The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
I am afforded an integrative approach wherein logos carries multiple meanings at the same time without one of them usurping another.
Among the pre-Socratics who took on the concept of logos, Heraclitus is especially compelling. In his fragmentary accounts, logos begins as an existential principle ordering the natural world, including the elements’ relation to one another. Dominating these relations is a self-sustaining energy source, constantly “kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”9 By extension, Heraclitus’s logos principle orders the sociocultural world as a function of humans’ fundamental, natural orientation. Here, logos is something like the immaterial material we humans move around in, experiencing its texture variously as constraining and enabling. The word system is not quite right; neither is culture, paradigm, or framework. But somewhere among these words is the meaning of logos as a condition. Within this conditional Logos (with a capital “L”), we engage one other wielding logoi (with a lowercase “l”) instrumentally. These individuated engagements, arguments, and claims, reflecting logos as a nominal version of legein (to say, speak, or tell), are “languaged” in singular episodes. As Martin Heidegger explains in a beautiful essay on Heraclitus’s logos fragment, legein originally meant to lay things in patterns, to “place one thing beside another.”10 The particular logoi are intelligible, meaningful, and valuable in the context of the Logos. To express meaning, then, is to gather things such that they reference one another, laying and being together. Logos, Heidegger writes, is “the Laying that gathers.”11 At the point when individuated engagements revert to the conditional Logos principle, they congeal as an account, or theory; they synthesize as sense making. In sum, I turn to Heraclitus so that I can use logos to mean (1) a socio cultural condition or context, (2) the principles that order it, (3) particular rhetorical actions within it, and (4) the theories generated by actors in that context about their rhetorical action. Moreover, a Heraclitean logos allows for an analysis that assumes principles but does not require praxis to be rational and an analysis that assumes the continuous indeterminacy of a network in flux.
As the book’s central concept, the gifting logos is both a principle of operation within the digital commons and the hermeneutic with which I study this principle’s instantiations. It is a language and structure that coordinates the activities of digital commoners. As such, it is variously implicit and explicit in the artifacts of those activities. And digital commoners may be more or less critical in their orientation toward the rhetorical processes in which they are engaged. By comparison, in my use of the gifting logos as a hermeneutic, my ambition is to analyze the productivity, artifacts, and life-forms of the digital commons. As a rhetorical critic, I am attuned to the assumptions that certain language practices make evident, including, for example, the idea that expertise is captured in digital materials and generatively distributable in a network infrastructure that connects people and experiences.12
As is evident throughout chapter 1, my analysis of the digital commons as an active and productive aggregate is informed by the extensive interdisciplinary literatures dedicated to the natural and cultural commons. My intention is to offer the reader a rich and historically grounded perspective on life in the commons, especially the centrality of expertise and authority. It is to highlight the connectedness and situatedness of cultural invention and proprietary powers. My intention is not to participate in the idealism that characterizes much scholarship surrounding the natural and cultural commons.13 On this point, I take a different approach. My interest in the commons is primarily conceptual. I make a methodological recommendation to a specific group of scholars, suggesting that those who study digital rhetoric would be well served by the concept and theory of the commons. I do not advocate for a commons of a cultural or ecological kind or argue that the commons were, or would be, a more ethical or democratic arrangement of people and resources than other regimes.
In chapter 1, following the sections on the natural and cultural commons, I detail the components of the digital commons, specifically working with Paolo Virno’s idea of the multitude and Manuel Castells’s and Yochai Benkler’s theories of networks. After the section on the digital commons, I introduce prominent theories of the gift. This section begins with Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, and Martin Heidegger, moving on to Lewis Hyde and Jacques Derrida. Focusing then on studies of gifting within rhetorical studies, I review the works of Michael J. Hyde and Mari Lee Mifsud. I direct attention to the rhetoricity of gifting, indeed to the potential of the gift for rhetorical scholarship. The subsequent section on the gifting logos foreshadows the final chapter, specifically the five characteristics and functions of the gifting logos itself that the conclusion explicates.
Chapter 2 situates the gifting logos in the discourses of the Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization primarily associated with a suite of licenses that make cultural content accessible beyond the constraints of copyright. The chapter begins with a historical survey of copyright, highlighting especially significant moments, including the English Stationers’ Company royal charter from 1557, the Statue of Anne in 1710, the copyright clause of the US Constitution, the Copyright Extension Act of 1998, and the emergence of the Free Software Foundation and the open access movement. This section is intended to contextualize how the Creative Commons articulates, reinforces, and/or subverts certain long-contested assumptions of copyright, authorship, and the common good. The analysis, then, focuses on primary texts, including the 2015 Creative Commons memorandum “State of the Commons,” a series of success stories titled The Power of Open, documents from the organization’s website, and a set of academic articles and popular books by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Examining these texts, I analyze how the Creative Commons defines and constitutes expertise via the gifting logos. The question of the chapter is: How is the interplay of knowledge and experience that happens in the making of cultural artifacts like texts and music accounted for by those who participate in the digital commons, specifically through the Creative Commons infrastructure? Explicating the gifting logos’s rhetorical functions, I focus on creative individuation, timing, networked accretions of value, the ideal of abundance (or copia), reproduction, and gifting intent.
Chapter 3 turns to the gifting logos as archival, exploring how the digital commons invents and curates its history. How, I ask, is the past made known and given to the digital commons? I analyze discourses by and about the Internet Archive (IA), a massive storehouse of digitized collections of literature, music, photography, and film, and its most famous initiative, the Wayback Machine, a retrieval technology for past versions of hundreds of billions of web pages. As in chapter 2 I begin with a contextualizing section that surveys archival theories and practices. From a rhetorician’s point of view, I introduce specific aspects of “the archive,” including the historical connection between institutions of curated knowledge and public authority. Orienting archival theory in relation to expertise, I examine both processes and contents of archiving and archival research. To transition from brick-and-mortar archiving to digital archiving, I bring along a cluster of topics, including the public-private dialectic and the paradox of bureaucracy and mystery. In the analysis of the IA and the Wayback Machine, I trace several themes of archiving as an inventive practice of knowing, connecting them to the discourses of gifting that circulate through the IA and that identify founder Brewster Kahle as a heroic benefactor. I demonstrate how the inventions of the gifting logos emerge in the context of data loss and how this urgency rhetorically deploys the familiar ideal of archival preservation, in which productive knowledge forecloses the limits and gradual disappearance of the commons.
Chapter 4 examines the gifting logos’s political implications for the digital commons. It extends the preceding two chapters’ analyses of expertise by explaining how a loosely affiliated group sought recognition and authority by making itself and the moment of its emergence known to potential supporters, giving them a policy agenda. In other words, the chapter approaches the gifting logos as the gift of a political construct for the common good. It focuses specifically on the campaign discourses of the Swedish Pirate Party, an organization that in 2006 grew out