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09/29/2005 Archived Entry: "WHAT?"

What?

The still is from the final scene in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a clip from Don't Look Back. A question for digital rhetoric: How important is meaning? What about meaning that ends with a final "WHAT?" as in "What the hell?" This is always a challenge for digital work. "What is the reason for digital writing?" The mistake is to answer the question with proof, for proof is never satisfactory. Logic does not always come to our rescue. "I don't believe you!" crowds shouted at Dylan as he plugged his electric guitar in (the electric a sign of an emerging digital culture). Of course not. We never believe when presented with proof as to WHY digital rhetoric is necessary. There exist moments outside of logic, moments of "What?" The crowds which booed Dylan in 1965 were, in effect, saying, "What?" "What the F is going on?" That dismay is really a response to changes in new media. New media, as McLuhan noted, always bring on confusion and anxiety.

This is a question Barthes raises as well as he challenges the conventional method for personal classification, the autobiography. In Roland Barthes, the autobiographical taxonomy is redone, remade, rethought, in light of technological innovation. Barthes notes:

Constant (and illusory) passion for applying to every phenomenon, even the merest, not the child’s question: Why? but the ancient Greek’s question, the question of meaning, as if things shuddered with meaning: What does this mean? The fact must be transformed at all costs into idea, into description, into interpretation, in short, there must be found for it a name other than its own.

This moment of confusion, or of allusiveness, is an important component of digital rhetoric. Traditional taxonomies which depend on exact or fixed meanings no longer feel sufficient. Thus, the lure of folksono(me) which works to understand such shifts in light of personal investment, an investment highly affective (a point stressed throughout Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains and Jenny's work on rhetorical ecologies).