Rhetorical economy: Affect, labor, and capital in transnational digital circulation

ABSTRACT

Web 3.0 informational capitalism and authoritarianism challenge our assumptions about rhetorical circulation in relation to affect, labor, and capital forces, particularly in transnationally networked publics. A new model is needed in tandem with the robust ecological model to analyze the axiological dimension of transnational digital rhetorical circulation, i.e., how rhetorics produce and accumulate what types of value as they circulate digitally. Drawing on theories of rhetorical capital and communicative labor, this article proposes a theorization of rhetorics that circulate in digitally networked publics as an economy: the changing totality and relationships of rhetorical value produced and accumulated as a result of constant interactions among digital prosumers, technologies, labor, affect, commodities, and capital. The article also seeks to recontextualize the model of rhetorical economies in a transnational context with complex circulatory conditions. The author then reads the rhetorical economy of a Chinese nationalist cyber campaign in response to the Xinjiang cotton controversy.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational rhetoric
• rhetorical economy
• digital circulation
• labor
• affect

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, Karrin Anderson, and Kristen Herring for co-shaping this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Immediacy, according to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, suggests that “the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented.” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 6.

2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

3 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think (London, UK: John Murray, 2013).

4 Christian J. Pulver, Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical Environment (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2020).

5 Pulver, Metabolizing Capital, 6. The term “Web 3.0,” originally coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, has gained traction in the technology industry as a vision for a decentralized web sphere based on public blockchains. Pulver's iteration of the term highlights the current status of informational capitalism that thrives on centralized data control. Pulver's “Web 3.0” differs from other widely accepted characterizations of the digital culture, for example, Ted Striphas's notion of “algorithmic culture,” in that it directs our attention particularly to the capitalistic power structure embedded in the manipulation of data.

6 Pulver, Metabolizing Capital, 87.

7 Zhaozhe Wang, “The Switched-off Circulation: A Rhetoric of Disconnect,” Rhetoric Review 40, no. 4 (2021): 395–411, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2021.1963041.

8 Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).

9 See Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 5–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940509391320. See also Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 1–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236733.

10 Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution,” 9.

11 Originally coined by futurologist Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave, “prosumer” is widely used in cultural studies to emphasize the blurred role of producers and consumers. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York, NY: William Marrow and Company, 1980).

12 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976). Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25, doi:10.1353/par.0.0047. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 188–206, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238183.

13 Jonathan L. Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation: The Ethics of Speed and Rhetorical Persistence,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 5 (2018): 481, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2018.1455987.

14 Pulver, Metabolizing Capital, 18.

15 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

16 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 14.

17 Wang, “The Switched-off Circulation.”

18 Marx, Capital, 709.

19 Marx, Capital, 251.

20 Marx, Capital, 256.

21 Laurie E. Gries, “Introduction: Circulation as an Emergent Threshold Concept,” in Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, ed. Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2018), 3–4.

22 Casey Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018), 27 and 57.

23 Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2015), 32.

24 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 20.

25 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 14.

26 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 14.

27 Catherine Chaput, “Affect and Belonging in Late Capitalism: A Speculative Narrative on Reality TV,” International Journal of Communication 5, (2011): 1–20.

28 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 14. See also Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117.

29 José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).

30 Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 125.

31 Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 62.

32 Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook's Affective Bonds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 18.

33 Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 125.

34 Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation.”

35 Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 189.

36 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–50.

37 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

38 Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 198.

39 James Reveley, “The Exploitative Web: Misuses of Marx in Critical Social Media Studies,” Science & Society 77, no. 4, (2013): 512–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24584619.

40 Wendy S. Hesford and Eileen E. Schell. “Introduction: Configuration of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics,” College English 70, no. 5, (2008): 463–64.

41 Mary Queen, “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World,” College English 70, no. 5, (2008): 471–89.

42 Taina Bucher, Facebook (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2021), 20.

43 Andreas Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 301, https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043.

44 Zhaozhe Wang, “Activist Rhetoric in Transnational Cyber-Public Spaces: Toward a Comparative Materialist Approach,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2020): 240–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2020.1748218.

45 Pulver, Metabolizing Capital, 87.

46 Jeroen de Kloet et al., “The Platformization of Chinese Society: Infrastructure, Governance, and Practice,” Chinese Journal of Communication 12, no. 3 (2019): 249, https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008.

47 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).

48 See Ahmed, “Affective Economies.” See also Papacharissi, Affective Publics.

49 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 302.

50 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric.

51 My translation throughout the article.

52 Wang, “Activist Rhetoric in Transnational Cyber-Public Spaces.”

53 See “China: Free Xinjiang ‘Political Education’ Detainees,” Human Rights Watch, September 10, 2017. See also “Mandates of the Special Rapporteur,” UN Special Rapporteur, November 1, 2019. See also The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang [White paper], The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China, March 2019.

54 Cissy Zhou, “Xinjiang Cotton Ban Uncertainties Weigh on Chinese Farmers, Smaller Textile Firms,” South China Morning Post, April 16, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3129610/xinjiang-cotton-ban-uncertainties-weigh-chinese-farmers.

55 Data from the report “Leading Cotton Producing Countries Worldwide in 2020/2021,” Statista.com, January 12, 2022.

56 BCI Task Force on Forced Labour and Decent Work, BCI Onboards Task Force Recommendations, January 2021, 3.

57 Weihua Mao and Huiying Zhou, “Mechanization of Xinjiang's Cotton Sector Approaches 90%,” China Daily, April 2, 2021, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/02/WS6066514da31024ad0bab3265.html.

58 Liang Ma and Ting Han, “新疆棉花, 凭什么是世界顶级?” People.cn, March 26, 2021, http://society.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0326/c1008-32061768.html.

59 “为新疆棉花代言, 就是这么硬核,” CCTV News, March 29, 2021, https://news.cctv.com/2021/03/29/ARTI24LtE0314JXlXFOMLy9L210329.shtml.

60 Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2003).

61 Angeli Datt, “The CCP Hand Behind China's Xinjiang Cotton Backlash,” The Diplomat, April 29, 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/the-ccp-hand-behind-chinas-xinjiang-cotton-backlash/.

62 For an in-depth analysis of the “CCP cancel culture,” see Adam K. Dedman and Autumn Lai, “Digitally Dismantling Asian Authoritarianism: Activist Reflections from the #MilkTeaAlliance,” Contention 9, no. 1 (2021): 1–36, https://doi.org/10.3167/cont.2021.090105.

63 Goubin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009).

64 Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery,” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 13, no. 2 (2009), https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/intro.html.

65 See, for example, Zhaozhe Wang, “The Switched-off Circulation.”

66 Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 8.

67 Dedman and Lai, “Digitally Dismantling Asian Authoritarianism.”

68 Jake Cowan, “The Constitutive Rhetoric of Late Nationalism: Imagined Communities after the Digital Revolution,” Rhetoric Review 40, no. 2 (2021):183–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2021.1883833.

69 Xiaoting Wang and Tetsuro Kobayashi, “Nationalism and Political System Justification in China: Differential Effects of Traditional and New Media,” Chinese Journal of Communication 14, no. 2 (2020): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2020.1807372.

70 See Ahmed, “Affective Economies.” See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, NY: Verso, 1983).

71 Zoe Jordan, “Xinjiang Cotton and the Shift in China's Censorship Approach,” The Diplomat, April 29, 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/xinjiang-cotton-and-the-shift-in-chinas-censorship-approach/.

72 Zhongshi Guo, Weng Hin Cheong, and Huailin Chen, “Nationalism as Public Imagination: The Media's Routine Contribution to Latent and Manifest Nationalism in China,” The International Communication Gazette 69, no. 5 (2007): 467–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048507080873.

73 Ying Jiang, Cyber-Nationalism in China: Challenging Western Media Portrayals of Internet Censorship in China (Adelaide, Australia: University of Adelaide Press, 2012), 55 and 56.

74 Florian Schneider, China's Digital Nationalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018), 6.

75 “网络民议: 别支持新疆棉花了, 请支持新疆人,” China Digital Times, March 25, 2021, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/663984.html.

76 Datt, “The CCP Hand Behind China's Xinjiang Cotton Backlash.”

77 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 20.

78 See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London, UK: Profile Books, 2019). See also Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

79 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 31.

80 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 92.

 

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Zhaozhe Wang

Zhaozhe Wang is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the University of Toronto, where he holds a cross-appointment in the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His work, broadly exploring transnational digital rhetorics and multilingual literacy, has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and WPA: Writing Program Administration, among others. He is also co-editor of Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing.