In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience

Abstract

In the opening to the seventh chapter of The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, C. writes, I, C. Taylor, am not writing this book (196). This seems counterintuitive. I have the book; his name is listed as the author; some agent with the designation Mark C. Taylor at some time put words to page or screen. Is this not an author? Well, perhaps not. Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have suggested that the author is but a discursive fiction, a mere function of discourse if not actually dead.1 continues this line of thinking. Words, thoughts, and ideas are never really his, he tells us; it is more that he is theirs. He becomes the vehicle for their circulation (196). The boundaries between brain and body, self and world, language and thought, beginning and end are permeable. This permeability is equiva lent to flow and the dissolution of stability. When states that thought thinks through him in ways that are unfathomable, he traces this flow and identifies it as the spectral quality of writing (197). In this sense, all writing is ghostwriting; all writing is haunted by innumerable specters?thoughts, writings, images, events, feelings of others of which I may or may not be aware (196). The writer writing in network culture