Abstract
In this edited collection, Stuart Selber (Penn State) presents a strong and diverse selection of work from noted scholars in rhetoric and technical communication. Carolyn Miller provides a foreword and Selber an introductory overview. A broad, tripartite structure organizes the collection: (1) Redrawing Borders and Boundaries, (2) Constructing Discourses and Communities, and (3) Understanding Writing and Communication Practices. These categories, however, offer only nominal help in sorting out the various contributions. That said, the collection offers readers a chance to sample some of the best thinking and writing by leading lights in professional rhetoric, scholars in mature form at the top of their disciplines. Each contribution in itself is engaging, thought provoking, and well argued.
If the collection has a shortcoming, it is that the individual chapters do not speak directly to each other—they do not form a conversation that helps create a center or a coherent whole. The reader can find threads that weave through the collection, but the authors themselves do not appear to have communicated with each other while developing their essays. Thus, Marilyn Cooper, in her ambitious opening chapter, works to extend her productive notion of ecologies of writing in order to develop a deeper sense of writing as embodied activity. She draws on complexity theory, and on biologists, philosophers, and paleoanthropologists, to build a case for language arising out of contexts of activity—organisms interacting with their surroundings. Anxious to move past cognitivist limitations, Cooper provides fine examples of how to better inform instruction by paying greater attention to organisms, connectivity, and complexity. Her work could be in conversation with that of Johndan Johnson-Eilola, who asks what influence spimes will have on the technologies of texts. Spimes, he explains, are “simply objects that are aware of their own contexts and communicate about those contexts, usually using relatively cheap, wireless, networked sensors” (p. 38). We might know something of the work of spimes as inventory-tracking sensors, used by large retailers and shippers. Johnson-Eilola places spimes as a next stage in the evolution of texts, spinning out in clever ways what might happen as texts start to keep track of themselves and communicate with other texts and with their users. His analysis connects to Cooper’s in that both suggest that many forms of powerful communication are part of socially networked, communal activities, such as those observed in the organization of ants or bees. Not just the bees send signals, of course, but the flowers themselves, just as the spimes busily organize textual and social worlds through communication with and about human and material interactions.
While Johnson-Eilola goes off in a technorhetorical direction, M. Jimmie Killingsworth pursues something similar to Cooper in appealing to the body and its importance to an ecorhetoric. Killingsworth considers what it means to maintain the body as an essential component in a continuum extending from earth to machine. Invoking Marshall McLuhan, he explores what sort of extension (or prosthetic device) technologies constitute—in what particular ways and with what consequences our bodies are extended. The depth of Killingsworth’s essay reflects his lifelong work on these issues, and he summons the force of his prior scholarship and long-term reflections on poet-of-the-body Walt Whitman, as well as his deep understanding of various ecological writers, such as Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey. Killingsworth’s concerns with embodied rhetorics could be extended, at least tangentially, to Paul Heilker and Jason King’s piece on the Web rhetoric surrounding autism, in particular, the conflicting and incommensurable rhetorics that arise from two writing communities—those who speak on behalf of individuals who are autistic (the autism community) and those autistics who speak on their own behalf (the autistic community). The issues that Heilker and King crystalize are present not only in the Web rhetoric between these two communities but in that of other agonistic dyads (of bulimics or cutters or the obese or hearing impaired) that contest representations of diversity. Such traits of diversity are taken either as simply one way that people vary or as a condition that ought to be the object of control or therapy. Heilker and King suggest a project of training both sides in the art of rhetorical listening. They do not actually take up this project, which would surely be a challenging effort of applied rhetoric.
Other contributors suggest changing our own community, specifically, the ways we conceptualize and teach writing and rhetoric. John Carroll demonstrates how models of user documentation based on specifications and top-down architecture have given way to scenario-based development involving user communities. He provides compelling examples from classrooms and Web-based community-action groups of how to take advantage of a highly contextual, narrative, user-based development process. James Porter argues for greater attention to the economics of rhetoric, focusing on how networked communication elevates the canon of delivery to new or restored importance. Porter’s analysis leads him to suggest that the economics of creating and distributing texts will encourage a move away from one-size-fits-all attempts to reach wide audiences and toward increasingly specialized and distinct services tailored for diverse and small audiences. He usefully calls attention to user groups and various specialized forums in which groups network to achieve technological or social goals.
Debra Journet’s case study might be an instance of what Porter is describing as emerging, specialized forums. In a close analysis of the television show Lost, Journet describes a particular instance of convergence culture, with a highly participative community of fans spawning a wide range of complex literate and rhetorical activities. Journet’s pop-culture study is nicely complemented by a chapter by Susan Wells that looks at a particular genre—power structure research—a product of the 1960s counterculture. Wells argues convincingly that the rise of photo-offset printing put the means of printing production in the hands of the people, allowing for the first time the easy creation and dissemination of a wide range of new genres—text-intensive, voluntarily-produced, cheaply printed tracts. The essay is valuable as a demonstration of how the affordances of a particular technology enable new texts that serve arising social purposes, including black-power, feminist, and student movements.
Two of the contributions make strong arguments for a new textual aesthetics. Geoffrey Sirc develops a notion of serial composition, as reflected in the minimalist composition principles shared by certain abstract expressionists of the early 1960s. He wonders why we, as a field, reject short, serial, minimalist compositions, suggesting that the mixed-tape artistry of the cassette-tape era provides a useful composition model for students today. Anne Wysocki too works from an aesthetic grounding and would like to find ways to recover rather than to dull bodily sensation by valuing response over, or at least as well as, cognition in our rhetoric. She contributes toward an aesthetic of new-media compositions, with some reliance on the familiar though neglected stylistic rhetorical tradition of Longinus. She also analyzes the public reception of new and different art (particularly installation and electronic art) before discussing what we are learning from gaming technologies such as Wii that engage bodily movement. Wysocki has an invigoratingly expansive view, one which enlarges the definition of relevant scholarship in rhetoric.
This book is published by the University of South Carolina Press in their studies in Rhetoric/Communication series, edited by Thomas W. Benson. It is a welcome contribution to the series, which tends to focus on more traditional studies in rhetoric. The book is an example of high printing standards—hardbound with a cloth cover, sewn binding, good stock, and excellent print quality. It is also an example of high editorial standards: free of any annoying typographical or layout errors that increasingly afflict contemporary publications. My one criticism would be that the quality of printed images—whether screen shots, textual facsimiles, ads, or other visuals—is not good, and often the visuals are not large enough to make out the detail. Some of the visuals, especially in the chapters by Johnson-Eilola and Wells, invite close scrutiny. In fact, I would argue, the volume as a whole deserves close scrutiny by those interested in rhetoric, technology, and communication.