Ok, this is, perhaps, preaching to the converted, but nevertheless… I’ve been writing about the disappearance of ethics in the commodified university and the difficulty of a employing a rhetorical approach to knowledge in most disciplinary practice. Now, as I am preparing for my summer course on cyberpunk lit., I’ve been thinking more about new media. As has been well-documented, ethics also disappear in cyberspace. From time-honored practices like hacking and flaming to more contemporary interests like PK (player-killing in online games), file sharing, plagiarism, and spam, we have struggled to develop ethical relationships online (or perhaps we only fool ourselves about the ethics of our FTF relations).

With video games, we pay for the privilege of acting without consequence (that is, besides the internal consequences of the game). The anonymity of the net give us the same power. Here we can see the convergence of new media and capitalism, in the erasure of ethics and the reduction of value to a common valueless digit. Arthur Kroker termed this the “will to virtuality.” Deleuze and Guattari likewise articulated a continuum from a purely fascist-destructive pole to a mutative-creative one. This has never been more evident that it is now. The virtual war on terror and the colonial war in Iraq clearly demonstrate the triumph of fascism, which should only evoke memories of the pure illogic and in(s)anity of war to the few living participants of the recently celebrated anniversary of D-Day. On the flip side, the volatility of our culture allows for creative-mutative acts. I believe there is great potential for the ability to share information to unveil to us the limits of capitalism, right at the moment when it would appear that capitalism had commodified every last cultural space. It is not a question of choosing one or the other, or even of pitting one against the other, but rather of recognizing how each contains the other.

This is the ethical aporia that we face. I am thinking that what need to call upon the cultural studies Massumi describes (one that hinges on affect) and a particular rhetoric that engages the material, embodied event of symbolic behavior to rethink ethics. Guattari’s Chaosmosis contains some of my main touchstones on this. He writes

If there’s choice and freedom at certain “superior” anthropological stages, it’s because we will also find them at the most elementary strata of machinic concatenations. (53)

And then later

Values are immanent to machines. The life of machinic Fluxes is not only manifested through cybernetic feedback; it is also correlative toa promotion of incorporeal Universes stemming from an enunciative Territorial incarnation, from a valorising consciousness of being. Machinic autopoiesis asserts itself as a non-human for-itself through zones of partial proto-subjectivation and it deploys a for-others under the double modality of a “horizontal” eco-systemic alterity (the machinic systems postition themselves in a rhizome of reciprocal dependence) and phylogenetic alterity (situating each actual machinic stasis at the conjunction of a passeist filiation and a Phylum of future mutations). (54)

I know what you’re thinking: no one can sling jargon quite like Guattari…Ok, well, maybe Lacan. But here is the/my point. Guttari suggests that ethics are emergent, immanent to the relations between machines at pre-subjective levels. To reduce it so much as to perhaps miss the point: ethics emerge from how we recognize our co-dependence with others in our ecology, as well as our situation between the past and the future. Such values are not hypothetical, abstract, or applied after the fact; they are emergent in our relations.

Both capitalism and virtuality rely upon calculation. They would insist that ethics must be calculated as well–that ethics become politics. But ethics are the limit case of calculation b/c, to use a Baudrillardian phrase, they rely upon symbolic exchange. And to return to my eponymous point, ethics are rhetorical where morals are not. Morality is the politics of ressentiment. Ethics are the immanent and emergent values of symbolic behavior: how do we figure out a way to keep living together without destroying everything?

It’s an open question that must always be answered, if only implicitly by our practices.

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