559CULTURE’S OPEN SOURCESRhetorical Virtues: Property,Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web Rosemary J. CoombeYork UniversityAndrew HermanWilfred Laurier UniversityProperty, Propriety, and Appropriation Our comments extend our mutual scholarly interest in the articulation ofdiscourses of property in contemporary capitalist culture and how theseare deployed in the narrative conjuring of capital as “salvific” moral virtue inglobal neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). We are interested in hownarratives of property and propriety, ownership, and entitlement come to beembodied and performed as moral stories in digital environments (Coombeand Herman 2000, Coombe and Herman 2001). As Marx argued “capital” is a“very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical and theological niceties” (Marx1976[1867]:163). Capital is strange for Marx because it can apparently morphinto so many different forms—as commodity, as debt, as labor, as knowledge,as brand image, and, underlying these, money as the universal, impersonalstandard of value that makes these commensurable. Yet these strange andmagical qualities of capital rest upon a foundation of metaphysics and theolo-gy—a particular set of ethical values that construe lifeworlds into monetaryforms and human beings into autonomous individuals.Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web560We offer here a small slice of our ongoing work on the rhetorics of intellec-tual property in the age of digital media and information-based capitalism.1We use rhetoric in the strong, Nietzschian sense of the term—as the “act ofordering the chaos of life” (Witson and Poulakis 1993:16). In this reading, rhet-oric is a social and material practice of the pragmatics of power that punctu-ates the world with meaning and thereby renders social action possible. Touse Barbara Biesecker’s words, “it is in rhetoric that the social takes place”(Biesecker 1997:50). Indeed, it is rhetoric that makes the social a place ofmeaningful habitation. We do not mean “rhetoric” in the vernacular, pejora-tive sense as when someone says, “Oh, that’s just mere rhetoric,” thereby con-noting a fount of frothy words without real consequence (McGuigan 2003:1);nor do we restrict it to discourse with persuasive force or intent.One of our favorite moments in teaching is when we ask students toexplain what the word “property” means. Given that the word is a fixture ofour everyday language and speech, students are remarkably perplexed whenthis question is posed. Their reticence to give voice to their understanding ofproperty clearly doesn’t have to do with their lack of knowledge of the wordor the concept. Rather, it is rooted in the seeming obviousness of the answer.“Property,” one student will venture after an uncomfortably long silence, “iswhen I own something.” This rhetorical statement is what legal scholar JackBalkin (1998) calls a hegemonic meme in an argument that transports the con-cept of the meme from evolutionary biology to a critique of legal and politi-cal ideology. In brief, a meme is an idea or rhetorical construct—a “packet” ofcoherent information—that is passed on from generation to generationthrough the cultural transmission of communication, imitation, and replica-tion called memesis (which should not be confused with the anthropologicalconcept of mimesis). Cultures (Balkin shares none of the anthropologist’squalms about using the term as a noun) integrate such memes into quotidi-an ideologies because of their pragmatic utility in making sense of the worldand allowing human groups to adapt to changing social environments.Through the memetic process of informational replication, to paraphraseBalkin, human beings become information made flesh.We have many reservations about Balkin’s evolutionary theory of ideology.Aside from the conceptual overlay of evolutionary biology and the languageand tropes of information science and technoculture, there is not much inwhat Balkin has to say that hasn’t already been said by Gramsci, Stuart Hall,Karl Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann, Foucault (especially), and even Marxhimself. But the idea that the social power of ideology resides in its corpore-561ROSEMARY J. COOMBE AND ANDREW HERMANalization, in how it is embodied and performed, and how its makes the worldhabitable in the Heideggerian sense as an ethos, is one worthy of furtherexploration when the location of this embodiment and performance takesplace on the World Wide Web (the Web).The problem with ideological memes, whatever their practical efficacy, isthat they become incorrigible—resistant to revision. Property is not simply oreven primarily a relationship between persons and things (as first year law stu-dents are swiftly taught). It is a social relationship between socially recognizedpersons with respect to real and intangible things (and between peoples whoas nations may hold cultural properties) that is authorized and legitimized inparticular cultural contexts. It is also a relationship of profound social power.The generalized failure to see the social relationships that produce the value ofthe things we consider property—the constitutive misrecognition that Marxreferred to as commodity fetishism—is one manifestation of this power.The cultural determination of property as a social relationship—and theambivalences that are embodied in the commodity fetish—are inscribed in theetymology of the word itself. “Property” is derived from the Latin propius, whichitself has two meanings: 1) that which one owns and 2) a standard of behavioror correct conduct that is “proper.” The latter meaning of property is linked toproprietas, which means both propriety as well as the proper signification withwords (Jones 1992:118). The ability to claim something as one’s own is rituallyperformed in social interactions which operate to render the owner suitableand fitting to appropriate that from which he or she claims the right to excludeothers. In the intrinsic alterity of claiming property as a function of propriety,the non-owner is a person who is not appropriate. In other words, the capacityto appropriate is contingent on being appropriate (Herman 1999).The governmentality of property and propriety, although always central tothe logos and ethos of capitalism, has assumed even greater significance in theage of globalized neoliberalism. Analyses of the scope and dimensions