"We are Right but They are Not!
“We are right and they are wrong!” is the tendency prevalent in academia. This is true mostly in disciplinary conflicts. Each discipline tends to claim that its research outcomes and methodologies are superior and that its scope and scholarship is more comprehensive and inclusive than those of other disciplines. Similar tendency is manifest even in the old versus new scholars and their researches/scholarships within the same discipline. Some could interpret this tendency as the tension that keeps the scholarship and research alive or makes possible the evolution of knowledge and learning but I don’t know why I don’t see it that way.
I am raising this issue here for general discussion because I can see similar tendency even among some rhetoricians and technical communicators. While doing that, I am not passing any judgment but definitely saying that speaking only with and within the discipline might not change many of the things going on in the other corners of the academy. So, some kind of communication across disciplines for sharing the perspectives and approaches is indispensable if disciplinary misunderstanding and stereotypes are to be removed.
I am in fact talking about some of the rhetoricians and technical communicators I encountered recently. Look at I.A Richards’ definition of rhetoric. He defines rhetoric broadly as “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.” (Qtd. in Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Rhetoric 7) or more specifically as “the art of removing misunderstanding” (Qtd. in Booth’s preface x). Similar strain is evident in Wayne Booth’s declaration that “Rhetoric is employed at every moment when one human being intends to produce, through the use of signs or symbols, some effect on another- by words, or facial expressions, or gestures, or any symbolic skill of any kind” (preface xi). He even celebrates “rhetoric as our primary alternative to violence” ( preface xi). In short, rhetoric, for him, is the “entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another: effects ethical…, practical…, emotional,…. and intellectual…” (preface xi-xii Italics original). Basically, Booth weds rhetoric with quality of life stressing the fact that the “the quality of our lives, especially the ethical and communal quality, depends to an astonishing degree on the quality of our rhetoric” (xii).
I am not being cynical here but just wondering what the folks in other disciplines might think of this characterization of rhetoric. Will they agree that the quality of our lives depend so much on the quality of our rhetoric? Do they even know that rhetoric has so immense a role and how?
Another significant point to note about Booth is that he sees rhetoric everywhere, across all disciplines. For him all the disciplines are rhetorical and knowledge production and dissemination no matter what is necessarily a rhetorical process. He argues that rhetoric is integral to all disciplines ranging from hard sciences to arts and philosophy but the question arises again whether scholars and general population in other disciplines think along the same lines?
Booth’s is the exact way Dave Clark argues about the epistemology and ontology of technical communication technologies in his essay “Shaped and shaping Tools: The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies” collected in Rachel Spilka’s collection Digital Literacy. He argues that technology is inherently rhetorical and “shows how understanding “the rhetoric of technology” can help us understand better the relationship of technology and our work in technical communication” (“Introduction”, Digital Literacy 12). While doing that Clark critiques many scientists and their scholarship both on science and technology as well as older technical communicators who assume technology as value-free or arhetorical/pragmatic mechanism instrumental in enhancing human life.
Calling such a view “instrumentalist” and maintaining that technology is essentially rhetorical, Clark does something unprecedented in the essay. He for the first time systematically divides technical communication theories and approaches into four categories: classical rhetorical approaches, technology transfer theories, genre theory, and activity theory and describes how they are useful in analyzing the rhetorical nature of technologies and tools being used in the workplaces.
I appreciate him for raising a number of questions including how the technical communicators learn about and assess the “broader implications” and “potential influence” of technology and what it means “to be rhetorically savvy user of technology, as opposed to uncritically allowing tools like word processors, social networking, and content management systems to structure our work?” (Clark 88) and trying to address them. But I still have the concerns expressed at the beginning. Do the folks in science believe that scientific knowledge is rhetorical? Do the innovators of technology acknowledge the rhetorical nature of their tools? If they do not, how can the rhetoricians and technical communicators communicate with them this paradoxical “truth”: there is no absolute truth, truth is provisional and knowledge is rhetorical but the knowledge that all the principles and theories including those of science and technology are rhetorical is absolutely true? How can cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary communication be made possible and effective?
