Aristotle famously lists twenty-eight of them in the second book of the Rhetoric, noting how speakers’ effectiveness depends on their capacity to innovate within the structure of what is well established. The trick to persuasion is to turn the common and obvious toward a novel insight; here we get the notion of a trope, which turns an argument as needed. In the process of innovation, the commonplaces give rise to rhetorical artifacts and performances. They are productive methods, indeed forms that continue to be useful for as long as they are relevant. Put another way, the forms of the commonplaces are nonrivalrous. Aristotle’s inventory of general topics demonstrates how rhetors might persuasively mobilize the audience’s sense of consequences, antecedents, and various dialectical relationships such as more and less, past and future, possible and impossible. Commonplaces are the rhetorical opportunities of the cultural commons.28
Another term in classical rhetorical theory that instructively connects the cultural commons with commonplace arguments is doxa. In Plato’s scornful definition, doxa, from dokein (how something appears), refers to the superficial beliefs of the public. It is indeed the purview of rhetoric, but to Plato, this is a bad thing. Doxa is distinct from episteme, or knowledge that is absolutely true rather than popular or common. From the beginning, thus, the commonness of doxa presses against questions of epistemology and what commoners may be said to know. Aristotle rehabilitates doxa with endoxa, which in his study of the Topics extends beyond the fickle whims of the people to more enduring beliefs and consensus.29 Because I am concerned with commons expertise, Mari Lee Mifsud’s treatment of doxa in terms of cultural “givens” is especially instructive, and I turn to it in the case studies that follow. As Mifsud explains, doxa are the givens of a particular community; references to doxa pass without critical reflection.30 Doxa are the assumptions that are taken for granted, the knowledge or wisdom that is smoothly, even imperceptibly transmitted. We might think, for example, of a garden variety idiom and how it contains a kernel of common epistemology: “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!” says the wise elder to the impatient youth. And the idiom proves him right. To say that idioms are commonplaces is to note that they are places in which one might discover the knowledge of the commons. What is commonly known may then be referenced among commoners, prompting us to say to one another, “There goes that guy who counted his chickens,” when we see the man who bought a Tesla at the first indication that his start-up company was going to take off. Doxa, put differently, constitute the theoretical context for studying the rhetoric of expertise in the commons, digital or otherwise. They are nimble, productive, effective, and as subtle or brash as they need to be.
As I take certain insights from the preceding sections on the natural and cultural commons, transitioning with them to the following section on the digital commons, I am compelled to emphasize emplacement. That is, the cultural commons are situated in particular places in the world. These places shape the cultural commons in fundamental ways. My own experience illustrates this, but in offering it anecdotally, my assumption is that the reader will supplement my story with his and her own. I grew up in Sweden, where traditions that reference light and dark are synchronized with seasonal rhythms. Advent, for example, falls at a time of year when most waking hours are wrapped in deep darkness. In this circumstance, lighting candles that signify hope and life against death and placing them in the liminal space of windows, where a thin glass pane separates cold and dark from warmth and light, is a way of culturing nature. Or, we might say, the cultural and natural commons interlace. Likewise, in the summertime the Swedish Midsummer pagan rituals play on the meanings of light and darkness, specifically the endurance of light. Midsummer is a major holiday that incorporates the natural commons, casting certain characters like the forest in myths and songs. Reflecting historically on the cultural commons of Midsummer, it is easy to imagine how, before electrical lighting, celebrants might spot fairies in the midnight haze against the tree line. Less romantically put, the living practices of commoners connect the natural and cultural commons in networked forms. What remains to be seen in the next section, and throughout the book, is how digital sites constitute these forms.
THE DIGITAL COMMONS
The term digital commons carries an idealistic connotation. It prompts many of us to think of the open access movement, or academic and public institutions that make their holdings publicly available. In order to critically complement rather than oppose this perspective, I align the digital commons with the natural and cultural commons, not because the three are neatly analogous or distinct but because significant conceptual insights may be drawn from multiple disciplines in order to examine the aggregate form of the digital commons. My contention with this alignment is that, when we study the digital commons from the point of view of commons theory generally, we are able to see certain facets of the aggregate that are important for rhetorical analysis. Thus, I define the digital commons in terms of three components: humans, networks, and resources. The humans, articulated via the formation that Paolo Virno calls “the multitude,” populate and constitute the networks. The networks are both electronic and social; they are, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, infrastructural. In the networks, the multitude engages in productive interactivity, inventing digital artifacts, or stuff, for circulation. In so doing, the multitude governs itself and its resources. In the following paragraphs I explain this definition of the digital commons with respect to the three key concepts.
Multitude
Paolo Virno’s theory of the multitude is an illuminating way to think of social being in the digital commons. For Virno, the multitude is a network that produces individuals rather than the other way around. Or, as he writes, singularities are the point of arrival following a process of individuation: “The individual of the multitude is the final stage of a process beyond which there is nothing else, because everything else (the passage from the One to the Many) has already taken place.”31 Taking this position on the individual and the network, the singular and the multitude, Virno begins by recasting the contention between Spinoza and Hobbes on political structures. Hobbes rejects the multitude, Virno explains, because it fails to achieve the unity of a single will.32 For Spinoza, “the multitude indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion.”33 The multitude remains politically and socially networked, not foregoing individuation but also not taking it as a prerequisite for collective action.34 For this reason, the multitude is appropriate for analyzing the “associative life” of digital commoners. As I demonstrate in the case studies, the multitude convenes and disperses in productive pulsation through networks, less like the languid motion of a jelly-fish than like the rapid flutter of an embryonic heartbeat. In this pulsation, the multitude functions as a name for the digital commoners. I turn to Virno’s theory because it affords a useful vocabulary for rhetorical analysis. As he notes, “an entire gamut of considerable phenomena—linguistic games, forms of life, ethical inclinations, salient characteristics of production in today’s world—will end up to be only slightly, or not at all, comprehensible, unless understood as originating from the mode of being of the many.”35 In the digital commons, “the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own [;] they are gasping for air, burning themselves out.”36
As Virno explains, the multitude coheres around “formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games.’”37 It meets on common ground, in other words—specifically the common ground of language itself, which belongs to everybody.38 Thus, the multitude functions through what Virno refers to as the “general intellect” and what I might describe as the cultural commons within the digital commons. With this description, I am drawing attention to how the aggregate of the digital commons (humans, networks, and resources) encompasses the cultural commons, as well as to how the cultural commons exceed the structure of digital networks. The cultural commons necessarily establish the context for what
