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Book chapter
The Visible and the Invisible: Arguing about Threats to Loyalty in the Internet Age
Networking Argument: Affective Argument and Popular American History, pp.274-279
Routledge, 1
2019
Abstract
This chapter examines loyalty as a civic virtue and demonstrates that sign reasoning advances disloyalty claims through the rhetorical topos of the visible and the invisible. It argues that the rise of the lone-wolf terrorist has made invisible signs increasingly salient. Among the flammable elements, loyalty is dry kindling because its virtuous status rests on problematic, contingent relationships that inevitably clash with rights-based limits on sovereign authority. Scholars often conceive the concept of loyalty as a public obligation, a moral virtue with a dispositional attachment to some end apart from the self. Like Oceania and the political philosophy of Ingsoc, the post-9/11 world of lone-wolf terrorism relies on increasingly robust systems of surveillance to make visible those signs of disloyalty. The chapter concludes that invisibility is a key premise in justifying aggressive counterterrorism policies as a defensible exception to liberal democratic norms.
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Details
- Title
- The Visible and the Invisible
- Edition
- 1
- Publication Details
- Networking Argument: Affective Argument and Popular American History, pp.274-279
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publisher
- Routledge; London
- Copyright
- © Taylor & Francis
- Identifiers
- 99380566197106600
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; Communication
- Language
- English