Clinamen

A Malian woman builds a small tent for her family so that her guests can sleep in the family’s home.

Photo Credit: “Hospitality II” by Arriving at the horizon

In my book project I use the phrase “hospitable code” (this also serves as the title of the project) to discuss software that addresses the problem of the other. But this phrase requires some unpacking, and I’d like to work through that unpacking here. My hope is that readers will respond to this post so that I can continue to refine this idea/concept.

First, let’s tackle “hospitality.” Hospitality is typically considered in terms of the choice to welcome another into our home. Thus, the picture above indicates the hospitality of the Malian people. The photographer describes the image this way:

“When we got to Mohammed’s campement, the women instantly got very busy dragging out cloth and sticks, destined to become a provisional tent. Great, I thought, we get a little tent for ourselves. And a little tent there was, but to my great surprise and embarrassment the whole family — Mohammed, his wife, their six children, and two visitors — moved in there, and left the big tent to us. Then women from surrounding campements came over with beautiful pillowcases and essabbar and other wallhangings, and decorated the tent! I think it was the nicest-looking tent I have ever seen. Desert hospitality at its best. More about it here.”

This kind of hospitality assumes a clean separation between “my home” and “my guest.” ��It suggests a definite threshold, a border between inside and outside. But I am attempting to discuss software in terms of hospitality, and there is no real “home” or clear threshold when it comes to software. So, let me try to explain how I’m using the term hospitality

The hospitality I have in mind is less an intentional, welcoming gesture than it is a predicament. In networked environments, others will continually arrive. This situation has its promises – the crowdsourcing of various problems and the possibility of a more inclusive conversation are two such promises – but it also has its pitfalls. Which others will arrive and when? What are their motivations? Who are they? How do I engage them? What will they do to me or my “home” or my text? Networked software is forced to deal with all of these questions in ways that an application such as Microsoft Word does not. To be sure, other writers can enter and edit my word document; however, this is not necessarily an integral part of the software platform. Word can be a perfectly useful piece of software on a machine that is not networked. Media Wiki, on the other hand, would be much less useful in a non-networked environment. One could use Media Wiki as a kind of content management system or as a personal CVS repository (I myself have used wiki software in this way), but this does not change the fact that the software was designed for networked environments and thus takes particular ethical stances with regard to other users/writers.

My case study in “Hospitable Code” is Wikipedia and its software platform, Media Wiki. Media Wiki is hospitable in that it deals with the question of the other much more explicitly than an application like Word. Whether or not Media Wiki is sufficiently hospitable or whether it welcomes all others is a more difficult question. No software platform teaches a pure hospitality (what Derrida would call absolute hospitality). This is an unreachable ideal. Nonetheless, hospitable code addresses the question of the foreigner in particular ways because the arrival of others is part of its functionality. Media Wiki is just one example of hospitable code. We could consider a variety of software platforms that deal with a similar set of questions: Google Documents, Google Wave, networked videogames, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. Further, given the recent trend toward online applications, it seems that more and more software platforms will be forced to deal with the question of the other. My book is an attempt to think through the implications of that shift and to understand the ethical stances built into software.

But the second part of the concept of “hospitable code” is worth unpacking as well. While this term has been dissected in various places (Kittler’s mediation on “Code” in the Software Studies Lexicon is but one example of this), I’d like to explain the two senses in which I’ll be using the term. My use of code evokes both software (code as ones and zeros) and the idea of an ethical code (code as ethical constitution). Given Lawrence Lessig’s argument in Code that “code is law,” separating these two notions of code is difficult:

In real space we recognize how laws regulate—through constitutions, statutes, and other legal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how code regulates—how the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is regulate cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it, this code is cyberspace’s “law.” Code is law. (5)

Building upon this definition of code as law, I am arguing that software makes ethical arguments – code establishes ethical codes. Those ethical codes are not the final word, and my project demonstrates how users grapple with and interrogate those codes. Nonetheless, code establishes a groundwork or a context in which we deal with one another, and in this sense code establishes an ethical dwelling (an ethos) in which rhetors/users/writers interact with one another. Those interactions are, in my view, inherently rhetorical.

But it will be necessary to define a couple of more terms as well: rhetoric and ethics. Stepping through the various definitions of rhetoric would be nearly impossible. This term has morphed over and over again over the past 2000 years. At various historical moment, rhetoric has been understood as the faculty of discovering the available means of persuasion (Aristotle), the study of misunderstanding and its remedies (I.A. Richards), the art of speaking well (Quintillian), and “a powerful instrument of error and deceipt” (Locke). This list is by no means exhaustive, but even these few examples exhibits the range of the term “rhetoric,” and the various ways in which it is put to use. However, I would like to indicate that “Hospitable Code” makes use of a modern definition of rhetoric developed by Kenneth Burke. Burke famously expanded the realm of rhetoric for 20^th century rhetoricians, and his framework is particularly useful considering my discussion of how rhetoric and ethics intersect. At its most general level, Burke’s definition of rhetoric encompasses all attempts to make meaning: “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.”

But Burke’s definition goes further than this by redefining rhetoric in terms of identification. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke explains this framework: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not jointed, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so” (20). Thus persuasion is happens (whether the result of an intentional effort or not) through identification, but this identification is not one of fusion or communion. When ‘A’ identifies with ‘B,’ they are substantially one, but each remains a unique individual locus of motives, joined and separate” (20). By understanding persuasion, and thus rhetoric, as identification, we can begin to see the relationship between rhetoric and ethics. Rhetoric as identification implies that we are simultaneously joined and separate from various interlocutors, and any understanding of this predicament will have to engage questions of ethics and how we relate to one another. Persuasion involves “the use of stylistic identifications to establish rapport” between rhetor and audience (46). That rapport is in constant tension as we make and break various identifications and as we deal with various others. We are consubstantial with one another, but we are never fused in any final way.

Understood as identification, rhetoric becomes the indissociable from how we relate to one another. Any time we are making meaning, any time we are attempting to communicate, we are in the realm of identification and we are determining how we can or should relate to one another. Questions of rhetoric and ethics are thus intertwined. This would seem an odd claim given certain definitions of rhetoric. Given a definition such as Locke’s(an instrument of “error and deceipt”), rhetoric is decidedly unethical. And certain rhetorical moves are indeed unethical. However, following Burke’s lead, I see no communicative act that is not shot through with rhetoric. And thus I see no way in which communication does not imply questions of ethics. The study of ethics is the study of how we treat the other (that other can be human, but it does not have to be). The question of the other is the question of ethics. In Derrida’s terms, the question of the “foreigner” (the foreigner here is a kind of metaphor for all of the various others that arrive on our various scenes…or on our desktop) is the question that continually presents itself to us. How we engage the foreigner is directly tied to how (or whether) we identify with the other. The difficulty here is that we do not always choose our identifications. As persuader or persuadee, we are constantly dealing with various, conflicting identifications. We are persuaded (or, better, persuadable) over and beyond any decision to agree or disagree, and we our own acts of persuasion entail identifications that we may or may not have “stylistically” deployed. In this sense, we persuade and are persuaded more (and less) than we ever intend. Thus regardless of whether we are in the “sender” or “receiver” slot, we are in an ethico-rhetorical predicament.

So, hospitable code is rhetorical and ethical; it makes ethical arguments. To some extent, all software makes ethical arguments and determinations. But the networked software that I am most interested in must explicitly address the question of the other. In networked environments, the question of the other is part of the software’s design. When we enter the rhetorical dwelling of a space like Media Wiki, we are put into relation with various others. Those various relations are rhetorical and ethical.

There is much, much more to say here (thankfully…if there wasn’t, then I’d be hard pressed to turn this into a book-length argument), but I’m hoping this can be a starting point. I’m hoping that some readers can help me continue to refine this set of ideas. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.