The Rhetoric of Technology
Charles Bazerman
University of California, Santa Barbara
What is a rhetoric of technology? How would rhetoric help us understand technology? How would a rhetoric of technology differ from a rhetoric of science? How would it be distinctive from other domains of rhetorical practice? How would it deepen our understanding of rhetoric? How would a rhetoric of technology help us understand our current way of life?
These are some of the questions I encountered in working on The Languages of Edison's Light, about the symbolic, representational, and rhetorical work that accompanied the emergence of the incandescent light as an everyday technology. A project such as this is, on the face of it, a study in the rhetoric of technology, because it examines rhetorical productions that surround a material technology. If we assume the world is split into realms of rhetoric, so just as people have examined the rhetoric of science, of economics, of sociology, of psychology, of presidential campaigns, and of legal briefs, so I now turn to the rhetoric of technology. But this project on Edisonian rhetoric turned out to be as much a project in the rhetoric of the patent system and civil court proceedings, in the rhetoric of financial investment and stock market reports, in the rhetoric of the nineteenth century newspaper and mass circulation magazines, in the rhetoric of the new technical and financial press, in the rhetoric of small group collaboration and large corporate communications, and in the rhetoric of civic regulation, regional boosterism, and Tammany Hall politics as it was in the rhetoric of technology. All these discursive arenas are scenes where the electrical technology must make its presence felt, must take on value and meaning, in the language and discursive interaction of each. So in what sense is my study of the representations of Edison's incandescent light especially a project in the rhetoric of technology? And in what sense, if any, can there be a specialized realm of rhetorical studies called a rhetoric of technology?
Three Distinctions
These last two questions are put in greater relief if we make some contrasts between rhetorical studies of technology and projects carried out under the banner of the rhetoric of science. The first concerns the identification of the fields; the second, the degree of enclosure that bounds the fields; and the last, the effect of materiality on the symbolic activity.
First, rhetoric of science has seemed in the short run to be unproblematic, or rather only a limitedly problematic, to define as a special area, although in the long run this may not be the case. The only recurrent definitional issue that has troubled the rhetoric of science has been precisely whether, and to what extent, science is rhetorical. I will not rehearse the now familiar arguments and history of the issue here, but only point out some rhetoricians and some scientists still would like to consider science as privileged knowledge and therefore free of rhetoric, rising above the situated and purposeful use of language. Throughout the history of the rise of modern science, from the time of Bacon to the time of Reichenbach and Popper, there have been explicit attempts to distance natural philosophy and then science from rhetoric. We can even trace to Plato and Aristotle the impulse to distinguish the uncertain persuasions of rhetoric from those domains of philosophic inquiry which provided access to certain knowledge. At various times experimentation, method, objectivity, and mathematical formulations have been seen as the key ingredient that demarcates science from other less certain endeavors.
In a way the very surprise of the title rhetoric of science defines it as a field, and has driven the kinds of questions that attracted the field's early controversialists. Is the title an oxymoron or a tautology? The intrigue of the field's title allows even those people who would simply subsume science into prior forms of rhetoric, such as Gross or Prelli, still can identify their work as rhetoric of science instead of just rhetoric happening to be examining some texts appearing in science journals. I think the real question is, how does the phrase "rhetoric of science" manage to be both oxymoron and tautology? That is, how can science--working through faulted, imprecise, multiply-perspectival human symbolic means--nonetheless establish a high level of agreement, stability, mutual alignment to symbolic representations, and reliability in guiding behavior? How can the symbolic representations of science facilitate unimagined material projects and counter-intuitive investigations? By what set of historical developments did a form of discourse develop within specialized systems of discourse circulation, so as to distinguish itself from other discursive practices and networks, establishing novel sets of relations with both the material and other social-discursive systems?
While science has gained the appearance of distinctiveness from other realms of rhetoric, technology has always been part of the rhetorical barnyard, part of commerce and finances, customers and vendors, partnerships and corporations, suppliers and production, lawyers and courts. Even more, technology has always has been fundamentally designed to meet human needs and desires. Technology has always been clearly a made object, made for human ends. Thus technology has always been part of human desires, values, and evaluation, articulated in language and at the very heart of rhetoric. While science has at times been able to wrap itself in a mantle of disinterested curiosity, free of overt interests (though we know this is never the case--scientists' curiosities are driven by who they are and societies fund the kinds of knowledges they need and want) , technology always must always overtly appeal to the marketplace, political ambitions, and personal desire.
This brings us to our second distinction, as rough and loose as the first, filled with exceptions and qualifications, but nonetheless recognizably as true as the first. Science has in the last few centuries been an increasingly enclosed specialized communication system, explicitly creating distances between itself and other systems of communication. Tom Gieryn has pointed toward the boundary-work by which scientists at particular moments, such as during the Scopes trial, in order to assert science's authority as a privileged way of knowing, have engaged in public campaigns to create strong boundaries between science and other sources of knowledge and belief. Within the bounded discursive world of science, an intertext of cited works or a literature defines a gradually transforming discursive space within which new claims vie for acceptance, judged by an epistemic court of insider specialists. This enclosed communication system must then represent itself and its knowledge outwards to the other public realms, to spread its influence, to sue for resources, and to establish and maintain its boundaries and authority. So a rhetoric of science can study an internal discourse of claim-making, a socially contentious discourse of boundary creation and maintenance, and an outward facing interest-driven discourse of professional representation. The discursive communities and directions are fairly clearly drawn, even though recent developments in computing and genetic sciences have overtly transgressed these socially-constructed boundaries. Nonetheless, there is a reasonably defined subject there.
In contrast, while some producers of technology work within discursive enclosures of professions, corporations, and specialties, these enclosures are smaller, more recent, and more permeable. Further, the technology itself moves rapidly outward from the small worlds of the expert innovators into the lives of many different kinds of people. The technology, as in the case of Edison's incandescent light and central power, must often enlist the support of numerous publics (financial, legal, corporate, public, technical) long before it becomes anything like a material reality. Certainly scientists and science laboratories do need support from academic sponsors and granting agencies, but usually this support is mediated through science-controlled peer review with the intended consequence that the arguments for the value of projected work can be largely cast in terms of internal scientific values. The words of technology, however, seem to flow all over the discursive landscape arguing for value in the terms of business, law, government, the public, and consumers (Bijker; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch; Latour). Even the professional knowledges of engineering sciences are permeable interdisciplinary spaces organized around practical problems and projects rather than the advancement of a disciplinary account. The discourse of technology is as pervasive as the electricity that comes out of all our walls. Even law, or newspapers, both of which are representation spaces that draw the entire world into them, are more enclosed than technological discourse. Both law and journalism require that all the world be translated into their terms to be regulated by the law or to become news, but technology is translated into all the terms of the world so as to gain the support and use it requires for its existence.
The enclosure of scientific discourse versus the profligacy of discourse about the technical that accompanies technological objects around the world is related to a third distinction: Technology for the most part produces objects and material processes; science for the most part produces symbols. Science generally produces as its end claims, sentences, sententia whether mathematical, graphic or verbal. So once you argue that those symbols are rhetorical--that is the strategic result of human processes of contention, fought out with words (although also in relation to the material practices of data gathering and experiments)--then the entire project becomes deeply rhetorical, calling for examination of its language at every turn. Technology, on the other hand, generally circulates objects and material processes, and not words. The words and pictures and numbers may accompany in the fund-raising, in the contracts, in the manuals, or in the advertising, but the technology itself has a seeming physical obduracy. Of course, as history of technology has always shown, the material embodies intentions and plans and imagined uses--armaments are built for wars with specific imagined enemies with known weapons, and bicycles are designed for users with specific leisure or transportation needs. Moreover, recent constructivist studies show how technologies embody interests and negotiations and struggles, as well as the enlistment of users, so that different constituencies contend for design control of arms or bicycles. So there is a kind of material rhetoric in whether a company produces daredevil racing cycles or safe and comfortable bikes for everyday transport. But ultimately it is the material object that conveys the primary rhetoric and not the language which went into the technology's formation and patterns of use and meaning.
A Rhetoric of Technology
So what is a rhetoric of technology? It is the rhetoric that accompanies and makes technology possible in the world. It is the rhetoric that makes technology fit into the world and makes the world fit with technology . There is a dialectic between rhetoric and the material design as the technology is made to fit the imaginably useful and valuable, to fit into people's understanding of the world. Technological discourse is a special coalescence of the many discourses of the world. Consider how the technology of architecture brings new buildings to life in the midst of proposals to clients, legal codes, contractual relations, financial discussions, blueprints and materials specifications, negotiations with contractors, and postmodern theories of aesthetics. Of course science discourse also intersects at many points with other differentiated discourses from the legal and even criminal to the political to the financial to pop culture--but yet we can still perceive those in relation to a primary discourse of knowledge production among specialists.
So given that the rhetoric of technology encompasses such a promiscuous and varied range of practices, whose only defining feature is its relation to the material technology being imagined, projected, emergent, advanced, managed, or coped with in the world of multiple affairs, why is rhetoric of technology of a special character or importance? Why does it not just decompose into the separate discourses which it engages? What is there separate to study which is not a rhetoric of law, or finance, or journalism, or corporate organizations? First, the obduracy of the technological object, although it may be plastic in its uses, meanings and interpretations, challenges the discourses it intersects with to assimilate its otherness. The rhetoric of technology shows how the objects of the built environment become part of our systems of goals, values and meaning, part of our articulated interests, struggles, and activities. The technological object, its circulation in many social worlds, and the impact it has on our daily life, give rise to further discourses of new corporations; social communication among enthusiasts, expert users, and aficionados (for example computer user groups and auto collectors); and people simply living in the wake of the new technology.
The changed conditions of life made possible by the introductions of new technology create new realms of discussion, as we try to figure out what these changed conditions mean, what problems they pose, and what we can accomplish within them. Technology constantly invites social, legal, personal and economic discussions that shape how that technology becomes incorporated into new ways of life. This strong discursive force of technology, the fact that we cannot seem to stop talking about the latest technological presences in our life, may make it seem that the technology is determining our life and we are only reacting. All that talk, however, determines what the technology becomes and what our society becomes with the new tools of technology.
Nonetheless, the course of that technological development is necessarily interactant with many other powerful discursive system, and if there seems to be an inevitable trajectory it is not technologically determined in itself; it is in the alliance of the several discourses that provide major meanings for the technology. For example, consider the way patent monopolies, corporate imperatives, and government planning and policy values, citizen desires in a post World War II period, ideological competitions, booming economies and international economic competition, and domestic and international political talk about international security came together to foster nuclear and rocket technology in the middle of this century. The inevitability of the arms race lies, if it was inevitable, in the coming together of these many systems of meaning and not just the demonstrated possibilities of big explosions and distant delivery (see MacKenzie).
Because we are living at a time when our lives seem so caught up in what seem the opportunities and imperatives of technology, the rhetoric of technology--that is the rhetoric of all the discourses that surround and embed technology--is a particularly useful endeavor. By picking apart the conjunction of powerful discursive forces that create value for and give shape to technological developments and their uses in the human world we can begin to regain some of our choices about the technological future we will live in.
Works Cited
Bazerman, Charles. The Languages of Edison's Light. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming.
Bijker, Wiebe. Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1995.
Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
Gieryn, Tom. "Boundary-work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists." American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781-95.
Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1990.
Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or, The Love of Technology. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996.
MacKenzie, Donald A. Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
Prelli, Lawrence J. A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.