In watching the aftermath of the recent discussion of humanism and anti-humanism (now there’s a fine reductive binary that could use some deconstructing, no?) at Invisible Adjunct, I was startled by the apparent hostility of the fisking performed by Robert Schwartz. Certainly, others in the discussion engaged in a bit of fisking, but none to Schwartz’s degree. It got me thinking about fisking as a genre particular to the net, and so I did a little googling. Imagine my delight at seeing that fellow traveler Dennis Jerz was far, far ahead of me, and even included a link that I see now, long after the fact, as demonstrating quite well that the recent discussions of “the postmodern” (as I think most of the participants understood) were hardly a new topic. (Now there’s a clunker of a sentence structure.) But thinking about fisking (definitions here and here) raises some interesting questions for me about the instrumental view of technology.
Fisking is, by definition, agonistic. While I’ve previously tried to defend agonistic discourse, I’ll also acknowledge the points made by Cindy and Rana in other discussions that All Agonism, All The Time make academia into a really crappy place to be. Agonistic discourse has to be balanced by irenic discourse. Why, then, does the phenomenon of fisking seem to have no irenic rhetorical counterpart?
Well: let’s start by asking, what does fisking do? As put into hostile practice by Robert Schwartz (I’m being unfair in singling him out, but I was really struck — verb choice entirely intentional — by his rhetorical intensity, and impressed by the grace and goodwill of his respondents) and others, fisking atomizes opposing arguments, responding to them line-by-line and piece-by-piece in a way that attempts to say, “All these tiny components of this person’s perspective are wrong, and so the perspective itself must be wrong.” As others have pointed out, it’s also asynchronous; the person being fisked cannot respond in real time. Finally, fisking allows the fisker to ignore the context and the synthesized point of the victim: in other words, it’s an attack that seems to have considerable rhetorical force, but excuses the attacker from actually engaging with what may be the victim’s broader argument. To put it into the parlance of the writing classroom, if you can go point-by-point with your opponent, you don’t have to write a thesis statement of your own. Fisking is easy.
But it’s not just easy rhetorically: it’s a convenience of the computer age. At the above-linked Kairosnews post, Dennis’ interlocutors point out — revealingly, I think — that this is not a Web phenomenon, but something that’s been around for as long as asynchronous electronic communication (email, bulletin boards, et cetera) has been around. I would submit that what really makes fisking so prevalent is the convenience of ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v; the ease with which we can electronically cut, copy, and paste the words of another. As has been said of other online genres, fisking would seem to be a “native” form of electronic discourse.
But wait: so why wouldn’t irenic discourse be equally facilitated by such electronic conveniences? I’m not sure, and I don’t really have a good answer. It may be that the motivation to do the irenic equivalent of fisking just isn’t there: if you agree with all of somebody’s points and their overarching argument as well, are you going to copy and paste all of them? Much easier to simply say, “Right on!” So maybe the technology-based argument I was going to make is invalid. I was going to say that fisking indicates ways in which technology — via the ease of copying and pasting in electronic documents — is not neutral, and thereby could be seen as helping to give the lie to the instrumental perspective, because fisking rewards agonistic discourse over irenic discourse, and the conveniences of the keyboard editing commands therefore carry with them ethical consequence.
But now I’m not so sure: did I not think things through adequately?
Mike, would you consider a wiki to be irenic?
Good question from Dennis, would love to see feedback.
Aren’t agonism and irenism in substantive part based on the receiver’s interpretation of and response to commentary?
Cannot a community “enforce” agonism or irenism by merely ignoring commentary which does not meet its needs (rather like ignoring a toddler’s tantrums)?
(I really just came here to say that I’m always amazed and bemused at the places to which links from my cross-blog discourse on post-modernism leads me. Invariably I find interesting content and comments!)
Interesting question, Dennis. I have limited experience with wikis, but from what I know, the idea behind them — collaborative construction and refinement of a body of knowledge — certainly seems irenic. But that’s the theory. In practice, there’s the problem of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, which, yes, Rayne, can take the form of the community’s “ignoring commentary which does not meet its needs” (South Africa was able to ignore such commentary until February 1990): wikis stabilize conventional wisdom, which, to a liberal like me, isn’t always a good thing. Couple this to the difficulty that wikis may hide conflict via a user’s uncritical acceptance of the wiki philosophy that progressive revisions further refine content and subsequent use of the first material she encounters, which seems to me even more troubling than the open conflict of agonistic discourse.
I’ll point out, though, that my experience comes only from Wikipedia and brief encounters with a couple other wikis. My own ideological position makes it difficult for me to accept the possibility that Wikipedia is “unbiased” or has a “neutral point of view”: the entry on “deconstructionism”, which currently draws almost entirely on hostile sources (the first quotation is from The Economist), seems to me to be a fine example of the geek community’s hard-science bias obscuring any possibility of any useful/intelligent/inclusive definition of the term. (One might as well ask for a definition of libertarianism as written by Marxists.)
So what your question makes me see, again, is that it’s reductive and foolish to characterize agonistic discourse as somehow “bad” and irenic discourse as somehow “good”. It’s like saying “war is bad”: yes, we all know this, soldiers more than anyone. But you say “war is bad” to the buddies of mine who shut down rape hotels in Bosnia.
Wikipedia is a great project, and one to which I have contributed. Since wikis are far from mainstream, and the interface (while easier than HTML) is geek-friendly (that is, it makes perfect sense if you wrench yourself into a geek frame of mind, or if you already have one), it is naturally going to reflect the same kind of geeky first-adopter-techno-utopian foo-fah attitude that characterizes the discourse of just about any new technology.
I started a wiki to create a glossary of terms related to interactive fiction (you know, the classic text adventure game genre). That glossary is down for the time being, but one very knowledgeable contributor always makes apologetic, helpful footnotes instead of jumping right in and modifying the actual text. This contributor is being so conscientious and polite (irenic?) that he’s slowing down the system. I’m sometimes reluctant to shift his comments into the main text because that puts me in the role of the moderator, promoting comments that meet my approval. If there is an entry in the Wikipedia that you think is biased, the thing you are supposed to is change it to remove the bias. Somebody else will probably come along and say you over-reacted, and the pendulum will swing back and forth. But rather than settle comfortably in the middle, it’s possible to preserve the differing points of view — adding qualifications, linking to other related sources, etc. Unlike Slashdot, where the opinion of the masses determines the fate of each individual comment, in Wikipedia (or any other wiki), passionate fringe voices can make themselves heard (as long as they keep policing the wiki pages that interest them).
By the way, I don’t know what foo-fah means, but it seemed appropriate.
Mike,
I am with you that the fisk/irenic potential of a given discursive interaction is not dependent upon the nature of the technology.
The nature of the response is mutable even in the point-by-point pickup. Imagine a tag to a refutation as an invitation to consider options. The author refuting Point B of the interlocutor’s text can appeal to the gallery and seek assent for the refutation proposed, can they not?
Generally, the “if…then” form of point-by-point analysis can reveal much about the way an argument or story has been shaped and thereby provide knowledge. It is a type of forensic retracing of steps. Fisking with cross-reference between the fisked points is perhaps the preliminary to an openess to wonder, to an understanding how a particular constellation of points emerged. And that is a step towards a thesis of one’s own.
I think the challenge of the “If…then” mode is that the apparenet tentativeness demands — not just invites but demands — an investment of intellectual energy for the rhetoric to work. The reader is positioned in the role of the completer or person with the responsability of continuing the train of thought or the strand of expression.
Fisking and the like have a Biblical flavour: “It is not the case that…” There is a strong hint of a heavy investment in the ontological power of the copula and in metaphor as fiat. Simile, as the figure of comparison, demarks, potentially, play with variation.
One could imagine fisking a la Erasmus of the De Copia. For example, that sentence that begins “There is a strong hint of a heavy investment…” could be run through the variation matrix:
strong, moderate, little, none
heavy, light, moderate, none
to query the association between strong and heavy. 🙂 Sure it’s a constructed example but it does suggest that the irenic fisker looks for and plays with associations. Figure it as a type of matrix reading. The table cell rather than the linear string as model of the set of yes/no relations that are possible in a point by point truth valuation.
So after this longish comment, I come to the conclusion that the tabular nature of an irenic response can be acheived in a computer networked environment through the use of multiple windows : reading blogs as parallel texts.
Francois,
Fascinating response, though I’m not sure I’m buying the conclusion you draw: I mean yes, certainly this can be done, and I like the idea of parallelism (I once tried to write a short story in two columns with footnotes where each column and set of footnotes referenced the other) setting up something like a matrix or field, but my sense is that people won’t do it; they simply don’t often feel the inclination. Fisking feels like it requires an investment of energy for which you gotta be really het up, as we used to say in Georgia, and in such a sense the tech can provide one possible environment for it — but the multiple windows aspect doesn’t feel to me like it interacts with the affective dimension necessary for fisking. But, yeah, you’ve certainly given me some stuff to think about.
Love the site, by the way, though I’d suggest: why not just “faux-mo”?
Glad you like the site. ‘mo in some quarters is short for “homo” so “faux-mo” would carry the semantic connotation of pseudo-gay, maybe?
upon re-reading that free-stylin’ comment in the light of your reading of the comment, I think what is lacking is a suggestion that the tabular or matrix format can be part of the composition phase of writing even if the final product is a one-screen continuous prose discursive product.
it the “if…then” start off point for reply that tends to lend a response an air of exploring options rather than simply bashing the one position put forward. I guess the habit comes from actively listening where questions for clarification precede adjudication. Or from playground politics where “mine, yours and not ours” shapes the distribution of objects and the zoning of spaces.
Well maybe “fomo” which of course in homophonous with a French phrase meaning “false words” and seems close to “faux pas” 🙂
Hmmm, the irenic/fisk thread had hank over me for when I picked up Oliver Sacks’s _Seeing Voices_ I could not help but wonder if the failure of alternative thesis formation noted in the discursive behaviour of the fiskers is not a function of a sort of social aphasia. It was Sacks quoting Hughlings_Jackson that trigger the association. “The unit of speech is a proposition. Loss of speech (aphasia) is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionize.”
I wonder if the same characterization could not be invoked in cases of overindulgence in ad hominem exchange. Again Sacks quoting Hughlings-Jackson: “Without a proper interrelation of its parts, a verbal utterance would be a mere succession of names, a word-heap, embodying no proposition.”
I do love word heaps and even letter and glyph heaps. The dislocation of sense-making mechanism can be a route to finding other propositions. But then that would be an irenic use of aphasic miming. Can fisking be mimed to produce irenic effects?
sent out a fibrous tendrille