Peter Lurie who writes "Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left" is a lawyer with a polished education in the traditional sense of pedigree knowledge: Dartmouth and The University of Chicago Law School. His online editorial is sharply written and does stimulate thought. My point of departure with Lurie is with the politics of cyberspace. What's the difference between a democrat and a republican? The way it's spelled. I am unsure if "conservative" and "liberal" constructs can be applied to the online phenomenon, but I understand individuals will try. Why? Authority.
I am thinking about authorship after reading his editorial, because I am reflecting on old school constructs of knowledge (the history of higher education institutions and their ability to control the educated, the empowered, the economics and the thought processes of America - in other words the elite -- at least academically). A multicultural, pluralistic society has not always found its way into the ivory towers. Instead, the non-collegiate majority have labored to create the ease from which the educated minority can spew off statistics, quotes and privileged rhetoric. We are part of a system, and it is miraculous in the sense that it exists as it does. Deconstructing this system to the point of "no meaning" does nothing but promote one's intellectual career (I ask, does a teenager's online angst at Facebook or MySpace differ from a lawyer's intellectual meandering at ctheory.net?). When all is said and done. an analysis of how we understand our world will not explain how the structures, infrastructures, and social structures, will continue to exist and redevelop because tribal, village, pack and community designs seem to be innate. We can be individualistic, but this relies on rebelling the community: conforming to non-conformity. There are truths and perhaps the most important one is that humans like to have meaning for what they are doing and they make meaning through group interaction. In meaning making, they justify hierarchy, positions and competitive intellect. As dorky as this may sound, texts like Stephen King's THE STAND and Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS explore how structures fall apart and redefine themselves again on the ethics of good and bad.
I am babbling, I suppose, but I do wish to quote several pieces of Lurie's editorial that interested me. His editorial self- destructs in that he is using language to show how language is meaningless and so his signifiers of left and right, conservative and liberal, right and wrong, become sort of nonsense. Yet, I understand where he's going:
"The culture wars between the religious, traditionalist right and the liberal, pluralist left have started to look like a rout everywhere but in the larger, coastal cities. Conservatives are recasting communities to be more comfortable with, if not prostrate to, received authority in the form of literalist interpretations of religious and political texts."
I am unsure if the culture wars are that "black" and "white."
"The architecture of the web, and the way users navigate it, closely resembles theories about the authority and coherence of texts that liberal deconstructionist critics have offered for thirty years. Deconstructionists believe that close analysis reduces any text -- novel, statute, religious work -- to meaningless blather. The popular response to deconstruction has always been that it's counterintuitive, that no one reads that way, that it lacks common sense."
Again, I'm unsure if it is that easy to ascribe the demographics of freedom on the web as being a leftist construct in line with what their agenda(s) is/are.
"Unlike reading or breathing, however, surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time online, particularly the very young, will find themselves thinking about content -- articles, texts, pictures -- in ways that would be familiar to any deconstructionist critic."
Agreed.
"A person engages the web in much the same way that a deconstructionist critic approaches a text. Deconstruction, which denotes a process rather than a belief system, shows how novels, statutes and court opinions collapse upon themselves, making their underlying assumptions absurd"
Ah, but deconstructing text is a privileged, time-consuming game of dodgeball for the elite. The fight is nothing more than an instinctual drive to prove oneself inferior/superior to those around us. Does such a linguistic war really matter to the larger constructs of a society?
"The structuralist critic Ferdinand de Saussure set the foundation of postmodern thought by describing language as a system of signs. Each sign was made up of a signifier (the word itself) and the signified (the concept or meaning). [1] Saussure's first principle was that such signs are arbitrary. [2] The letters s, i, s, t, e and r suggest a girl or woman who shares the same parents as the referent, but the idea of this woman "is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-o-r which serves as its signifier in French." [3]"
I'm glad to be reminded of Saussere -- I use him in my own interests.
"Meaning, then, is not contained or conveyed by a word or series of words because it is dependent on what those words do not contain or convey. Meaning is part of a process, in which words are examined with respect to other words, which lend meaning only in relation to still more words"
Meaning does, however, follow a pattern of power designed through the traditions of higher education.
"The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective."
Only if one is aware of what postmodern is. The majority of people do not get involved with such rhetorical warfare. Education is not a norm, necessarily.
"Its influence is structural rather than informational, and its structure is agnostic."
"The Web invites, even demands that its users go back, forward, around and elsewhere in an associative search for meaning."
The globe is now up to being 7% online. Lurie is editorializing for a position of authority within this 7%. 93% of the globe is not allowed such a privileged position.
"In a pluralist society, then, there can be no consensus regarding good and evil. If it is not quite true that anything goes, tolerance dictates that we must respect the choices that others make, even if they are repugnant to others in the community. "
In a pluralistic society, conversations about right and wrong, whether online or offline are a necessity. Such conversations began way before our times (even if they excluded the truth of a much more diverse world) in Greece. They will continue long after this generation of online ranters. Such is the crux of ethics.
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