This is an AI generated image (via WordPress) using the key terms “social,” “infrastructure,” “bodies,” “time,” and “invent,” roughly corresponding to Alford’s chapter headings.
In Chapter Three of Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality (2024), the chapter dealing with doxa and bodies, Caddie Alford discusses Hannah Arendt’s take on opinions as constituting a sort of “sixth sense.” In “Reality and the Thinking Ego,” an essay from her book The Life of the Mind (1978, Harcourt edition, the two volumes combined), Arendt writes that “[w]hat sense Thomas Aquinas we call common sense, the sensus communis, is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear . . . This same sense, a mysterious “sixth sense” . . . fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses . . . into a common world shared by others” (Arendt, 1978, p. 50). For Arendt, this “sixth sense’s corresponding worldly property is realness, and the difficulty with the property is that it cannot be perceived like other sensory properties. The sense of realness is not a sensation strictly speaking . . . . [rather, it] relates to the context in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures” (pp. 50-51). Alford writes that for Arendt, “opinions first start to accomplish things by intercepting bodily reasoning” (Alford, 2024, p. 17). The difficulty here, for Alford, is what this sixth sense means in a digital world where this sensus communis becomes “technosocial” and “biotechnic,” and how conspiracies and clickbait multiply as a direct result (p. 17). As we all know, such phenomena proliferate on the Web. Interestingly, Arendt makes the point that “thinking can nether prove nor destroy the feeling of realness arising out of the sixth sense . . .” (Arendt, 1978, p. 52). Commonsense is certainly complicated (and very possibly corrupted) when it comes to online spaces due to algorithms. Alford writes that “the encounters between platforms and repetitive online investigations are crafting a “sixth sense” configured by digitality and converging because of opinions” (Alford, 2024, p. 78). Drawing from the work of Erin Manning and Gilles Deleuze, Alford makes a distinction between commonsense, on the one hand, and common sense on the other. The space is important here because, according to Alford’s reading of Deleuze, “[s]ense is not bounded, predictable, and cannot be enforced by commonsense. Hyper hyperlinking, stimulating impressions, impulsive movement, a touched heart—sense translated [“Pizzagate” gunman Edgar] Welch’s investigation into a singular and generative pushing, pulling, shaping of moving bodies” (p. 77). According to her reading of Manning, a “rule-based commonsense wants bodies to stop what they are doing because what they are producing poses a threat to any naturalized order” (p. 84). In thinking of how commonsense relates to content moderation, I was reminded of Derek Mueller’s (2017) interesting term “curatorial ethic” and his proposal of an “information officer” when it comes to RCWS data (see p. 160 0f Network Sense: Methods of Visualizing a Discipline).
This discussion around “sense,” though largely negative, reminded me also of Derek Mueller’s (2017) idea of “network sense,” as well as Collin Gifford Brooke’s (2009) mentioning of Christina Haas’s notion of a writer’s sense of the text (see p. 32 of Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media). Mueller brings up Haas’s “text sense” as well as Sondra Perl’s “felt sense” in Chapter Six of his book. All three concepts of sense here are centered on what Mueller terms “epistemological wherewithal,” albeit in different ways.
Earlier in this post, we read briefly about Arendt on objects, appearances, and “sixth sense.” In her chapter on doxa and infrastructure, Alford states that the “common critique that epistemic rhetoric confuses epistemology and ontology has been misdirected all along” (p. 60). Drawing from Scott Sundvall‘s 2018 Philosophy and Rhetoric article, “Without a World: The Rhetorical Potential and “Dark Politics” of Object-Oriented Thought,” she writes that “Sundvall takes the muddiness between doxa and episteme in an interesting direction by claiming that the distaste that object-oriented ontology [“A new specter of materialist thought,” to quote Sundvall on p. 217] and rhetoric thinkers have for epistemology actually points to doxa as the ontological origin for epistemic meaning” (p. 60). Sundvall also makes the point that “[m]eaning-formation (significance) ontologically provides and is guaranteed by doxa, that slippery and multidirectional rhetorical bridge by which we ground ourselves in our otherwise groundless capacity for anxiety, angst, care and concern” (p. 238). Moreover, “here [in thinking about Lloyd Bitzer on the point of rhetoric as a discipline] we find the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy: value and reality cannot be ontologically divorced, no matter what the sophisticated allure” (p. 238).
Digital WRTC 