While Tufte could dispense with ideology, as we saw in the previous section, others have found it less avoidable. Visual scholars Ben F. Barton and Marthalee S. Barton (1993) relied on Foucault’s insight that surveillance developed out of necessity during the time of the plague to ensure “each individual is constantly located, examined, and distributed.” Its “function is to work out every possible confusion” (Barton & Barton, 1993, p. 197) so that the living, the sick, and the dead may be known and divided accordingly.
Such a system solves two problems, namely: “to procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude” (Foucault, 1977, p. 216), and “to analyze, impose discipline, and correct behavior at the level of the individual” (Barton and Barton, 1993, p. 141). Barton and Barton called these the synoptic and the analytic modes of power, respectively. Together, they form the panoptic mode.
For Foucault (1977), this was the “mechanism that coerces by means of observation . . . . an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power” and “conversely, the means of coercion [to] make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.” This surveillance uses “techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen” (p. 171 emphasis added).
Thus surveillance becomes synecdoche for the exercise of power, and to do its work, the appropriating gaze must dissimulate. As Barton and Barton (1993) wrote: “seeing-without-being-seen is, in fact, the very essence of power . . . because, ultimately, the power to dominate rests on the differential possession of knowledge” (p. 139). In order to see-without-being-seen, one must disguise, camouflage, conceal, and deceive.
As we shall see, this ability is also one of the main characteristics of the kind of intelligence the ancients called mêtis, and it is the operating principle behind all dark patterns. It is their defining characteristic.
According to the legends of Hesiod and Ovid, the goddess Mêtis was the daughter of Tethys. As an ocean goddess, she was a shapeshifter and her divine portfolio included counsel, wisdom, and trickery. Her story is perhaps not as well-known as others in the pantheon, but Mêtis was Zeus’ first wife and it was she who authored the ploy by which Zeus bested Chronos and inaugurated the Olympian age.
After, Zeus learned her progeny would one day overthrow him, so he tricked her into assuming the form of a fly and swallowed her, consuming her power and to become “himself pure mêtis” (Marcel Detienne & John-Paul Vernant, 1978, p. 14) which ensured his eternal dominance over gods and men.
However, Mêtis was pregnant. The unborn child eventually sprang from Zeus’ brow “arrayed in arms of war” (Hesiod, ln.901). Athena, chief goddess and patron of the arts, whether advising in stratagems or teaching crafts, perhaps most directly inherited the gifts of Mêtis that Zeus had tried to keep for himself.
To understand dark patterns, we must at least partially recover what Janet Atwill (1998) called a “neglected tradition of rhetoric embodied . . . in Protagoras’ political tēchne and Isocrates’ logon tēchne and preserved, in somewhat modified form in Aristotle’s Rhetoric” (p. 1).
Atwill (1998) described how mêtis enables tēchne through its transformational power. She wrote, “the significance of tēchne often lies in the power of transformation mêtis provides” (p. 56). Like its namesake goddess, it also can change its form.
Mêtis is not wholly unknown to modern rhetoric. Scholars, including Debra Hawhee (2002) and Jay Dolmage (2009) have emphasized its physical, embodied character, while others, such as Karen Kopelson (2003), have applied its teaching to pedagogical method. All have noted its relevance to feminist studies.
The core text on mêtis is Detienne and Vernant’s (1978) monograph Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, a sprawling semiotic map covering fourteen centuries of Greek data in search of “coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour” that is “conspicuous by its absence.”
For Detienne and Vernant, mêtis consists of:
flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting. and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic (p. 4).
While the ploys of cunning are many, Detienne and Vernant identified four essential aspects of mêtis: it
As Detienne and Vernant (1978) wrote: “the only way to triumph over an adversary endowed with mêtis is to turn its own weapons against it” (p. 43), and, as we shall see, each of these aspects has a rhetorical counterpart representing mastery over it. Every aspect, that is, except the last, which has no rhetorical cognate. This fourth aspect will receive special focus, for it is in fact the essence of deceit.
The first characteristic of mêtis is that it’s used to overturn superior power in a contest, so the weaker can overcome the stronger, such as when Antilochus (in Book 23 of the Illiad), overcame Menelaus in the chariot race, despite having slower horses. Detienne and Vernant explained: “his mêtis as a driver conceives a maneuver which is more or less a cheat and which enables him to reverse an unfavorable situation and to triumph” (p. 12).
This characteristic recalls the dissoi logoi, the method of “countervailing arguments” or arguing both sides (also known as in utrumque partes and dialexis). Atwill (1998) explained how “the sophistic tēchne of dissoi logoi,” like “the pulley” of a mechanical contrivance, enables “the ‘smaller’ to overcome the ‘larger’” (p. 72).
In speech, in sophistry, the skilled speaker may, as Aristotle puts it, make “the worse argument seem the better” (Patricia Bizzel and Bruce Herzberg, 2001 p. 235), or as Detienne and Vernant (1978) put it, “by means of his skill and rhetorical ploys, the sophist can make the weaker argument triumph over the stronger” (p. 45).
When the pulley, through an amazing reversal, is able to cause the lighter to outweigh the more massive, the mind is momentarily confused: “it appears as the strangest, most baffling thing in the world” (Detienne and Vernant, 1978, p. 46), aporia (without expedient) is “the state of mind that is provoked by the equal force of contrary arguments” (p. 303). It is this baffled state of mind of which mêtis takes advantage.
The second essential characteristic of mêtis is vigilant opportunism, and kairos is its rhetorical counterpart. Detienne and Vernant noted how mêtis is closely related to “the term kairos, opportunity” (p. 15). The relationship is not mere recognition of the kairic moment, but rather mastery over it. The authors explained how mêtis “can seize the opportunity in as much as... it has been able to foresee how events will turn out and to prepare itself for this well in advance” (p. 16).
Thus, acting with mêtis means learning from the past, inhabiting the present, and manipulating the future beforehand. Modern rhetorical conceptions of kairos are drawn ultimately from Eric Charles White (1983), who found the root of the word in activities related to both archery and weaving, describing it as “a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved” (p. 13).
The metaphor of an opening, a window of time, and the movement necessary to clear it, whether by arrow or shuttle, allows the archer, the weaver, or the rhetor to overtake the swiftly passing moment, as Detienne and Vernant (1978) wrote, “It is mêtis which, overtaking the kairos, however fleeting it may be, catches it by surprise” (p. 16).
The third characteristic of mêtis, polymorphism, has as its rhetorical counterpart copia, or, the ‘abundance of words and ideas’. Detienne and Vernant explained mêtis “is not one, not unified, but multiple and diverse . . . never at a loss, never without expedients (poroi) to get . . . out of any kind of trouble” (p. 18). This quality, polutropos, ‘many-turning’ or crooked, is identified by Phillip Sipiora & Joseph Baumlin (2002) as “the special rhetorical ability to invent language appropriate to specific classes of listeners” (p. 4).
In a speech or debate, circumstances may shift and the speaker must improvise. In Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian, noting this provisional nature, writes of rhetorical rules, they “must generally be altered to suit the nature of each individual case, the time, the occasion, and necessity itself; consequently, one great quality in an orator is discretion, because he must turn his thoughts in various directions, according to different bearings of his subject” (in Bizzell and Herzberg, 2001, p. 383).
This improvisation can only be accomplished by having ready to hand a copious storehouse of knowledge on a variety of topics. Quintilian writes how “an orator ought to be furnished, above all things, with an ample store of examples” (p. 423) so the “orator, therefore, know as many as possible of every kind” (p. 424). Erasmus echoes this, writing the “ultimate goal” of copia is “to equip a rhetor so that he can improvise as the occasion demands” (p. 583). The ability to shift in response to circumstance is enabled by knowledge that is various and multiple, and, like the others aspects of mêtis, is well- preserved in rhetorical tradition.
The fourth characteristic of mêtis has no obvious rhetorical cognate; it is the essence of deceit: the power of disguise. Detienne and Vernant (1978) wrote: “In mêtis appearance and reality no longer correspond to one another but stand in contrast, producing an effect of illusion, apate, which beguiles the adversary into error and leaves him as bemused by his defeat as by the spells of a magician” (p. 21).
When the sophist, endowed with mêtis, practices this art, he becomes a “living trap” (p. 40) or “living bond” (p. 41) who ensnares his listeners in “the glittering web of his words” (p. 22). In the oft-cited rejection of sophistry in Gorgias, when rhetoric is denigrated as flattery, as merely the “counterpart of cookery in the soul” (p. 98), Plato took aim explicitly at such arts of disguise, writing:
cookery is flattery disguised as medicine; and in just the same manner self-adornment personates gymnastic: with its rascally, deceitful, ignoble, and illiberal nature it deceives men by forms and colors, polish and dress, so as to make them, in the effort of assuming an extraneous beauty, neglect the native sort (emphasis added, p. 98).
We see it also in the Phaedrus, as Socrates educates his pupil in the arts of persuasion, disguise is implicit to the discussion of “resemblances.” Plato wrote, “then he who is to deceive another, and is not to be deceived himself, must know accurately the similarity and dissimilarity of things” (p. 158). Being able to distinguish “the real nature of things” (p. 158) is important precisely because it allows both the perpetration and the penetration of disguise.
As Detienne and Vernant wrote “Being on the watch for anything that might happen is a way of being able to forestall the cunning tricks of an enemy and to devise, in advance, ways of trapping him in his own net” (p. 311). This is why, when Plato discusses deceit, he speaks of the ability to deceive and the ability to avoid deception together: they are both aspects of the same intelligence and derive from the capacity to make one thing look like another. As we shall see in the following section, this capacity is foundational to the act of visual perception itself.
