Review of Colton and Holmes's Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues

Jialei Jiang, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

(Published Sept. 14, 2020)

Jared S. Colton and Steve Holmes’s Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues comes at an opportune time, especially given the increased attention to virtue ethics in rhetorical studies and digital scholarship. Consider, for instance, recent articles such as Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski’s “Rhetorical Ethics” and Jonathan L. Bradshaw’s “Slow Circulation;” John Duffy, John Gallagher, and Steve Holmes’s co-edited 2018 Rhetoric Review special issue on virtue ethics; the “Mission Critical: Centering Ethical Challenges” theme of the 2019 Computers and Writing conference; as well as Jialei Jiang and Jason Tham’s co-edited Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Blog Carnival titled “Multimodal Design and Social Advocacy.” This resurgence in scholarly discussions about ethics offers a direct response to the longstanding elision of virtual ethics in rhetoric and composition. Putting ethics in conversation with digital rhetoric scholarship, Colton and Holmes address this neglect of virtue ethics in rhetorical studies, which arises by and large from scholars’ skepticism over the role of ethics in perpetuating universality and normativity. As Gary A. Olsen definitively declares, “Ethics is dead . . . No system or code of moral values can universally regulate human behavior” (qtd. in Colton and Holmes 7).

Questioning postmodern theorists’ attempts to evade such a universal view of virtue ethics, Colton and Holmes argue that ethics is actually not dead—rather, ethics is being engaged differently. This different engagement ushers in a return to the Aristotelian framework of hexis, or dispositions stemming from the process of habituation. Colton and Holmes turn to hexis in their case studies of digital rhetoric ethics, articulating the ways digital media platforms and innovations allow scholars to repurpose and reframe social justice issues, turning to such case studies as racism in closed captions, social media slacktivism and subsequent shaming, computer gaming ethics, GPS and behavioral tracking, and algorithmic regulations. I find their analysis of YouTube closed captioning particularly salient in that the authors represent YouTube as an important site for interrogating the practices of digital ableism and racism. Ultimately, Colton and Holmes call upon digital rhetoricians to continue creating dispositions attuned toward social justice and equity by engaging ethical issues that surround digital rhetoric through their rich theoretical lens of hexis.

Amidst the myriad classical and contemporary theorizations of virtue ethics, Colton and Holmes advocate for reworking Aristotle’s hexis. I appreciate the ways the authors flesh out the implications of hexis for digital rhetoric. The second chapter details how this ethical framework stands in contrast to other contemporary ethical frameworks, including utilitarianism, deontology, and postmodernism. The authors cast doubt on utilitarianism for its focus on desired consequences and on deontology due to its promotion of rational universality in ethical works. Despite the benefits of postmodern relativism in critiquing universality, Colton and Holmes point out the enduring difficulty of deploying postmodern critiques to achieve an affirmation of ethical values and commitments. In their own words, “If one is ‘true’ to a postmodern sensitivity as a process of inquiry, eventually such commitments will be undercut as only contingent and partial values” (Colton and Holmes 31). By describing the limitations of such ethical frameworks as utilitarianism, deontology, and postmodernism, the authors shed light on the affordances of Aristotelian hexis. Colton and Holmes maintain that returning to Aristotle does not entail going back to a virtue ethics that are “fixed, inflexible, and privileging only those in power” (35). Instead, shifting to Aristotle’s theory of hexis opens the possibility to move beyond relying on a universal axiom to categorize ethical and social justice practices. Hexis leads us to recognize the contingency and flexibility of evolving ethical notions. In other words, Aristotle’s theory of hexis enables digital rhetoricians to attend to the production of emergent values and dispositions situated in and through social and technological interactions. The authors’ theorization of hexis makes explicit the ethical possibilities of rhetorical works that similarly engage emergent dispositions, such as Thomas Rickert’s works on ambient rhetoric.  

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters revisit contemporary ethical thoughts, including theories advanced by philosophers Jacque Rancière, Adriana Cavarero, and Martha Nussbaum—all of which provide opportunities for adding feminist and political dimensions to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The third chapter turns to Rancière’s political theory to inform a hexis of justice for practicing active equality on social media platforms. Colton and Holmes argue that the hexis of justice is particularly useful for addressing issues of social injustice and racism on YouTube screencasts. They demonstrate that the hexis of justice can actualize through purposeful productions of accurate closed captions. Along a similar vein, Colton and Holmes draw upon Cavarero’s feminist hexis of care to approach the ethical problem of cultural appropriation in digital remixing and sampling. Considering that both wounding and caring may take place during acts of remixing, the hexis of care signals the need for digital remixers to be wary of their vulnerable relations with composers and audiences. The authors’ reframing of Aristotle culminates in the fifth chapter, outlining a hexis of generosity through Nussbaum that foregrounds sympathy and connectedness without necessarily leading toward any utilitarian payback. Rhetoricians will find this theoretical discussion refreshing, as the authors have creatively reinterpreted Nussbaum’s theory for addressing social media slacktivism—such as KONY 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and Humans of New York. Beyond simply evaluating these sites of activism by the ends they achieve, Colton and Holmes reveal social media slacktivism as activities for cultivating generosity. Taken together, these chapters successfully move the Aristotelian ethical framework in directions that augment the ethicality of digital rhetorical practices.

Going beyond anthropocentrism in the Aristotelian paradigm, the authors promote a type of virtue ethics that is connected deeply to both everydayness and bodily habits. Much as the authors embrace the various benefits of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, they make it clear that the ethical scheme is not without limitations. Hexis is constrained by its prioritization of human subjectivity. The anthropocentric view of technologies in particular can prevent rhetoricians from “contending with the full political and ethical consequences that support, condition, and enable our digital rhetoric practices” (113). In the sixth chapter, for instance, Colton and Holmes warn that a human-centric approach to the practices of outrage and shaming on social media—e.g., #DroughtShaming—may be complicit in reducing complex social issues to a few “scapegoats.” Providing an example of moving beyond anthropocentric views, the authors turn to new materialisms. Jane Bennett’s political philosophy in particular enables the authors to advocate for cultivating a hexis of patience, which can account for multiple social and environmental factors, both human and nonhuman, that shape habits. In this sense, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues will be of great interest to enculturation readers who would like to see another timely extension of Bennett in rhetorical studies. While Bennett’s work is often used in new materialist studies, her work’s implications for ethics deserves equal attention. The authors similarly repurpose Bruno Latour’s ethical theory for the hexis of fairness, which, coupled with James J. Brown Jr.’s conception of hospitality, charts future directions for ethics in networked societies. The hexis of fairness opens up the possibility of developing a fair position to remedy the vice of relegating objects’ agency to mere human projections as well as the vice of according too much power to objects. Pursuing ethical inquiries by using the fair position requires focusing less on critiquing social injustice and more on articulating and appreciating human-machine relations in complex ecological networks.

This book makes considerable contributions to virtue ethics in digital rhetoric scholarship. Although Colton and Holmes have expanded the theoretical and practical engagements with hexis through Latour and Bennett’s new materialist theories, I would have been interested in also seeing the authors more fully address the challenges inherent in juxtaposing new materialist thoughts alongside social justice practices. Perhaps it is worthwhile to bear in mind Emma J. Rose and Rebecca Walton’s critical stance in “Factors to Actors: Implications of Posthumanism for Social Justice Work,” which explores the implications of utilizing new materialist/posthumanist concepts as ethical frameworks. Given the strength of these approaches in informing social justice work, Rose and Walton caution that the paradox of new materialism lies in its very assumption that “rejecting a particular version of human-centeredness can better position us to enact values of social justice” (111). Of the specific concerns proposed by Rose and Walton, relevant critiques include their arguments that ascribing equality to nonhuman actors may distract from centering on social injustice experienced by marginalized people. They write, “As researchers interested in social justice, our concern is less for the intentionality of actions and more for human outcomes—specifically, for humans who occupy positions of lesser privilege” (Rose and Walton 112). Although I acknowledge the value of the authors’ deployment of new materialisms in reframing hexis, rhetoricians need to continue being mindful of the potential practical challenges in putting their notion of hexis into conversation with social justice work—indeed, in the spirit of developing productive and generous scholarly hexis.

Mapping the future of virtue ethics, Colton and Holmes bring together their arguments in the last chapter, envisioning the applications of hexis in networked societies. Instead of pitting different ethical frameworks against each other—a shortcoming of Aristotelian hierarchy—Colton and Holmes acknowledge that different approaches to virtue ethics might overlap. More specifically, through questioning the dominance of white male voices in advocating for marginalized social groups, the authors stress the importance of grounding the hexis of justice “in the behaviors enacted multiple times and in multiple spaces and practices” (132). Even though the cross-cultural perspective may not fall within the scope of their project, I might have expected examples of such social justice work that cross temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. Take, for instance, virtue ethics and rhetorical practices in non-Western digital environments. In their 2015 study, Xiaobo Wang and Baotong Gu draw our attention to the design of WeChat, a Chinese social media platform, as an avenue for fueling activism and grassroots movements within the particular social and political context of China. The ethical design of the platform is best exemplified, in Wang and Gu’s study, by both the WeChat post that disseminated Chai Jing’s video about the smog issue in China and the post that aided in the release of five Chinese feminist activists. Wang and Gu’s work on WeChat points to the exigence of employing non-Western rhetorical concepts and practices to broaden Colton and Holmes’ delineation of “virtue ethics in networked societies.”

I see the contributions of Colton and Holmes’s book coming from how the chapters, taken together, offer fascinating and exciting angles for retooling virtue ethics for digital media spaces and issues. I appreciate the authors’ careful attention to the complexity of various scholarly efforts to resuscitate ethical theories. Instead of completely breaking away from postmodern relativism, the authors use Aristotle’s hexis to build on postmodern critiques of universality while at the same time seeking to articulate specific dispositions for digital environments and situations beyond these critiques. The main argument of this book—Colton and Holmes’s creative and thorough call for a resurgence of virtue ethics in digital rhetoric scholarship—unveils a promising avenue of research that deserves further pursuit and investigation.