IN THE CHAPTERS before this last one I have been assuming—without flagging or defending the assumption—that argument is the practice of offering propositions about a contested matter and responding to competing propositions by citing evidence and giving reasons. Argument involves the exchanging of words. But, as we have always known, arguments come in nonverbal forms—in gestures, colors, musical refrains, and, above all, in images. Argument, in short, is embodied; it doesn’t take place in just the head but involves almost everything that comes before our eyes. What is now called “visual rhetoric” has been around at least since the elaborate description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad, book 18, and arguably since the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But is visual rhetoric argumentative in the appropriate sense? Do images make assertions in a way that renders them “a legitimate tool of rational persuasion,” as opposed to emotional persuasion, which certainly occurs but is usually thought to be inferior and suspect? The answer has often been no, but J. Anthony Blair makes a good case for saying yes when he analyzes a pre–World War II cartoon by David Low depicting “an evidently complacent Englishman . . . reading a newspaper, sitting directly underneath a jumble of precariously balanced boulders” (“The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,” Defining Visual Rhetorics, 2004).
The boulder at the bottom is marked “Czecho” and the caption reads, “What’s Czechoslovakia to me, anyway?” The propositional content of the cartoon, Blair explains, is “that to regard the fate of Czechoslovakia as having no consequences is mistaken,” and the reasoning supporting the proposition is that if Czechoslovakia were to fall to Germany, the other precariously placed boulders—labelled “Rumania,” “Poland,” “French Alliances,” and “Anglo-French Security”—would fall down too. (How’s that for political prophecy?) Blair concludes that “to the objection that propositions cannot be expressed visually the reply is that because it has been done in Low’s cartoon, it is possible” (48).
Blair could also have found support in the ancient traditions of emblem books, religious iconography, bestiaries, heraldry, illustrated fables, and other literary/cultural forms that present moralized images, images with propositional content. The figure Rhetorica from the “Tarot Cards of Mantegna” (1467) is a nice example because it makes a point about visual rhetoric visually. It shows an imposing female figure, standing with an upraised sword at a ninety-degree angle to her outstretched arm; although her feet are bare, her clothing is rich and elaborately draped; she wears a long, flowing garment adorned by a jeweled breastplate; on top of the garment, secured just below the collarbone, is a purple cape, the hem of which she holds with her left hand; on her head sits a helmet topped with a crown; on either side of her two putti, also barefooted, blow trumpets, one pointing up, the other down.
The argument being made by this image is as easy to read as the argument being made by Low’s cartoon: “You might have thought that rhetoric is the art of filigree and mere decoration, a weak feminine sister of forceful, manly verbal argument, but in fact the sword of rhetoric is mightier than even the military sword, for it can bring men low or raise them high simply by blowing either the trumpet of blame or the trumpet of praise; that is why the figure of Rhetorica is clothed in purple, the color worn by priests, cardinals, princes, kings, magistrates, and warriors, all bearers of a male authority that is superseded by Queen Rhetoric, resplendent in her crown.” All that and more (I didn’t get to the breastplate and helmet and bare feet) is conveyed at a glance by the image, which exemplifies the truth it preaches: arguments made visually have “more force and immediacy than verbal communication allows” (Blair, 53).
Blair doesn’t want to make the concept of visual rhetoric so broad that it includes any image at all. In order to count as an argument, an image must, he insists, “render vivid and immediate . . . a reason or set of reasons offered for modifying a belief, an attitude or one’s conduct” (50). That standard, he tells us, is not met by many familiar, even iconic, images, like the image of the Marlboro Man: “A billboard with a picture of a cowboy with a tattoo on a horse smoking a cigarette. Visual influence? Absolutely. Visual argument? None” (58).
Wrong. It’s an argument about image and self-esteem. The proposition is that you should smoke Marlboro cigarettes rather than smoke another brand or not smoke at all; the reasoning is that if you do, you will be that much closer to being lean, rugged, independent, self-reliant, self-branding, mobile, and adventurous. The argument can be criticized for being shallow and meretricious because it equates well-being with surface characteristics, but that is the argument built into almost all advertising: X is a good or desirable thing to have or be; purchasing our product is the way to achieve X (happiness, beauty, popularity, influence, respect, love, wealth); therefore you should purchase our product. The middle term is specious—you can’t purchase the real thing, only a simulacrum—but it works.
The Marlboro Man ad is literally a fashion statement, with the emphasis on “statement”: it proclaims values and tells you how to live. Fashion is never merely the announcement that this cut or accessory or length is now in and others are out of fashion; the new wrinkle, whatever it is, sends a message about identity, status, political affiliation, and a thousand other things. In her brilliant study Seeing Through Clothes (1978), Anne Hollander provides example after example of the complex, propositional messages sent by clothing. From the very beginning, she observes, there was a connection “between draped cloth and lofty concepts,” and although there is “no evidence that wearing full, draped clothing ever made anyone nobler . . . the association of the idea of drapery with the idea of a better and more beautiful life flourished” (2–3).
Other associations of ideas with clothing include the dandy’s wearing of fitted black clothes to indicate an artistic temperament and an alienation from society, even as he displayed to society an apparent negligence that required “exacting hours before the mirror” (229). At the other extreme are those who “dress down” in an effort to declare an admirable indifference to what they wear. Hollander notes that in every age, some of the high and the mighty who can easily afford extravagance nevertheless embrace “the notion that unassuming costume is the sign of more serious temperament or more refined aesthetic taste,” a taste that is not a slave to fashion (257–58). But as she points out, the trouble with this anti-fashion strategy is that others will soon imitate it and it will become the “fashionable thing” it tries to avoid. “Those who create anti-fashion are themselves products of the coercion they wish to ignore” (365).
It is never possible, Hollander says, to just “wear anything” and think by your studied carelessness to avoid making a statement, although the statement you make will vary over time as colors and styles (short skirt, low skirt, cinched waist, full waist, belt, no belt, hat, no hat, baggy pants, fitted pants, high neckline, plunging neckline) take on ever new significance in the turns of the history of fashion. In that history, fully elaborated by Hollander, black more than any other color is the medium of multiple messages, depending on which of the “two aspects of black clothing—the conventionally sober, self-denying black and the dramatic, isolating, and distinguished black” is in vogue (377); but the one thing black will never be is just black; an argument is always being made. After all, you’ve got to wear something—if not black, white, purple, or red; if not cotton, linen, denim, or silk—and even if you were to wear nothing and go naked you would still be sending out messages and declaring a position; for clothes or their absence cannot help but “suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie” (355) (when your clothes say one thing but your heart means another).
What is true of clothing is true also of furniture, restaurant interiors, hairstyles, automobiles, boats, apartments, city-street grids, landscape gardening, baseball stadiums, airplanes, storefronts, book jackets, television sets, smart phones: each is characterized by an intentional arrangement of components, by choices of size, shape, material, dimension, finish; in each instance those arrangements and choices say something, often in contrast or opposition to what has been said previously (modernist architecture celebrates the unity of form and function; unity is what postmodern architecture mocks); and as customers or consumers or viewers we affirm or reject the messages that emanate from everything we see. The world, at least the world of man-made artifacts, is just one argument after another, a point made crisply by Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz: “all language, including the language of visual images, is persuasive, pointing in a direction and asking for a response” (Everything’s an Argument, 1998).
A Modern Version of the Desire to Escape Argument
Enlarging the scope of argument to include images, clothing, jewelry, and everything else runs the risk of feeding into the distrust of argument—really the distrust of language—harbored by those who yearn for the unvarnished truth and are therefore wary of any intermediary layer—be it verbal or material—placed between them and the possibility of what Jürgen Habermas calls “undistorted communication.” Undistorted communication is communication from which the wrong motives—instrumental, strategic—are excluded so that only a single motive, “that of the cooperative search for truth,” is allowed (Legitimation Crisis, 1975). This means that participants refrain from making arguments that reflect their own interests and resolve instead (just how this resolve is to be executed is the problem) to make arguments that flow from and toward a common interest in establishing a universal truth assented to by everyone. Those who make and receive such arguments will be speaking the same language because they will have harnessed themselves to the same impersonal discourse: “all participants stick to the reference point of . . . achieving a mutual understanding in which the same utterances are assigned the same meaning.”
It’s a promise and an agenda we have met before: language use will be put on the right path by filtering out everything that acknowledges interest and difference, that is, the fact that we are not all the same. Orwell thinks that communication can be purified by being careful about the individual words you use. Habermas thinks that communication can be purified by being careful about what kinds of arguments you make. It is the lesson of the marriage manuals universalized. The difference is that in the manuals the disavowing of interest is performed (in a rigidly constrained discourse context) with the hope of securing a harmony between just two persons; the harmony sought is local and is, at least occasionally, achievable. The harmony sought by Habermas is universal.
It seems like an attractive program until you ask questions such as: How do you know when participants have set aside pragmatic and strategic considerations and moved to the higher state of being disinterested in the strongest sense of that word? How do you know when one of the participants in the ideal speech situation is only pretending to have broken with the purposes that have hitherto motivated him and is holding one of them up his sleeve on the reasoning that “after all, I’m right, and it would be unwise to surrender everything I believe for the vague promise of some intersubjective nirvana”?
The answer to these questions is that you can’t know, or, rather, you can’t know unless you can identify and occupy some independent, nonangled perspective—a contradiction in terms—from which judgments on sincerity and purity of motive can be securely and noncontroversially made. But if such a perspective were available, if good and bad arguments—arguments aimed at a consensual understanding versus arguments aimed at prevailing—were self-identifying, the discursive realm would already be the place cleansed of preference and bias to which discourse ethics is supposed to bring us. If we could get to that place by an act of will, by first cataloging and then renouncing the presupposed norms that produce distortion, there would be no need for the elaborate machinery and severe cautions that make up Habermas’s project. When he directs us to “start with concrete speech acts embedded in specific contexts and then disregard all aspects those utterances owe to their pragmatic functions” (the functions they perform in ordinary angled speech), I hear “disregard” as an imperative waiting for a technology, for a set of directions that never arrives. How do you do it?
Habermas’s surprising answer to this question is that we are already doing it because every time we open our mouths to say something we have committed ourselves to validating what we say by universal norms. From the beginning we’re already partway there. All we have to do is grasp that part of our utterance that is not tied to a limited, instrumental aim and run with it. “[A]nyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose they can be vindicated” (Communication and the Evolution of Society, 1979). We may be saying things like “here is what we must do” or “I think you are flat wrong,” but at bottom what we’re really saying is “let’s work toward intersubjective praxis.” It may seem that each of us is interested in the triumph of a particular point of view, but in fact our true interest, even when our statements take an agonistic form, is to join with others in securing a general consensus.
I see no reason to believe this to be so. When I try to persuade you to my point of view, my intentions are entirely strategic. I want to get you on my side and there is no larger communicative goal (like universal understanding) to which my contextually situated effort aspires (behind my back as it were). Habermas appears to think that we are all philosophers operating within philosophical (not forensic) ambitions even when we say, “I think the policy you recommend is wrong” or “I think we should bomb Iran now.” If we were all philosophers, if philosophy were built into our everyday speech acts rather than being a very specialized discourse of interest to only a few people, it would make sense to say that the goal of our every utterance was its transcendence. But saying we are all philosophers doesn’t make it so. And unless we are all philosophers, engaged always in the raising of universal validity claims, the realm of instrumental purposes is the realm we will always live in.
Escaping that realm is not an option—there’s no way out—and asserting that we have already escaped it by virtue of some genetically wired orientation to universality undercuts both the urgency and the point of Habermas’s enterprise. Whether you agree or disagree with Habermas’s account of language as a universalizing engine, the project has nowhere to go. If he is right about the intersubjective hopes built into ordinary discourse, his utopian conversational ideal has already been realized, so what’s the fuss all about? If he is wrong and conversation is irremediably situated and local, his program of purifying discourse is a nonstarter (just as Orwell’s was) because there is no place for the would-be purifier to stand; the entire field is saturated with interest.
How Both Liberalism and Religion Look Forward to the End of Argument
The failure of Habermas’s project is an instance of the general failure of liberal rationalism, the project of establishing a common ground rooted not in obedience to a deity or to an overarching moral order, but in a thin proceduralism. Liberalism—and by that word I mean the Enlightenment philosophical program inaugurated by Kant, not a position on the political continuum—seeks to avoid the conflicts that arise when substantive agendas fight it out in the public square by substituting procedural norms for the interest-laden norms that produce social and political division. (The idea is to fashion laws that match, insofar as possible, the minimal content of the rule mandating that we all drive on the same side of the road; who could argue with that?)
The first step in the liberal program is to dethrone God or any pregiven morality as the source of meaning, because there is no version of God or morality to which all members of the citizenry assent. The next step is to come up with a replacement for what has been dethroned, to come up with a mechanism that provides the same generality of meaning that was provided (at least for believers) by revealed Truth. The value liberalism substitutes for obedience to a higher authority is the value of choice as it is exercised by a free and autonomous individual. But freedom, autonomy, and choice are problematic values if the goal is to fashion a polity where conflict has given way to agreement and harmony, at least with respect to basic foundational matters. Give freedom of choice full sway and it will produce the very divisiveness from which liberalism promises to rescue us. How can the freely choosing individual be constrained in a way that avoids a Hobbesian war of all against all, now that suprarational constraints like God and moral absolutes have been repudiated?
The answer given in the liberal tradition will be familiar to readers of this book: forge a language devoid of substantive hostages, a language of such generality and metaphysical emptiness that to speak it is to commit oneself to almost nothing. The thinness of its terms and definitions ensures that it will be intelligible and acceptable to anyone, no matter what he or she happened to believe, or not believe, about God or the shape of moral truth. If such a language (akin to the neutral observation language Kuhn declares unavailable) could be devised and adherence to it were required of everyone who entered the public sphere, the decisions reached in the political process would be truly communal because they would depend not on variable and contested beliefs, but on matters of social fact encoded in a language common to all.
Given this linguistic/ethical program, it is easy to see why public discourse in the liberal state cannot accommodate religion and religious arguments. Religion does not consider itself bound by the norms of empirical validation; instead it is answerable only to the norms of faith, norms that refuse to be judged by any standard but their own, norms that are affirmed and adhered to no matter what the world and its socially approved methodologies deliver as truth. When strong believers converse with one another, the vocabulary they deploy points to (but does not contain) realities that are powerfully present for them, yet inaccessible to those outside the fold. Therefore a public language that was doing its job of enabling rational consensus cannot contain religious terms and concepts. Liberalism’s hope of a community of rational choosers is incompatible with religion.
That incompatibility becomes painfully obvious when religious commitments clash with the commitments encoded in secular law. In the summer of 2015, Kim Davis, an elected county clerk in Kentucky, declared herself unable to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because her religion restricted marriage to the union of a man and a woman. The national debate that erupted when a judge declared her in contempt and sent her to jail pitted those who insisted that she was obligated to follow the law she had sworn to execute against those who insisted that she was obligated to follow the higher law of her faith. Neither side gave an inch, and in innumerable op-eds, sermons, and radio talk-show conversations, a familiar point-counterpoint played itself out in predictable ways.
One side, the side of faith, said that religion speaks to our highest aspirations and no one should be asked to abandon those aspirations just because a merely secular law, interpreted strictly and without due concern for the claims of conscience, requires it. The other side, the classically liberal side, argued that those aspirations are attached to a faith not shared by everyone—they are not public aspirations—and it is wrong to allow one person, especially a person in office, to hold herself above a law that has been established democratically and applies to all citizens; Kim Davis is free to think and believe anything she likes, but she is not free to impose her beliefs on others who are denied their rights by her actions. The response came back saying that the state is denying her rights under the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment by refusing to accommodate her strong and sincerely held religious convictions. But, declared the counterresponse, if we grant that accommodation to her, don’t we have to grant accommodations to anyone who claims to be moved by some inner prompting, and won’t we end up with a government not of laws but of men (and women), all lawgivers to themselves? And won’t that mean the death of law and the destruction of civil order? And so it went, and so it goes to this very day. As Milton might have said, “And of their vain contest appeared no end.”
And yet, although religion and liberalism are locked in an opposition for which there is no resolution, they are alike in one respect—their claim to be universal, albeit in different ways. Liberal universalism is to be achieved by subtraction, by removing or bracketing comprehensive moral dictates not everyone would recognize; religious universalism is inherent in the comprehensive claim of a religion to be bearing a truth everyone, including nonbelievers, should acknowledge. One kind of universalism says, “be an independent, rational chooser rather than someone chosen and scripted by deity or a pregiven morality”; the other says, “forgo your independence—you really don’t have it anyway—and allow yourself to be absorbed into a structure not made by hands.”
In the shared context of their quite different universalisms, liberalism and religion share something else: they are both suspicious of argument, the first because argument, if pursued beyond the level of the procedural, tends to unsettle a political order that depends on procedure and the avoidance of substance to hold it together (you can argue about little things, but not about big, metaphysical, things); the second because religion privileges obedience and conformity to the divine will and regards argument as a sign of distance from the peace that passeth understanding. It is no exaggeration to say that a desire for argument’s death is built into the tradition that names the fruit of the forbidden tree in Genesis the apple of discord.
Before the Fall, the story goes, harmony and unity were the rule, but when pride—the desire to stand out among one’s fellows—infected first Satan and then Adam and Eve, discord began its long tenure. Ever since, philosophy, theology, and ethics have been devising ways to reverse the Fall’s effects and return us to an Edenic state in which peace and good will once again reign, and argument will be superfluous. Oh, if we could only stop bickering, if both individuals and states could only put aside their disagreements rooted in the base impulses of acquisitiveness and the will to power and learn to live together. In the words of Rodney King, can’t we all just get along? Can’t we damp down the noise, soft-pedal the acrimony, let go of the scorn, withdraw from judgment, find common ground, give one another a break?
Argument and the Unredeemed World
Deborah Tannen asks the same questions from a secular perspective in her aptly titled The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words (1998). Tannen surveys the public scene and argues (an irony of which she is very much aware), “Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting opposition—an argument culture” (3). She observes, “Our public interactions have become more and more like having an argument with a spouse,” because when you’re having that kind of argument, “your goal is not to listen and understand. Instead you use every tactic you can think of . . . in order to win” (4–5). The compulsion to win an argument mandates an oppositional stance and therefore “privileges extreme views and obscures complexity . . . and poisons our relations with one another,” and that means, she contends, that “the argument culture is doing more damage than good” (25).
Tannen is particularly hard on the argument culture of the academy, where the need “to make others wrong” leads you, she says, “to search for the most foolish statement in a generally reasonable treatise, seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent’s views, and focus only on those that support yours” (269). The rules of the academic game as I described them earlier are the objects of Tannen’s criticism here. Rather than reading with an open mind, students in the grip of the argument culture act out the lesson “that they must disprove others’ arguments in order to be original” (269). Sometimes it seems, she muses, that the “maxim driving academic discourse” is “if you can’t find anything bad to say, don’t say anything” (269).
It is not surprising that Tannen’s strictures have drawn a vigorous response from Gerald Graff, who invented the pedagogic strategy of “teaching the controversies.” (It’s his big idea.) Graff acknowledges that argumentation can take a bad turn and become little more than vituperation or “trash talk,” but he insists on its “unavoidable centrality . . . to democratic societies and educational institutions,” and he questions whether Tannen’s preferred mode, dialogue, is really a distinct form and not a variant of the argumentative form she wants it to replace: “Tannen overstates the distinction between debate and dialogue, which form a continuum rather than an opposition”; for “conversation alternates between adversarial and consensual moments and often pauses as we reflect on which mode we’re in” (“Two Cheers for the Argument Culture,” Hedgehog Review, 2000). This moment of reflection, within and not apart from the argumentative field, is the closest thing there is to the “reflective moment” Habermas offers as the way to escape argument. But it affords no escape. Stepping back in a moment of reflection from the context of argument is an act performed within and shaped by that context. Consensual moments certainly occur, and when they do the edge of argument is softened as a stylistic matter, but it is still argument you are engaging in (consensus is a part of strategy, not an exit from it) and, indeed, you have no choice if you agree with Michael Billig (as Graff does) when he says that “argument is the root of thought” (Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology, 1996). No argument means no assertion, no exploration of alternatives, no movement, no advance in knowledge, no building of community.
While Habermas and Tannen, in their very different ways, want to pull argument’s sting and find a way out of it, Leon Wieseltier wants to do the reverse. He wants to fully and joyously engage in, not transcend, verbal conflict. He observes that more and more these days, “a shared understanding is preferred to a multiplicity of understandings, which is rejected as an epistemologically fallen condition” (“The Argumentative Jew,” Jewish Review of Books, 2015). He refers to this preference as a “consensualist mentality” and the “cult of unanimity,” and he opposes to it the tradition of the argumentative Jew, which, he says, “displays an almost erotic relationship to controversy.” Controversy, the back-and-forth of argument, is what is left to us when the “God’s-eye view” is unavailable, and Wieseltier is not one of those who believes (against all the lessons of history) that the earthly heaven of undistorted communication and unanimity of opinion is waiting for us at controversy’s end.
Rather than envisioning a progressive enlarging of perspectives as Habermas does, Wieseltier celebrates the give-and-take of vigorous exchange, which if engaged in wholeheartedly creates a community of persons who continue to disagree: “The parties to a disagreement . . . belong to the group that wrestles together with the same perplexity, and they wrestle together for the sake of the larger community to which they all belong.” “A quarrel,” Wieseltier declares, “is evidence of coexistence.” It is evidence that we are all in the same boat, trying to figure things out in the absence of clear direction from a deity, and offering to one another, sometimes with an aggressive edge, analyses and arguments we are obliged to answer. In this “model of quarrelsome unity”—unity as a function of, not an escape from, agon—we learn “to live with disagreement and not to think less of it because it cannot be miraculously consummated.” Disagreement—argument—Wieseltier roundly declares, “is not only real, it is also an ideal—at least in the unredeemed world, the only world we know.”
An unredeemed world is a world where final meanings of the kind that would stop conflict in its tracks are not available. The choice—and it really isn’t one—is to live with that reality or search for ways to neutralize it or get around it, which are really ways of denying it. What is being denied by the various schemes and methods surveyed in these pages is the inescapably contextual and mediated nature of human experience. The famous verse in 1 Corinthians reads, “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face” (13:12). The glass (or perspective or lens or mirror) through which we now see is the glass of human limitation. Situated as we are in the midst of—not to the side of—local perspectives, ever-challengeable assumptions, imperfect information, and ungrounded beliefs, “face to face” seeing will be ours only when the condition of mortality has been left behind, when we have been absorbed into the perfect wholeness of vision and understanding now (literally) beyond us, when the differences that now divide us are revealed—and “revealed” should be understood very strongly—to be inessential and ultimately unreal.
Every “projector” whose messianic promises we have encountered along the way tells us that the arrival of that happy day can be accelerated by some device or insight or magic key that at once identifies and removes the obstacles to perfect communication. Getting rid of ambiguities, metaphors, figures of speech, and fictions, using only simple words that point directly to things (somehow self-identifying), hewing closely to facts (somehow self-identifying), taking care to put forward only impersonal arguments (also somehow self-identifying), devising a language from which substance has been exiled—these, supposedly, are the levers by which we can hoist ourselves to the heaven of static-free, perfectly transparent conversation while remaining earth-bound.
The latest vaunted vehicle of “paradise here and now” is the Internet, whose most fervent apostles predict that because of it war, inequality, confusion, want, and poverty will disappear and be replaced by a perfect democracy in which every voice is equally heard and equally valued and none can claim precedence. These new prophets (sounding very much like the old prophets) believe, Evgeny Morozov explains, that factions, ideological disagreements, and deep conflict “are simply the unfortunate result of an imperfect communication infrastructure” (To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, 2013). The “fundamental assumption,” Morozov adds, is that “disagreements occur not because people are bound to differ, but because they are misinformed.” They are misinformed because what they hear and receive is filtered through institutions, political parties, biased media, and other vehicles of interest and distortion. “Solutionists” believe we can bypass those vehicles and free ourselves from their baneful influence by engaging directly with information via “open networks”—networks that are uncensored, without gatekeepers and therefore antiauthoritarian. We will thus become capable of seeing the undistorted truth, and our decisions about what to do and whom to elect (if elections are still necessary) will be instantaneous and epistemologically clean. Don’t go to meetings or contribute to candidates or hew to a party line; just look, face-to-face, and click.
In this techno-utopia, “organized political parties won’t be needed” because people will “organize ad hoc, rather than get stuck in some rigid group” (Esther Dyson, quoted in “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington,” Wired, 1994). The result will be the elimination of politics altogether, for we will be able to, according to Morozov, “replace politicians and politics with technocrats.” Formerly political questions can be decided scientifically through algorithms, so there will be “no need to waste time discussing their merits and perpetuating all the messiness of the political process.” All that will be left to what we used to call politics will be “fixing potholes and dealing with stray dogs.”
So once again, and for the umpteenth time, we see the desire to eliminate difference and the confidence that we can do so by either devising a neutral observation language or, in this brave new Internet world, by the frictionless exchanging of information that has been cleansed of ideological encrustations. Such information, unsponsored and uninflected by bias and strategic motives, speaks for itself to clear-eyed observers who needn’t engage in any adversarial argumentative battles because everyone sees and registers the same unfiltered thing. This is what Beth Noveck, described by Morozov as an “open government advocate,” celebrates as the “public exchange of reason”; not an exchange in which your reasons and my reasons might clash, but the public exchange of reasons that, because they issue from a base of commonly shared, interpretation-free data, have the capacity to create community all by themselves without the intervening and distorting screen of argument. “People,” Noveck enthuses, “can ‘speak’ through shared maps and diagrams” without having to talk, without having to use words. It’s Gulliver’s Travels all over again, offered this time not as satire, but as salvation. Instead of things taken out of a backpack, we will have raw data untainted by the corruption of subjectivity and therefore capable of generating meaning and agreement simply by virtue of getting bigger and bigger. Language, always vulnerable to manipulation, kills, but big data saveth. (Actually, you could pile up data until it stood higher than ten Empire State Buildings and it wouldn’t tell you anything.)
As I said earlier, this is a dream that dies hard. In fact it will never die, and it will survive every effort to puncture its balloon, including mine. I can say till the end of time what I have said over and over in these pages—that the wish to escape argument is really the wish to escape language, which is really the wish to escape politics, and is finally the wish to escape mortality—and it won’t matter a whit. For one effect of inhabiting the condition of difference—the condition of being partial, the condition of not being in direct touch with the final unity and full meaning of the universe—is that we long to transcend it; and it is that longing, forever disappointed, that keeps us going.