we’ll see, may amount to the same thing.) And we find this answer – and begin to trace out the connections between the IA and the posthuman – by attending to what many IA detractors (as well as adopters) never got quite right: (1) the IA is not a thing, but a process; (2) it takes into account the dialogic fluidity of agency by granting it to the IA via judgments of ethos as character.

The first argument is James Phelan’s. While for Booth the implied author is the audience’s “intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole,” for Phelan, Chicago School rhetorical critic and longtime IA defender, the IA is an “actual or purported subset of the real author‘s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other properties that play an active role in the construction of the particular text.” 127 Above all, however, Phelan argues that the IA is an interpretive process. Rather than depositing agency in either authors or audiences (or presuming these entities are pre- or arhetorical constructs), the IA exists as part of a “feedback loop”: a circuit – an inescapable hermeneutic circle – between authors and texts and readers. Particular

126 For perhaps the strongest critique of the implied author along these lines, see Ansgar Nunning, “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 127 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 73. James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 45. 80

implied authors – whether “you” or “me” or “Mitt Romney” – cannot exist but for the audiences that create them, and vice versa. Implied authors are never the sole product of a flesh-and-blood initiator (the speechwriter, the candidate, the comedian) but are summoned into existence, co- actively, by their audience. This intersubjective process, we contend, makes the implied author not really an author at all, in any conventional sense, but the ethos – the agentive, anthropomorphized ethos – produced by author-audience interaction. (To be a bit wonkier, but more precise: the IA is the agentive, anthropomorphized ethos produced by the text, as the cause of the text: The thing which brought the text – and itself – into existence, while in the process creating the audience exactly insofar as the audience allows it to create itself.)

Ergo:

(flesh & blood author)  implied author  [“text”]  implied audience  (flesh & blood audience)

Figure 1. Narrative Model of Communication

Put into the simplest terms, what the IA begins to paint is a primitive sketch of the narrative model of communication, with the flesh-and-blood author and the flesh-and-blood audience standing on opposite sides of a text, looking at each other over and through the chasm of communication, that glorious refractory reservoir and graveyard of symbol, language, and medium. What is clear is that the “real” audience and the “real” author will never see or know each other. As a matter of ethos, rhetorical entities do not pre-exist: an “Aaron McKain” or a

“Mitt Romney” or a “Wayne Booth” do not come into being prior to their involvement in the orgiastic entanglements of rhetorical exchange. Nor is the implied McKain, Romney, or Booth somehow less real than their “flesh-and-blood” doppelganger. Quite the opposite: We have no

81

access – as poststructuralist accounts of language have long foretold– to the “real,” “authentic,” pre-rhetorical, pre-mediated flesh-and-blood person. We only have access – via rhetorical exchange along the implied author-ideal audience nexi – to the intersubjective ethos that we collectively create. They are what is real – rhetorically – because they are what is communicatively acted upon.

This intersubjective process, perpetually distributing and redistributing who has the authority to judge and assign ethos as character, is the key to our connection of the IA to posthumanism and our presentation of the IA as a superior – in that it captures and better articulates its insights for the materiality of the digital age – account of ethos. And the key advantage is precisely what made the IA so maddening to literary critics: it doesn’t exist.

Let’s break this down point by point. If the point of the posthuman – one of them at least

– was to move beyond the digital divide (and its pretense of technological mastery), the IA (a portable heuristic of judgment, a pedagogy about ethos and judgment) holds clear advantage over the cyborg. More substantively, if, as Hayles tells us (but in this case, Fenske makes more clear), our current discourses about body, technology, and performance reproduce the dialectic of the real and the virtual without “reproducing a binary and unidirectional relationship wherein humans either act upon technology (in order to assert agency) or technology acts upon humans (a sign of loss of agency),” then the IA’s feedback loop – its dialogic process of interpretation as ethos creation – makes the pretense to either form of unidirectional agency impossible.”128 Lastly, and most importantly, if we must begin to recognize the materiality of digital media ontologically, and if the point of the posthuman project is to protect people from domination via information, the IA carves out the only possible space for ethos: Neither data, nor flesh, but something other, something decidedly non-material, something posthuman.

128 Fenske, “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished,” 6. 82

II. Everyday Posthuman People: Fluidity, IA, and Articulating Agency

So what does the posthuman look like stripped of its cyborg shell?

Here, Cary Wolfe’s recent, and on the path to becoming definitive, account of the

posthuman – the surprisingly titled: What is Posthumanism? – gives us guidance. Laying out

perhaps the most naked case for the posthuman imaginable – stripping the concept not only of

paeans to technology but of the proper nouns of tech-culture that populate Apple stores and Best

Buy Black Friday doorbusters – Wolfe cracks open the chassis of the cyborg metaphor and ends

up exposing the posthuman’s gears and guts in an argument-cum-mission statement that distills

the concept down to

…a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them upon us), a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repression of fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historical specific phenomena.129

By design or not, Wolfe has done us quite a favor. For what is unique about his championing of the posthuman is how he quietly strips away all of the typical “transhuman” futurism – the paranoid/emancipatory embrace of the cyborg, the Blade Runner meets David

Cronenberg infatuation with the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace versus the ‘meat’ of the body”

– and makes the most bare bones case for the posthuman: the “decentering of the human,” the end of “humanism as a historically specific phenomena.” But therein lies the riddle and the rub:

Boiled down to a “decentering of the human,” as Wolf skeletally frames it, what is the

posthuman, in the end, but simply the longstanding suspicion in the humanities about the liberal

humanist subject, a premise that has been kicked around since the day Derrida crash landed in

Connecticut and Foucault wrote his way out of the asylum. It’s a premise that – in Composition

Studies (let alone English Studies) – has been (when not explicitly adopted and lobbied for) at

129 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xvi. 83

least acknowledged and paid lip service to in nearly every tenure line granted since the days of

answering machines, Atari, and Nintendo NES..

This is an ad hominem point, to be sure. But it points to our primary concern in this section: How best to articulate a posthuman ethos which, as Hayles tells us, “need not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor need…be construed as anti-human.” The issue is

how best to negotiate the tight – if not asphyxiating – fit between the “decentering” of the human

that the posthuman wants to articulate and the fluidity (our status as always/already producer and

produced) that is not only definitionally inherent in the materiality of digital media, but

unavoidably apparent to anyone who cares to look. And the problem is that the deconstructive

and post-structuralist methods and strategies of articulation, which the posthuman typically

depends upon and deploys, only telegraph the fluidity that the materiality of digital media doesn’t

bother to hide. To put it bluntly: As scholars, what does the posthuman articulation of fluidity,

ethos and the liberal humanist subject – exposed since Foucault four decades ago, slain

(rightfully) in the humanities (most notably by queer and feminist theories of performance), and

encased in the post-structuralist DNA of rhetorical theory and comp pedagogy (e.g., Susan Miller

and Lester Fraigley) for at least twenty years – tell us that we don’t already know? 130 And what kind of people does it encourage us to be?

This is a knotty (and somewhat weird) argument. And so, to clear the ground and lay a path forward, we may as well start with the ancient rhetorical device that deals with all of these elements: agency, fluidity, articulation, and the post-Enlightenment, post-liberal humanist subject

– all at once: Ethos.

Ethos, properly understood, is always fluid. To pervert Quintilian’s – much admired and maligned – formulation: persuasion occurs via a good man speaking well whose speaking well

130 Susan Miller, Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 84

makes him a good man, and vice versa. Ethos is always a chicken-and-egg proposition. There is

no stable ethos – or stable self – that stands prior to or outside of a given rhetorical situation

because the rhetor is always a part of a given rhetorical situation, not, a priori, apart from it.

Which means, in terms of subject/object causality, it was always a deconstructive proposition,

mapped in the rhetorical situation like this:

SUBJECT/PRODUCER  [“text”]  OBJECT/PRODUCED

Figure 2. Ethos As Producer/Produced

This insight, which began with Aristotle – to wit: the speaker is also part and parcel of the text – means that ethos is always mutually constituted, negotiated between speaker and audience.

Moreover, in relation to ethos, the posthuman re-accounting of the self – which, for Wolfe

(echoing nearly all the others), is unabashedly a post-structuralist account of agency – has always

depended upon a scarecrow argument: James Baumlin’s alarm (to take just one well-reasoned

example) that “post-Cartesian thought might very well be defined as an age after ethos, since the very notion of a sovereign individual now falls under question” doth protest too much. Cartesian

(and pre-Cartesian) thought may have – in “highly specific, local, and material ways” – offered up a thinking about ethos, and a system of public judgments of character that presumed the stability of the self and the rhetorical agent. But nothing about ethos as a theoretical heuristic ever demanded it, and to do so would make ethos necessarily arhetorical: divorced from doxa, custom, and episteme.131 For the sophists, those paleo-deconstructivists, ethos was always

131 James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin, Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994), xvi. 85

recognized as both a “cause and effect,” which “cannot be reduced to an essence or located in a

single rhetorical act.” Even for Cicero, it was always a fluid, symbiotic, chicken-and-egg affair

involving speakers, audiences, and whatever myths of the self (decentered, in control,

deconstructively unraveling, or otherwise) were prevailing at the time. 132

Fluidity, then, is always built into ethos. And so the question is: What articulation of this fluidity (of the endless merry-go-round of speaker/text/audience) should we choose? Do we pick deconstruction’s endless spin? Or do we choose – as we will discuss in the next section – the hard-core intentionalists’ edict to “Stop!” Stephen Mailloux’s theory about thinking about theory, “rhetorical hermeneutics,” helps us to see how to consider the difference. 133

All acts of interpretation are acts of politics. Given this, rhetorical hermeneutics proposes that we “do” theory by “doing” history. Moving past endless, abstract philosophical debates about, say, intentionalism (which we are, by the by, absolutely going to get bogged down with in a few paragraphs), Mailloux argues that we should instead (and herein lies his William James by way of Richard Rorty via Stanley Fish pragmatism) consider the historical and material conditions that theories of interpretation actually emerge from and become persuasive in.134

Sound advice in any instance. But given that the posthuman is – and here we’ll re-quote Cary

Wolfe’s increasingly definitive definition – the “historical moment” where the materiality of digital media (“technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks”) makes the

“decentering” of the human “increasingly impossible to ignore,” Mailloux’s framework seems particularly apropos. And so, rather than dither, let’s just go at the obvious question: Given our

132 For a history of ethos, see Nan Johnson, “Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric,” in Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, eds. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). For the sophistic account, see Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 133 See, for instance, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Pedagogy,” College Composition and Communication 35 (May 1984): 155-171. 134See Steven Mailloux, “Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (June 1985): 620-641. See also Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 86

search for a viable ethos for the new media era, does it really make sense to articulate the

posthuman with the left-over grapples and hold outs of avant-garde interpretive theory circa

1968?

It has, after all, been forty years since Roland Barthes killed the author off outright (the

“death of the author” becoming the “birth of the reader”) and Foucault, with four words – “What

is an Author?” –rendered it into intellectual obsolescence. 135 It has also been forty years since, in

1967, poststructuralist sensibilities were already so ingrained in the intelligencia that John Barth

could take potshots at a culture of unlimited interpretation that decried any deferral to an author’s

intention as “fascist.”136 But history lessons – and glib remarks about the four decades that have passed since the campuses were on fire and the coffeehouses cared about Derrida – are only half the story. If the posthuman is to matter at all, and if the materiality of the new media era is even worth discussing, how can it be taken at face value that interpretive politics catalyzed by the mass media age, and thus directly counter to the fluidity of texts produced in the digital age, should be unquestionably accepted?

Perhaps we are alone, but this is the question we increasingly find ourselves asking.

While the ease with which Foucault and Derrida and Barthes can be used to articulate the fluid materiality of the technologies that inhabit our digital environments cannot be denied, it is precisely this ease – which accounts for the daily proliferation of articles connecting the dots between discursivity, deconstruction, and writerly texts and whatever new technology is en vogue at the moment – that should, by now, cause some alarm. After all, digital media makes no secret that fluidity – our status as producers and produced – is built right into its armature. For David

Marshall, new media is defined as precisely those technologies that smear authors/audiences,

135 Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124-127; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5, no. 6 (1967). 136 John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1967, 29-34. 87

producers/produced into a blur of encoded interactivity. For Johndan Johnson-Eilola, the

“datacloud” of our networked environments is a circularity that spins “out of simple cause and

effect toward an understanding of culture and technology as contingent, multi-dimensional, fragmented.” For Brian Jackson and Jon Wallin, and god bless them for avoiding syntactical heroics, this is the “back-and-forthness” at work in any YouTube video or discussion board.137

All sound accounts of ethos in new media. But – and here is the swing back to the question of the

posthuman – if the point of the posthuman is to announce a “new ethic,” a new ethos, for new

media judgments, one that is “grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied

information,” what do articulations of fluidity – rooted in the deconstructive/post-structuralist play of subject/object – let us see about ethos in the new media era that we don’t already see?

This is the impasse we will attempt to get beyond. And so we have reached our proposal.

As the novelty of new media melts into a fluid, imperceptible, in-distinguishable landscape of cookies and IPhones, and humans and machines humming in equally indistinct harmony and dischord, what if the posthuman mission – to offer “resources for rethinking the articulation of humans within intelligent machines” – found its articulation and its enaction of a post-liberal humanist subject in the narrative model of communication, and, in doing so, stumbled upon a better articulation of the IA function within it?

We begin to flesh this out by turning to that familiar, but slightly odd, critique of the IA’s conception of agency: That it is synonymous with God.138

137 David Marshall, New Media Cultures (London: Oxford University Press, 2004); Johndan Johnson- Eilola, Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005), 9; Brian Jackson and Jon Wallin, “Rediscovering the Back and Forthness of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube,” College Composition and Communication 61, no. 2 (December 2009): 374-96. 138 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287. 88

A. Breaking the Deconstructive Merry Go Round of Agency Down: The Posthuman’s Interpersonal Ethos of Imaginary, Interconnected People

Why does it make sense to apply the implied author, designed to plunge the mysteries of

Henry James, to face-to-face or political communications?

So begins narratologist Per Krogh Hansen’s critique of the IA. And while it would be easy enough to sidestep the argument – by claiming, for instance, that we are only interested in scenarios of judgment which are technologically mediated – Hansen’s strategy (focusing on unreliable narration, the very basis of the coherence gaffe explored in Exhibit B) and his conclusion, the oft-offered equation of the IA to a commitment to Intelligent Design, provides us an opportunity to explore how the IA articulates agency in terms of fluidity, offers a mode of resistance against the fluid materiality of the new media era (case in point: the crucifying of Mitt

Romney), and, in contradistinction to the liberal humanist subject, provides a way of articulating a posthuman ethos.

We start with unreliable narration. A standard novelistic device, unreliable narration is when an author purposefully constructs a narrator who the audience knows, or should know, is not to be trusted: they fib, they exaggerate, they are misled or misinformed in some ethical or factual way. The classic example is Holden Caufield, and he shows why unreliable narration is such a pivotal concept: as readers of The Catcher in the Rye, are we supposed to believe that

Salinger intended for us to take Holden’s diatribes against phoniness (those goddamn Luntzs!) and authentic purity at face value, or should we understand them as misguided, albeit romantic, adolescent passion? (Whatever you decide sways the entire meaning of the book, if not the meaning of your own adolescence.) For Catcher in the Rye to work, Hansen argues, we have to understand that Salinger and his audience are talking behind Holden’s back. And this novelistic possibility for authors and readers to talk around a character/narrator – and thereby prove that the character/narrator is unreliable – is, for Hansen, the main problem with thinking about unreliable

89

face-to-face communication in terms of the implied author: unreliability necessarily fiats a

puppet-master, someone pulling the strings of a speaker, making him or her unreliable. For the

IA to make sense in face-to-face communication, there must be some agent laying (if not lying)

behind the face, and, for Hansen (and most other critics of the IA) this notion of agency has some pretty unavoidable ontological, if not ecclesiastical, consequences. Namely, it conjures up God

In terms of our thinking about agency, Hansen has a point.139 The implied author does not accidentally commit us to some intending, agentive force: the whole point of positing the implied author is to commit us to some intending, agentive force. Nor is there any reason that this force could not be a deity. But it could just as easily be an id, or an unconscious, or some trendy (and maybe even correct) neo-Spinozic account of agentive non-agency (a la any comp studies grad student’s pro forma incantation of Deleuzue and Guatarri’s “bodies without organs”). Even more

benignly, this intending, agentive force could simply be the person themselves, calculating,

however so slightly, the show they feel they must put on, however so imperceptibly, in a given

rhetorical/social situation: the pose they must adopt at the bar or in the classroom or the at board

meeting or the long-feared Thanksgiving with the in-laws. But, and this is key, what the agentive

force behind the IA absolutely is not is the author. And what it absolutely is, is us: Gifting agency back to the IA in the form of judgments of character.

Turning back to our narrative model of communication helps make this clear:

139 As do, in Communication Studies, Joshua Gunn and Chris Lundberg, who in their recent critique of interpretive intentionalism as the “onto-theological myth of intelligent design” find the necessary corollary to be acceptance of the principle that any “perfect” rhetorical/artistic creation presumes the existence of its perfect, intending, all-knowing, masterful creator. Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, "'Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?': Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 83-105. 90

(flesh & blood author)  implied author  [“text”]  implied audience  (flesh & blood audience)

Figure 3. Narrative Model Redux

As we already saw (and you can go back and check if you’d like), the narrative model, powered by the deconstructive motor of the feedback loop (the merry-go-round of agency) creates two non-existent, but rhetorically acted upon, entities: The IA and the implied audience.

But, as a model of ethos – and here it bears repeating our “wonkier” definition of the IA: the IA is the agentive, anthropomorphized ethos produced by the text, as the cause of the text: The thing which brought the text (and itself) into existence, while in the process creating the audience exactly insofar as the audience allows it to create itself – what makes the narrative model unique, and separates it from a pure, deconstructive account of agency, is that, rather than allow the merry-go-round to spin and spin ad infinitum, it puts in thumb on the scale, ever so slightly, and for a particular purpose: Granting some degree of agency back to the author by fiating the author’s intention to commit a public act and by recognizing that the primary purpose of rhetorical acts is to create a persona, and an ethos, persuasive enough to carry them off.

From the perspective of “pure” hermeneutics, or even theory about theory, there is much to discuss about this “small” move that the narrative model uses to tip the balance of interpretive agency. But given that our primary interest is in developing a heuristic to orient judgments of ethos in the new media era, we’re going to table that discussion for the moment. Instead,

“rhetorical hermeneutics” helps us see why this small move aligns the IA with the materiality of digital media and begins to open up the possibilities of the posthuman. 91

Starting small, we know, as we learned with Gov. Romney in Exhibit B, that the encoded materiality of digital media (interactivity + the Archive = fluidity) makes all texts “writerly.” And while Barthes, in the mass-media age, implored readers to cast off the chains of authorial intention (the death of the author announcing the “birth of the reader”) today, held technologically at the mercy and/or creative/political power of the reader, the politics that rejected the policing of any text by any trace, hint, or whiff of an “author” (let alone the authoritative opinions of the elbow-patched literati) seem, at the very least, out of balance in a remix culture of fluidity. The issues of materiality in the new media era are much bigger, however. In fact, as

Manske and Manovich have already told us, they are everywhere and everything. The issue is not a particular text, or particular technology, but the total ontology of digital media. This is the insight that, ironically, Hansen’s focus on un-reliable narration helps us to see. We are – by

virtue of our past and future-tense data-selves and doppelgangers – always existing with the potentiality of an alternate, “truer” self being excavated and summoned. The true crisis of ethos as coherence in the new media era is that we are always/already unreliable, because we are always textualized in ways we have no way of knowing, let alone – via self-narration – making coherent. Thus, what defines the new media era is precisely that there is no “real” (in Hayles’ parlance, “embodied”) person to have the face to face interactions with. Hansen may not need to check my Facebook page to see if I’m lying about still buying Stanley Fish’s “Is There A Text in

This Class” (irony intended – ed.), Aaron McKain’s insurance company may well check his web- history for searches for illnesses, and Target may tell me that I’m really a pregnant teen, even if

I’m telling myself I’m not. In a world populated with re-assembled and de-corporalized “me’s,” every one of us is unreliable.

How we should conceptualize ourselves in this technocratic world, in this “informatics of domination” is, of course, the prime directive of the posthuman. Which is precisely why it is hard to see how the deconstructive and post-structural articulations of fluidity carve out any 92

distinguishable space for us. Given the materiality of digital media, the infatuation with the

deconstructive merry-go-round of fluidity, its poststructuralist articulation of ethos, and its incandescent aesthetics of impossibility, it all seems unavoidably played out. Victor Vitanza’s

“method of (infinite) self-reflection, of paradox, of pararhetoric, of paralogy, of serial presentation (or fragments and digressions) via Third Sophistic Theater” was once the revolutionary perpetual-motion whir of fluidity – keeping the merry-go-round of agency

(oscillating between authors and audiences, speakers and spoken to, producers and produced, subject and object) spinning via the self-devouring, self-reflexive, self-abnegating articulations of masterful non-mastery. Today, to the undergrads surrounding me in the computer lab where I am typing this sentence (the youngest born eight years after Super Mario Brothers, having never lived a day without the internet, and fidgeting, as they study, absentmindedly, and virtuosically, with cell phones and IPads to Photoshop and photo-bomb each other) this seems like really no big deal (nbd).140

We are back at Fleckenstein’s original standard of fluidity: To “discern the fluid, dynamic, and constructed nature of ethos and identity in new media contexts in which we are both producer and produced.” And the narrative model, while acknowledging but not genuflecting toward post-structuralist agency, does precisely that: discern, not acquiesce, to the fluidity inherent in the materiality of digital media. To the skeptics, of course, this will not be enough, and, as Hansen tells us, we will continue down the path to (here quoting Joshua Gunn and Christian Lunberg) the “onto-theological” myths of interpretation. But the new media era, again, flips this on its head: the IA does not lead to God, the IA prevents us from becoming Him.

The only risk of deification – given the fluidity of digital media – is our own. Granted total

140 Victor Vitanza, “Concerning a Postclassical Ethos,” in Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994), 398. 93

interpretive control, total agency, over the ethos of others, the only alternative – literally, the only

option – is to relinquish this power. And so, as a solution – an anti-baptism, an antitdote to beatification – the IA catalyzes the means to gift back agency, through our judgments, in the hopes that – as fluidity renders us all producer and produced – such agency is (in the cosmic, interconnected chain of ethos) – someday gifted back to us.

Which begs the question: What does this re-gifting, this carving out of space for the posthuman, look like? Here we turn to the question of the IA’s aesthetics of enaction, which emerge from its controlling principle, and that trickiest – and least theorizable – of interpretive maneuvers: Restraint.

III. Enacting the Posthuman: The Aesthetics and (Evidence) of Restraint

“I've always said that my personality is a lot truer on the show than it is in life. So you're really seeing my personality. What you're getting now and what most people get daily is a dishonest human being." – Larry David,141

Who is this Aaron McKain – or Wayne Booth – talking to us?

We are back to our original question, and our larger question of how we are to judge ethos as character. And having already considered how the cyborg metaphor points the posthuman in the wrong direction, and how post-structuralist articulations of agency are too tightly wedded to the fluidity inherent in digital media, we turn to our final consideration of fluidity and the posthuman: How, exactly, does the IA, or the narrative model of communication, guide us as we make judgments about ethos?

Before proceeding, it bears reiterating the rationale that catalyzed the posthuman project, and thus this lengthy Theory Interlude, in the first place (i.e. the politics of the materiality of

141 Larry David, “Larry David Talks Seinfeld Reunion on Curb, Working With Michael Richards,” Huffington Post, February 8, 2011. 94

digital media). And it is precisely through the “informatics of domination” (to use Hayles phrase) that digital media forces us to confront – to re-quote Wolfe – “the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks [that] are increasingly impossible to ignore,” a regime that – surprise surprise – relies precisely on a constant push to make our ethos coherent (a constant push to understand the cognitive and genetic pre- determination of our actions) in order to secure our acquiescence into a medical-technical- economic landscape where autonomy is transformed into manipulateable and marketable data.142

In terms of interpretation and ethos, this strikes us as an evidentiary question. Given our unparalleled access to data and paratext and information, and given that fluidity gives us carte blanche writerly control of all the ethos smeared into the all-encompassing realm of digital media, when and why should we elect not to continue the hunt for the “real” Aaron McKain, or the

“real” Wayne Booth, or the “real” Mitt Romney? Or, to amend our original question: Who is this

Aaron McKain talking to me, and should I – even if I can - find/locate/re-animate/disintegrate him/them/it?

This is the question at the heart of the posthuman project and what the IA’s (we would argue) central theoretical mechanism of interpretation – restraint – aims at. The complications of this method of restraint – the levels of the narrative model of communication it occurs and doesn’t occur on – and the political implications for the narrative model of communication in

American representative politics, are pursued in Chapter Three. So here, we will attempt to make the case for the IA and restraint vis a vis the posthuman’s politics of interpretation. But we will do so in a slightly peculiar way: By pointing out what restraint is not.

Part of the problem with positing an interpretive theory of restraint is that it is seems counter-intuitive to a theory of interpretation: The opposite of reading or interrogating or deconstructing a text. Restraint, and this is critical, must be seen as a form of action, of

142 See Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, xvi. 95

resistance, just as all methods of interpretation must be seen as a form of politics. This brings us to our next critique of the IA, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s contention that the IA posits God and their alternative theory of interpretation, “genetic criticism.”

Having already discussed the differences between the IA and the post-structural articulation of fluidity as agency, Herman and Vervaeck allow us to distinguish the IA from a seemingly non-theoretical mode of interpretation: intentionalism. Arguing against their genetic criticism allows us to see how the IA’s odd straddling of deconstruction (i.e., its acknowledgment of, but not genuflection toward, fluidity) and positing of a non-existent, but rhetorically acted upon, entities (the IA itself) is more in keeping with the politics of information than the posthuman alerts us to. It also, and this is the larger point, attempts to demonstrate the futility of the “intentionalist” method, regardless of one’s position on posthuman politics.

Concluding, as this section does, our examination of the connection between the IA and posthuman (and the posthuman and composition studies), we realize that another question presents itself: What does the posthuman subject conjured by the narrative model of communication – a Booth, a McKain, a Romney – look like?

Given the continued valuation of the aesthetic as the posthuman’s natural counter to the materiality of the new media era, and given our continued interest in proving how the traditional articulations of the posthuman – the cyborg, the stylistics of post-structuralism – fail to meaningfully articulate an account of fluidity given digital media’s omnipresent Archive and interactivity, what the IA “looks like,” seems like a fair question, even if “looks like” is a fairly dumb way to articulate it. And so, again, the difficulty of establishing a negative – an aesthetics of restraint – presents itself. So, before turning to Chapter Three’s discussion of the aesthetics of the implied author, we will first consider what it absolutely is not, and what, as a method of stylistics, makes no headway in articulating an ethos that pushes the new media era to the digital

96

media age: Jeffrey Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool.

A. Leaving The Church of Informational Acquiescence

On face, Herman and Vervaeck’s critique of the IA is a by-now familiar one: The IA is a

flawed, quasi-religious, and moralizing tool designed to limit a texts interpretation to the

divinations of an all-knowing, all-powerful Author God. We cannot see or prove the IA. We

succumb to Him/Her via our reader-responses, are chastised – according to their reading of Booth

– for getting our Answers wrong, and legitimate our interpretations by claiming we have found

Him. Distilled down, for Herman and Vervaeck, the problems are that (1) “the IA is restrictive

(since it reduces texts to a supposedly ultimate source)” and (2) the IA is “circular (since the

source is really a projection of the reader’s own processing; the effect on the reader is mistaken

for the origins of the story.)”143

They are absolutely right on the latter, and half right on the former. But that they misread the implications is both curious and telling. To begin, the IA is not exclusively, as they say, a

“hermeneutic.” Like all acts of interpretation, it is necessarily about politics. (Moreover, and this distinction will become key, in our conceptualization the IA, as part of the narrative model of communication, is a heuristic for judgment which is uniquely situated to guide rhetorical judgments in the new media era: It cannot escape its politics, and does not pretend to.) Which makes it all the stranger that the mode of communication and interpretive schematic Herman and

Vervaeck put forward as an alternative to the IA – ethos and a set of guidelines they call

“empiricism” and “genetic criticism” – does exactly what they, wrongly, accuse of the IA of

doing: claiming God-status and hiding the politics of interpretation behind an incontrovertible

claim to know an author’s intention.

143 Luc Herman and Bart Veraeck, “The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication,” Style 45, no. 1 (2011): 11. 97

Herman and Vervaeck avoid the IA’s “pitfalls of deification” via their own method of interpreting ethos, “genetic criticism.” Picking Thomas Pynchon as their author (precisely because Pynchon is both an infamous recluse, guarding his privacy and personal correspondence, and, in their reading, a stand in for postmodernism, which makes him a poster child for the Death of the Author), they cut against the cult of the IA – populated with “[r]eaders…who tend to think that there is only one correct reading, namely the one in accordance with the implied author”144 – by digging through Pynchon’s drafts and letters to solve the mini- (if not micro) literary scandal of “Sphere,” a fairly caricatured, beatnik black saxophone player in the novel V. Was he supposed to be a parody of Mailer’s “White Negro”? Did Pynchon’s white guilt get the best of him? Is he reinforcing the racism he was supposed to critique? Herman and Vervaeck claim to have the evidence to solve the mystery: correspondence between Pynchon’s editor (who thinks the character makes V seem like a book about the “Negro problem”) and Pynchon (who says he will “try to make it a little less doctrinaire liberal than it was actually meant to be.”). And so and thus and voila! They know the secret of “Sphere”: he was intended “to be a sign of…moderation in opposition to the militancy of a black patriarch removed from the final version of the book.”145

Our argument now presents two paths forward. Our actual interest is in how this mode of genetic criticism is, given the materiality of digital media and the need to establish fluidity, exactly backwards, politically (if not ethically) by remaining exactly in-line with the Big Brother ethos of coherence that the new media era validates, and that the IA can help us kick out of. But it is also, as a method of interpretation, also wrong in its own methods and its relationship to the

IA. And since that helps clarify our method, and cyberethos, we can’t resist.

To start, simple addition (and rhetoric) shows us why – as a hermeneutic, as a “theory” of literary interpretation – using one indeterminate text to prove another is doubling your instability.

144 Ibid., 21 145 Ibid., 23 98

We don’t know – absolutely – what Thomas Pynchon intended for Sphere in V, any more than we

know his intentions when talking to his editor (maybe he couldn’t stand the corporate S.O.B.,

maybe he was drunk, maybe he changed his mind). This doesn’t mean that you can’t cite letters

and drafts as evidence, and, for critics, such as Walter Benn Michaels, for whom intention is the

only interpretive criteria, there are no good theoretical reasons for you not to cite any scrap of evidence you can find regarding intent.146 Yet even Michaels would admit that the hunt for intention is often a losing game. If your interest is truly in whether The Passion of the Christ is a racist film, discovering that the flesh-and-blood Mel Gibson is a racist gets you no closer to that truth; he could have just as easily intended not to make a racist movie.147

These arguments against intentionalism are fish in a barrel. (How about the fact that

James Frey, the junkie memoirist who duped the Oprah-nation by lying about his junkie-dom,

embodies the junkie ethos even more precisely, or coherently, by being unreliable? Doesn’t this

prove Booth’s maxim that ignoring the public persona of an author, and focusing on the private

“real” one, can actually mislead, as maybe the author’s most sincere moment was precisely when

they were writing their fiction?148) But for the sake of our real argument, let’s grant that any and

all uncoverable intentionalist clues get you closer to the author’s meaning. The larger question is:

Should we use them? Are the admissible as evidence?

146 See Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723- 742. 147 Likewise, to return to Per Krogh Hansen, and his American Psycho example, if Hansen is arguing that the delusional – or is he? – yuppie Patrick Batemen misunderstands Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip To Be Square” as a “rollicking ode to conformity” and thereby “misses the irony in Lewis’s text,” do I win if I prove that Lewis (yuppie product of the 80s) wasn’t being ironic, or do I lose if I remember that his backing band played on Elvis Costello’s first record, or if I find Brent Easton Ellison’s well-worn, and likely coked- streaked, vinyl copy of Sports? (Or if you went to the Big Bear [grocery store chain] Balloon Festival in 2002 as a joke because you thought it was funny that Huey Lewis was playing at a decrepit horsetrack and surrounded by deflated hot air balloons, but – after ten minutes of guitar solos and hi-fives and wiggling, middle-aged white asses – it became apparent that this wasn’t at all meant to be funny, not even their song from the We are the World soundtrack, which you figured – because c’mon they played with Elvis Costello – that they had to know was ridiculous, but they opened with it?) 148 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 75. 99

Literary criticism, again, helps us see the consequences of our practices. Back in the era of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the hunt for intention, for real motive, for Freudian insight, was a – literal – paper trail: Anyone trying to figure out the real Ezra Pound, or Phillip Roth, or General

Eisenhower was only going to have access to diary pages and memoirs and family histories, birth and death certificates, public notices in local papers and other physically localized, time-sucking reams of pressed pulp and ink. Time, resources, and geography necessarily, and severely, limited the hunt. In the new media era, surveillance is not only cheap, but inherent in our every public act: we are each a conglomerate, a digital blob of browsing histories, old blog posts, cookies on our hard drive, credit card receipts, to speak nothing of the fact that our very DNA commits us to daily acts of negotiated bureaucratic biopolitics. In this climate, is there anything less ethical – less courageous, less scholarly, less in keeping with a posthuman ethos, or a critical digital media age – than “genetic” criticism, the en vogue diagnosing of an author’s intention? Is there any example more perfect to explain the change from the mass media age to the new media era than the fact that the “institution” of mass media collectively allowed Salinger his pretensions to

Holden Caulfieldesque authenticity? His willingness to drop out of society and live as recluse, to use privacy to become monk and martyr for mass media age authenticity, is now, precisely, impossible, and it is not his long-protected manuscripts and letters which are now for sale, but his toilet, from which, perhaps, like the Mossad tracking Assad’s health (true story), someone could perhaps glean and analyze a strand of madness – or alcoholism, or autism?149 (Only then, so this logic must go, could we finally know whether Holden was right to think his teacher was coming on to him.)

No ethic – no politics – can be based upon pure acquiescence. And so, undeniably, the

IA must sometimes make interpretation – or, more specifically, arguments about interpretation –

149 See Willa Paskin, “Buy J.D. Salinger’s Toilet,” Vulture, August 17, 2010 and Douglas Davis, “Mossad Has Assad Urine Sample,” accessed May 27, 2012, http://www.generalaoun.org/news41.html. 100

harder to win. If you want to prove that The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic, why wouldn’t

you site Mel Gibson’s drunken ranting about the Holocaust as evidence? If you wanted to prove

that the implied author commits you to a baptismal contract with god, why wouldn’t you cite

Booth’s Mormonism as dispositive evidence? You could, certainly. And intentionalism will never tell you not to. But politics can mislead, and sometimes losing is the only way to win.

Ironically, it is Walter Benn Michaels’ much maligned views on race that here cut against his arguments (“against theory”) about interpretation as being synonymous with intention. If class – and economics – trumps race (because he finds the former to be more politically pertinent) it is, in the new media era, the economics of the materiality of digital media (the ultimate class issue) that makes intentionalism worth rejecting.150 As Barack Obama’s birth-certificate proves, if intention

– if evidence of coherence – is the standard, there is no longer any end, quixotic or not, to the manhunt. And there is no longer any ability to perform any version of one’s identity, racialized, feminized, or otherwise.

So let’s say you agree with these premises. What next? How do we – as an exercise of restraint – decide not to rifle through Pynchon’s diaries, or Obama’s kindergarten water-colors, looking for clues to their intent? What, exactly, does this exercise of restraint gain us? How is it connected to the posthuman? What does it look like?

Let’s start, because it offers guidance, with what restraint absolutely does not look like:

Jeffrey Rice’s digital media aesthetic of “cool.”

Focusing on the connections between digital media and aesthetics, Rice wants to unearth the “rhetorical moves that comprise a specific new media writing [he] is inventing,” one that recognizes “cool” as the common denominator of cyberculture.151 And what is cool? It’s a

150 Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 151 Jeff Rice and Gregory L. Ulmer, The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 8. 101

“highly interactive system of pattern making that foregrounds connectivity.” It venerates “the

ability to link information, manipulate information easily, morph information, and so on.” And it

achieves this – it enacts cool – through a set of rhetorical stylistics, chief among which is

“chora,” an “electronic writing practice” that “offers a set of instructions [emphasis mine] for how to be a chorographer: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings.”152

What makes Rice’s project so intriguing is how exactly right he gets the connections between digital media and aesthetics – i.e., how the materiality of digital media has encouraged the stylistics of appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, non-linearity, and imagery – while getting their relationship with our current cultural moment (and the challenges of forging an ethic of ethos within it) exactly backwards. Not that this is Rice’s fault: his project is to articulate how new media stylistically works and how we are to arm students to be effective – again, cool – producers within it. But since our interest is in judgment, and how, a la Hayles, we can resist the

“informatics of domination,” and how our “selves” are made and unmade in the name of coherence, it is striking how little guidance Rice’s mantra “do not choose between the different meanings…but compose by using all the meanings” really gives us.153 What guidance, other than

technological determinism and acquiescence to the corporate interests of, say, Google, does this

offer for recalibrating our judgments of ethos, or even of enacting, in any meaningful way, an

ethos that is, even in a marginal sense, a bulwark against the tyranny of the “empire of

information,” give us? 154

So what might a counter-stylistic to “chora” – one that opens up a space for reconceptualizing ethos – look like?

152 Ibid., 34-35. 153 Ibid., 34. 154 Hayles , How We Became Posthuman, 290. 102

Aesthetics, as Ranciere tells us, are a “distribution of the sensible,” the “ways of doing and making” that create a shared, common sense of “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.”155 And what is required in order to achieve critical distance from digital media’s all-consuming regime of information, and to free ethos from it, is the emancipation of the person – the politician, the artist, the neighbor – from

digital media’s inescapable, epistemological net: the paratextual snipe hunt for a semblance of

self in the eternal archive of the internet, the jumble and tumble of chora, or the always possible

gaffe remix This unpinning, this release from captivity – where we, because of fluidity, are

always captor and hostage – must necessarily, because there is no where else to go, be aesthetic, a

stylized attempt to escape information by climbing to another ontological level. This is precisely

the move that Herman and Vervaeck’s genetic criticism cannot allow, and what Rice’s stylistics

cannot make apparent. And it is precisely the move that the IA – via its dialogic feedback loop,

limited gifting of agency, and exercise of evidentiary restraint – fiats: The move from

epistemological agitation about ethos as character (i.e., the neurotic hunt for the “real” coherent person) to the acceptance of ethos’ ontological impossibility.

Given the all-encompassing materiality of digital media, and if posthumanism is to mean

anything, it must, as Fenske and Manovich have told us, be rooted in an understanding of how we

negotiate each other given the eradication of space and geography and time into pure, fluid data.

The posthuman is only politically relevant if it is able to re-politicize an aesthetic incision into

this omnipresent ontology of the datasphere and the Archive, while still understanding our status

as always producer/produced. (Which the IA does whether we call it post-humanism, post-post-

humanism, humanism 3.0, or ethos is, to us, largely irrelevant.) In the quote-unquote political realm, this move from the epistemological to the ontological would be a seismic shift in our

155 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum Press, 2004). 103

conceptualization of ethos: Politicians are not “real” people, they are – by virtue of being

political actors – fictional, often group-authored, constructs, and questions of who they “really”

are should be replaced by considerations of craft and skill and ideological representation. In the

quote-unquote non-political realm (the former public/private/professional sphere), it then

becomes precisely the de-realizing – the fictionalizing, the implied authoring – of these “real”

people via our judgments of ethos that politicizes them. (Which opens up a central question of judgment for the critic to decipher as she sees fit. The IA’s posthuman politics, in the new media era, stops at the politicization of ethos.)

Still not buying it? At this point, you shouldn’t. For Booth, the implied author was not a deconstructively-motored heuristic for judging ethos in the new media era, but a part of a particular program of literature, with implied authors and their readers creating “better,” “weirdly richer,” and “more sympathetic” versions of themselves and of their interactive rhetorical-literary exchanges. The question is – and this is what makes Booth such delightfully sticky test case – does any of his particular backstory matter? Just as we must choose which version of which self we play with, which version of Booth – his Mormonism, his tenure at the University of Chicago, his Presidency of the MLA – takes precedence? How do we make the choice? Turning to our next Exhibit – and turning to Fleckstein’s final criteria for cyberethos: how do we take responsibility for our judgments – how can we begin to consider how the narrative model alters our aesthetics of ethos, and thus the political consequences of those judgments within representative democracy. Let’s look at this via our ongoing test case: Campaign 2008, and its insistent clinging to the classic postmodern style of ethos (metafiction), and its inadvertent celebration of character – and of the implied author par excellence – who has already begun to move beyond postmodernism, Stephen Colbert.

104

CHAPTER 3 (EXHIBIT C): LOSING TO WIN: INTERPRETIVE RESTRAINT, MCCAIN AND COLBERT

“Two centuries ago, when a great man appeared, people looked for God’s purpose in him; today we look for his press agent.” – Daniel Boorstin, “The Celebrity as Human Psuedo-Event”156

American politics has always made for strange bedfellows and pop-culture cross- pollinations: Chuck Norris endorsing Mike Huckabee, Oprah catapulting Obama into viability,

Donald Trump attempting to host a Republican primary debate (to name just three oddities from

Campaigns 2008 and 2012). But in telling the story of the beginning of the new media era of

American politics (so that we can begin to tell the story of how it ends), one of the strangest and least studied aesthetic/political partnerships in presidential campaign history takes center stage.

And it starts on February 7, 2000, when David Foster Wallace – alleged postmodern wunderkind,

MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, bane and cause célèbre of MFA programs everywhere – was sent onto the campaign trail by Rolling Stone to solve a mystery: How was Sen. John McCain – aging war hero, foreign policy hawk, and then candidate for the Republican presidential nomination – even still in the race, let alone a contender? And what made even less sense: Why was McCain – his ethos, his character – winning Wallace over? By the calculations of traditional politics, McCain was an also ran. He was a long-serving Arizona Senator. He was a once-corrupt

Washington insider (caught red-handed in the 1980s Savings and Loan scandal). 157 And he was a lockstep Reagan Republican, now taking on George W. Bush, the conservative establishment’s

156 Daniel J. Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event,” in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (New York: Routledge, 2006), 72. 157 Jill Abramson and Alison Mitchell, “Senate Inquiry In Keating Case Tested McCain,'' The New York Times, November 21, 1999. 105

favorite son. Yet, somehow, McCain was spinning his shit c.v. into gold: transforming his

political sins into a crusade against Congressional corruption; turning his super-square,

Eisenhower-era exhortations about patriotism, service, and duty into a new paradigm of foreign policy pragmatism; and he was making his catchphrase – “Straight Talk” – into a rhetorical rallying cry. Gen X’ers packed his town hall meetings. Pundits and politicos joined together to sing his praises. And John McCain’s quixotic campaign was not only not dead, he actually – in the primary season window between New Hampshire and South Carolina in the winter of 2000 – had a chance to win. None of this made sense. Rolling Stone and the pontificating punditocracy all wanted to know why.

Wallace had a simple answer: John McCain was almost human. And for the Washington

Press Corp – the reporters who were doomed to months and months on the campaign trail covering the candidates – “almost human” was more than enough. Professionally bred to be fed bullshit, the campaign press – made famous as the “Boys on the Bus” by Joe McGinniss’ 1969 classic Selling of the President, and summarily dismissed by Wallace as “the Twelve Monkeys”158

– were the connection between the American people and their candidates. And to keep this connection alive, and to fill the daily news-needs of the nation’s newspapers and news- broadcasts, these reporters had to eat, sleep, breathe, and live within the insular, fetid, bubble of the presidential campaign: enduring the same talking points and stump speeches over and over, regurgitating the candidates’ same carefully constructed soundbytes over and over, and allowing themselves to be manipulated and spun by campaign staff and campaign consultants and party hacks over and over and over. And so, for the tired foot-soldiers of the Fourth Estate, McCain was an oasis, a guy – a bona fide war hero at that – who was willing to crack jokes and speak

158 Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President, 1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969). 106

freely on and off the record and break from the pre-fab politician-reporter campaign script.159

And in return, to quote Wallace, “the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate

– McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so

paroxysmally thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human

being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal

level of genuineness in the men who want to ‘lead’ and ‘inspire’ them.”160

Wallace’s summation of McCain’s candidacy (published as “Up Simba”) canonized the

Senator as the anathematic “Straight Talking” politician, adhering to a code and character lost and forgotten in the hypermediated 24-7 campaign news age of 2000. “Up Simba” also canonized

Wallace as essayist and voice of an ennui-riddled generation and brought to light the central

inquiry that was always lurking behind the his polymathic asides, or winding its way up his

Jacob’s Ladder of footnotes: In an age of cynicism, of society-wide emotional pharmacopia, of ironic necessity and consumer identity and televised group therapy, how do we still connect and communicate with each other? How do we get outside of our own skulls and make each other see and hear the world we are all each trapped in, and beholden to, by our particular ears, minds, and eyes? Decidedly humanistic stuff. And taken out of his usual Pynchon-esque fabulism (the short stories of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the Technicolor reality of The Broom of the System, the never-ending self-interrogations of Infinite Jest) and put into the stark, banal light of

American politics, Wallace’s raison d’etre reflected off of McCain’s weird contradictory charisma and came through more nakedly than ever before:

But if you, like [me], have come to a point on the Trail where you’ve started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box- sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear

159 For instance: On why he missed Woodstock, “I was a little tied up at the time.” Less cute: McCain’s recitation of the old barroom and bachelor party joke about the “marvelous ape.” 160 David Foster Wallace, “Up Simba,” in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 188. 107

and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain’s refusal to violate a Code. There were no tech’s cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines the “real John McCain” still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain “real” is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too; you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the- scenes pencils [reporters – ed.] get put on the case, a “profile” of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split, and diffracted by so many lenses there’s way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox – the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzle’s spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain – is that whether he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.161

What Wallace provides – in one stunning paragraph, written during the last Presidential election to pre-date the new media era – is a snapshot of the postmodern condition and

contemporary American politics: the crisis of trust; the technological miracle and Orwellian

tyranny of (then) mass media communications and 20st century journalism (and today, digital media communications and, as we will argue, the same standards of journalism); the never-ending neurosis about the real and the fake. 162 And in the middle, for Wallace, is John McCain: anachronistically teetering on the precipice – in January of 2000 – of the pre-, post, and post-post modern, waiting for us to push him, and ourselves, one way or the other. McCain, for Wallace, is a Holy Grail, quixotic and transcendent: he is whatever the answer is to the question of what is in our hearts. He is who we want him to be.

And that’s the problem. For as the mass media age has given way to the new media era, what we want McCain and all of our elected officials to be, remains the one thing that rhetoric, politics, ethos, and the mass media age make impossible, and it’s one of the things that the new

161 Wallace, “Up Simba,” 233-234. 162 Yes, yes: Granted the Internet did exist in 2000, but it wasn’t until Howard Dean harnessed the money- printing power of the “netroots,” as we once so coyly called them, that Presidential politics, that old dinosaur of slow-motion patriotism and slow-pitch policy, truly made the move into the digital era. See the discussion in the Introduction and or Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (New York: Regan Books, 2004). 108

media era uses to trap us with our own heart’s desire: Authenticity. Specifically: Fidelity

between our leader’s public and private selves.

Post-Authenticity and The Search for Responsibility

“The focus on events and activities is much more something that you would expect from someone releasing a movie, than someone running for President.” – Rick Davis, McCain Campaign Manager, on Sen. Obama163

Who is this person, really?

This is the question behind the rhetorical mandate of public-private fidelity, the most prima facie consideration of ethos as character, a judgment that, as Wallace tells us, always boils down to a simple declaration: “Trust me.”164 And this is, of course, the question that lies behind most of Campaign 2008’s game-changing gaffes: the bowling scores, bourbon shots, and terrorist fist jabs that we think – via some miraculous, revelatory moment of deus ex machina – will reveal a politician’s “true,” “authentic” self (secretly super-Mormon; secretly gay; a secret smoker; a secret liar; secretly not black enough; not-so-secretly screwing everyone in sight?). As we saw in

Exhibit A, public-private fidelity is also the catalyst for the materiality of the new media era, the motivation lurking behind public coherence gaffes, not just monetizing the technologies of surveillance, but powering our acquiescence (and, via judgment, active support) of their inquisitions, creating a new media era defined by:

starlet crotches blared from open car-doors by the baker’s dozen. Leading men berating their daughters on cell-phones, when not going viral on YouTube struggling, drunk and valiant, against their hamburgers. The bikinied mayors and bikinied teachers, the Congressmen cruising Craigslist and Twitter with muscle poses and groin-shots, all part of the perpetual perp walk that struts daily, hourly, by the ADHD minute across our gossip websites, news aggregators, and late-night talk shows. Hordes of cheating governors, and senators, and presidential hopefuls caught sexting, soliciting, carousing bathroom stalls, stashing

163 Quoted in Brian Montopoli, “New McCain Spot: Obama the Celebrity,” CBSNews.com, July 31, 2008, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502163_162-4307418-502163.html. 164 David Foster Wallace,“Authority and American Usage,” in Consider The Lobster (New York: Black Bay Books, 2007). 109

mistresses, and skulking outside Hollywood motels, with the paparazzi in tow, for glimpses at their own lovechildren. Then the rest of us: the unfamous, the quotidian nobodies – co-eds and co-workers and family members – filmed, Flickr’d, Facebook tagged, meme-d, made momentarily infamous, in states of undress, unbridled racist raconteuring, unrepentant rage, joy, ecstasy, or clumsiness. Captured – whether unauthorized or underthought – telling ribald jokes, pissing in the street, groping Hillary Rodham Clinton before writing a speech for Barack Obama: all of them, all of us, walking everyday outside and online in a hail of cellphone flashes, GPS signals, traffic videos, and satellite image-light from the telescopic lens of Google Earth, all specimens in each other’s petri dish, poked and prodded and squinted at Heisenberg-ingly, to find an answer to that most driving question of the new media era: who is it that we think we really are?165

The ease by which such paragraphs are written – marrying undergraduate hyperbole with

A.M. talk radio banality about a coming Orwellian state – begs an obvious question: Why do we still care about public-private fidelity, about the quixotic search for the “real” self behind the presented public persona, when, as any dinner with in-laws instantly reminds us, and Erving

Goffman long (long) ago told us, we are always applying and peeling off multiple (false?) faces?166 And isn’t this snipe hunt doubly-silly when any casual glance at MySpace, Twitter,

Facebook, etc. confirms the many people each of us performs, the “remediated selves” (to pervert a phrase Bolter and Grusin coined back in the halcyon days of the new media era) we inhabit every day, the selves that rub our faces in their own constructedness?167 Which is all to say, if we

know that the materiality of digital media commits us to standards of public-private fidelity that

are impossible to live up to, why stay with them, why allow them to still dictate and define the

rules of ethos and judgment for not only our political sphere (which will be our emphasis) but our

personal and professional spheres as well?

The answer is threefold. First, we don’t have any other standard of ethos to turn to.

Second, public-private fidelity, and its associated gaffes, stem from a (ancient) fear of rhetoric in

165 Wallace, “Up Simba,” 47. 166 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). 167 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1999), 233. 110

the political arena. Third, the solution to recalibrating our ethos is not – as we also learned in

Exhibit B – legal or economic or legislative. It’s aesthetic.

This brings us to Krista Fleckenstein’s final criteria to move our conceptions of ethos from the new media era to the digital media age, responsibility: “the need to discern the fluid, dynamic, and constructed nature of ethos and identity in new media contexts in which we are both producer and produced” and to “ensure the continued fluidity of those boundaries by taking responsibility for them.”168 We do this by continuing to flesh out the political and aesthetic implications of the narrative model of communication. And we proceed in three stages:

• First, we consider the aesthetic tradition that Wallace inherited, tried to write his way out

of, and which, ushered in by the New Journalists at the height of the mass media age, has

come to dominate and pervert the politics of ethos in the new media era: Metafiction.

Our goal will be to show that the metafictional aesthetic, the hallmark of postmodernism,

while once a potent weapon against the subterfuge of mass-mediated politics, is not only

superfluous in the new media era, due to the materiality of digital media, but, in its

inadvertent veneration of the public-private fidelity gaffe, it traps us in an unwinnable

battle vis a vis our judgments of ethos as character.

• Second, we turn from Wallace to begin finding a new aesthetic paradigm. And here we

encounter that high-priest of new media era politics: Stephen Colbert. Using Colbert’s

aesthetics as a guide – specifically, his move from the postmodern obsession with

monological performance to a post-postmodern appreciation of dialogic play – we see

how the narrative model of communication (via the implied author and its multiple

ontological levels) already presumes, as a heuristic of judgment, the stylistics that Colbert

168 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, "Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: the Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly," in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, eds. Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008): 340.

111

employs, and which allow us to recalibrate our thinking about ethos in keeping with the

inherent fluidity of a digital media age.

• Finally, we consider the aesthetic politics that the narrative model illuminates. Bringing

in complementary theories of the post-postmodern – Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin

van den Akker’s “metamodernism” and Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” – we propose

another conceptualization of post-postmodernism: rhetorical aesthetics. And we argue

for the power of its politics: a renewed respect for rhetorical craft, a rethinking of

ideology in terms of acting/play, and a reconfiguration of ethos as character that starts

with the principle – admittedly a bit too cute – that the persona is political.

I. Metafiction: Fear and Loathing (in the Fear and Loathing) of the New Media Era

“For all his integrity, he [McGovern] is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent —with a good voting record on ‘the issues’ – is a natural man for the White House.” – Hunter S. Thompson169

The relationship between rhetoric and ethos – particularly ethos as character, as authenticity – has always been a double-edged sword. Inauthenticity – viewed as a perceived discrepancy between a person’s public and private actions, the “true” self and the public, socially- perceived self – has been a political concern since Plato, and it is most famously manifested as the fear of the Machiavellian, the politician who turns infidelity between private beliefs and public action from a moral failing to a political virtue.170 Even in contemporary political theory, which has made a centuries-overdue pivot back to considerations of rhetoric (see, for instance,

Bryan Garsten’s Saving Persuasion), there is still a peculiarly squeamish, and paradoxical,

169 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1985), 414. 170 See Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909- 1914). 112

relationship between rhetoric and ethos.171 As Simone Chambers, a Habermas devotee coming to

now acknowledge the role of rhetoric in political deliberation, puts it: Modern politics relies too

much on appearance and the “crafted image” versus character and the “real thing.”172

This celebration of authenticity (here: authenticity seen as oppositional to rhetorical consideration, i.e., the “crafted image”) relies on an odd distinction, and all the odder given that ethos, our evaluation of a rhetorician’s production of rhetorical trust, necessarily presumes rhetorical craft and skill. Stranger still is that this academic paradox of ethos and judgment, for all of its supporters’ erudition and nomenclatural tap-dance, is precisely the quagmire that

American politics – in the new media era, in the endless Campaign – is trapped in: the Veneration of public-private fidelity gaffes as possible glimpses past all the statecraft and bullshit and rhetorical strategizing that had ostensibly come before. George Will, grand pooh bah of the punditocracy, captures (inadvertently) this double-bind nearly perfectly, defining gaffes as a

“moment of truth in a climate inhospitable to that virtue,” puncture wounds in the plastic of modern campaigning.173 Arthur Miller, in his seminal “Politics and the Art of Acting,” makes the bizarreness of this relationship between gaffes, rhetoric, authenticity, and ethos even clearer by

way of his observations of the pre-new media era 2000 Presidential campaign:

One remarkable thing did happen, though – a single, split-second shot that revealed Gore shaking his head in helpless disbelief at some inanity Bush had spoken. Significantly, this gesture earned him many bad reviews for what were called his superior airs, his sneering disrespect; in short he had stepped out of costume and revealed his reality. This in effect, was condemned as a failure of acting. In the American press, which is made up of disguised theater critics, substance counts for next to nothing compared with style and inventive characterization. For a millisecond, Gore had been inept enough to have gotten real! And

171 Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgement (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009). 172 Simone Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?” Political Theory 37, no. 3. (June 1, 2009): 323-350. 173 George Will, “Parties May Stick With Status Quo,” realclearpolitics.com, January 28, 2008, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/where_the_races_stand_now.html 113

this clown wanted to be president yet! Not only is all the world a stage but we have all but obliterated the fine line between the feigned and the real.174 For Miller, writing at the end of the mass media age, what is profoundly odd is that, between Bush and Gore, “in acting terms there was no inner reality, no genuineness, no glimpse into their unruly souls” except for the moment of gaffe.175 In the new media era, where The

Archive and interactivity of digital media make gaffes inevitable (see Exhibit B) and thus a daily

part of the (endless) news-cycle, the incongruity between gaffes and genuineness becomes even

more schizophrenic and strained, as public-private gaffes come to perpetuate the very thing (craft)

that they were designed to prevent. In the new media era, gaffes now measure how well

candidates craft and strategize their stories, how well they stick to a script across a long and

grueling campaign, saying the same thing over and over and over again, regardless of how sick to

death they are of the whole damn thing. Authenticity, by any human measure, is the opposite of

all of that. To put it another way, campaigns are not about a candidate’s character, they turn

candidates into characters: ideological mascots mass marketed across the spectrum of left, right,

middle, and lunatic fringe that makes up the American electorate. Requiring candidates to adopt

the costumes and postures necessary to appeal to this hypothetical, bi-partisan peanut gallery – not just the bowling scores and bourbon shots, but the waffling on FISA and ANWAR – and then calling them out for assuming the postures, the ethos, asked for, is, by definition, insane.

So how do we get out of this? By understanding how we got into it, and got into the gaffe business, and its peculiar, pretzel-logic about authenticity. What we find is that the story of how the news draws the line between what is public and what is private in a candidate’s life – and, thus, by virtue of the gaffe, how we all deliberate upon the public and private – is not as straightforward as we might expect. Quickly tracing out the history of news-coverage of presidential campaigns in the 20th century (even in an absurdly reductive few paragraphs),

174 Arthur Miller, “American Playhouse: On Politics and the Art of Acting,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2001, 16. 175 Ibid., 20. 114

provides the history that not only allows us to rethink our contemporary political ethos (and the

contemporary norms of rhetoric and authenticity that it commits us to), but also allows us to

reframe the story of where the aesthetics of journalistic practice – the aesthetics of the gaffe –

may go next.

A. New Media’s Old New Journalism

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.” “I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.” – Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72176

In his history of American political journalism, Larry Sabato differentiates three –

canine-based – phases of press coverage of 20th century presidents: lapdog, watchdog, and

junkyard dog.177 The lapdog phase comes about during World War Two, when national unity was needed to combat both the depression and Axis powers, and not only FDR’s policies, but also his private life – his disability, his live-in mistress and all – were given a deference that McKinley and Hoover, to say nothing of Lincoln, Jackson, and Jefferson, could only have dreamed of. This tight-lippedness carried over through the Eisenhower era (the General swore like a sailor) and reached its zenith in the Rat Pack days of Kennedy’s Camelot, where a gentlemanly code of discretion – bordering on omerta – kept the President’s confidences regarding sexual conquests,

Addison’s disease, and medical reliance on a healthy daily dose of methamphetamines.178 Even

when, in the wake of Vietnam, the American Press Corp began aggressively questioning LBJ and

Nixon’s policies – the dawn of Sabato’s post-Watergate “watchdog” phase – a Mad Men, boys-

176 Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 247. 177 See Larry Sabato, Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1991). What is intriguing, and not discussed by Sabato, is that, at their time, each of these journalistic eras were seen as the height of a robust democracy (a sign of a healthy and informed plebiscite) and were critiqued as inferior to the epoch that came before (a la de Toqueville’s famous critique of American journalism). At the same time, in hindsight, they all seem a bit nasty. 178 For the most recent, and juicy, JFK gossip, see C. David Heymann, Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story (New York: Atria Books. 2009). 115

will-be-boys ethos still prevailed, sparing either president public exposure of their drunkenness and – woefully unsuccessful – womanizing, both of which were an open secret.

In Sabato’s history, entitled Feeding Frenzy, the press’s protection of politicians’ private

lives ends in some amorphous moment between Chappaquiddick and the Congressional

prostitution scandals of the mid-70s. And what comes next is the moment that, for Sabato, the new media era and its perpetual Campaign 2008, are still embroiled in: the junkyard dog phase of

American journalism, the tabloidization of serious news, with presidential candidates caught, like

insects or celebrities, in a web of surveillance and gossip, their every phone call, memo, meeting,

email, text message, kindergarten homework assignment, grocery list, and late-night, whiskey-

drunk IM subjected to public scrutiny. For Sabato, and other media critics and historians and

blowhards (from Chompsky to Eric Alterman to Glenn Beck), this is dystopia, an environment of

ethos just shy of the surveillance society depicted in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, wherein the

every twitch and sneeze of the president, who is trapped in the never-closing eye of a close-circuit

TV camera, sends shudders through the nation and the market.179

By providing a potent and procrustean summation of evolving journalistic treatments of ethos, Sabato, and his fellow journalistic historians, do us a great service (and give us someone else to cite in case the summation is wrong). But what these historians of American journalism miss, and what might better help us to see how, in the new media era, we arrived at this nexus of technology and journalistic obsession with public-private, is that the “junkyard dog” phase was as much an aesthetic innovation as a journalistic one. Specifically, it was, and is, a commitment (if not acquiescence, if not celebration) to metafiction, that tent-pole of the postmodern project. And

179 Quoting DeLillo: “'There’s a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He’s supposed to resign any time now, she said. “Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of the comment. Or it wasn’t even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing. So the whole economy convulses…because the man took a breath.” Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), 47. 116

to understand why this postmodern aesthetic continues, post-mass media age, to dominate our

news and our political ethos, and to reflect and refract our attitudes toward political character, authenticity, and trust, we have to understand how it got here and why, once upon a time, it mattered. For that part of the story – the story that the new media era must learn to turn the page on – we turn to that omnipresent, but forgotten, part of Sabato’s history: The New Journalists.

At the height of Haight-Ashbury and Tet and ‘Nam, reliance on the American press – still caught up in the strictures of the lapdog phase – lost credibility as a line on reality. Waiting until the end of the story – the end of the campaign season, the end of the war, the end of the peace movement, the end of the 60s– to tell a hindsight bedtime story about how it all happened (to document the “official” news history of an event) became not only viscerally and intellectually passé, but politically poisonous. What seemed more real, more immediate, more trustworthy, was to try to capture the whirlwind of history in the making, to stand in the storm of the March on

Washington, to call out George Wallace’s race baiting, to confront the horror-show fear and loathing in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention. To do this, reporters had to stop being objective recorders of the action and acknowledge their (subjective) role as creators of the action: of news, of history, of political reality. So went the credo of the New Journalists –

Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson chief among them. And the aesthetic that let them do it – and that sounded the death knell for any pretense of detached and gentlemanly journalistic prose – was metafiction. 180

Metafiction, as any half-assed Google search, senior seminar in Literature, or causal browsing of Onion AV Club television reviews will tell you, is self-referential, self-conscious narration that calls attention to a text’s artificiality. (For the uninitiated, here’s the Greek Chorus

180 For the history and significance of the New Journalism as a literary movement, see John Hellmann, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981). See also, Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution (New York: Crown, 2005). 117

of literary scholars defining the term: “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality…providing a critique of their own methods of construction,” says Patricia

Waugh; writers and writing “which either reflexively analyzed their own creative processes or which could be read as allegories about the writing process” and which “usually include a reflexive irony which mocks the realist claims of artistic significance and truth; they also insist that the reader accept the work as an invented, purely made-up entity,” says Larry McCafferty.)

Metafiction wasn’t invented by the New Journalists, it has been around for forever, and famous since at least Sterne and Cervantes.181 What was new, however, was adopting– at the height of the mass media age – metafiction as an ethical alternative to, and political referendum on, mainstream journalism. And so, in the hands of the New Journalists, metafiction was not merely a random, en vogue stylistic choice, but a mission statement and call to arms born of an avant- garde impulse to expose the Machievellian machinations of craft and rhetoric.

Caught between the FDR-esque mythmaking of the lapdog and the emerging Vietnam- era sensibilities of the watchdog, the New Journalists’ motive for putting themselves into their writing and calling attention to the fictionality and stagecraft of politics was always fairly clear: to deconstruct the manufactured character of the candidates’ themselves. Hunter S. Thompson’s ire, for instance, was focused on the “shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack

Hubert Humphrey,” who he believed epitomized the protean nature of all political personas.182

One way to achieve this critical awakening was to stalk the candidates and their surrogates on the campaign trail or in the convention hall, to catch the fiction-making processes of character formation as they happened (and, on occasion, just make crazy shit up, i.e. Thompson planting a

181 See Wayne Booth (why not, since he might be talking about this earlier than most, and given the politics of the implied author we will discuss below, this might not be a coincidence): Wayne Booth, “The Self- Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction Before Tristam Shandy,” PMLA 67, no. 2 (March, 1952): 163-185. 182 Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 209. 118

press story that Muskie’s gaffes [and alleged emotional instability] were attributable to an

addiction to the entirely fictitious drug Ibogaine; the “story” was dutifully reported on).183

Another way was to endlessly revel in and reveal their own unavoidable status as authorial

fictions (which, of course, had the side-benefit of avoiding the hypocrisy of the immense

rhetorical success of their own persona and ethos). To this end, the New Journalists ran the

gamut of pomo metafictional tactics to hijack and deconstruct their own subject positions:

circular, self-referential, first person narration; manic Dexedrine-speedball prose; and the ultimate metafictional conceit (and the most heretical move against conventional journalism): interjecting yourself – your drunk, addled, screwing, howling, micturating, pill-popping alter-ego self – into your story, and allowing the caricature, the hyper-subjective beast of pure id and ego (from

HST’s Gonzo to Mailer’s Aquarius) to run amuck.184

Lumping disparate authors under the umbrella of a cause or movement, let alone an aesthetic, is always a fool’s errand, especially when those authors include characters like

Thompson, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion. But sometimes umbrellas help us get out of the rain, and while each so-called New Journalist painted with – to varying degrees of endearment and success – different colors and hues in the metafictional paint-box, what undeniably united them all (even Capote, who believed that he could, and did, write himself out of In Cold Blood), and what made the New Journalism mean something (because it surely did), was the guerilla attempt at broadcasting a new critical media awareness to counteract the static of the mass media age, to reveal the machinations behind a public persona, and the press’s complicity in its construction. Didion, in her early, 1961 profile of Nancy Regan, gets at the heart of the metafictional impulse (which has now ruled our understanding of media and American politics for forty years) with exceptional clarity and grace:

183 Ibid., 151. 184 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1995). 119

we seemed on the verge of exploring certain media frontiers: the television newsman and the two cameramen could watch Nancy Regan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Regan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a cinema verite study of the rest of us watching and being watched by one another.185 In the mid-90s, it was still impossible for us dyed-in-the-wool GenXers not to be moved by Didion’s diagnosis and synopsis of mass media politics. Even teaching rhetoric and media in the early 2000s, this passage from her White Album still seemed prescient and indispensable if you happened to be in the business of trying to teach 9/11 tweens, still awe-struck by presidents in flight suits. Today, in the new media era, Didion’s observations about mass media mediation are not merely quaint, but, in a cruel twist, anaesthetizingly superfluous: Mere articulations of precisely the aesthetic the mainstream news uses to garner cynical trust about their complicity in the crisis of ethos in American politics.

Behind every public-private fidelity gaffe was always a paradox, a sticky, two-sided logic. The more reporters hunted for gaffes, chinks in a candidate’s PR armor, the more scripted candidates became, and thus the more pervasive, and invasive, the hunt for gaffes had to become:

Every phone call, email, text message, every moment on the campaign trail, every handshake, or

Afro-centric fist-bump, vetted and poked and prodded as a potential gaffe – which, then, of course, makes them part of the calculated construction of a politician’s political persona. So, as the long shadow of Campaign 2008 shows, for 21st century journalism, metafiction is no longer the property of avant-garde New Journalists – or even political satire a la The Daily Show.186 It’s

the primary weapon used by mainstream news to pave over this paradox, selling us on the value

of investigating the constructedness of a politician’s ethos by demonstrating their own ethos’

constructedness as well: CBS News’ Facebook profiles for the pimply 20-somethings they have

185 Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 90. 186 For how the metafictional practices of The Daily Show came to influence mainstream news coverage, see Aaron McKain, “Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show,” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (2005): 415-430. 120

covering the campaign; NBC sending its anchor, Brian Williams, to host Saturday Night Live;

CNN’s bizarre, Star Wars-esque interactive electoral map (a “fucking Hologram,” to quote comedian Patton Oswalt); ABC cutting away from the Democratic debate to film its reporters taking cell-phone calls from the candidates’ campaign staffs (who are calling, of course, to influence said debate coverage) and then having the Orwellian audacity to call it a “Spin Room.”

What unites all of these stunts, unites – left-to-right – contemporary political journalism (whether printed, televised, or blogged), and what catalyzes every new news-gizmo and gimmick, is the metafictional drive for the authenticity of self-conscious inauthenticity, convincing the viewer of reality not by transparently reporting reality, but by reporting on your own reporting of reality, calling attention to the opacity of your mediums of communication.

All of which would have been less than no surprise to David Foster Wallace.

It is an irony among ironies that DFW, almost inarguably one of the most gifted writers of his generation, ended up being preternaturally skilled at a style he was born into and thought was thoroughly played out: metafiction. Pontificating on that transformative technology of the mass media age, television, DFW argued, back in 1993’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S.

Fiction,” that TV was already – even in its most pedestrian, prime time manifestations

(Entertainment Tonight, St. Elsewhere, Newhart, Moonlighting, MTV) – more “about ironic self- reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever have dreamed.”187 Beyond

Wallace’s horror at mass media factoids that today seem like quaint antique curiosities – e.g., he

is alarmed that “more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers” and

Wheel of Fortune has higher ratings than all three network news programs combined” – what is of

187 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), 33. 121

lasting value is how sees metafiction as the inherent aesthetic of television and, at the same time,

he worries that postmodern irony “has my generation by the throat”188

Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do’ers and be-er’s for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers. For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis: Realism. If Realism called it like I saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing it. This high-culture postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastatsi of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television…especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious, Metafictiona zenith was less a “response to” televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.189

Wallace, like many, sees the dawn of television’s self-conscious, metafiction reign in

1974, the year of Watergate and Saturday Night Live. So why, nearly forty years later, awash in the fluidity of digital media (which makes television look like a lumbering piece of furniture), populated by a generation not just born digital, but who has never lived a day without The

Simpsons, or a political campaign without The Daily Show, let alone MSNBC and Fox News

(which makes SNL’s Weekend Update look like a lumbering piece of furniture) does the new media era still cling to metafiction?

Here’s why: These tired aesthetics of metafiction are, thanks to the materiality of digital media, at once obvious and inescapable. Obvious because – thanks to Facebook, Twitter,

FourSquare, Instagram and the other technologies of character performance – digital literacy demands that we understand our “networked,” “remediated” selves in the same terms that tripped

Didion out about Reagan. (To wit, and quoting Bolter and Grusin: “As these [i.e., digital] media become simultaneously technical analogs and social expressions of our identity, we become simultaneously both the subject and object of contemporary media. We are that which the film or

188 Ibid., 49 189 Ibid., 34. 122

television camera is trained on, and at the same time we are the camera itself.”190) It’s inescapable because the New Journalism lets the cynical, pomo genie out of the bottle. Once metafiction revealed to the public the ways that the news media and the political machines spitting out candidates were obviously manipulating viewers/readers, and, therefore, established a

righteous, critical, rightfully cynical political ethos of character, how could we possibly go back, back to the lapdog age of myths and cherry-tree, wooden-teeth, bullshit?

And therein lies the rub, and the tragic-comic coda to the New Journalism: We can’t go forward either, because we still don’t know, aesthetically, what comes next. And we don’t know, not because the New Journalists’ are wrong about politics – and ethos as character – in the new

media era: They were too right. And yet, from the start, with the New Journalism, and metafiction, there was always a problem: There wasn’t any end. Begun from a perspective of ethos and politics, as giant killers and myth-busters, nearly from the beginning there was always something heartbreaking about the New Journalism: Hope and implicit knowledge of aesthetic futility. Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous deflated postmortem – on America, on the presidency, on himself, on the New Journalism, on his defeated interviewee George McGovern – at the end of

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail:

I have one question to ask you before I finish this book. Did the American people know you [McGovern]? Did they know Nixon? As you two really were and decide that they wanted Nixon? If they really knew him, and really knew you, to hell with this book. I don’t think it’s even worth publishing. But if they didn’t know you as you really were and didn’t know Nixon as he really was, then there’s some hope for the future.191

By making absolutely apparent the stagecraft and cynicism and, well, rhetoric always at place in American politics, the New Journalists created a gap: a vacuum of ethos that their metafictional stance had displaced, but which failed to provide the solution to what comes next, to a post-authentic, post-public-private fidelity ethos. In the late mass-media age, the New

190 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1999), 231. 191 Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 243. 123

Journalists lost because they won. And that is sad. In the new media era, their metafictional

aesthetic became precisely the way in which the paradox of rhetoric/authenticity, of

public/private ethos, was paved over and rendered invulnerable and eternal. And that is tragic. As

is the tragic irony that David Foster Wallace – who was trying to write his way out of the metafictional, to “get it over with, and then out of the rule affirm that idea of art being a living transaction between humans” – is now, now that he’s dead, perhaps our best example of the ethos

of resistance and re-thinking of the motivation of rhetoric, which we must embrace to get out of

the new media era.

B. The Persona is Political (and Personal): Re-Motivating Ethos

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest192

“My friends, I’m sure Woodstock was a cultural and pharmacological event, but I was little tied up at the time” – Sen. John McCain193

“Where is the real John McCain?”

This was the question that sent David Foster Wallace out into the wilderness of American politics, onto the path out of the mass media age and the postmodern condition of ethos and toward some attempt to think about where responsibility lies in process. And so we are sitting with John McCain in his prison cell, or we are standing with John McCain on the campaign trail, all of us trying to decide who he should be. Except now, in 2012, David Foster Wallace is in his garage, two years dead, by suicide. He is the stacks of papers he left behind, never submitted for publication, scattered around the same room where he hung. Now rifled through by editors and

192 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006). 193 Sarah Wheaton, “A New Moment for Aquarius,” The Caucus, New York Times, May 3, 2008, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/a-new-moment-for-aquarius/. 124

agents, now reassembled, now published as The Pale King, now sitting in your house.

And the question is: Do you open it?

Distilled down to one hypothetical, this is the dilemma of ethos in the new media age,

and the test case for interpretive restraint. It doesn’t matter that The Pale King is made of glue

and paper and ink, any more than it matters that your Halo avatar lives in your television, or your

credit score lives on some mainframe in Mumbai. They are all part of the interconnected

ontology, the overarching ethos of the new media era. Judgments made in any corner of it

invariably – if imperceptibly – influence and form the ethos of interpretation that determine the possibilities we all live by.

This gets to the ultimate question of ethos (and ethics) for a better digital media age: How do we want to treat each other in material environments – in sublimely inescapable digital landscapes – wherein the fluid, dynamic, and constructed nature of ethos and identity puts us in

contexts in which “we are both producer and produced?” How do we “ensure the continued

fluidity of those boundaries by taking responsibility for them?”194

This is a big question. And so before, in the next section, we attempt to think about

solutions, let’s think for a moment – as Wallace often did, as McCain might have, broken and beat

in ‘Nam – about rhetoric and authenticity. Let’s think about what they tell us about how people

need people, and about how that might or might not change what we think about rhetoric, or the

story we tell about it, and might help us to rethink how to split the difference between the New

Journalist’s fears of, and the new media era’s demands on, ethos.

The Motives Of Rhetoric

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” – David Foster Wallace195

194 Fleckenstein, “Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics,” 340. 195 D.T. Max, “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009. 125

“Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit.” — Jonathan Franzen, Freedom196

If it is true that it is social interactions that make us lose the sense of who we really are – or, to put the philosophy in its more typical form – if our true selves can only be discovered in isolation, away from the temptations and corruptions of others, then authenticity is necessarily at odds with rhetoric and virtually allergic to politics, the art of the possible, which, in practice and considered from the vantage point of ethos, means being (persuasively) as many things as you can be for as many people as possible. Authenticity, then, becomes an arhetorical or pre-rhetorical

refuge, which, as a philosophical or phenomenological premise, may even be true. But it is a

truth that takes the foundational premise of rhetoric – that we can never really know one another

– and pursues it exactly backwards.

Kenneth Burke – the arguable godfather of 20th century rhetorical theory – points us forward, starting with a very basic, and ancient, premise: humans are a symbol using animal.

Inter-human communication relies on language, an imperfect tool, a fragile and tenuous system of signifiers and signs that can never truly connect one mind, one system of meanings, to another.

(Not that we would even know if it did, since we can’t climb out of our heads and onto an objective, omnipotent vantage point to find out). For Burke, this uncrossable chasm between one human mind and another is not a symptom of society, it is a given of the species. We will never completely know one another. We are born into language and symbol and separate bodies and forever in the world alone, with only signs and gestures to signal to each other over the abyss.

Rhetoric, defined as the attempt at identification, at mutual understanding, is the – always placebic – antidote. Love, telepathy, consubstantiation – the latter being Burke’s term – are

196 Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). 126

metaphors not of rhetorical success, the full crossing of the divide, but of our best attempts to

empathize with and know one another. 197

Burke’s story of humans talking over the abyss is not gospel; to be sure, his genesis story of rhetoric is just one story among many of how and why we communicate.198 But it is an alternative to the self-contradictory, self-unraveling story of authenticity, which claims that the real person is only found in the private self, but fails to acknowledge that this private self only comes about because of the existence of a public one, and of other people. As Gorgias points out, without hypocrisy – without lying, without your false self – your real, authentic self couldn’t exist, because it wouldn’t need to.199 Fleeing society – fleeing rhetoric – does not establish the

“real” self, because without society, and other people, you wouldn’t have one; the flight just advertises that authenticity and individualism (as ontological categories) could only come to be through our interactions with others, a rhetorical sticking-point that all the Nietzsche and Sartre and phenomenology and Woodstock and self-referential emo albums in the world can’t change.200

This is why the vision of McCain, alone and broken in his prison cell, unseen by anyone but himself, able to find his mettle, his character, through his insufferable isolation, can just as easily be re-imagined the other way: McCain gaining his strength – the authentic strength at the core of his being – by thinking about himself vis a vis his comrades, his bloodkin warriors in the

197 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 198 For another story, see John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 199 The Gorgias example comes from Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107. 200 We are reminded of the old sawhorse about Nietzsche – which applies equally, we suppose, to Fall Out Boy or Bright Eyes: why, if the superman is precisely the being who no longer worries about the opinion of his neighbors, do they feel the need to convince us – their neighbors – of this position? Clichéd as the point may be, the fact remains: the philosophical position cannot escape the orbit of the rhetoric that encapsulates it. (Which is why it is Salinger and Spinoza, the recluse and the unpublished philosopher, who make the best – but still quixotic – attempt to escape rhetoric’s symbiotic relationship with inauthenticity.) 127

McCain clan, his country, his God, or the not-yet existent John McCain, patriot and presidential candidate, that he wants to be.201

This circular-symbiosis between rhetoric and authenticity – our ability, as rhetorical critics, to read either rhetoric or authenticity as prior to the other – is why Wallace says the “real”

McCain, “depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.” And given that considerations of character – of ethos – are reflective of the character of a community, these reconnaissance missions for the “real” John McCain quickly and easily metastasize throughout society: the searches – in job interviews, blind dates, and tenure-review meetings – for the “real” person inside all of us, the authentic core behind the avatar or dust jacket or profile photo that can be revealed, if we look hard enough, and if we discover the right gaffe. Which is why, given the magnifying and surveilling lenses of 21st century communications technology, if we don’t think

our public personas are up to such scrutiny, or if we think armchair psychoanalyzing a tortured

veteran on national TV is gross, we might want to think about wanting a way to rethink the

interpretative-imaginative process that gaffes as public-private authenticity require.

Dead by suicide at 46. And now Rolling Stone is in DFW’s garage: rifling through

family and friends, picking through the carrion of interviews and letters and manuscripts left

behind for clues: The drinking, the depression, the medication, the crippling self-doubt, “his…not

having an authentic self,” his “being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever

he was talking to,” his heartfelt desire “to be sincere, even though his brain kept turning him in

the direction of the ironic.”202

If authenticity is not thought of as a personal virtue – since the self never exists apart from others – then authenticity can be seen as the dialogic connection between speakers and

201 The account of McCain’s captivity comes partially from his autobiography, see John McCain with Mark Salter, Faith of My Fathers (New York: Random House, 1999). 202 David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008, 100-111. 128

audiences, between the self and others. Such a framework may also help us to remember that

ethos is always a product of particular rhetorical transactions, an ongoing series of negotiations

with particular rhetorical actors, a point illustrated rather perfectly by David Foster Wallace’s

short story “Octet.” Beginning as series of pop-quizzes inviting the reader to judge the ethos –

the ethics, the credibility – of characters caught in the delicate, Faberge-egg, Jane Austen dramas

of everyday interpersonal existence, “Octet” soon turns the tables on these judgments as the

narrator version of Wallace intrudes upon the text. Through increasingly ornate metafictional

conceits, the narrator attempts to establish his ethos – his bond of trust with the audience, his authority to judge and weigh-in on the ethos and rhetorical situatedness of his characters – by

climbing higher and higher and higher up the ladder of ironic, post-authentic, self-awareness, all

the while challenging the reader on their own authority – ironic or otherwise – to make these rhetorical judgments about other people (or rhetorical judgments about rhetorical judgments about other people, rhetorical judgments about….) in the first place.

“I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” says Karen Green,

Wallace’s widow. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.”203

By going through the funhouse mirror of postmodern metafiction, Wallace’s point in

“Octet” is to show the ultimate futility of the self-conscious, metafictional stance and of the inherent inauthenticity in ethos’ splitting of the public and private. But his other point is to show

the inescapability of having to make these rhetorical judgments (about other people’s presumably

authentic rhetorical relations), and the inevitability – even in a postmodern age so solipsistically

self-aware – of being a rhetorical actor in the world.

This seeming contradiction (and its harmful effects, if swallowed) returns us, finally, to

John McCain, Wallace’s reluctant, straight-talking hero of 2000, and a living embodiment of ethos’s paradoxes of public and private, authentic and fake. And it returns us to David Foster

203 Ibid., 111 129

Wallace’s dilemma – which was all of our dilemma, in the context of Campaign 2008 and the

new media era: What do we do with John McCain, which is to say: With all of each other and our

private, protected selves? If he was in charge, what would Wallace have done with McCain’s

ethos?

“I go through a loop,” Rolling Stone has Wallace tell us from beyond the grave, “I

notice all the ways that I am self-centered and careerist…at least here I am worrying about it,

noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity…It’s very confusing.”204

As Lionel Trilling has noted, heroism, by definition, requires theatricality: the appearance of being larger than – or beyond – mundane life. Yet it is only at the moment when men begin self-deprecating that they can conceive of themselves in noble terms, and thus aspire to enact the

heroic. The heroic ethos is, then, a rhetorical tightrope, the simultaneous embrace of what

Wallace called “both truth and bullshit.” And it is what John McCain negotiated expertly and

impressively: a “regular” guy refusing to do the self-narrating necessary to become a hero, but

skillful enough as an actor/politician to allow his story – his captivity, his torture, those private

moments, known to none but Lt. Commander John McCain, those moments that seem almost too-

impossible, all-too mythic, to be real – to circulate within the celebrity-economy of heroism.

Eureka! The moment is found: the final, private moment of pain and in extremis, the real

David Foster Wallace – at last! – resigned and beaten, walking to the rope hanging from the

rafter. “I can’t get the image out of my head,” his sister says. “David and his dogs, and it’s

dark. I’m sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry.”205

McCain’s persona was a rhetorical balancing act, one that, as “Up Simba” proved, required the utmost care and acumen. But, of course, John McCain lost in 2000, the victim of smears in South Carolina, put forward by Bush surrogates, that he had fathered a black child. So

204 Ibid., 111. 205 Ibid., 111. 130

when McCain took the stage at the Republican National Convention eight years later, trailing

badly in the polls – once again an underdog – it is perhaps of no surprise that he told, publicly, for

the first time, to tens of millions, the story of his captivity and capture at the hands of the North

Vietnamese, revealing to the light of the cameras the “certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain

Hilton half a world and three careers away,” where, despite the “torture and fear and offer of

release” a certain “Young Voter named McCain refuse[d] to violate a Code.” McCain put his

thumb on the scale of the private/public paradox, the delicate balance of ethos and authenticity.

Three months later, he lost the general election to Barack Obama. And whether the loss is

attributable to the dispersal of McCain’s aura of authenticity – the remarkable, era-defying ethos

he developed eight years earlier – is anyone’s guess. But a slew of editorials wondering “Where

is the real John McCain,” may, in some future antiquarian’s hindsight, tip the balance.206

III: Ethos 3.0: Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert, and Stephen Colbert

“Our writers – any writers – are the weakest creatures of our existence, posing as martyrs, seers, directors, doers. Their weakness is so great that their practiced lie becomes literature.” – Charles Bukowski 207

“This isn’t a dream. You’re not going to wake up from this.” – Stephen Colbert208

“I’m far realer than Sam Brownback, let me put it that way.”

So answered Stephen Colbert – or maybe “Stephen Colbert” – two weeks after announcing his candidacy for President of the United States and in response to Meet the Press host Tim Russert’s inevitable, and fairly reasonable, question: “So, are you a real candidate?”209

“Realer,” as it turns out, may be more true – or “Truthier” – than even Colbert intended. By raw

206 See “Bring Back the Real McCain,” The Economist, August 28, 2008. 207 Charles Bukowski, ”In Defense of a Certain Kind of Poetry,” in Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), 41. 208 Falcone, Michael, “Colbert: I Am a Candidate (And So Can You),” The New York Times, October 21, 2007. 209 Stephen Colbert, interviewed by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, NBC, October 20, 2007. 131

mathematics alone, the Comedy Central star was already arguably a more viable contender for the

White House than a number of his fellow competitors: ahead of Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd,

Dennis Kucinich, and, yes, Sen. Brownback in the polls, holding a respectable 13% in a hypothetical match-up against Rudy Giuliani, and with a Facebook group – 1,000,000 Strong for

Stephen Colbert – that was the fastest growing in the social-networking site’s history (averaging,

at one point, 83 new members a minute, threatening to overload the system’s servers and leaving

Obama and Clinton fan-pages in the dust). 210 But “realer” gets at something beyond real as well,

something at the heart of our dilemma of ethos in the new media age. For if “are you real” – are you your authentic you? – has become our default, if entirely paradoxical, question about

character in digital environments, then the success of Colbert – political satirist, improv art-

project, bona fide presidential candidate, or whatever he or it is – may help us to see forward to a

new rhetorical real: past the tired binary of authentic/inauthentic that our new media age – and

metafictional proclivities – renders untenable, even as it keeps binding our judgments of ethos as

character to them.

Squinting past what is easy to see – Colbert’s virtuosic performance, not just on Meet The

Press, but the Colbert Report and his (now infamous) roast of sitting President George Bush

(with the president sitting next to him) – helps us to realize how Colbert’s virtuosic performance

blinds us to what is actually occurring. We know that Colbert is a prescient send-up of political

inauthenticity run amuck: in particular, of the right-wing bloviators and mainstream Republican

candidates who fill cable-news talk shows and Presidential debates with endless chest-pounding

about who is the “real” conservative. Moreover, we have no shortage of scholars who tell us that

the new regime of politics-as-parody-as-political journalism that has emerged in the last decade

of new media, and came to define Campaign 2008, distinguishes itself by simultaneously

210 Rick Klein, “No Joke: Colbert's Campaign May Run Afoul of Law,” ABCNews.com, October 24, 2007. 132

exposing and participating in the blurring of the “real” and the “fake” in American politics. 211

But mere reflections on the cultural phenomena of Colbert miss perhaps the most critical aspect of his performance, and certainly the most critical question that any reconceptualization of our rhetorical standards of ethos must ask of him: Why does Stephen Colbert get away with being

“Stephen Colbert” (or vice versa)? How does he get a pass? And how can we get one? The answer: What Colbert does, he does not do alone. We are part of the joke. And the joke is on us.

And we play it on ourselves.

This is the true satiric beauty of Colbert’s appearance on Meet the Press: not the

skewering of the Styrofoam personalities, like Sen. Brownback, who crowd Sunday morning talk

shows or bluster their way through campaign trail Q & A’s spouting platitudes about authenticity

and ideological purity, but the way his exchange with Russert allows us to scope his true target:

the millions and millions of us who tune in each week to watch Russert, or his journalist-brethren,

prod and poke – via gaffes, usually via The Archive – to elicit more and more scripted, which is

to say inauthentic, answers to the fundamentally unanswerable rhetorical question: Are you real?

What is extraordinary about Colbert being grilled by an NBC reporter is not that Russert plays

along with “fake” candidate Colbert (asking him ostensibly real questions about policy and

campaign strategy), but that Russert plays along with – by treating deathly seriously – all the

quote-unquote-real candidates: the handled, spun, scripted, and ghostwritten Palins and Obamas and Bidens, candidates who, with relentless, almost pathological tenacity, Russert tries to expose as fakes, which is to say, handled, spun, scripted, and ghosted. The performance Colbert brings to life is not his, but ours: whether through our Fourth Estate proxies or by our simple acquiesce in these rituals of “authentic” political performance. This, in a nutshell, is our schizophrenic relationship with contemporary ethos as character: our full knowledge of the machinations,

211 For one example, i.e., mine, see Aaron McKain, “Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show,” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (2005): 415-430. 133

manipulations, and strategems of presidential campaign politics (brought to light as much by

common sense as forty years of the New Journalism), standing alongside our stubborn refusal to

let go of authenticity as a measure of political character, if only because we have no other way to

keep score.

What this strange partnership between Colbert and Russert – this tightrope performance

that acknowledges the inauthentic nature of political characters while understanding that it is

precisely inauthenticity (the behind-the-scenes reporting on political campaigning and rhetorical

skill) that news-programs depend upon to feed the 24-7 news cycle – grants us is a chance to

explore the symbiosis between speaker and audience that has always, or at least since the sophists

and Cicero, been part and parcel of ethos. What, after all, is Colbert – that ontological non-entity,

that fiction walking among us, that three dimensional persona, enacted only via the critical role,

the interpretive restraint, he/it asks/cajoles/invites/tricks us into assuming – and what is his aesthetic secret?

Our contention is that Colbert is an implied author par excellence. And as we think

through Fleckenstein’s notion of responsibility – the development of an “ethical stance [that

accounts for the] embeddedness of good character” within new media environments, which in

personal, professional, and political communication give us virtual carte blanche power over each

others’ presentations of self – we will further contend that Colbert allows us to see how the

narrative model of communication can be used to (1) get beyond public-private fidelity and public coherence gaffes and (2) enact three emerging, and promising, post-postmodern aesthetics

of politics: Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” Raol Eshelman’s “performatism,” and Timothy

Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism.”

134

A. I Am Colbert (And So Can You, With A Little Help From Narrative Theory)

“[T]o acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.” – Werner Herzog212

How does Stephen Colbert become “Stephen Colbert,” or vice-versa, whichever is which?

We have already considered, in Theory Interlude I, how the implied author (IA) – defined, briefly, as the ethos of the text, which emerges by audiences granting agency back to the author – is a logical theoretical response to the materiality and fluidity of digital media. But, as an interpretive method and model of ethos, it is the entanglement of the IA and the three – coterminous, totally non-existent – audience subject positions it necessarily constructs (the flesh and blood audience, the ideal audience, and the narrative audience) that creates the gears and levers to recalibrate our judgments. And so, put into the narrative model of communication, the heuristic looks like this:

(flesh & blood author)  IA  [narrator   narrative audience ]  authorial audience  (flesh & blood audience)

Figure 4. Narrative Model With Audiences

These three divisions of audience are critical, both for a workable version of ethos and for

any study of political public persona. Because what these divisions of audience allow is for a

triangulation of, and thus an opportunity to assume responsibility for, our rhetorical judgments of

character and authenticity. Narrative theorist Peter Rabinowitz, who developed this model as a

jumping off point from Booth’s implied author, provides the distinctions. Recognizing that all

acts of fiction require the reader to simultaneously accept the “true” and “untrue,” Rabinowitz

trifurcates the audience positions readers must then simultaneously inhabit: the flesh and blood

212 Werner Herzog, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” trans. Moira Weigel, Arion 17, no. 3 (Winter 2010). See also, Matt Zoller Seitz, “In Defense of Film and TV Hoaxes,” Salon, October 22, 2010. 135

audience, the narrative audience (which believes in the world of the fiction and is addressed by

the narrator) and the authorial audience (the hypothetical audience outside the world of the fiction, which understands the intentions, designs, and goals of – and thus agrees to join the

audience of – the implied author).213 The toggle between authorial and narrative audiences is

where interpretive judgments lie, as the flesh-and-blood audience either consents to or resists

joining either.

In fictional texts, Rabinowitz’s distinctions make obvious sense. Our interest, however, is how – and what is gained – when these distinctions are applied to a particular form of non- fiction discourse: American political rhetoric in the new media era. It is here that Colbert, a strange case, helps us to see the complexities and advantages.

As applied to Colbert, there seems to be an easy fit between the narrative model and the

game he asks his interlocutors to play. While any other candidate can hide beneath the apron

strings of authenticity, we instinctively understand that for flesh-and-blood Stephen Colbert to

transform into the fictional construct “Stephen Colbert,” we have to work, we have to play, we

have to join with him, and mutually create this political phantasm. The separation of the

performance from the biological entity (and what came biographically before or after) are

instantiated via our willingness to participate in the authorial audience: the audience that

recognizes the fictional nature of his character-performance, and is thus able to conjure up the

implied author who orchestrated it, an implied author, an ethos of Colbert, that exists in

contradistinction to both the “flesh-and-blood” agglomeration of life-choices and the pixelated

fiction on the television screen.

213 Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 121-144. For the classic account in communications studies of audience construction that Rabinowitz responds to, see Walter Ong, “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 9-21. 136

The miracle of this is that Stephen Colbert – versus, say, Lady Gaga, that other high- priestess of the new media era – does, on face, nothing to trigger his transformation. While Gaga, the Warholian, self-proclaimed, “sociologist of fame,” goes through endless lengths to perform and re-perform and fashion and refashion her “self” (meat-dresses, egg-dresses, all performed under the auspices of queer theory’s notions of “play”), the most famous star in the new media era is hounded, harassed, and tabloid hunted ad infinitum.214 (And, apparently, ad nauseum, if her, to date of this writing, “retirement” from press and publicity is to be believed.) Daring the paparazzi to pursue her is part of the act – the ethos – to be sure. But what is inarguable is that all the (monological) metafictional play achieves is more (monological) metafictional play, a living dissertation on performance art amounting to 50.4m Google hits on “Does Gaga have a dick” and the continued tailspin in the paradox of public/private, the search for the “real” Stefani

Germanotta lurking behind Gaga. Stephen Colbert, standing alone in a room, is just Stephen

Colbert. The same person, looking identical, on The Colbert Report, or the floor of Congress, is three people at once: The naïve and earnest conservative blowhard; the fearless, arch-cool, 21st

century Mark Twain ethos/IA; and some Catholic dude with glasses who used to be on Strangers

With Candy and whose dad died when he was a kid. The only difference, the catalyst, is us and

our interpretative restraint, our participation in the (as we would conceptualize it) narrative

model’s gifting of agency to allow for the IA. The question is why do we – and journalists and

politicians and elected officials – play along? Why do we allow Colbert the posthuman

sensibility, that we deny so many others?

The answer we hope for, because we also believe it has to be a bit true, is trust. Trust is the foundation of all considerations of ethos as character, but what makes Colbert unique is that he has an existential need for it. Without trust, without people willing to work with Colbert, to

214 On the sociology of fame, see Anderson Cooper, “Lady Gaga and the Art of Fame,” 60 Minutes, February 13, 2011. For examples of Gaga and theories of play, see Victor P. Corona, "Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga," Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 2 (2011): 1-19. 137

keep quiet about the other Colberts, the latter two don’t exist and the former, in the scheme of

American politics, doesn’t matter. What Colbert here telegraphs is the way that ethos as trust – in

particular in a new media era dominated by fluidity – must always be a two-way street. His vulnerability is that his entire being is dependent upon the (dialogic) care other people have for his ethos.

Of course, we – and the journalists and Congress-people who play along – also care because we get something in return. And as this is bringing us closer to our larger contention – that the narrative model of communication reorients, if we want it to, our judgments of politics and aesthetics more in keeping with a digital media age – we need to bring in the rest of the model variables, and so we turn back to James Phelan and his heuristics for studying how we experience fiction.

Positing three co-existing dimensions on which we process fictional works – the mimetic

(“an audience’s interest in the characters as possible people”), the synthetic (the characters as

artificial constructs), and the thematic (the allegorical level; “the ideational function of the

characters…the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the

narrative”) – Phelan argues that the experience of reading involves the toggling, or cross-

focusing, across these dimensions. 215 (A process, for explanation’s sake, similar to Burke’s

positing of “molten” rhetorical situations, which can be analyzed by adjusting the “ratios” of his

dramatistic pentad [act, scene, agent, agency purpose], a process which presumes that all

elements are always present, though some sometimes take prominence.216) The toggle between

these three dimensions is where interpretive judgments lie, as the audience (in negotiation with

the implied author) consents to or resists joining particular mimetic-synthetic-thematic

alignments.

215 James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2007), 6. 216 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 138

Acts of interpretation, always acts of politics, are really expressions of how we choose to juggle and negotiate these three variables: Whether we opt to be absorbed into the fiction as a form of reality, whether we resist it via a distanced appreciation of its machinations, or whether we decide to read the situations its presents allegorically. Applied to our competing aesthetics, we quickly see how Phelan’s model makes their complexities and differences clear. For the New

Journalists, the struggle was also, by no coincidence, between the public persona (synthetic) and the private, never realized, individual (mimetic). What Colbert telegraphs –as a means to rethink ethos as character in terms of responsibility– is a necessary realignment of our interpretive chakras, and ethical judgments of ethos) in ways that are more in keeping with the material,

aesthetic, and political realities of the new media age, specifically, a realignment of the mimetic-

synthetic axis that renders postmodern metafiction, from a critical perspective, politically (and

ontologically) superfluous. Coincidentally, this is precisely what the narrative model of

communication, and the IA, does.

Figure 5. Experiential Axis: Character

Looking at the diagram, we see not only the quixotic binary that the public/private gaffe

traps us in (the public persona versus the “real” private person), but also the two experiential

poles these variable correspond to (synthetic and mimetic) and the axis of ethos that connect them

(character). We also better see, interpretively, the nudge that the IA provides. By focusing on –

139

and by making impossible to ignore – the mutual processes of construction between speakers and

audiences, the implied author function necessarily fiats a synthetic (i.e, meta-level) understanding

of how character – ethos, public persona – is formed. This is necessarily a point of friction

against mimetic absorption into a text: Treating a Colbert or a Romney or an Aaron McKain as a

“real” creature. And by removing any pretense of pursuing the real author, it mutes (if not

renders superfluous) the mimetic/synthetic axis, i.e., public-private fidelity. It also transfers the

work that metafiction, in the New Journalistic tradition, was designed to do – i.e., call out the

constructedness of character, of the self – in a presupposed, prima facie, interpretive act. And by

presuming what Dr. Gonzo and Gaga aesthetically enacted, it provides a means to move beyond

the stylistic politics of metafiction, without re-adopting either a naïve view of rhetoric, or the

mythmaking that ran rampant during the lapdog era of American journalism.

What Colbert embodies, Russert – along with the other Congressmen and politicos who interact with Colbert – can’t ignore: The tedium of the public/private gaffe’s endless paradoxical rituals of political authenticity and, for a glimmering moment, a path to get beyond it. Because what it offers – by providing a heuristic to move on from public/private fidelity – is a new opening, and newfound prominence, for the third variable (lost in the shuffle of the endless discussion of character gaffes): The thematic.

And so, to get a better sense of the post-postmodern aesthetics and politics Colbert enunciates, we turn to a potential ally and proponent of the “realer” over the “real,” Werner

Herzog

One of the few – and certainly one of the most famous – artists to overtly challenge the material regime of digital media technology, Werner Herzog – avant-garde filmmaker, shoe-eater, boat-over-mountain hauler, radical documentarian – espouses, in manifesto and artistic practice, a familiar, but prescient aesthetic paradigm: “Ecstatic truth.” Fearful of digital media’s “assault on reality” – a consequence of digital technology becoming “articles of everyday use” – Herzog 140

agitates against our acquiescence to “all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become

part of everyday life,” a position he summarizes in an interview with Henry Rollins:

I think at the moment there’s a major tectonic shift going on, we have virtual reality, the internet, we have reality tv, we have digital effects, we got Photoshop: Everything is pointing toward a redefinition of reality. We have to start seeing, and working, and explaining and articulating reality in movies in a different way. Cinema veritie was the answer of the 60s…Today’s its something else out there…I’ve always said, sure reality has to be seen in a new way….Where is truth in all of this. Cinema verite is the accountant’s truth. I’ve always been after what I call an ecstatic truth, an ecstacy of truth.217

Ecstatic truth is certainly, as Herzog admits, a sloppy kissing cousin to Longinus’ sublime. But far from a timeless or anachronistic statement on the nature of art, Herzog’s call to aesthetic action is specifically rooted in the materiality of the new media era, both its fluidity and regimes of information. Given the new media era’s “assault on reality,” Herzog sees the only remaining defense to be the aesthetic (the ontological) waged against technologies that, while ostensibly motivated by epistemological interests, do nothing but devour reality as a meaningful category. As applied to the crisis of ethos – the paradox of public/private fidelity, the impossibility of coherence, both issues that Herzog deals with (and we wish we had time to deal with him dealing with) in his “documentary” Grizzly Man – Herzog’s call to abandon the pursuit of empirical, data-driven, informational “truth,” and to instead focus on fictionalization

(intensification, as he sometimes calls it), leads us, naturally, to our usual questions: How can

Herzog’s help us build a heuristic for rhetorical judgment? And what would an ethos that

embraces the “ecstasy of truth” – versus epistemological obsession for the real person – look like?

Surprise, surprise: Stephen Colbert. The question, though, is which one?

217 Werner Herzog, interview by Henry Rollins, The Henry Rollins Show, Independent Film Channel, April 15, 2006. 141

Let’s go back to the narrative model and the different audiences it asks us to join, as it illuminates the complex inter-relations of ethos, fiction, and mimesis that the Colbert-Russert exchange turns inside out. To begin, the issue is never that the narrator – or, even the implied author – is somehow less “real” than any flesh-and-blood doppelganger. Quite the opposite. We have no access – as Exhibit B argued – to the “real,” “authentic,” pre-rhetorical flesh-and-blood person (the John McCain locked away in his prison cell; the long suffering DFW). We only have access, via the IA-ideal audience or narrator-narrative audience nexi, to the Maverick war-heroes and tortured geniuses that we collectively create. Both “Colberts,” the narrator and the IA, are realer – rhetorically – because they are what is communicatively acted upon. They are, as classic conceptions of ethos have long let us know, all we have. At the authorial level, where our judgments are about our relationship with the ethos that we find as the producer of the text, we can even find Aristotle foreshadowing a version of realer-ness, “the speaker [is] an element of the discourse itself, no longer simply its origin (and thus a consideration standing outside the text) but rather a signifier standing inside an expanded text.”218

Judgments at the narrative level work a bit differently, for – when applied to political rhetoric – these judgments are not only about fictional characters, they have the potential to turn us into characters: satirical apparitions, political personas, live-action alter egos. Colbert makes

“Russert” (respected, hard-hitting political journalist, proud lion of the American political

process), just as Russert makes “Colbert” (talk show host and village idiot). Not only do we

participate in the creation of these actionable fictions (these specimens of ethos as ecstatic truth),

they also – as we will gesture toward in the Conclusion – have the potential to trap us into

characterizations (fictionalizations) we do not want. For the moment, however, we will turn to

our second gaffe – public coherence – to see how Colbert and the narrative model helps us to set

218 James Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin, eds., Ethos : New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994), xvi. 142

up a critique of ideological purity in the deliberative process that is an essential part of

representative government.

B. The Thematic Truthiness of Realer-ness

“How do I know that I am not my own Doppelganger?” – Werner Herzog219

“I want to party with you, cowboy” – Stephen Colbert, interview with Werner Herzog220

Every hero needs their anti-hero, the other side of their Janus mask, the upside down mirror image that better reflects their ethos and motivation. Batman, the Dark Knight, has the

Joker, the glowing anarchist. Magneto, the Malcom X mutant revolutionary, has the X-Men, the reluctant MLK-ish keepers of the (mutant-ist) status quo. And while Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly is, in the official origin story, the catalyst for Stephen Colbert, it might be Grover Norquist – one of least known but most powerful people in American politics – who is the true Joker to Colbert’s

Batman, or maybe the other way around.

The inventor and guardian of Americans for Tax Reforms’s infamous “no taxes pledge,”

Norquist is, in essence, the purest embodiment of the ideological rigidity that has emerged in response to the coherence gaffe in the new media era. An idea that came to him when he was 13

– as he loves to tell horrified journalists – the tax pledge was a young boy and Nixon enthusiast’s rhetorical coming of age story: Politicians, the adolescent learned, cannot be trusted. They say one thing to one group and then another to another. They change their mind. They don’t do the things they promised you that they would do. 221 The “only way to have a conversation,”

219 Werner Herzog, interview by Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 6, 2011. 220 Ibid. 221 Grover Norquist, interview by Steve Croft, “The Pledge: Grover Norquist’s Hold on the GOP,” 60 Minutes, CBS, November 20, 2011. 143

Norquist concluded, was to “stop rhetoric.” 222 And so, the pledge was born, putting – at one particular date in the endless slog of Campaign 2008 - 236 House Members, 41 Senators, 13

Governors, 1200 State Legislators, including every Republicans running for president in 2012, except Gov. Jon Huntsman – in Grover Norquist’s pocket, giving him a guaranteed gaffe bullet that, as President George “Read My Lips” Bush learned, and Norquist likes to remind us, killed his presidency, even if he ended the Cold War.

To be sure, American politics has always had its ideologues (McCarthy, Fr. Coughlin), and in considering the rise of ideological purity as the emerging standard of ethos in Campaign

2008, it is impossible to discount the rise of the Christian Right within the Republican Party in the 1980s. Yet, as we saw with Gov. Romney in Exhibit B, the materiality and fluidity of digital media (interactivity and The Archive) leave politicians in a paradox: Coherence and consistency are impossible, but with no other standard of ethos to take their place, the only solution, however quixotic, is to attempt to become even more ideologically rigid. This is the seriously under- understood connection between the materiality of digital media and the rise of ideological rigidity both in our candidates (i.e., Tea Party libertarianism, Ayn Rand objectivity, religious fundamentalism, Originalism in Constitutional adjudication) and in our rhetorical judgments.

We’ll leave it to some polis sci grad student to crunch the numbers (and come up with a statistical correlation we won’t buy anyway.) Because, oddly, the ethos purists are on the right side – but only halfway, which is always dangerous – of an emerging post-postmodern aesthetic which shares intellectual real estate with ecstatic truth: Performatism.

Prophesizing the end of the postmodern, Raoul Eshelman advises us – correctly – that the path forward “must take place through a mechanism completely impervious to postmodernism’s

222 Ibid. 144

models of dispersal, deconstruction, and proliferation.”223 In other words: the materiality of digital media. His proposal –incorporated by “metamodernism” (which we will discuss in a moment) – is performatism. Distinguished from performativity – the metafictional gymnastics that the New Journalists leaned on and which tangled DFW up – performatism “serves neither to foreground nor contextualize the subject, but rather to preserve it:

[t]he subject is presented (or presents itself) as a holistic, irreducible unit that makes a binding impression on a reader or observer. For this reason the new subject always appears to the observer as reduced and “solid,” as single or simple minded and in a certain sense identical to thing it stands for. This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: telos, the author, belief, love, dogma, and much, much more”224

The aesthetic enaction of a simple-minded, dogmatic, nearly theological, un- deconstructable ethos? How could this not describe the cavalcade of candidates emerging in the new media era, or Norquist’s brand of purity at all cost (he seriously has the pledges notarized and locked up in a safe), or, of course, that other, “realer,” performatist ethos, Stephen Colbert.

And here’s the key thing, and what provides our clues to how performatism can get us out of ethos as coherence and on the way to responsibility: When Grover visited The Report, Colbert and Norquist played very well together. Case in point, this interview, from June 27, 2011:

Colbert: I’m going to ask you a trick question, I hope you have the right answer. “Is there any time and any circumstance under which raising taxes would be the right thing to do”?

Norquist: No.

Colbert: Good Answer. Now let’s amp it up a little bit. Terrorists have kidnapped all of our grandmothers. They’ve got them in a subterranean burrow…and all of our grandmothers have been slathered with honey….and they are going to release fire ants into this burrow who will bite our grandmothers to death. Their only demand is that we

223 Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 2008), 1. 224 Ibid., 1. 145

increase the marginal tax rate on the top 2% of Americans...do we increase the tax rate, or do we let our grandmothers die by ant bite?

Norquist: I think we console ourselves with the fact that we have pictures… and memories.

(Audience groans)

Colbert (laughing): No, that’s the right answer. The man signed a pledge. Grandmothers be damned, he signed a pledge.225

What is notable about Norquist’s Colbert Report appearance is that, in typical interviews, he is a nearly impervious nut to crack. (Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, tries to press Norquist on his pledge, and he tells her– with a straight face – that taxes are equivalent to the

Holocaust.226) But given an interlocutor – an ethos – to play along with, Norquist immediately becomes realer a la Colbert – trifurcating himself as character-narrator (zealot), implied author

(oddly charming Machievelli), and flesh-and-blood person (oddly-bearded guy in a funny chair).

Moreover, working with Colbert, they both enter, as equals and co-players, the narrative level of communication.

And so our contention is this: What if, in the new media era – and in coordination with an approach to ethos that diminishes the synthetic/mimetic binary to better pursue thematic issues – the performativim of ideological purity – in conjunction with dialogical play – is precisely the antidote to ideology? What if, by providing an arena that embraces the creation of ecstatic truth – versus ideological coherence and technocratic mastery of policy (the former being impossible in the new media era, the latter being one of the major obstacles to judging rhetorical performance), the narrative level of communication provides a representation of deliberative theater that helps get us past the gaffe’s commitment to coherence?

225 Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 27, 2011. 226 Grover Norquist, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, October 2, 2003. 146

Always Acting As If: Improv and Ideology

“Saying the opposite of what you mean isn’t funny, folks. It’s just stupid. Irony: You’re on notice.” – Stephen Colbert227

Is it any surprise that after two millennia of investigation into the rhetorical practices that

help smooth the functioning of deliberation within democracy, that a possible – and currently

working – solution came not from Aristotle or Jurgen Habermas, but a comedian with a working knowledge of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and improv?

It is, by now, no secret that Colbert’s rules of play are heavily indebted to the tradition of

improvisational comedy.228 Trained at Chicago’s Second City in the 1980s (alongside Steve

Carrel and Amy Sedaris) by improv guru Del Close, Colbert discloses the secret of his aesthetic

strategy, the first and most important rule of improv: always act as if. As Tina Fey, also a

Second City alum, explains the rules, start with “yes,” then add “yes and….” and “make

statements – Don’t ask questions all the time.”229 Her example:

Bad improv: Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in that box?

(This puts pressure on the other actor to come up with all the answers.)

Good improv: Here we are in Spain, Dracula.

Play and world-making are the key features here, and it can be no coincidence that game play is such a defining feature of digital media and (unstated) metaphor for Eshelman’s

performatism (see footnote for comparison).230 But the other key feature of improv-play is

227 Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, September 19, 2006. 228 See Christopher R. R. Weingarten, “Before the Report: Stephen Colbert’s Rise From Sketch Shows to America’s Hero,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2009. 229 Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011). 230 To wit, the connection between performatism and game play: “Performatist works are set up in such a way that the reader or viewer at first has no choice but to opt for a single, compulsory solution to the problem raised wthin the work at hand. The author, in other words, imposes a certain solution on us using dogmatic ritual or some other coercive means. This has two immediate effects. The coercive frame cuts us off, at least temporarily, from the context around it and forces us back into the work. Once we are inside, 147

responsibility to your co-players: You do not want to offer a proposition which will block them from future action. You also are held responsible for your choices as they reflect – publicly – in

your partner’s responses. Force them to say “Here we are in Spain, Dracula” in front of an

audience expecting dramatic, realistic improvisation (a la the films of John Cassavettes), or at

least a modicum of reality in the improvisation (a la Curb Your Enthusiasm), and the audience’s

willingness to play along (as spectators) dies down.

In his interview segments and live-action interactions, Colbert masterfully shows (on occasion) the value of applying improv tactics to a political theater located at the narrative level

of communication. If the New Journalism – interested in epistemology – turned candidates

(people) into half-assed caricatures as they attempted, through inhuman pretzel logic, to dodge

the ethos as coherence gaffe, Colbert, and the narrative level of communication, takes the next –

ontological – step: Freeing politicians from the bounds of people-hood altogether and,

dialogically, allowing them to become characters acting in the thematic realm. As he explains, his only instructions to his guests are: “I am a well-intentioned idiot. Honestly disabuse me and we will have a good time.”231 What is remarkable is how quickly – and gamely – political figures rise to the challenge. Even more remarkable is how often they find that they cannot disabuse him without disabusing themselves. And what fares the worst, and so poorly that it effectively becomes as if’s corollary and second rule, is ideological purity.

One of the more telling interviews – which puts the pedagogy and politics of as if in its best light – is with Texas School Board member, avowed creationist, and dentist by trade, Don

we are made to identify with some person, act, or situation in a way that is plausible only within the confines of the work as a whole. In this way performatism gets to have its postmetaphysical cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you’re practically forced to identify with something implausible or unbelievable within the frame – to believe in spite of yourself – but on the other, you still feel the coercive force causing this identification to take place, and intellectually, you remain aware of the particularlity of the argument at hand. Metaphysical skepticism and irony aren’t eliminated, but are held in check by the fame.” Eshelman, qtd. in Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010): 10. 231 Christopher R. R. Weingarten, “Before the Report: Stephen Colbert’s Rise From Sketch Shows to America’s Hero,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2009. 148

McLeroy. McLeroy is on The Colbert Report to “promote” –and if this isn’t a bit of new media

era ethos weirdness, nothing is – Revisionaries, the documentary that represents him as a

“radical” in charge of rewriting Texas textbooks to better suit his creationist, anti-evolution, and revisionist historical worldviews. As is typically the case, Colbert lets his guest make the first move and set the parameters of the game, the foundational premise of the world they are creating.

McLeroy makes the familiar new media era claim about logos and knowledge (which comes from both the Lyotard-loving intellectual left and evangelical right, both of whom are pantomiming

Bakunin-anarchism from over 100 years ago) that “[s]omebody has to stand up to the experts.”232

How Colbert (“C”) navigates the rules of he and McLeroy’s (“M”) world, and his most dis-

abusive moves, is as follows:

1. C: “I don’t recognize dentistry….I don’t believe the science is in on cavities.” C: “It’s your personal scientific view. I agree with you: Science can be a personal choice.”

2. C: How do things get into textbooks? Because I imagine that experts decide, but, in fact, it is voted on? M: [explains process of establishing state standards by consensus and acknowledges that those standards dictate the content of nationally marketed textbooks] C: I have always been a fan of reality by majority vote.

3. C: You have removed references to Thomas Jefferson M: That’s not true. C: Actually, I say it is. M: That’s not true. C: No, I have personally chosen that it is true.

The target is not Leroy, nor even his ideas: It is simply the world, and the character in that world, that he is creating. Neither dialectic or Socratic, what Colbert offers is something much more valuable in the new media era: A gaffe-free space that makes ethos as coherence impossible and, and more importantly, a critique of ideological purity that neither scolds, nor offends, but forces – dialogically – both parties to publicly own, and take responsibility for, the world their

232 Don McLeroy, interview by Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, April 23 2012. 149

ideas are creating. Only judgment can negotiate the world that is being created. Ideology – as

Phillip Converse long ago defined it (in its most non-ideological, old school, poli sci way) – is

about constraint, the necessary limiting of choices to aid voters in representative democracy.

Ideological purity – fundamentalism of any kind – restricts too many moves for either player to

play well, or for very long.

This is what theorists of Colbert seem to get wrong. He is in one-on-one performances, not a

parody or a satire or anything approximating the postmodern critique of the self or knowledge.

He is, underneath it all, a gamer. He is, above all, a pedagogy of deliberative politics. And he’s

one that any teacher, or law student, immediately recognizes: The pedagogy of play, of taking

students’ beliefs to their next, and then next, and then next, logical conclusion until they find that

they cannot live with (at least in public) their beliefs any longer. Colbert – and the narrative level

of communication – takes this a step further: Could your character, he is asking his co-players,

live in the world that you are creating, and that our characters are now inhabiting. Is it viable? Is

it anyplace that anyone would want to be? Are these performative-istic creations creating a

fiction, an ecstatic truth, that we, as the spectating citizens, would want anything to do with?

These questions – whether a fiction is allowing for the creation of rich characters, whether the

implied author could live a day in the world he created (or if he or she was just a “hack”),

whether these were characters, or IAs, you would want to join with – are precisely the questions

that drove Booth in the Rhetoric of Fiction and later in The Company We Keep. As applied to

American political rhetoric – and the separate ontological level that the narrative model of communication provides (provided there is an ethos of trust, like Colbert’s, that can encourage a

Norquist or LeRoy to play along) – what we have, in yet another back to the future moment, is a model that, oddly or not, aligns with Jacques Ranciere’s articulation of aesthetic politics as theater premised on the pedagogical paradox of the “schoolmaster attempting to abolish the

150

difference between himself and the ignoramus” (i.e., the student).233 Ranciere’s theater, and the

narrative level of communication (the thematic: the space of performance, exploration, and play),

is a good fit for deliberative politics, one component of a citizen’s political life in a civic republic.

(Either as citizens debate amongst themselves or watch as their representatives hash things out.)

But we have another role in American politics: Rhetorical judgment, acting as rhetorical critics as

we are hailed and persuaded by our elected leaders. This is the much stickier question of

representation, a question that occupies the remainder of this project, and which – because it turns

in part on the narrator-narrative audience axis – we will touch on as we conclude our examination of ethos as character.

C. Conclusion and Coming Attractions: Responsibility, Rhetorical Aesthetics, Representative Politics

“..it may well happen that the public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant the public good, than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.” – Madison, Federalist No.10234

How does representative politics work? How do we come to feel represented?

This is philosopher Frank Ankersmit’s question, and it begins with a reasonable observation: Since after the voters vote and the ballots are counted, politics (in its parliamentary/republican form) then becomes about how representatives “negotiate” (or, ideally, deliberate) competing principles and preferences, why, despite this discrepancy between the represented and the negotiated results of the parliamentary process, does the person represented consider his or herself represented at all?”235

233 Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009), 72-73. 234 James Madison, “Federalist Papers No.10,”in The Federalist Papers (London: Penguin, 1987). 235 F.R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 38. 151

A perfectly good question. But what we can’t help but find quaint is how, given the discord of American politics in the new media era, Ankersmit frames his question exactly upside down. The crisis of ethos in the new media era – the epidemic of the gaffe, the aforementioned

goddamn mess of American politics – is precisely a crisis of representation, a breakdown of the

rhetorical connection between leader and led. Presented within a theater of representation that

does not resemble the days of newspapers, television, and radio, and armed only with rhetorical

criteria that are no longer viable, there is, in the final analysis, a sense that we are no longer sure

how, or if, or whether, we are being represented at all.

And so we are back at the starting premise of this book: How do We, the Rhetorical

Critics, update our rules of ethos so that our judgments are more in keeping with the materiality

of the new media era, respect the fluidity inherent in it, but allow us to take responsibility for our

judgments? We have now considered ethos as character, the value of the implied author and the

narrative model of communication, their relation to the emerging academic configuration of ethos

(the posthuman) and how they attempt to provide solutions to our impossible standards of public-

private fidelity and public-coherence. In terms of aesthetics – for it is via aesthetic enaction that

our judgments often materialize – we considered the limits of metafiction, the necessity of a

dialogically enabled ontological approach to our many selves, and the ways in which the narrative

model coincides, and provides an heuristic to implement, the post-postmodern aesthetics of

performatism and ecstatic truth. All of which is, of course, only one piece of the puzzle of ethos,

which (even in our limited conceptualization) also includes ethos as agency and ethos as

community. And so to conclude our examination of ethos as character, and continue our look at

the interplay between the authorial and narrative audiences, we will set up the tensions that the

remainder of this project, at a future date, will articulate.

Which brings us back to Ankersmit and the question of what a post-postmodern

aesthetics of political possibility in a representative democracy might look like? 152

For Ankersmit, it is only by virtue of an aesthetic realm that representative politics can exist, let alone function. It is precisely discord and division within a representative body, he argues, that proves the value of a representative body: If there was no division and discord – nothing to be negotiated and deliberated upon – then direct democracy, a simple vote, could have solved the problem. This absolute correspondence between represented and representative – which Ankersmit dubs “mimetic” representation (and we would call coherence) – denies the possibility of politics because all actions would merely be the tallying of agglomerated interests rather than the attempt to overcome division. (“From a theoretical perspective mimetic representation on the level of political ideology is rejected because that would deprive parliamentary work of any purpose: Why deliberate different political proposals if, in the final analysis, one remained bound by the opinions of the people represented.”)236 The necessary solution is the aesthetic, which, as he tells us:

The political reality created by aesthetic representation is therefore essentially political power. The aesthetic difference or gap between the represented and his or her representative is the origin of (legitimate) political power, and we are therefore justified in assigning to political power an aesthetic rather than an ethical nature. 237

Our question is this: What would a non-mimetic approach to politics look like? Or, more

to the point, what would, as we try to move from a new media era to a digital media age, an

aesthetic of politics look like? We find an answer – and a set of principles that seem very familiar – in one of the more promising articulations of post-postmodern stylistics: Timothy

Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism”

Locating an “informed naivete, a pragmatic idealism” in the emerging artistic sensibilities

of early 21st century artists – (Michael Gondry and Wes Anderson in film, Gregory Crewdon and

Kay Donachie in painting and photography, others we won’t pretend to know off hand) –

236 Ibid., 38. 237 Ibid., 49. 153

Vermeulen and van den Akker sense an abandonment of the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction,

parataxis and pastiche, in favor of what they, wonkily, call “aesth-ethical notion of

reconstruction, myth, and metaxis” but, in shorthand, increasingly refer to as just

“neoromanticism.” 238 We are less interested (at this point) in quibbling with who Vermeulen and van den Akker corral into the metamodernist stable (i.e., David Lynch, really?) then one of their key theoretical terms: Oscillation. Splitting, while not negating, the difference between

“modern[ist] enthusiasm and postmodern irony,” oscillation is what defines metamodernism as a toggle, a back and forth, between modernist aspiration and postmodernist skepticism.

Metamodernism, then, should not be confused with the postmodern negation of meaning but rather “...in metamodernism this pluralism and irony are utilized to counter the modern aspiration, while in postmodernism they are employed to cancel it out….metamodern irony is intrinsically bound to desire, whereas postmodern irony is inherently tied to apathy.”239

Orienting the end of the postmodern project as the question of how we split the difference between modernism’s epistemological search (“fanatic and/or naïve”) and pomo’s self-conscious destruction of it (“apathetic or skeptic”), it is only logical that Velmeulen and van den Akker find

“the current generation’s attitude – for it is, and very much so – an attitude tied to a generation – can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivete, a pragmatic idealism.”240 Nor is it much of a

surprise that the first artist/text/representative figure they locate as the embodiment of the

metamodern, of simultaneous hope and cynicism, is candidate Obama and the mantra, and

soundtrack to Campaign 2008, “Yes we can. Yes, we can change. Yes we can.”241

So, since they have already dragged American representative politics into it: How do we

– as rhetorical critics – enact the metamodern, and its “informed naivete” and “pragmatic

238 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010): 1-14. 239 Ibid., 5 240 Ibid., 8, 10. 241 Ibid., 2. 154

idealism”? This brings us to the narrative model’s toggle (oscillation) between the authorial, narrative, and flesh and blood audiences, and the question of when we should – and shouldn’t – play along.

We’ll start with the one interpretive criterion the implied author skews toward, because it makes not noticing it impossible: the attention to craft and the synthetic level. With the implied author as a guide, gaffes suddenly matter for a very different, and almost counter-intuitive, reason: they telegraph, not a window into a person’s “soul,” but the incompetence of a candidate/campaign team that has let the seams show. Whether its $150,000 in swag that doesn’t gel with Sarah Palin’s Carhartts and NASCAR image, or Mitt Romney suddenly seeing the light on abortion just in time for the southern primaries, the rhetorical sin behind either event, the reason they qualify as rhetorical failures, changes from inauthenticity of character to rhetorical/communicative incompetence. An avalanche of editorials (from the New York Times, from The Economist, from NPR) asking “Where is the real John McCain” is valid, not because of a political need, or desire, for Holden Caulfield-esque purity, or artificial ideological rigidity, or the pernicious search for the true self, but because any such discrepancy may be proof of a short circuit in the PR chain of command: a breakdown between the multitude of advisors, surrogates, and staff charged with creating and maintaining “John McCain” or the “Maverick” persona/brand that gave the Arizona Senator the Republican nomination and made him the darling of the political press since 2000.

This is, more or less, the classic interpretative question that runs along the implied author

– authorial audience axis. Recognizing that ethos is always dialogic, and that the onus of its production is always on us, if we already know that politicians are not “real” people, but are fictional, often-group authored, constructs, the question of who they “really” are can, and should, be replaced by questions of craft and skill: of whether they are leading us in the ways we want to be led, of whether their ethos is constructed on terms we can abide by. This sort of analysis – of 155

how we have become persuaded – is, more or less, the sort of literary analysis the IA was created to produce, as Booth himself tells us: “Even more important is the fact that if we don’t think about the difference between good and bad masking, we are much more likely to get sucked in destructively by the bad kinds – such as politicians’ dishonest rhetrickery.”242

Craft, however, looks suspiciously like New Journalistic politics: The obsession with the construction of the political persona over other considerations. But, given that the IA mutes the obsession over persona/person, and invites more stringent attention toward the thematic, we are presented with another question: How are we, the addressees of political rhetoric, being represented?

While, on the level of deliberation, the narrative model of communication (a la Colbert) provides a theater of politics to play at performatism, that is only one part of rhetorical performance in a civic republic. And in the arena of non-deliberative rhetoric – i.e., all the discourse used by candidates and elected officials to persuade us that we are being represented – the injunction to join, to act as if, becomes problematic. When “we” – we, the people; we, the folks standing around a V.F.W. listening to Ron Paul; we, whoever can stand to watch paid political advertisements – are addressed as the audience, we are invited to be pulled into the narrative level, to be represented by the representative’s rhetoric. But, paradoxically, it is only by resisting that we can keep Ankersmit’s aesthetic realm of politics from dissolving into mimetic form of politics. To quote Ranciere, the “aesthetic community is a community of disidentified persons. As such, it is political because political subjectiviation proceeds via a process of dis- identification.”243 This process of voicing dis-identification, of non-representation, is not only the

sin qua non of the gaffe, but – via the toggling between the narrative, authorial, and flesh-and-

blood audiences that the narrative model invites us to consider as we make our rhetorical

242 Wayne C. Booth, “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowtiz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 77. 243 Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, 72. 156

judgments – we can potentially achieve the “oscilating”(i.e., the back and forth informed naivete

and pragmatic idealism) that the metamodern promises and which looks suspiciously like the

rhetorical aesthetics (to coin a phrase) that Chicago School rhetorical theory always presumed

and which, strangely enough, may find its day in the digital media age.

And so, just so it is in print somewhere, here is where our investigation into the interplay of the narrative model of communication, rhetorical aesthetics and ethos will go in the next stages of this project:

Figure 6. Experiential Axis: Agency and Community

• Ethos as agency: Considering how reconceptualizing rhetorical action narratively helps us to

get beyond the idea of bias in the news, moving beyond this binary (of rhetoric versus reality,

thematic versus mimetic) and beyond the aesthetics that grant the gaffe its power: “campaign

narrative.”

• Ethos as community: Rethinking the ways in which the fluidity of digital media eliminates

the ability to communicate to any single, intended audience and traps us in the binary of a

universal (apolitical) versus particular audiences. Taking on remix, the new media era’s

dominant metaphor for justifying contextlessness as “play,” we instead argue for another

musical conceptualization – compositional-improvisation – as a way to bring mimetic 157

considerations back into our judgments.

158

CONCLUSION: IMPLEMENTING ETHOS AS CHARACTER IN THE CLASSROOM

“What we want to try to do is start talking about judgment, how do we actually get stuff done, what’s common sense.” – Sen. Barack Obama, The Daily Show, 11.26.07244

Who cares?

If there is a question that most immediately distills a 200 page investigation into our norms of ethos in the new media era – let alone a dissertation on gaffes and rhetorical judgment – this might be it. Because confronted, as we are, by the daily pile-up of ostensible rhetorical mistakes – the Congressman caught trolling college co-eds on Twitter; the revelation (obtained by recovering the computer files he thought long erased) that Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was a staunch supporter of the individual health care mandate that 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney now campaigns against; the everyday instantiations of these public-private fidelity and public coherence gaffes that affect how we live and work and play in the world – the questions that must be asked, if our judgments are to be meaningful, are not only why we care about any of these alleged transgressions, not only how we care for each other as we collaboratively enact an ethos we are all implicated in, but also who are these people

244 Barack Obama. Interview by John Stewart. The Daily Show. Comedy Central. November 26, 2007.

159

doing the caring or not caring, and how do they (especially if “we” are “they”) take responsibility for the consequences of our judgments?

The logical follow up question, of course, is how are any of these insights implemented?

What this project promised – back in the Introduction amidst a cascade of paragraphs lamenting a new media era which, while providing a perhaps unparalleled ability to have our judgments and voices heard, had not yet updated our standards of judgments to the material realities of digital media – was a heuristic, available to citizens and students, to better see the consequences of our rhetorical judgments, focusing first, via the first two Exhibits (Mitt Romney and John McCain/Stephen Colbert), on ethos as character. I’ll now conclude by demonstrating, using a small piece of my own professional writing pedagogy as a guide/exhibit, how the narrative model of communication can be used as a guide – not a prescription – in how to navigate our judgments of ethos as character. The interest here is not to explore the issues that follow (the nature of work, the postmodern economy of the 21st century, and the issues of power that lurk behind instantiations of the public-private divide) in their full, academic complexity, nor is it to intervene (nor claim to intervene) in pedagogical debates within Composition Studies.

Instead, my goal for this Conclusion is to provide a (fairly simple) test case to see how the narrative model of communication (and its component parts: the implied author, its multiple audience positionalities, its mimetic-synthetic-thematic axis, its pathway to metamodernism) can be used to guide and triangulate, but not necessarily prescribe, judgments of ethos given the materiality and fluidity of digital media.

Which brings us to this dissertation’s final test case: To that poster child for damaged professional ethos in the new media era, Tiger Woods.

160

I. Ethos Inc., Redux

“[T]he futility of public admiration is such that money seems tangible by comparison.” – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition245

“Who cares that Tiger Woods, maybe the most famous athlete in the world, and one of

the richest celebrities ever, cheated on his wife?”

This is the question that, for two years’ worth of job talks and writing courses, I have asked groups of students to explain (with eager faculty eavesdropping). It’s also a fairly reasonable question to ask after watching Woods’ nearly preternaturally tone-deaf press conference in February 2010, three months after the car crash and domestic disturbance that led to the excavation of the cell phone sexts, texts, and messages confirming that he had slept with an

(approximate) gazillion women who were not coincidentally not his wife.

“No, really. Who honestly cares – who honestly, actually, personally gives a shit – that

Tiger Woods, world’s most famous athlete, impossibly rich guy, thing on your TV with a golf club, had sex with all these women?”

Honestly cares usually gets me a couple of takers. The most common answer is that as an athlete – and, in particular, an African-American athlete – Woods has an obligation to be a role model. (Which always invites the rejoinder: But are you, person standing right here, personally, offended?). The most meaningful answer I ever heard was a young woman who explained that the only real bonding experience she had with her father was when they used to watch Woods play golf when she was a kid, and now she can’t think of those times with her father without thinking about Tiger Woods and the halo of general sleazeballiness that now hangs over him.246

245 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57. 246 Note: As was the case with the student who once publicly confessed -- as we searched as a class for a song we all hated so as to theorize a baseline parameters of aesthetics and taste for our classroom micro- community – that whenever he heard “Who Let the Dogs Out?” he was transported back, via the Baja Men’s madeleine melodies, to his grandfather and Cleveland Indian games (and thus he was the lone hold- out in the 24-1 vote that it was the worst song ever), the girl who got to know her father via Woods’ wicked 161

But the brute fact remains: In two years of asking a couple hundred (give or take) students

whether Tiger’s infidelity honestly, personally, matters, there haven’t even been a dozen self-

selected wounded and heart-sick casualties. Which begs the question: “So, why do we care, and should we?” And this, typically within a couple of beats, gets us to the sticky paradoxical heart of the new media era’s policing of ethos as character via two very telling answers. (1) We shouldn’t care what Woods’ does because what he does in private is his own business and (2) we should care because Woods’ behavior has hurt his brands, thus jeopardizing his partners and benefactors and shareholders, and, therefore, it is precisely their, and our, business.

As was argued in Exhibits B and C, given the materiality and fluidity of digital media, privacy, as a protective marker of ethos, is a troubled category. But as we build the case for the narrative model of communications, it is actually the second response – thinking not just of Tiger

Woods, but of our selves, as brands – that helps us to see the narrative model’s possibilities.

Because while Brand You gets the diagnosis of the crisis of ethos in the new media era correct – and has, arguably, become the predominant pop cultural, if not pedagogical, re-conceptualization of ethos and “the self” in the new media era – it also, if the preceding 200 pages of analysis is to be believed, gets the solution to it exactly backwards.

To begin, we must acknowledge that for students (our stand in for citizens) to make the connection between ethos and brands is not surprising, given not only our infatuation with personal branding (discussed below) but the earnestness with which thinking of ourselves as brands has been proselytized by both the corporate community and (though it may be painful to admit it) institutions of higher education.247 A business school black board mantra turned viral

fairway drive brooks no rejoinder of any kind. For you, Tiger is an asshole, and sanctity of public-private fidelity was violated. And, as in all matters of judgment, such judgment is yours to have and make. 247 See, for example, this write up of Schwabel’s invited talk at Rutgers, Lisa Marie Segarra, “Students Hear Tips on Branding Themselves for Job Market,” DailyTargum.com, September 23, 2011. Alternatively, and for an attempt to sell the Brand You philosophy to a different audience, see this write up of a talk – titled “Rep Yo Brand” given by professors at the University of Central Arkansas: Hilary Dixon, “Students Learn to Represent Themselves,” The Echo, March 7. 2012. 162

rethinking of the self, Brand You is summed up most simply in a text that has become

representative of the trend, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Create Career Success, by Dan

Schwabel: In the Brand You world, Schwabel preaches, “[a]s an individual, you must acknowledge that you are a brand.” Schwabel’s argument is simple and, on the level of diagnosis, one I agree with. Since we already know that companies, universities, and potential partners/friends/coworkers/employers/employees/etc. troll the internet for proof of our public coherence and public-private gaffes; and since we already know that “[o]nline deceptions are just waiting to be discovered”; and since we already know (thanks to Ad Busters and Marxist

humanities professors and just generally being half-awake to the ways we are bought and sold)

that we are always/already “personally branded by the various corporations [we] support”; then

why not, so Schwabel argues, fight fire with fire? What could make more sense, given this crisis

of ethos in the new media era, then treating ourselves, and each other, as a brand?248

This is where Schwabel – a “leading voice in the area of personal branding” (Business

Week); creator of a “roadmap to create and implement your marketing plan in the digital era”

(Harvard Business School Dean, John A. Quelch) – and I (grown man still defending his dissertation) part ways. And not only for the reasons you immediately think, like the fact that reducing humans to brands is dehumanizing and just generally fucking yucky and about absolutely the last thing institutions of higher education should be doing. (Those are pretty good reasons.) But here’s the real problem: Without an alternative conceptualization of ethos to replace Brand You with, pointing out the ickiness of the idea isn’t going to dissuade our students or our colleagues across the campus. Instead, the problematics of Brand You – the ways in which it offers no real economic or existential protection from the materiality and fluidity of digital

248 Dan Schwabel, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2009).

163

media, nor any way to take responsibility for our judgments (the very issues that the Tiger Woods

case telegraphs) – need to be addressed head on.

So let’s start by triangulating the judgment that so few students would cop to: That Woods

did commit a breach of public-private fidelity that we do, or should, care about. Because, as we

will quickly see, this judgment of ethos is, in the new media era, as potentially problematic as its

opposite: That Woods has some sort of nebulous right to a “private” self apart from the public.

And given that Woods is a personal brand par excellence, we’ll throw Schwabel’s Brand You in

the mix as well. Because, acting “as if” and taking Schwabel at face value (i.e., “ok, Schwabel

you win. I’m a brand. Now what? How do I reconceptualize myself and others?”), what he

offers, likely because he also has no alternate conceptualization of ethos, is a tres peculiar

answer: “To be a brand means to be authentic.” Which brings us to a question of ethos as

character I find myself often asking (out loud and in my head): When am I not a professor of

rhetoric?

A. Materiality and the Office In Your Head: How We Let The Professional Sphere Eat the Public-Private Divide

“The pervasiveness or absolutizing of the economic in the flexible post-Fordist society is a reflection of the pervasiveness of language in the new mode of producing and selling goods. We could speak of semio-capital, the semioticizatoin of the social relations of production. The private has become public, and the public has become economic.” – Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language 249

“When am I, untenured professor of rhetoric, ever not at work? When am I not a professor? When do you, my students, let me be my self, in private?”

These are questions that I – a new professor at a fairly intimate liberal arts college – find myself asking myself almost daily, even when I’m not asking my students. After all, as a

249 Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language, trans., Gregory Conti (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 43-44. 164

professor of digital media and rhetoric, by virtue of even pondering the question “When am I a

professor?”, I am necessarily erasing any meaningful distinction between notions of “work” and

free time. More concretely, it is a series of abstract questions that raises some rather concrete

concerns about ethos, character, and what (if anything) materially divides the private from the public/professional spheres. Am I a professor at the bar or the coffeehouse or my backyard or the drug store, all places where I am likely scribbling furiously on laptops and napkins and, odds are

– college towns being notoriously cozy places – crossing paths with students? What is my time, and what is my university’s time? What is public, what is private, and what is what was once considered the “professional” sphere?

It is by now a banality that digital technology – even in primitive manifestations a la email and cell phones – has eaten away at the spatial and temporal parameters of what once constituted the 9-5 workdays and bricks and mortar offices of the professional sphere. But querying students on when, in their estimation, I am a professor – not only when I am still expected to be on the job (at 3 in the morning when their emails show up; when they can see that

I’m on Facebook, when they encounter me on the street), but whether it is even possible to sever me, and my ethos, from my work – helps to get to a perhaps too overlooked consideration when we discuss, say, Tiger Woods from the perspective of public-private fidelity vis a vis digital media: What are our expectations about public-private fidelity and work? When aren’t we what we do for a living?

This is, of course, a way to baby step toward a much thornier issue about the aforementioned (though not to be too much mentioned in this conclusion) postmodern economy.

But it’s also part and parcel of a relatively simple point that is essential to understanding the materiality of digital media and is easy enough to make apparent to students enrolled in a course in professional communication, and thus (perhaps, if the recession ever lets up) headed toward

165

that ominous construct called the “office”: Once upon a time, “theatrical alienation” from one’s labor (whether the assembly line or the construction site) was what the employee abhorred and the employer preferred. 250 You were not your job; your job was a thing your private, “real” self did for money. Information work troubles this distinction. Authenticity – whether as a standard of judgment we acquiesce to (a la Exhibit C) or via Brand You’s explicit call that we should present our “professional” selves as authentically as possible – collapses the distinction.251 To see the consequences – and tackle the relation between work and public-private fidelity with some ease (and no post-Marxist theory) – we turn to another fairly popular (and undergraduate friendly) critique of the new media era and its predominant ethos: Matthew Crawford’s Shop

Class as Soulcraft.

Something like an updating of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – with a dash of Hannah Arendt – for the born digital (and, unless things change, semi-perpetually, post- collegiately under-employed) generation, Crawford offers a straightforward critique of information labor work and the office’s dehumanizing colony of cubicles that centers around the knowledge worker’s inevitable agony of abstraction. An escapee from the drone hell of white

250 See Yaron Ezrahi, “The Theatrics and Mechanics of Action: The Theater and the Machine as Political Metaphors,” Social Research 62 (1995). 251 For the connections between economic systems and authenticity, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974). Sennett’s historical argument can be summarized thusly: Inauthenticity – viewed as a perceived discrepancy between a person’s public and private actions, the “true” self and the public, socially-perceived self – has been a political concern since Plato, and is most famously manifested as the fear of the Machiavellian, the politician who turns infidelity between private beliefs and public action from a moral failing to a political virtue. As a social concern, however, authenticity -- the degree of fidelity one was expected to keep between their private and public life, the amount one was allowed to withhold or perform about their “true” self -- has modulated widely through the ages. During the Renaissance, with humankind on the cusp of allowing for class mobility, fear of posing – of social subterfuge and deception -- hit new heights (ergo Shakespeare’s lament that “all the world’s a stage”). In the 18th century, once capitalism made social roles and one’s station in life more fluid and less fixed, the common belief was that we would only know people through their public acts, since we had no access into their “real” lives. For Rousseau and the Romantics that followed him in 19th century Britain -- and the hippies, punk-rockers, and Emerson-loving Americans that followed them – the dilemmas of authenticity were geographic. It was life in the city, the Romantics argued, rife as it was with never-ending, near- anonymous social interaction -- where your roots, your family and past, were unknown and where outsized personalities and serial social exaggerators ruled the day -- that insincerity was bred, and the self, the true self, was lost. The solution – egged on by everyone from Emerson to Wordsworth -- was to get out of town. See also P. David Marshall, Ed., The Celebrity Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006). 166

collar (but probably Dwight Schrute short-sleeved) information work, Shop Class uses its

author’s trajectory from U. of Chicago Ph.D. think tank debutante to intrepid motorcycle

repairman to make the argument that in the absence of the production of measurable, tangible,

function-oriented commodities (joists joisted, toilets made flushable, carburetors tuned to purr

and vroom), a vacuum opens up in the professional sphere, and what inevitably fills it is the

cultivation and maintenance, and above all management, of personality.252

Calling back to Negt and Kluge (Exhibit B), we remember that a way to think about the dynamics of public/private (and materiality) is to consider the market’s need to legitimate “that which has become too powerful (or profitable) to remain illegitimate (and thus ghettoized) in the private sphere.”253 The problem, so Crawford would argue, is that in the absence of the

production of tangible goods separable from our self, what is too powerful to remain illegitimate

is precisely our (ever diminishing) pretense to private life. (Even if the eminently readable

Crawford wouldn’t go quite this far, we have a panoply of economists, e.g., Marazzi, who

will.254) The office may be gone, but there is no longer any escape because the office is no longer some spatial or geographic entity: The office is you, enacted with every moment of self-doubt or hesitation to act as you would were you not afraid you might, at that moment, still – somehow, even some day in the future – be at work.

For Crawford, the answer to this soul-enervating problem is simple: Get the hell out of the office. And, relying on his youthful experience as an electrician – a job where, he correlates, the presence of tangible production goals means the absence of abstract criteria for professional character; i.e., as long as the lights turn on, no one cares if you fart or curse or won’t shut up

252 See Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009). 253 See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 254 Case in point, Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2008). 167

about Ron Paul – he suggests that more of America’s under and unemployed young folk just pick

up a shovel or a drill or a wrench and lead a better, more realized, less surveilled life. Which all

might be true, except for one small problem: The Archive of digital media, which Crawford

doesn’t take into account, makes all this fantasy of “dropping out” from the information economy

a pipe dream. The big reason – so big it is almost no fun to talk about – is that, as we saw in

Exhibit B, the monetization of our selves via the Archive means that simply by the act of living –

emailing, browsing, buying, carrying on any sort of digital inter-personal interaction – we are being put to work. (Which is as good a place as any to throw down the postmodern economy footnote, if you were looking for it.255)

There is, to be sure, a certain hopelessness and sense of inescapability here. We have already discussed (in Exhibit B and the Theory Interlude) both the omnipresence (the

“informatics of domination”) and interlinked economic and existential complications of The

Archive. (As well as the claim that, if we chase it through the vernacular rhetoric of privacy law, the common thread connecting all of the various arenas of quote-unquote private life that digital media threatens to up-end – sexual, medical, financial, racial, and so on – is the loss of precisely what we never have: the ability to self-narrate.) So here it is worth pursuing for a moment a slightly different, but perhaps equally depressing, digression: How authenticity not only offers no escape from the encroaching professionalized/monetized sphere – i.e., how it carves out no new

255 As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explain, the postmodern economy is the post-industrial system wherein “performance has been put to work.” What is produced is not “just the material goods” but, instead, as part and parcel of the next-level phase of capitalism, “immaterial labor,” the “actual social relationships and forms of life.” Human inter-relations are the goods, in and of themselves, new forms of labor which “produce an immaterial good, such as a relationship or an affect, solving problems or providing information, from sales work to financial services.” The “the product is the act itself,” to take Hardt and Negri’s beautifully tautological pomo-econ 101 equation. What was once called networking – the professional presentation of the public self, the forging of connections with others -- is no longer the means to an end, it is means-and-end: In our parlance: an economy of ethos. Or, as they conclude: “This presupposition is basic, in fact, to the concept of biopolitics and the biopolitical production of subjectivity…Any theoretical effort in this context to pose the autonomy of the political, separate from the social and the economic, no longer makes any sense.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 78.

168

space – but, caught in the economic and technological logic of the new media era, encourages us

to attempt to evade public-private gaffes by excavating even more of our “private” selves.

Woods’ press conference is case in point. Starting out by – somewhat defiantly –

drawing lines between matters that are public and are between a “man and his wife,” scolding

reporters and paparazzi for not respecting the privacy of his wife and children (whom, he insists,

he had never involved in his personal branding), Woods – because what other option is available

to him? – within seconds capitulates: Discussing his family counseling, his therapy sessions for

sexual compulsion, and his stint in rehab. Given no other avenue of escape – confronted with a

collapsing private/public/professional divide, since, after all, he is his work and his work is his

ethos – he necessarily has to dig backwards, further into the private, authentic, and real and, under

the auspices of regaining control of his ethos, offer up even more of his “self” to the public.

(Most glaringly, in his post-scandal Nike ad, in which Woods, staring through the screen at the

viewer in black and white, stands silently while his father, in voiceover, expresses his dismay,

parental disapproval, and finally confused acceptance of the “character” of his son.)

Authenticity, then, seems like a dead end: A further pushing of the private into the public

in an attempt to recover a non-professionalized/monetized space. Which is precisely why – as we

will elaborate in a moment – using the implied author to kick out of the mimetic/synthetic binary

holds the advantage of thinking about ethos not in terms of epistemology (how we know or don’t know the entity under observation) but ontology: How we, through our judgments, dialogically create them, and in the process a “space” that exists between/beyond public, private or professional and opens up new (posthuman) possibilities for ethos. But first we have to return to an inhuman conceptualization of ethos, Brand You, to consider how in the face of the monetized/professionalized sphere’s erosion of public/private, it does (or doesn’t) offer guidance against the default narrative posture of public coherence.

169

B. Fluidity: Virtual Students in Grey Flannel Suits

“To be eligible for this scholarship, students must have an online identity in keeping with

University X’s mission and standards.”

That such administrative commands have become – to my ex-University PR and professional writing teaching eyes and ears, at least – commonplace, is a testament to how deeply entrenched the logic and principles of Brand You have become (even if that nomenclature is not overtly used). From the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) nudges for students to gear their

“online” identities to the public relations’ campaign of their University, to the expectation

(serious enough that it is acknowledged in the student newspaper) that a new hire in critical digital media studies would offer strategic help in how to market students’ networked identities

(to take examples from my immediate professional surroundings), what is being taught – as a way of thinking and judging ethos – is, to quote Schwabel, that “[j]ust like a corporation, if you don’t take ownership of your brand, you’ll be stuck forever with how the world initially judges you.”256

The question now before us, of course – and continuing with Woods – is whether Brand You offers us any guidance in how to judge ethos as character. And here we sense two problems: (1)

A recognition, but also denial, of the interactive fluidity of digital media and (2) that Brand You commits us (or our students) to a quixotic (and, though it is ultimately up to them, seemingly unpleasant) mode of future-tense living.

This first point is easy, so let’s just get to it.

As Schwabel tells us, Brand You begins with the premise that the consumer/producer distinction has largely collapsed, blurring the line between the products you consume, your tacit endorsement of them, and your position as the (imaginary, but acted upon) audience they are marketed to. (Case in point, to take a comic episode from this week’s parade of new media

256Schwabel, 9. 170

outings, the man who, by liking – ironically or not – an industrial sized container of personal

lubricant on Facebook, found his profile, and his face, part of that company’s advertising

campaign.257) The lesson here—the same lesson that scares colleges and universities (those fragile factories of ethos, selling parchment and reputation) into policing students – is that, given the fluidity and interactivity of digital media, you really don’t have much control over your Brand or persona. But since this is – again – the paralysis in the face of The Archive, let’s consider the potential viability of Brand You from another angle: Brand You actively encourages self- surveillance in the service of an impossible goal, public coherence.

Turning back to Crawford, we start to build the case. Cribbing from the horse’s mouth

(i.e., how-to books on management strategy and organizational communication), Crawford continues his analysis of ethos and information work and hits, perhaps, his true target: Without any real, finite, tangible standards to compare work-product to (i.e., that brick ain’t laid level or straight; do it again and do it right), the ethos of the office is always in some measure the perfection of the tabula rasa subject working in anticipation/defense of some future-tense event from which responsibility will have to be claimed or extricated, cultivating a perpetual posture of potential mea culpa. In the cubicle – to strain the metaphor a bit – blank, always adaptable to whatever arbitrary judgment lays on the horizon, is beautiful.

In an economy where, as Schwabel points out, the average worker will have 14 post- college jobs, blank – adaptable, moldable – is undoubtedly advantageous. Blank is also, of course, impossible, as can be demonstrated by turning that default lesson of Brand You on its head and “Googling” your self.

While typically pitched to students – a la Schwabel – as a means to scour the net for any semblance of self that could be – someday, to some potential employer – evidence of

257 Somini Sengupta, “On Facebook, ‘Likes’ Become Ads,” New York Times, May 31, 2012. 171

unacceptable incoherence, rather than orient the Google Search for the Self toward some

unknown, forever future tense, forever anonymous future self they will never meet – and would

surely detest if they did – we can turn the classroom activity upside down: What moments of your surveilled, cookied, manipulated, archived, and now so fluid they are effectively a knife against

the throat of your financial future life are you most proud of? Which moments could you – would

you – not live without?

Triangulated not against some never-knowable corporate other (the someday job, the

someday school), but against themselves – their conceptualization of their selves, their ethos, the anti-fluid (but, as seen in Exhibit B, narratively bullshit) account of who they want to be – the

answers I continually receive from students participating in this exercise are, well, enlivening,

reaffirming of the banality and random spectacularity of life itself (Facebook friend lists that

actually connect them to friends; match.com profiles that worked; Holy Grail shopping purchases

that would have been quixotic otherwise; embarrassing and completely acontextual inappropriate

but hilarious photos) as well as the extraordinarily personal and deeply serious and sincere and

weird ways in which we throw ourselves into the world: the blogs, and rap albums, and in

memoriams that constitute our always fluid life in the Archive. These are the ways of living

digital that are compromised via our acquiescence to the professionalized sphere of ethos and our

clinging to the public-private fidelity and public coherence gaffes. And so to conclude, if our

initial question of ethos is “who cares,” we must consider, given the materiality of digital media,

not only what we have acquiesced to, technologically and existentially, but how, if we want our

judgment to lead us elsewhere, if we want – for ourselves, our own self, and others – to preserve the ability to live as incoherent people, how do we carve about a space – as those who care – for

these sorts of ethos to thrive?

172

C. Responsibility and Restraint: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love A Dialogically Enacted Posthuhman Reconceptualization of the Implied Author

“A speechless mass for every hollow spokesman without a past. Admirable conjunction, between those who have nothing to say, and the masses, who do not speak.” – Jean Baudrillard258

Who cares?

We are back where we started, this time with the emphasis on who. And to conclude this conclusion, we consider how we take responsibility for our judgments by considering audience, specifically which audience Brand You asks us to occupy and which audiences the narrative model of communication provides us the option of entering. Once again, Tiger Woods’ mea culpa is our guide, this time via the question: Who, exactly, is Woods apologizing to?

Ask this long enough and I’m betting – from experience and, at the moment, rhetorical conceit – that you’ll hit upon a perplexing answer: Just as few students (again, our stand-ins for citizens) personally care about Woods’ infidelities, they are positive that other people – you know, those other people out there: less refined in their ideas about ethos, more easily captivated by such silly spectacles — surely do.

This evasion of responsibility – cloaking our judgments, or acquiescence, in the presumed ethics of the Nixonian (or Baudrillardian) silent majority – is nothing new, just another chapter in what Frank Zappa once called called the market’s moral and economic catering to “an imaginary 13-year old girl out there somewhere.”259 But this unknown mass audience – and its

everyone/no one-ness – is pernicious, because it allows us to not only evade responsibility for our

judgments, but also, by hiding our complicity, makes it impossible to update our problematic new

media era standards of ethos as character. More specifically, we see how Brand You helps us to

258 Baudrillard, 6. 259 Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Touchstone, 1990). 173

abdicate rhetorical responsibility under the auspices of a metafictional appreciation of rhetoric, a

throwback to the New Journalistic fear of rhetoric pursued in Exhibit C.

We start with what is now so common, and so thoroughly ingrained in our judgments of gaffes, that it is almost imperceptible: While public-private scandals once scandalized,

presumably, because they actually shocked some sort of community standard of decent behavior –

don’t have sex with your interns (Clinton); don’t have sex with your 19 year old virgin interns on

their first day of work at the White House (Kennedy) – now what is scandalous is that the rules of

coherence have been potentially violated. The scandal is the risk of scandal. As economists

Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango’s rather mesmerizing analysis details, in the days following

the Woods’ imbroglio, his core sponsor corporations (EA, Nike, and PepsiCo) did, in fact, lose

more than two percent of their market value. But these losses are correlated (as Knittel and

Stango ascertain via data analysis of Google Insight) to “internet search intensities”

(in plain English: ‘internet searches for’) not on “Tiger Woods sex” or “Tiger Woods scandal,”

but people searching explicitly for news-stories and gaffe analysis on how Tiger’s cheating on his

wife will affect his endorsements. (To wit: “[T]he scandal sponsors’ losses are greater on days

when the search term ‘Tiger Woods endorsement’ is more popular on Google, a result that is

statistically significant and economically substantive.”260) In the chicken-and-egg, deconstructive logic that is always/already at the heart of ethos, Woods loses endorsements (and ethos) – and is therefore judged/proven to have violated our norms of private-public fidelity and/or public coherence – because we think he might have violated them, which is enough to actually cost his sponsors.

In this way, Brand You, via metafictional obfuscation and the nature of the stock market

(based upon bets on future expectations of a company’s success/failure), doubles down on the

260 Christopher R. Knittel and Victor Stango, “Celebrity Endorsements, Firm Value, and Reputational Risk: Evidence from the Tiger Woods Scandal,” 1. 174

future-tense logic that public coherence already commits us to in the monetized sphere. But given that this sort of cynical wisdom about rhetorical performance – a hyper-awareness of how to calculate the potential effects of a gaffe on some potential unknown audience – avoids taking a stand on what ethos actually means (to you, to us), we are back at our question of responsibility:

How do we carve out a space for enacting new standards of judgment in the absence of the workability of public-private fidelity and in the face of the potential self-coherence that the monetized/professionalized sphere seems to demand? One potential clue is the bare minimum rhetorical effort that fuels the future-tense, Wall Street logic of Brand You: Attention, the mere act of attending to the scandal and thus becoming complicit in its financial effects. For what else could possibly be the active mode of resistance, the political response, to attention but that lynchpin of the implied author, and the narrative model of communication, interpretative restraint?

Restraint and the implied author (as we saw in Exhibit C and with Stephen Colbert) trigger a number of recalibrations of ethos, to wit: Moving some forms of evidence (Woods’ correspondence with his girlfriends, perhaps) out of our purview of evaluation; breaking out of the limitations of the mimetic/synthetic binary; kicking out of our twitterpations about public- private fidelity in favor of a more “ecstatic”(to use Herzog’s phrase) or “performatist” (to use

Eshelman’s) approach to ethos; and focusing on the thematic, on what Woods, as a public persona, stands for. Which, admittedly, in the case of a star athlete, does not pack the same punch as, say, burning away all the public-private baggage of Sen. John McCain or Grover Norquist to consider the ideology they are promoting. But the implied author, as dialogic enaction of the posthuman, does provide a rethinking of ethos that moves beyond, if not between, the futility of bringing back the private sphere or attempting to live under the tutelage of Brand You. And its ultimate advantage, in terms of professional ethos, may be best articulated via a final question:

What if, instead of retreating, and stumbling, into the rhetoric of branding (which, in the days and 175

weeks following his scandal, seemed to offer no way to live, economically or as a person), Woods

had asked, or we had offered, to judge him as a vulnerable posthuman subject? What if, knowing

that the professional sphere offers him no place else to go – that he can neither retreat inward, under the auspices of authenticity, into pop culture psycho-babble nor up climb up into the metafictional evasions of economics – Woods reaches out, or we reach in, through the television, through his hopeless wooden apology (tagged with being insincere and scripted, but authentic in the sense that it looks and sounds precisely like a scared-shitless, thirty-something athlete asked to orate before the world on the most embarrassing topic imaginable), and we each attempt to etch out a space that lays between the pixels of the performatively apologetic face on the screen and the “real,” flesh-and-blood, possibly egomaniacal, possibly incredibly lonely, possibly horrible, likely confused man that, really, none of us will ever know and, really, none of us would likely want to.

The other advantage of this approach, of course, is that it makes escaping responsibility for our judgments – both for the Woods’s that we create and the versions of ourselves that we create in this dialogic process of creation – impossible. For what the narrative model provides, and concretizes, are the three (imaginary) audience positions that we choose to occupy and negotiate. First, the flesh-and-blood author/flesh-and-blood audience level, wherein the “real”

you and the “real” Tiger will never meet, nor interact. Second, the narrator/narrative level, where

you the fan, the spectator watching the Master’s, might be awed and entertained and taken in by

one of sports entertainments all time bona fide phenoms. But it is on the level of implied

author/implied ideal audience interaction – the ontological separate axis of the

anthropomorphized ethos, the axis of rhetorical trust, the axis that creates posthuman rhetorical

entities that exist neither in flesh nor data nor technology, the axis that recognizes our mutual

rhetorical constructedness – where true possibilities, beyond the tired ethos of public-private and

public-coherence are opened up. Because given options, and an awareness – a metamodernist 176

awareness, a post-postmodern rhetorical aesthetics – of both the constructedness of the three

Tigers (flesh and blood author, narrator, implied author) and our ability to, in a spirit of “naïve cynicism,” join and not join them (to toggle, to simultaneously occupy and “oscillate” between our audience positions), we have the ability to give back to Woods, in a spirit of reciprocity, what the materiality and fluidity of digital media has taken away: Any pretense to self-narrate, to control, his pubic person, a way – for him or us – to make the persona political.

Or maybe, because it is absolutely your right to judge, you call bullshit on all of this.

Maybe you have no desire to let Woods –or Romney, or McCain (or even Booth or Colbert or

David Foster Wallace or Aaron McKain) off the hook. Maybe you have no desire to join any of these creatures’ ideal authorial audiences and, via your act of interpretive restraint, grant them a safe haven for mendacious (e.g., Romney) or just generally shitty (e.g., Woods, the line-up of

Congressmen and Presidents presented in Exhibit C) behavior. Better still, maybe you are wondering how these recalibrations of ethos as character play into larger political considerations, like (duh) power, and the nature of democracy, and who is granted, or not granted, the right to speak. This seems eminently sensible and is why this examination of the narrative model of judgment and the new media era is heading next to consider ethos as community and ethos as agency, focusing -- because why not just end with coming attractions? – on those other faces from the perpetual Campaign 2008: Gov. Sarah Palin, Con. Ron Paul, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen.

Hillary Clinton and, of course, that elephant implied author in the room: Sen. Barack Obama.

177

Bibliography

Abramson, Jill, and Alison Mitchell. “Senate Inquiry In Keating Case Tested McCain.'' The New York Times, November 21, 1999.

Andrews, Lori. I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Ankersmit, F.R. Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Asinof, Lynn. “Attacking Student Loan Debt.” The Boston Globe, May 27, 2012.

Atwill, Janet. Rhetoric Reclaimed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

“August 2008 Republican Debate.” ABC News, August 5, 2007.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen 5, no. 6 (1967).

Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Atlantic Monthly, August 1967.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” In When a Writer Can’t Write, edited by Mike Rose (New York: Guilford, 1985).

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Baumlin, James, and Tita French Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994.

Benhabib, Seyla. “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.” In Democracy and Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Bennett, W. Lance. “Assessing Presidential Character: Degradation Rituals in Political Campaigns.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (August 1981): 310-321.

Benn Michaels, Walter. The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

178

Berlin, James. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Boehlert, Eric. Bloggers on the Bus. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1999.

Boorstin, Daniel J. “From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event.” In The Celebrity Culture Reader, edited by P. David Marshall. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Booth, Wayne C. “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

–-. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

–-. “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction Before Tristam Shandy.” PMLA 67, no. 2 (March, 1952): 163-185.

Bousquet, Marc, and Katherine Wills. The Politics of Information. Alt-X Press, 2003.

Boyd, Danah. “Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life." In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, edited by David Buckingham, 199- 142. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008.

Braun, M.J. “Democracy Hope.” In Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, edited by Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson. Crestkill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008.

“Bring Back the Real McCain.” The Economist, August 28, 2008.

Broder, David. “The Story that Still Nags Me: Edward S. Muskie.” Washington Monthly, February 1987.

Brooks, David. “The Crowd Pleaser.” New York Times, February 9, 2012.

Brooks, Peter. “Inevitable Discovery: Law, Narrative, Retrospectivity.” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 15, no. 71 (2003).

Bukowski, Charles. ”In Defense of a Certain Kind of Poetry.” In Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook. San Francisco: City Lights, 2008.

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.

179

–-. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1966.

–-. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.

Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Butler, Paul. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2008.

Camia, Catalina. “Huntsman Slams Romney as ‘Weathervane.’” USA Today, October 28, 2011.

Chalian, David. “Sparks Fly Between McCain and Romney Over Iraq.” ABC News. January 30, 2008. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=4219498&page=1#.T8MTocX4LqA.

Chambers, Simone, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?” Political Theory 37, no. 3. (2009): 323-350.

Cicero. de Officiis. Translated by Walter Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.

Colbert, Stephen. Interviewed by Tim Russert. Meet the Press. NBC. October 20, 2007.

–-. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. June 27, 2011.

–-. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. September 19, 2006.

Connelly, Chris. “Public Inferno Over Mayor's Not-So-Private Photos Results in Recall.” ABC News 20/20, February 27, 2008.

Cook, Marianna. “A Couple in Chicago.” The New Yorker, January 19, 2009.

Cooper, Anderson. “Lady Gaga and the Art of Fame.” 60 Minutes, February 13, 2011.

Corona, Victor P. "Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga." Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 2 (2011): 1-19.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University. Pittsburg, PA: Pittsburg University Press, 1998.

David, Larry. “Larry David Talks Seinfeld Reunion on Curb, Working With Michael Richards.” Huffington Post, February 8, 2011.

David, Larry, and Jerry Seinfeld. “The Beard.” Seinfeld. Season 6. Episode 15. Directed by Andy Ackerman. Aired February 9, 1995.

Davis, Douglas. “Mossad Hass Assad Urine Sample.” Accessed May 27, 2012. 180

http://www.generalaoun.org/news41.html.

Davis, Rick, CBS NEWS. July, 31 2008.

Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.

DePalma, Brian. Blow Out. 1981. MGM Video and DVD. 2001. DVD.

Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” The Library Quarterly 68, no. 3 (1998).

DeVoss, Danielle Nicole, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, Eds. Technological Ecologies and Sustainability. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2009.

Dewey, John. The Public and its Problems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954.

DeWitt, Scott Lloyd, Michael Harker, and Aaron McKain. Commonplace: A Citizen’s Guide to Persuasion (For an Age that Desperately Needs One). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 35 (May 1984): 155-171.

Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 2008.

“Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says Privacy No Longer a Social Norm.” Huffington Post, March 3, 2010.

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Falcone, Michael. “Colbert: I Am a Candidate (And So Can You).” The New York Times, October 21, 2007.

Farnham, Alan. “Job Prospects for New Grads Best Since Recession.” ABCNews, May 15, 2012.

Fenske, Mindy. "The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance." Text and 181

Performance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (January 2004).

Fey, Tina. Bossypants. New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011.

Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Aristotelian Ethos and the Author Position in Digital Poetics.” Kairos 11, no. 3 (Summer 2007).

–-. "Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: The Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly." In Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, edited by Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008.

Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. “Social Triumph of the Sexual Will.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997.

–-. "What is an Author?" In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 124-27. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Geisler, Cheryl. “Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 107-113.

Gilmore, Dan. We the Media. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2004.

Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Gray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Habermas, Jurgen. “Political Communication in the Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 411-426.

–-. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991.

Halasek, Kay. A Pedagogy of Possibility. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 182

Hallet, Joe. “Eye Opener in Iowa.” The Columbus Dispatch, January 20, 2004.

Hall Jamieson, Kathleen, and Paul Waldman, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Hariman, Robert. Political Style. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Harker, Michael. “The Ethics of Argument: Rereading Kairos and Making Sense in a Timely Fashion.”College Composition and Communication 59, no. 1 (2007): 77-97.

Harris, Joseph. “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 40, no. 1 (February 1989).

Harrison, Stanley. “Our Cyberbodies, Our Selves.” In Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age, edited by Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008.

Hawk, Byron. “A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity.” Rhetoric Review 29, no. 2 (2010): 209-212.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

–-. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subject and Literary Texts. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

–-. “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman.” In The Cyborg Handbook, edited by Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Heilemann, John, and Mark Halperin, Game Change. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.

Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Herman, Luc, and Bart Veraeck. “The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication.” Style 45, no. 1 (2011): 11-28.

Hertzberg, Hendrik. “Laffs and Gaffes.” The New Yorker, January 17, 2008.

Herzog, Werner. Interview by Henry Rollins. The Henry Rollins Show. Independent Film Channel. April 15, 2006.

–-. Interview by Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. June 6, 2011.

–-. “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Translated by Moira Weigel. Arion 17, 183

no. 3 (Winter 2010).

Heymann, C. David. Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story. New York: Atria Books. 2009.

Hutcheons, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jackson, Brian, and Jon Wallin. “Rediscovering the Back and Forthness of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube.” College Composition and Communication 6, no. 2 (December 2009): 374-96.

Jacobs, A.J. “Joan Jett: What I’ve Learned.” Esquire, November 9, 2009.

Jakobson, Roman. "On Realism in Art." In Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 19-27. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Jarratt, Susan. Rereading the Sophists. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Jarvis, Jeff. Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005.

Johnson, Nan. “Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric.” In Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, edited by Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

Kennedy, Edward. Hardball. MSNBC. January 1, 2007.

Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Mueller. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006.

Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.

Klein, Rick. “No Joke: Colbert's Campaign May Run Afoul of Law.” ABCNews, October 24, 2007.

Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723-742.

“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accessed May 27, 2012. http://www.bls.gov/cps/.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadet: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. 184

Levmore, Saul, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Lippman, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

Lipsky, David. “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.” Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008.

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn, "'Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?': Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 83-105.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Edited by Charles W. Eliot. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909-1914.

Madigan, Kathleen. “Housing Still Drowning in Underwater Mortgages.” The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2012.

Madison, James. “Federalist Papers No.10.” In The Federalist Papers. London: Penguin, 1987.

Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. New York: Plume, 1995.

Mailloux, Steven. “Rhetorical Hermeneutics.” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (June 1985): 620-641.

–-. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Manjoo, Farhad. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2008.

Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence 5, no. 2 (1999).

Maron, Marc. “Out Technologize, Over Informatised, Time Vats.” In Tickets Still Available. Comedy Death Ray Records, 2007.

Marshall, David. New Media Cultures. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Martin, Clancy W. “The Drunk’s Club: A.A.,The Cult That Cures.” Harper’s Magazine, January 2011.

Max, D.T. “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest.” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009.

McCain, John, with Mark Salter. Faith of My Fathers. New York: Random House, 1999.

185

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1992.

McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1978).

McCorkle, Ben. “Assessing Remix Assignments: Audio/video and Fair Use.” Kairos PraxisWiki 16, no. 2. (January).

McGinniss, Joe. The Selling of the President, 1968. New York: Trident Press, 1969.

McHale, Brian. “1966 Nervous Breakdown, Or When Did Postmodernism Begin?” Modern Language Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2008): 391-413

McKain, Aaron. “Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show.” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (2005): 415-430.

–-. “Rhetoric.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011.

–-. “The Rhetoric of Narrative: What the Law as Narrative Movement Can Teach the Rest of the Narrative Turn.” In Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge, edited by Debra Journet, Beth A Boehm, and Cynthia E. Britt. New York: Hampton Press, 2011.

McLeroy, Don. Interview by Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. April 23 2012.

Miller, Arthur. “American Playhouse: On Politics and the Art of Acting.” Harper’s Magazine, June 2001, 16.

Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Montopoli, Brian. “New McCain Spot: Obama the Celebrity.” CBSNews.com, July 31, 2008. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502163_162-4307418-502163.html.

Morello, John A. Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Moriarty, Erin. “Did the Internet Kill Privacy?” CBS News, February 6, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Philadelphia: Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group, 2011.

Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Nelson, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

186

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 60, no. 1 (Spring 1996).

Nissenbaum, Helen. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Norquist, Grover. Interview by Steve Croft. “The Pledge: Grover Norquist’s Hold on the GOP.” 60 Minutes. CBS. November 20, 2011.

–-. Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air. NPR. October 2, 2003.

Nunning, Ansgar. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Ong, Walter. “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 9-21.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Papacharissi, Z. “The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life: Characteristics of Personal Home Pages.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2002).

Paskin, Willa. “Buy J.D. Salinger’s Toilet.” Vulture, August 17, 2010.

Perelmen, Chaim, and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, IA: Notre Dame University Press, 1969.

Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2007.

–-. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

–-. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1996.

Politi, Daniel. “An Authentic Fall.” Slate, February 8, 2008.

Poster, Marc. “The Information Empire.” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004).

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4, no.1 (Autumn 1977): 121-144.

Ranciere, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum Press, 2004.

187

–-. The Emancipated Spectator. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009.

Remer, Gary. “Cicero and the Ethics of Deliberative Rhetoric.” In Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy, edited by Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Rice, Jeff, and Gregory L. Ulmer. The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Deliberate Conflict. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.

Romney, Mitt. Interview by Tim Russert. Meet the Press. NBC. December 16, 2007.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Rosen, Jeffrey. “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” New York Times Magazine, July 21, 2010.

Sabato, Larry. Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics. New York: Free Press, 1991.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964.

Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper, 1942.

Scorsese, Martin. Public Speaking. New York. HBO Documentary Films. 2010.

Selfe, Cynthia. “Foreward.” In Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age, edited by Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson. New York: Hampton Press, 2008.

–-. “Paying Attention to Digital Media.” In Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities Pedagogies, and Social Action, edited by Kristine L. Blair, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley, 256-257. New York: Hampton Press, 2008.

–-. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Selfe, Cynthia, and Gail Hawisher, eds. Literate Lives in the Information Age. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

Shklovsky, Victor. Theory of Prose. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991.

Silverstein, Ken. “Making Mitt Romney: How to Fabricate a Conservative.” Harper’s Magazine, November 2007.

Solvoe, Daniel J. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

188

–-. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Spindelman, Marc. “Surviving Lawrence.” 102 Michigan Law Review 1615, 2004.

Stern, Howard. The Howard Stern Show, January 26, 2004.

Strawson, Gale. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17 (2004): 428-52.

Taylor, Mark C. This Moment of Complexity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

“This.Fucking.Election.com.” Accessed May 27, 2012. http://thisfuckingelection.com/.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1985.

Trippi, Joe. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. New York: Regan Books, 2004.

Tulis, Jeffrey. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.

Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010): 1-14.

Vie, Stephanie. “Technology as a Site of Struggle: The Interplay of Identity, Morality, and Power in Four Popular Technologies.” Review of Communication 8, no. 2 (April 2008): 130 – 145.

Vitanza, Victor. “Concerning a Postclassical Ethos.” In Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, edited by James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994.

Wallace, David Foster. “Authority and American Usage.” In Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.

–-. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction.” In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998.

–-. Infinite Jest. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006.

–-. “Up Simba.” In Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 189

Warnick, Barbara. Critical Literacy in a Digital Age. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Weaver, Richard M. “Language is Sermonic.” In The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

Weeks, Linton. “Google And Privacy: Is It Time To Give Up?” NPR, February 29, 2012.

Weingarten, Christopher R. R. “Before the Report: Stephen Colbert’s Rise From Sketch Shows to America’s Hero.” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2009.

Weingarten, Marc. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution. New York: Crown, 2005.

Weissmann, Jordan. “53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed – How?” The Atlantic, April 23, 2012.

Wheaton, Sarah. “A New Moment for Aquarius.” The Caucus, New York Times, May 3, 2008. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/a-new-moment-for-aquarius/.

White, Theodore. The Making of the President 1960. New York: Atheneum House, 1961.

Will, George. “Parties May Stick With Status Quo.” realclearpolitics.com, January 28, 2008. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/where_the_races_stand_now.html

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Affective Fallacy.” Sewanne Review 57 (1949): 31-55.

–-. "The Intentional Fallacy." Sewanee Review 54 (1946).

Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

“World News Tonight Preview.” ABCNews, January 28, 2004. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129241&page=1.

Young, Iris Marion. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Zoller Seitz, Matt. “In Defense of Film and TV Hoaxes.” Salon, October 22, 2010.

190