Protest Rhetorics #6

Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice
Martha McCaughey and Michael D Ayers, eds.

“Considerations for American Freireistas”
Victor Villanueva, Jr.
The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary
Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, Charles Schuster, eds.

“Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere”
Craig Calhoun
Habermas and the Public Sphere
Craig Calhoun, ed.

“The Commodity”
Capital
Karl Marx

“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Karl Marx
Surveys from Exile: Political Writings
David Fernbach, ed.

Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice
Martha McCaughey and Michael D Ayers, eds.

The book hopes to cross disciplinary lines and discuss how the Internet is being used by activists to their advantages, where these activists tactics have been successful, when their tactics have failed, and ask thought provoking questions about online activism: does e-activism count as activism when it only affects individuals, or has a limited effect radius (one interaction between an individual and a corporation via email; the temporary defacing of a website; the movement against corporate and government regulation in a traditional laissez-faire space), or when it is not the site of change but merely a meeting ground for groups looking to create social change?

The book is divided into three parts. Part one, “Cyber-Social Movements Emerging Online,” demonstrates how “new social movements that have emerged as a direct result of Internet technologies” ie, using the Web to “recruit, strategize, and create change…on the politics of the Net itself” (15).

Part two is entitled “Theorizing Online Activism.” Here, “contributors take theoretical approaches that have been applied to traditional social movements and examine how well they have been applied to traditional social movements and examine how well they stand the test of cyberspace” (16).

Part three is called “Cautionary Readings of Community, Empowerment, and Capitalism Online” and this section “examines ways in which traditionally RL social movements are incorporating the Internet into their activist repertoire and provides some cautionary tales about the commercialization of this process” (17).

Cyber-Social Movements Emerging Online
“Internet Protests, from Text to Web”
Laura J Gurak and John Logie

This essay recounts various types of Internet protests, the “text” of the title referring to emails and not SMS short messaging (a sign of the age of the book). Gurak and Logie recount the email chain letter protest again Lotus for its MarketPlace database (info on purchases and shopping habits pressed onto CD-Rs for purchase by interested corporations) and the Federal governments move from DES encryption to EES and the use of the “Clipper Chip”; the use of the online petition clearinghouse Petitionsite.com; and the haunting/darkening of GeoCities websites in response to Yahoo’s change of the service agreement ceding them all rights to any content put onto an individual user’s GeoCities website.

Gurak and Logie uses all three of these examples to explain the strengths and weaknesses of all three types of protest.

Strengths

• Speed
• Reach
• The possibility of bottom-up protest
• The ability to leverage interconnected media sites to spread news of the cause.
• Instant ethos/solidarity (31)

Weaknesses

• Lack of credibility due to inability to vet
• Disingenuous protests (pranks)
• Anonymity
• Ability to discard quickly and easily any unwanted messages by those being protested
• Instant ethos/solidarity
• Inability to name what is meaningful participation in a protest action

The weaknesses are the most interesting, especially the “instant ethos” and “meaningful participation” points.  Neither Gurak nor Logie see the instant ethos as inherently troublesome, but I do as this means we’re talking about people in an echo chamber; and this, I think, ties into the inability to name what is meaningful participation in a protest action.  “Assumptions about technical knowledge and computer privacy” which allowed for “the creation of short, direct messages that assumed the community ethos and would appeal to the readers of these messages” means a homogeneous population of users, and the only time it was clear what meaningful participation was in the instance of buyer boycott  or the changing of internet properties (web pages) to signify anger.  Both run along a very specific bourgeois axis, which is still prevalent today with Facebook and its e-activism of “supporting” various causes.  Oftentimes this means supporting a cause everyone would support, eg, curing cancer, promoting literacy, etc; and the only action taken is a virtual petition signing or generic email write-in campaign.  All of these are traditional forms which do not promote progressive social change, nor support causes beyond the pale of middle-class, mainstream values.  There is nothing messy or resistant going on; no one is blocking or picketing or marching.  Also, it promotes either a diffuse, unfocused, and unseen destination (the clearing house petitions) or the strategic belief (strategic in the vein of Paula Mathieu’s differentiation between strategic and tactical) in the need for an identifiable leader (the GeoCities protest).

“Indymedia.org: A New Communications Commons”
Dorothy Kidd

This essay recounts how social networking (often under-girded by the Internet), digital and mundane technology, open source software, and volunteerism have all come together to create the Seattle Independent Media Center, a non-corporate entity broadcasting activist media from all over the world. What I find interesting is the mobilization around the phrase, “the commons.” This term refers to the historical English commons, tracks of land which were:

Open to all with a shared interest in their use, their value was derived from participation and was not a tradeable commodity (Shiva 1994). Not private, they were concerned more with continuing sustenance, security, and habitat, not with producing, distributing, or circulating commodities for a growth-orientated market system (Ecologist 1993). Common regimes were also not public resources administered by the state, but instead were a form of direct rule by individuals and groups drawn from civil society, for the most part outside the electoral franchise. (52-53)

This concept has come across the Atlantic and has a long history as the impetus for revolution (Kidd claims it was an element in the French and American uprisings), and has become the rally call for what Kidd terms “the new commoners” (56), a group including Zapatists, grass roots unionists, environmentalists, Marxists, peace advocates, anti-globalization protesters, open-source software developers, and all factions of traditional activist media. For me, it’s the term that’s interesting because it matches Fuchs’s ideas about words or phrases becoming mobilization flash points via the networks using them (think the “art” or “scholarship” examples); that these various factions could define, utilize, and create a unifying and inclusive definition describing the commons as airwaves, land, food patents, and access to resources as “the commons”–and use it as the bridge they can all find commonality and camaraderie by–seems an example of Burke’s rhetorical theories in action.

“Classifying Forms of Online Activism: The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank”
Sandor Vegh

Vegh uses the space of this essay to create a taxonomy of cyberprotests and then uses that taxonomy to explain how hacktivism, which Vegh sees as online direct action, is the most evasive and potentially punishable form of cyberprotest.

At first glance, the types of Internet activism fall into three general areas: awareness/advocacy, organization/mobilization, and action/reaction. This typology emphasizes the direction of initiative–whether one sends out information or receives it, calls for action or is called upon, or initiates an action or reacts to one. (72)

Sustained and continuing hacktivism, performed either by hackers or by a nation-state and containing several mutual attacks and counter-attacks, is called cyberwar. Usually hacktivism (in any of its forms–cyberattack [isolated], cybercampaign [coordinated, part of an idetnfied conflict], and cyberwar) uses the media exposure from attacks to either communicate their dissent or make the larger world aware of their cause. The problem with ongoing hacktivism are the consequences. Hacking in this way breaks various laws designed to protect commerce or national security, and if said hackers are caught, they are often prosecuted to the fullest extent. This, coupled with the general public’s ignorance of social change movements, how the Internet works, and general view of the Web as entertainment/on demand service, often makes the hackers and the causes seem disproportionately “evil,” considering all the hackers are doing is moving around information to create a desired effect.

What I find interesting is Vegh’s paraphrasing of Solomon on page 89.

If protesters start using laptops and other advanced communication technologies they basically subscribe to the Western corporate bias inherent in these technologies and will ultimately find themselves playing in the corporate league where they have a comparative disadvantage. Staying in the corporate ballpark, protesters and their strategies would allow the elite to frame them to fit into a popularly opposed category, such as crime, vandalism, or anarchy. The media would play along given their settlement for surface-level news and sensationalism. What the protesters have to seek instead is to disrupt the normalized operation of corporate hegemony in a way dissonant with established corporate practices. (89)

One thing Vegh does not cover is how protests utilizing cutting edge technology is taken up by the mainstream audience who (I would argue) is the intended audience, or the super-addressee, of these activities. Much like I discuss in the KB Journal submission, it becomes problematic when activists are thrown into the “popularly opposed categories” listed by Solomon via Vegh.

Theorizing Online Activism
“Democracy, New Social Movements, and the Internet: A Habermasian Analysis”
Lee Salter

In this essay Salter discusses how the Internet could be an informal public sphere, the type of sphere needed to legitimate the official public sphere, through allowing for the vocalization and talk between members of the life world (the everyday world of the folk). This can only be achieved by the interaction of the folk with new social movement groups; these groups make known to the official public sphere (the world of legislative bodies) the desires and wants of everyday folk. In Salter’s estimation, the Internet is problematic since it is not a true public sphere unto itself , nor the informal, peripheral public sphere that could inform the official public sphere. It is somewhere in-between because it does not meet the qualifications of a true communication space. Language is released from convention (l33t speak); there is no universal access; and anonymity means a ducking of responsibility (an interlocutor is not held responsible for his statements since no one know who “he” is), and the Web has turned the Internet into a space colonized by corporate ways of knowing and being–meaning most communication is now a top-down, inside-out broadcast, not conversations between individual citizens. This “in-betweeness” proves Salter’s larger point: technology is not wholly determined by its creators, nor is it wholly determined by the eventually users. Technology, its usefulness in pursuing democracy, and how individual pieces of technology are used is an on-going and constantly changing process dependent both on users, creators, and context.

Salter’s terminology and theoretical lens is shaped by the work of Jurgen Habermas. In the beginning of the essay Salter takes scholars to task for not reading more than The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and if they do, not fully giving Habermas credit for the development of his more recent theories concerning democracy and communication which he reformulated in response to criticisms from the academic world. Salter’s essay is an interesting thick description of how technology works in the Western world as well as a rejoinder to those writers who use Habermas as a whipping post.

“Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement”
Maria Garrido and Alexander Halavais

This essay is a straightforward mapping of the network formed by the Zapatista website, via it hyperlinks, to other nodes within the activist electronic public sphere. Much like the Seattle IMC from “Indymedia.org”, this site serves both a Burkean and Fuchsian purpose; in a more traditional mathematical, network studies since the Zapatista site serves as a bridging node spanning over strucutural holes, ie, it is the friend who is a “weak” (weak meaning not totally invested in one specific friendship netowrk) node in several friendship networks that connects many disparate individuals to each other.

Cautionary Readings of Community, Empowerment, and Capitalism Online
“Gay Media, Inc.: Media Structures, the New Gay Conglomerate, and Collective Sexual Identities”
Joshua Gamson

In this essay Gamson demonstrates how the Internet has been utilized as a way to commodify the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender communities. While the sites promote the larger concept of diversity within American society, at the same, they also pre-package specific identities for LBGT communities in an effort to make those communities more appealing to potential advertisers. The image most often produced is that of the white professional with expendable income, who while queer, is not threatening. This move to make such a homogeneous population cuts off the traditional exchange of ideas inherent in the larger LBGT community, and therefore, ends another long standing tradition: the coupling of queer media with the larger queer political movement.

“Considerations for American Freireistas”
Victor Villanueva, Jr.
The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary
Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, Charles Schuster, eds.

In “Considerations for American Freireistas,” Villanueva critiques and offers amendments to the traditional Freireian pedagogy through his observations of a Freireian trained writing instructor in an ideal teaching situation (a non-public, private school vested in social change, working with students of color, and unconventional classroom methods). Villanueva begins by taking the four preconditions of Floyd’s (the aforementioned instructor’s) for “the true progress of oppressed people” (252) which served as the foundation for his (Floyd’s) classroom practices and rephrases them in more Marxist terminology (the left will be Floyd’s precondition, the right Villanueva’s rephrasing):

1. the creation of history = class formation
2. the raising of a mass consciousness to oppression = class consciousness
3. the refusal of the people to accept oppression = class struggle/class conflict
4. the rising of the conscious intellectual = the creation of an organic intellectual

As the last rephrasing signals, Villanueva is working from the Marxist theories of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s concept of the dominant hegemony is the linchpin for Villanueva’s criticism; Villanueva uses dominant hegemony as a way to describe how those in “subaltern positions” (250) accept practices, traditions, histories, and ways of navigating reality as appropriate for their individuals lives even if those ways of being hurt the subalterns–as a group–overall.  For Villanueva, American Freireistas (and I’d claim liberatory/critical educators as whole) deny the existence of a dominant hegemony, and therefore, develop practices like Floyd’s, which while evocative for students and provocative for scholar-teachers, does little to move them towards the Freireian goal of creating critically literate who can work within exisiting political and social systems towards a more egalitarian, democratic society.  For Villanueva, this occurs since there is no active dialect for students in an American Freireista’s classroom.  There is only the teacher’s way as “the hegemonic and counterhegemonic were not allowed evaluation” (256), both are presented as bad/good or wrong/right.   Villanueva supports his claim by interviews coming out of the class.  Students understood what Floyd was attempting but at the same time saw Floyd as an example of bootstrapping, ie, making it using the methods offered up by the dominant hegemony.  Floyd was seen as “bad.  You know.  He got no-tay-rye-eh-tee.  I mean he was the bad rags and the ride and like that” (257), that is, he can speak his mind and have the nicer things–all through his (Floyd’s) individual work and success as a college graduate, published poet, and educator.

Villanueva ends the essay offering up his then current classroom practices.  In his writing class, students were reading and discussing one text from the canon and then a non-canonical text, the non-canonical text dealing with conflicts unmentioned in the canonical texts as the protagonist of the non-canonical texts attempted to reconcile the ideas and practices from her home community with the ideas and practices of the mainstream, professional, and pre-dominately Anglo world.   These readings were followed by writing assignments asking the students to “consider…the degrees to which they can or do resist, oppose,  or accommodate” (259) similar conflicts they’ve experienced as they leave their home communities and enter the university.  These texts are eventually bound and become part of the course’ s reading list.  Through this process students contextualize their existence within America, and read and discuss with the same amount of respect and attention their life stories as those of the published writers.  Through the discussion of the conflicts, the dominant hegemony is made real, and, I assume, removes the focus from the instructor as the licensed giver of knowledge, and consequently, the connotation the instructor has earned this right through (mainstream approved) bootstrapping.

“Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere”
Craig Calhoun
Habermas and the Public Sphere
Craig Calhoun, ed.

In the intro to this anthology, Calhoun provides an excellent overview of Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere–the most important idea being that Structural Transformation was only the beginning of a theory which has developed and changed as Habermas has accepted criticism of the monograph and responded to changes in the political scene of the Western world since the original German publication of the book in the 1960s. Through showing the origin of specific theories in Structural Transformation and connecting its evolutionary end point in later Habermasian texts, Calhoun stresses Habermas’s theories have been much maligned; most significantly (for me at least) the concept of critical, rational debate. Calhoun explains Habermas’s need to postulate the existence and possibility of critical, rational communication lies in his (Hasbermas’s) belief real communicative actions can occur only between individuals within the “lifeworld” of everyday people. The lifeworld stands in opposition to the “system” of the nonlinguistic steering media, a system of organic outlets which broadcasts the values of capitalism with all of its productions since the health of these outlets is based on the intertwined well-being of the nation-state and corporate capitalists. Calhoun explains:

This…cannot be overcome, Habermas argues, because…large-scale modern society would be impossible without such a systemic integration (and dreams of doing away with such large-scale societal integration are not only romantic but dangerous because reduction in scale can come about only in catastrophic ways). (34)

The possibility of rational, critical debate in the lifeworld makes clear Habermas’s “reliance on a transhistorical capacity for human communication” (34), a use of language which could verbalize the need for change in the interest of the everyday folk that could be used to persuade those in governmental/corporate culture. This use of language has two main entry points into the system; through codification in specific official channels more open to folk culture, like law, or through the swaying of party leaders whose party members control legislative bodies and would want to respond to the public opinion of the folk they claim to represent (and therefore count on their votes to remain in political power) in a legislative dimension. This shift has only its beginnings in Structural Transformation, becomes more real in later works, and signals the shift from conceptualizing the public sphere as either a physically or temporally demarcated space ensuring critical-rational debate to envisioning the existence of the public sphere through the interpersonal enactment of critical-rational debate.

Calhoun closes the introduction discussing the criticisms of Habermas’s theories, and also explains how the following essays within the anthology deal with these shortcomings (33-39). Nonetheless, Calhoun also explains why Habermas’s defense of “the unfinished project” (40) of modernity, however controversial, is still as valuable today as it was thirty years ago. Calhoun explains:

The rehabilitation of formal democracy that thirty years ago was a crucial complement to Marxism now appears just as important in the struggle against the “new conservatives.” These people present themselves often as postmodernists and sometimes misleadingly as radicals or progressives. Though there are genuine insights in this tradition, at their worst, postmodernists reveal a cynicism and a relativism that together permit the normalization of evil: more generally, the throw out the criteria of progress along with the rigidities of utopia. (41)

“The Commodity”
Capital
Karl Marx

This chapter from Marx’s work Capital appears to be a material-historical analysis of the development of commodities (in the most general sense, the re-occuring example is a bolt of linen and a coat) and the prices attributed to these commodities. From what I can glean in reading this chapter without any historical-theoretical context, it appears there was a belief floating about that commodities had an intrinsic–not extrinsic–value. Marx spends the chapter dispelling this fallacy, demonstrating how the value of various commodities is determined by social factors, and especially by the factor of labor, that is, the cost of labor to produce a commodity. While this may not, even at that time, have been earth shattering, what probably was (and may still be for some) is Marx’s claim this ability to see commodities as endowed with intrinsic value not only hides the role of people in the economy (that is “the unseen hand” is actually a confluence of traceable forces), it also hides the fact that labor is in itself a commodity. The connection of labor to produce commodities and make them ready for “exchange value” takes the whole economy of commodities out of the realm of artifacts deriving mystical value by some unseen hand through exposing the interconnected nodes of production within society; material relations, that is, the making of commodities and the labor to make those commodities move from natural to use value dictates the realities of everyone involved. Work and money–what people do with their hands and the status such work provides within a given society–affects individual perception of the world.

“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Karl Marx
Surveys from Exile: Political Writings
David Fernbach, ed.

In this work, Marx stresses the importance of socio-economic class as the determiner for relations to others, and how this material relation can force a political party, based on the interest of the bourgeoisie, to eventually severe its ties with its base, perform deeds against its stated values, and thereby self-destruct and allow the dissolution of the French republic (this would be the party of Order, which was in existence, from what I can tell through this text, from the late 1840s until 1851 when Louis Bonaparte dissolved the General Assembly and, eventually, re-established the French empire).

Along with stressing positionality as the determiner for how to navigate the material, experiential world, Marx points out two other key lesson to be learned from this moment in French history: first, capitalists work out of their concern for the market and trade first and foremost, no matter their nationality or stated sense of patriotism; second, the creation of landholding French peasants, and those peasants reliance on the Bonparte’s various government bureaucracies for aide due to their existence as virtual sharecroppers, created the work which justified the need for Bonaparte’s administration and ensured the continued defense of the status quo by the peasantry. This effectively stopped an alliance between the city proletariat and the country peasants, which, if the peasantry would have been left alone and they would have become desperate, could have led to an uprising against the new monarchy. Concomitantly, this lack of outrage by the hoi polloi of France was part of the mental gymnastics Marx claims the bourgeoisie performed in blaming someone other than themselves for the dissolution of the republic (the party of Order portrayed itself as the great defender of the republic and all its attendant qualities); for Marx the ability of a huckster like Bonaparte to obtain power comes from the comedic set of events the ruling bourgeois got themselves into as they attempted to maintain social and political order in the name of commerce.

Another aspect of this text is the telling of history from the perspective of classes, or class orientation. Even though Marx names individuals and discusses the things they said in public or actions they performed which are part of public record (or done on their orders), he still positions each actor within the set of events as a representative of their specific class upbringing and class position at the time of the revolution. In this way, it appears Marx is doing away with the idea of objective history and a history told as the deeds of “great men.” They are merely men acting on impulses which protect their financial interests or respective social-political statuses; these men are not cast as figures embodying essential, universal qualities, nor even working towards the maintenance (or creation or extension of ) such lofty concepts like “democracy” or “freedom” or “equality.”

Side note: the creation of the complicated bureaucracy where individuals worked through larger parties, or fraternal/secret societies, to advocate for resources from the nation-state seems connected to Habermas’s concern with the socialist welfare state and its public sphere. Also, it seems Gramsci may have interpreted the actions of French peasants differently than merely being duped (it’s something I would claim Marx is intimating, but I’ve read through this and “The Commodity” rather quickly) but as the evidence of the dominant hegemony at work.