Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication

Abstract

In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

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