Folks,
I’ve been converted to the way of the forum.
If you’re interested, you can find my personal blogs at this link: http://www.gregoryzobel.com/board/journal.html
If you’re more interested in what I am doing generally, you can hit the top index here: http://gregoryzobel.com/
Thanks for being here, but I’m using a technology which, at least at the moment,
appears to meet my strange organization, information hording, and social interaction
needs.
Come pay a visit!
I am in the second cycle working with TacFit Commando. Thus far, it’s been an achy but good experience. I had forgotten how quickly and easily I lost flexibility and mobility when I was not working out. This PhD stuff certainly commanded my attention for a while.
That said, I am quite enjoying the cycling of no-low-medium-high intensity of workouts. I’ve been using that approach with my studying and writing for about two weeks now, and I’ve been rocking in my classes. Training my body with the same protocol feels really good–I can tell my body is happier, and I certainly know that my brain is. There is something relieving, something that eases me when I know I’ve worked out at the start of a day–it makes the rest of it flow more easily.
I’ve not blogged for some time, and I’m pretty sure a lot of it has to do with putting too much attention on PhD course work and not enough on the rest of my life. That’s one reason the TacFit Commando launch really got my attention. The CST programs in the past have worked really well for me, and I knew that I needed to get back into shape. I enjoy the structure, the challenge, and the militarism/discipline of the program–it feeds my soul and my drive to run with the pack.
I know that a lot of academics don’t care for that kind of chat, but it’s how I feel. Most of my pack is back in Arcata, and I’m still trying to figure out the pack here. This kind of training that TacFit Commando provides gives me that sense. It’s a feeling that I want and I need.
Above and beyond the physical need to train, the emotional drive to belong to a pack, and the academic need to excel, TacFit Commando had a beautiful product launch. It was enjoyable, well-executed, and a pleasure to watch unfold. Since I started studying launches, they’ve been like a sporting event. The high point of TacFit Commando’s launch, however, was the live podcasts. I hope they transcribe those puppies…
David Korten’s interview appears to be about economics and not technology. However, economics is a sociotechnical system, and thus Kline would label it technology. Economic systems muster large amounts of human labor, govern it, and direct it; this matches Mumford’s description of a mega-machine which is another form of social technology. Given these two points, economics is considered a technology in this paper. Korten’s interview about economics can also be read as an interview about technology. In the interview, several distinct threads emerge which echo standing themes in technology studies. One theme is the apparently unchangeable nature of technology and its deterministic illusion. David Korten asserts that economic, i.e. technological, change appears difficult because,
the thing that holds us captive to the system are the stories that circulate in our culture, by which we define what it means to be human and what human possibilities are, and all the various aspects of what is wealth and what proper life should be. All of those stories are currently framed within a culture in ways that support the system of domination and exploitation which I refer to as Empire.
Korten claims it is not the economic technology which prevents change but the stories surrounding that technology. These stories work to reinforce the apparent pre-destined and determined nature of technology. This harmonizes with Marcuse’s definition of one-dimensional thought:
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definition or dictations (410).
Marcuse explains that one-dimensional thoughts promote false needs—these false needs are in conflict with what people really need in order to live: vital needs. These master stories, these one-dimensional thoughts reproduce and promote the idea that technology, including economics, is a fixed system. Thus people live and work in order to satisfy these false needs instead of their vital needs and experience misery or emptiness as a result of this lack of fulfillment. In the individual’s experience, Korten depicts it as a battle between stories handed down and stories based upon personal needs and lived experience; Marcuse’s version is false/one-dimensional needs and vital needs. Individuals internalize the combating discourses and are often confused or frustrated by the resulting tensions.
Korten depicts the current economic structure as an illusion: the currency is not based on anything real like people, relationships, and the environment, thus it is his goal to help people see through the illusion and address their personal, real needs as opposed to serving the needs of a hollow economic system. This is similar to how Feenberg describes the illusion of technical determinism and how it can be undone. Through his faulty boiler example, Feenberg demonstrates technological determinism is a construction that can be undone. He shows legislative and political action’s power to correct systems. If laws can change technology, then economics, a social technology, can be changed. This connects to the second theme: average, normal people working for social change. Feenberg’s boiler example directly questions people’s deterministic view of technologies and economics, and it encourages them to engage and take control of their experience. The example also recognizes how changes only took place over a length of time. Feenberg pushes for this kind of longitudinal democratic social action and progress throughout his work, and his roots are clearly established in Marcuse’s thought. For Marcuse, undemocratic constructions can be adjusted and undone through the power of engaged and meaningful public discourse by an educated public. Such discourse works and is effective because it can directly challenge the assertions of one-dimensional thought, help resist false needs, and help people recognize their vital needs. For Korten, vital needs are the “real reality” of people, family, and a decent environment. The elite will not simply instill a new economy or stories in order to meet these values. Korten states, “My view is that the only way we can get there is through civil society, people’s action of creating anew from the bottom up.” Korten’s writing and interviewing are intended to generate more discourse and push for more engaged political action and economic discussion.
This emphasis upon “people” and working from the “bottom” of society draw heavily from classical Marxist ideas of class and resistance. These strands are seen clearly through Marcuse as well as more blatantly in Feenberg’s attempts to recuperate Marxian economics and labor critiques. Marxism, and its rejection or promotion, is present throughout technology studies for a good reason: technology, innovation, production, and economy are all interlocking and integrated elements which cannot be disconnected. Thus, when Marxism critiques modes of production or class structures, it often evolves into a critique of class and social structures, the role of innovation, and questions of governance. Korten’s emphasizing the terms civil society and “from the bottom up” indicate he is probably heavily influenced by Marxist criticism. His calls for citizen action and “solidarity” on a global scale also echo traditional Marxist traits. This reading is supported by his analysis of the economy where he asserts that a small elite control of the economy and are fooling the masses with their narratives. Korten draws here upon the Marxist narrative of class conflict. In another parallel, rather than describe religion as the opiate of the masses, Korten appears to have relabeled Marx’s opium religion as stories. Like two other technological theorists and critics, Feenberg and Marcuse, Korten takes a viable critical method, Marxism, and retools it to fit his needs and situation. This Marxist connection emphasizes the value of comparing Korten to Feenberg and Marcuse: it clarifies the evolution of Marxist thinking and its distillation and dispersement throughout technology studies.
Korten’s humanistic priorities of people and environment echo Feenberg’s interests in socialist democracy that are partially rooted in Marcuse. All three seek to recenter economies and social systems around ecologically sound democratic socialism, but Feenberg makes it clear that this can only happen when the public is educated or engaged enough to organize. Marcuse seems more pessimistic in his writings because he regarded the US as being almost totalitarian. In spite of this, Marcuse continued to push for discourse and action. Unfortunately, Korten does not provide any direct or specific examples in his interview as how economic change can be achieved beyond “resistance”; this pragmatic gap is similar to technological critics like Heidegger, Arendt, Mumford, and Ellul. Unlike Heidegger and Arendt, whose vocabularies are complex and have little clear link practical action, and Mumford and Ellul, who make sweeping statements regarding social problems and solutions while providing no actionable suggestions, the pragmatic vagueness of Korten is on par with Feenberg and Marcuse. They are more practical than Arendt or Ellul, but they do not provide action items. Unlike the other writers mentioned, the works of these three seem much closer to every day experience and thus easier to interpret and apply by readers. In stark contrast, Bob Johnson demonstrates the ability to theorize about social change by developing technorhetoric and then applying it. Rather than get lost in describing social control or admitting determinism, Johnson and his class applied Feenberg’s boiler example: over a period of two years they worked with a local activist coalition to get a waste site cleaned up. This proved that what appeared to be impossible or predetermined could actually be changed.
Korten’s interview, while pointed and poignant at times, hovers between the highly theoretical and directly actionable. This was a brief interview, but Bob Johnson made his claim to value and ethos with his waste clean-up site in less than a paragraph. Korten’s interview demonstrates a weakness in technology studies: providing powerful and specific concrete examples. While Feenberg and Johnson can claim a credible and practical theory, largely due to specifics, Korten cannot.
Here’s the first third or half of my paper. Finally got a decent workable draft going, thank goodness.
I know it’s not perfect, but I love having workable copy.
Introduction
–research question/ issue
Concept of assemblage can contribute to the development of research training in TC graduate programs:
If graduate Technical Communication (TC) programs allowed Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage to more overtly influence their graduate research teaching and training practices, the programs and students could benefit in several significant ways. Assemblages offer TC a new research method. The sliding and rhizomic nature of assemblages could impact the direction of current and future research and provide rich new territory to examine. Finally, training graduate students to consider assemblages in their research could impact beyond that realm and potentially help TC redefine itself.
Graduate training instills the values and practices of the current field and determines the field’s future direction. Since doctoral training’s purpose is to contribute meaning and knowledge to the field while “moving the ball forward,” initiating new assemblage-based practices, theories, and approaches at the graduate level could impact three areas: research practices, research focus, and professional identity. Developing assemblage-based research methods in graduate programs has several valuable reasons. First it develops future professionals entering academia and industry by providing them with another research method that complements the other methods they have learned. Second, it nurtures the application of a theory based method in an environment which is generally more receptive to Continental theory than industry; this offers a chance for the method to develop with less resistance while keeping in mind the importance of developing methods which are viable in and valuable to industry. Third, the assemblage-based method, and its position within the larger Deleuzian theory of rhizomes and insterstices might help resolve some of the concerns and splits in research training in both undergraduate and graduate research.
Situating doctoral research training contexts, the key binaries in TC, and the differences between modernist and postmodern approaches to organization theory are necessary in order to properly consider assemblage’s potential impact on the field in this limited topic: graduate research training. After situating the question, assemblage theory’s key facets directly relevant to developing an assemblage-based research method in TC are presented. Deleuze and Guattari develop assemblage rhizomatically throughout their works. Any shorter work with assemblages, especially of article length, will necessarily exclude many ideas and definitions; however, this paper’s purpose is not to fully elaborate assemblages or assemblage theory. The purpose is to apply several key theoretical concepts in directly relevant and practical actions that can potentially benefit Technical Communication as a field and individual doctoral students. Concepts important to developing an assemblage-based research method are then discussed. Buchanan, DeLanda, Hardt and Negri, and Galloway and Thacker’s works are cited as examples of scholars in other fields applying assemblage-based research. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the potential impacts that an assemblage based research method could have on Technical Communication and proposes future research and practice directions.
1 Situate Discussion
1.1 A ROLE OF RESEARCH IN THE ACADEMY: History, Academy/Industry,
Research: History’s Impact & Value
Doctoral students are trained to conduct research for many reasons. One of the most important ones is to generate new knowledge and move the field forward. When students are trained, they are exposed what has been taught and researched historically. As Smith indicates, awareness of what has been taught and researched in the past directly influences what is currently research and what will be researched in the future (427). Thus, historical awareness helps explain why the field emphasizes specific topics and methods; similarly, this helps explain why new methods or ideas, such as the assemblage, have a difficult time being adopted: they have not been taught or researched in the field before—at least not on a larger scale. Coppola also urges historical awareness because it would help technical communicators better understand the influence “Big Science,” anthropology, and history have on TC. The scientific approach, Coppola claims, has shaped TC’s emphasis on the physical world while the humanistic roots have driven the focus on close readings of texts (Coppola 261-2). Recognizing these roots, and where the field does not have roots, can help identify both the strengths and the gaps in Technical Communication.
These historical roots often determine which research questions are explored. Research questions, Carolyn Rude claims, define academic fields. She writes, “Research questions, more than research methods or topics, define a field internally and externally by pointing to the knowledge making that is unique to the field. Questions are dynamic and generative. If they are good questions, the answers gained through research point to refinements or extensions of the questions—more questions” (Rude 175). Thus, when graduate students are trained in which research methods and topics are viable or not, the questions they are learning to ask and analyze determine the field’s future. Assemblages are not based in science or humanistic traditions, and thus its presence could help the field ask new questions and develop new topics. Historical awareness is critical for understanding why doctoral students are trained the way they are, but tradition should not be followed just for tradition’s sake.
Research: Job Training for Academia and Industry
Traditionally, doctoral programs in TC have prepared students to take positions in academia. Research and publication are central to academic citizenship. While various doctoral programs emphasize different methods and epistimologies, all graduate programs offer and require research training. What motivates the training has a direct impact upon what and how the training is taught and what is emphasized. Blakeslee indicates that the expectations of what academics do and how they are judged—research, tenure process, publication—directly impacts how research is taught and evaluated in graduate TC courses. Blakeslee states that the goal of research is and should be to “Better prepare our graduate students for their scholarly pursuits” (149). She states research training should improve students’ research abilities, increase their exposure to research, and make research a larger part of graduate student culture (158-9). Campbell concurs with Blakeslee by stating, “Research activity is an integral ingredient in the development of any profession, including business and technical communication” (223). Davis agrees with Blakeslee and asserts that the drive for professional status directly shapes graduate education (Blakeslee HUH? DAVIS? 76-7). Johnson-Eilola’s article demonstrates the diversity in programmatic expectations and outcomes and shows how programmatic emphases—empirical research, rhetoric, seminars, exams for critical skills—directly impact what the students are taught (406). Instead of focusing on skills which students may need after graduate school, programs usually emphasize skills necessary for student success. While there may be overlap between skills useful inside and outside of academia, programs appear to emphasize their own needs over students’. From these perspectives, research is a part of the professionalization process: induction and indoctrination into academia’s professional values. By emphasizing research as a means to tenure and publication, research becomes a tool for developing social capital within a limited community.
Doctoral programs in TC are not solipsistic or short-sighted. While priority is given to student success in academia, training for industry’s importance is recognized. As Campbell states in one piece, “The underlying assumption within this article is that research methods course work plays a crucial role in curricula for preparing professionals for their future careers in both academe and industry” (225). Davis indicates that industry’s expectation that graduates are capable of research impacts graduate education as well (Davis 80). As graduates move from universities into industry, programs which ignore industry’s needs would quickly lose credibility and their graduates would have limited job offerings. Thus, students need training in methods like usability testing, surveys, case studies, and statistical analysis so that they can deliver the kind of actionable information for decision makers who seek to improve their efficiency, productivity, and increase their material capital. While academia maintains a solid footing professionalizing their students for work in the academy, they must also offer practical, viable research methods so that they can retain and develop relationships with industry. Doctoral research training must address these numerous needs and goals within coursework, and the required diverse preparedness can stress both faculty and students attempting to develop competence in this variety of methods. Synthesizing these values, Whiteside asserts that the best approach to teaching research would consider what employers want, what technical communicators need, and what academia should provide (Whiteside 304).
Given these expectations on just the purposes research should serve, it is important to ask where is the time for teaching assemblage? Few doctoral students are able to train competently in more than a few research methods; as such, aren’t assemblages going to remove or reduce the students’ research competence and ability to perform for their academic or industry employers? This paper will address these concerns later; however, it is important to acknowledge the limitations on time and resources faced by graduate programs and doctoral students.
Research: Creating Core of Shared Values & Practices
Research coursework also provides a shared core of practices and values among doctoral students who have diverse backgrounds and different levels of research training. One result is that the diverse students have diverse needs. Student diversity has a notable impact on doctoral research training. Campbell addresses this in part by claiming that the diverse needs of students in technical communication shapes research (Campbell 238). Johnson-Eilola echoes the diverse needs of students, and he locates this need in the “Interdisciplinary nature of technical communication [which] involves faculty with expertise in different strands of research” as well as student having different academic backgrounds who are preparing to go into equally diverse professions (Johnson-Eilola 404). Since large numbers of graduate students in TC do not have professional experience in industry and little training in TC, graduate programs must rapidly instill an understanding of the field as well as develop a foundational understanding of research, research methods, and how these methods can be applied in industry.
Fields like biology and philosophy often have graduate students who have been working in their field since their undergraduate years and are familiar with the research methods and professional culture; TC’s interdisciplinary nature means that a fair amount of effort goes into establishing a consistent level of understanding and basic premises in their students. Spilka makes it clear that even undergraduates in TC receive limited research training, and that undergraduate research training is not consistent. One reason is administrators cannot agree on which research skills are most important (228). Just as students come to TC from fields like literature and engineering, graduates leaves TC for fields like academic research, Human Computer Interaction, grant writing, and medical documentation. An effective graduate program thus must teach research which is accessible to the different student backgrounds as well as the diverse future career goals.
TRANSITIONAL/COMMENT CHUNK
1.2 Binaric Iterations: Acad/Indus, T/P, Concept/Skill
Academia versus industry is one obvious binaric tension which emerges when discovering the purposes behind doctoral research training. Graduates experience this fracture in their training and when they enter the job market; it directly impacts their capacity in research methods as well as the development of their professional attitudes towards academia and industry. Another significant binary in TC is over the role of theory and the question of what, if anything, theory contributes. This tension often manifests as the debate of theory versus practice. Patrick Moore proposes this debate is rooted partially in the differences in priorities between academia’s valuation of social capital and the workplace’ emphasis on material capital (Cruel 208). If academics seek collegial social capital, then researching theory with little practical application is still potentially valuable and can professionally advance the academic. Theory means little to most practitioners if it does not generate material capital, that is, improved efficiency, production, and profits. While theory may generate some new practices in industry, if academics do not publish these connections, their work has little value for practitioners.
Concluding thought or sentence here, please.
Knieval observes that TC’s historical relationships with and roots in both technology and the humanities might explain the academic/industry tension (66). Because TC is interdisciplinary, it has drawn on multiple traditions for its theories, training, practices, and perspectives. Depending upon the doctoral programs as well as professional experience, practitioners will be directly influenced by which larger tradition they identify with . This could be seen as a smaller scale manifestation of the sciences versus the humanities split. Savage reframes the academia/industry or theory/practice binary as concepts versus skills (1). A concept-based approach is likely to attempt to define itself as a different field, a development of ethics, aesthetics, values, and professional identity while a skills-based approach is usually regarded as working in service to other industries or fields. If a field attempts to relocate from a subordinate position to increase its pay and stature, then it often needs to demonstrate its independence and value by developing unique concepts or theories. Thus, centering on skills can be seen as an attempt to maintain TC’s historical roots of service and subordination to engineering, industry, and manufacturing while emphasizing the conceptual approach is an attempt to obtain greater social capital and professional acceptance. Both approaches are likely correct: the ability to work with our historical clients is important, yet every profession evolves. Concepts and theory can facilitate evolution. Ignoring professional history and attempting to prevent the field’s evolution both seem short-sighted and rooted in short-term professional interests as opposed to interests in allowing the fullest expression and development of the field and its practitioners.
Fortunately, this divide is not permanent and not everyone embraces this binary. There have been attempts to bridge this divide. Miller’s assertion that technical communicators do practical rhetoric seems like a clear bridge between the practice/theory divide (Practical 23). Ironically, while Miller asserts that practical rhetoric could be a bridge between the two poles, her most famous article, “Humanistic Rationale” has helped polarize the field; it is foundational to numerous technical communicators who theirs as a humanistic practice and reject or condemn the often technical, scientific service to industry (check on Moore’s article on Miller). Thus, it is difficult to accept Miller’s proposition as genuinely trying to bridge the poles; by focusing on rhetoric, a millennia-old humanistic practice, she reinforces TC’s conceptual and ethical aspects. Her positioning of practical rhetoric is more inclusive than many writers who cite her. In spite of this, rhetoricians often reject “practical” applications of their art while practitioner often reject “rhetoric” out of hand for not being practical or not being “objective” like technical writing supposedly should be. Instead of acknowledging the inherently persuasive nature of socially constructed “objective” scientific texts or how rhetorical skills are used in the academy to obtain social instead of material capital, both poles–slightly hyperbolized here–do not seem to recognize how much they actually have in common. Thus, by ignoring Miller’s approach which urges collaboration between academia and industry, the division is furthered and deepened. (Practical 23).
Rivers presents a potential solution different from Miller. Rivers does not deny the split between science and politics, objective and subjective, or demonstration and persuasion in TC. Instead of giving preference to one or the other, he asserts that technical communicators can create new spaces and translate between different fields (191). This moves TC from a role of merely transmitting or translating information to a role of collecting and articulating information (193). Both concepts, creating new spaces and collecting and articulating information, changes technical communicators’ role and power in important ways. First, it does not dismiss historical roles; rather, it builds upon them by offering new and different spaces. By emphasizing collecting and articulating information, this approach emphasizes the activities instead of providing information to one pole or another. This enables the profession to focus on its activities more and internal conflict less. Rivers’ Latourian approach could be modified for each new space addressed, thereby embracing rhetoric’s emphasis upon context and audience as well as industry’s expectation for useful, actionable information which is relevant to them. However, there appears to be little adoption of his suggested approach.
Doctoral students are trained in the heart of the academy, and they often spend three to five years earning their degrees. Their investment in time, effort, emotion, and relationships is usually centered with other academics. Even if a student only attends classes and works with their committee, a massive investment in academia still occurs. While this clearly benefits the academy, it is not necessarily the best result for doctoral students. Indeed, it likely biases doctoral students with academia-centered values, preferences, and understandings about the best methods, uses, and applications of research. An absence of the “other,” industry, means that many doctoral students will not have or grasp the full potential range of how they can apply their skills in various contexts. Even when research is taught in ways applicable in industry, the emphasis of academic training and work is on publication and the generation of social capital; there is little doctoral training on how research skills in order to facilitate material capital.
This paper does not suggest that industry should take control over academia, or that social or material capital is more valuable than the other. Instead of seeing the need for either side to dominate or control the other, or the importance of one invading the other’s territory, the assemblage concept offers an approach to research training and application which enables academia and industry to maintain their binaric autonomy while generating valuable understanding and exposure to doctoral students interested in making the the slide between the binaric poles.
Abstract
Reframing Technical Communication’s Binaric Identity
Through the Assemblage Concept
Technical Communication (TC) is a young profession. Unlike philosophy, rhetoric, or physics, Technical Communication has not had centuries to develop a sense of itself, nor has it had time to establish full relationships with other fields, to develop traditional practices, or to be fully aware of its social, political, economic, and cultural positions. Thus it is of little surprise that the field’s identity is still discussed and contested. Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept offers a potential solution to the current binaric factionalization of Technical Communication. Instead of defining the field with these binaries as inherent to TC, the postmodern assemblage concept offers technical communicators a way to see binaries as poles on a line along which technical communicators can move or slide. Assemblages could help redefine the profession as a constantly shifting field where practitioners are but one territorializing force. For practitioners, assemblages offer the perspective and understanding that binaric poles exist, but an individual is not obligated to be loyal to either. Instead, practitioners are free to explore the territory between binaries. This means being free from socially constructed notions of loyalty to humanism or skills-based thinking, not being confined to academia or industry, or not thinking that they can only write certain kinds of texts. Recognizing that the poles’ control is constructed, sliding the lines between the binaries could potentially open up exciting new territory and help generate new kinds of practice, new research topics, and new methods.
Reframing Technical Communication’s Binaric Identity Through the Assemblage Concept
1 Introduction
Technical Communication (TC) is a young professional and academic field. Unlike philosophy, rhetoric, or physics, Technical Communication has not had centuries to develop a sense of itself as a field, nor has it had time to establish a series of relationships with other academic fields, to develop traditional practices, or to be fully aware of its social, political, economic, and cultural positions. Thus it is of little surprise that the field’s identity is still discussed and contested. Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept offers a potential solution to the current binaric factionalization of Technical Communication. Instead of defining the field with these binaries as inherent to TC, the assemblage concept offers technical communicators a way to see binaries as poles on a line along which technical communicators can move or slide.
Historically, Technical Communication has resisted theories and concepts which appear to have little practical or pragmatic value. This is due in part to TC’s initial role as a skills provider to engineers who needed to improve their writing; practitioners’ initial concentration within industry reinforced service experience. For decades, practitioners generated documents which supported physical processes, procedures, and equipment operation. Historical centering in supporting action, manufacture, and procedure has resulted in many practitioners identifying TC only with these kinds of relationships, services, and writing. In short, practical work is what the field did for decades; as many fields’ identities are based upon what they do and where they are located, it is no surprise that many practitioners’ identity resides in a fixed sense of being practical and pragmatic.
Technical Communication’s practical nature has been contested for several decades by the humanistic approach best signifed by Carolyn Miller’s articles. The pragmatic/humanstic binary is just one several which have divided TC. This paper emphasizes assemblage’s potential value to practitioners by contributing a different sense of professional identity. In order to address assemblage’s potential promise and its relevance to practical-minded practitioners, this paper situates and identifies several of TC’s major binaries, sites of continued struggle, which attempt to define “what” TC is. This identifies several of the forces at work in current discourse about professional identity. Second, the paper identifies assemblages’ core concepts that are relevant to discussing professional identity in this limited context. As these concepts are introduced, the paper attempts to demonstrate how assemblages can possibly reshape professional identity by valuing binaries in a different way. Thus, this paper addresses the problem of whether or not Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept be usefully applied to professional identity in TC. If it is possible to apply assemblage in practical ways, then it opens up a larger question of what other theoretical constructs, ignored or dismissed up until now as impractical, can be applied in a practical fashion to TC.
2 Situation
Rarely is a field consistent in how it sees and represents itself. If a field has hundreds of years of existence, then it is more likely than a relative newcomer to have a fixed sense of self. This has problems and benefits. While a relatively fixed sense of identity enables most members to agree on the purpose, role, and goals of the field, it can make the field less adaptable and more resistant to change. Relatively new fields like TC have the opposite problem: they are constantly impacted by change, especially if they are interdisciplinary like TC. Interdisciplinary fields by definition draw from a variety of other traditions in fields. Often, those fields hold conflicting values. When TC draws on ethnographic methods from anthropology, it values the qualitative. When TC draws on engineering’s need for facts, charts, and data to present in reports, it values the quantitative. Thus the richness of interdisciplinarity comes at the price of internal tensions. Within TC, two consistent binaries struggle to define practitioners and the field: humanistic/skills and academia/industry. While each pole has attempted to define the field’s identity, a few individuals have recognized that middle ground is not only possible but valuable. Assemblage theory not only recognizes the value of binaries, but the assemblage concept could potentially reshape the field’s view of itself by encouraging practitioners to see themselves as constantly sliding and shifting on the lines between the binaries’ poles. Rather than defending a fixed position at either pole or in the middle, movement between the binaries allows for constant movement, adaptation, and growth. This could contribute to the professional identity by emphasizing practitioner’s pragmatic ability to move between academia and industry as well as to work for socially-centered humanistic goals as well as for material culture and profit. Just because a technical communicator has worked in one arena does not mean they or their skills cannot be applied in other arenas. The assemblage concept could encourage practitioners to explore the territory between the different poles and thereby increase practitioners’ social and material capital as well as develop individual adaptability to change. Rather than waving humanism’s or capitalism’s banners, assemblage offers TC the potential to recenter their identity as adaptive problem solvers.
2.1 Binaries
Definitions are central in establishing TC’s identity. Definitions vary between the two traditional factions: academics and practitioners. The tension between these two populations often plays out as theory versus practice, and the arguments often draw in part on the “humanistic versus skills” tension for supporting evidence. Carolyn Miller indicates that the historical relationship between TC and science and technology has long made TC a positivist practice (Humanistic 49). Thus measurable, objective, and scientific criteria have been privileged in TC. Privileging the measurable and quantifiable in terms of professional competence can be seen in the drive for certification. Certification requires fixed standards, a certifying body, and some form of test or exam, and it is currently an important issue within the Society for Technical Communication. Cunningham uses a business paradigm as a basis for judging which criteria are important for TC; this establishes his view that the workplace and market should determine TC’s definition (1). Certification requires a valid and credible certification board and the demands a stable body of knowledge (Turner and Rainey 227-28). Hughes’ position in “Mapping Technical Communication to a Human Performance Technology Framework” is similar to Cunningham’s in that Hughes defines TC largely by communicators’ tasks, and he identifies how the shift in tasks, moving from writing manuals to helping users, has changed the nature of the field (368). This limits TC’s definition to a skills-based, evaluative position and excludes the potential for larger social action or theory.
While practitioners often support the skills-centered position, academics usually assume the humanistic stance. Knievel observes that TC’s historical relationships with and roots in both technology and the humanities might explain the academia/industry tension (66). Another mitigating factor Patrick Moore indicates is the different kinds of capital, social and material, which the academy and workplace prioritize and value (208). Mara states, “The argument between overly practical Technical Communication approaches and more civic-minded approaches, such as service learning, echoes a long-standing technical communication and rhetorical division between the Aristotelian notions of praxis and technê” (219). Mara’s assertion, rooted in Carolyn Miller’s seminal “Humanistic Rationale,” implies that the academic/practitioner split echoes a much older division and supports Knievel’s claim. Savage reframes the academia/industry or theory/practice binary as concepts versus skills (1). It is unlikely that the academia/industry binary will be overcome or resolved within the confines of a fixed field, only-one-definition-allowed approach to professionalization.
The efforts to resolve these splits have largely failed. In one attempt, Davis asserts that there should separate definitions and criteria for academic and practitioner technical communicators (84). Cementing the field’s binaries might result in creating two completely different communities. For a nascent field like TC, already struggling for power and legitimacy, this could cost both communities the credibility and status they currently have. In another move towards resolution, Miller asserts technical communicators do practical rhetoric; this appears as bridge between the practice/theory divide and urges collaboration between academia and industry (Practical 23). Unfortunately, rhetoricians often reject “practical” applications while practitioners often reject “rhetoric.” In one of the boldest propositions, Rivers’ asserts technical communicators can create new spaces and translate between different fields (191). This solution seems more viable because it does not deny the split between science and politics, objective and subjective, or demonstration and persuasion in TC. Rivers’ approach shifts TC from being a transmitter to collecting and articulating information between different stakeholders (193). Johnson-Eilola and Selber offer another model: three dimensional axes of teaching, thinking, and doing with no edges (416). This model’s unbordered nature, its openness to outside influences, corresponds well with an assemblage-based approach. It allows for free movement on the three axes and enables constant redefinition of what technical communicators do and where they operate. If identity were determined by the movements and shifts along these axes, it could redefine the role of binaries in discussions of TC’s identity as well as value the identity’s fluidity.
2.2 Assemblages
The potential for constant shift and redefinition of the professional self as well as the field can feel nebulous; however, constant movement and shifting appears to be a more accurate rendering of lived experience than fixed universals. Attempting to concretize TC’s identity as only skills-based or only humanistic is an attempt to create or establish a fixed universal in the metanarrative of professionalism. In spite of all of Postmodernism’s contributions to current thought and practice, professional fields still drive to establish these fixed universals because they are often rewarded by prestige and profit. Assemblages, as a postmodern concept, denies fixed universals. Assemblage theory is similar to Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s open axes in its discussion of fields, lines, and territorialization and de territorialization. Instead of having a simple, fixed definition, assemblages are explicated rhizomically: Deleuze and Guattari discuss it in a number of their works. In order to address how assemblage theory can be directly relevant to theory-skeptical practitioners, this paper centers on a few key ideas from the complex vocabulary which emerges around assemblages. A brief tangent into Postmodernism is necessary to help ground this shift in perspective. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is postmodern, and as Cooper and Burrell explain, Postmodernism centers on non-human actors and moves away from anthropocentric views. The importance of human actors’ role differs in the two views. Modernists center humanity and treat them as primary actors; Postmodernists like Deleuze decenter human agents and regard social life as indeterminate and paradoxical (91). As Cooper and Burrell state, “In the postmodern view, organization is less the expression of planned thought and calculative action and a more defensive reaction to forces intrinsic to the social body which constantly threaten the stability of organized life” (91). For practitioners grounded in the workplace, this may seem unreal or completely irrelevant. What link is there to their professional identity? With a postmodern understanding, human and non-human forces are seen as shaping human response and environments. It is possible to see TC’s binaries as more than the result of discourse or lived experience; instead, the binaries themselves are actors/operators which impact and help define technical communicators and TC.
Similar to Johnson-Eilola and Selber visual representation, assemblages are “tetravalent” in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus description; the horizontal axes are expression and content, in the authors’ terms bodies and passions, while the vertical axes are territorialization and deterritorialization (88, 505). Assemblages are constantly shifting on the axes described above; they do not possess fixed borders or limitations. Assemblages are the result and the expression of multiple complicated and developing relationships between the different forces represented on and by the axes. Finally, assemblages operate in material and non-material manners, and language is not a determining or driving element in assemblages. For another view of these dense but powerful concepts, Wise summarizes them:
Deleuze and Guattari write that assemblages have two axes. One axis is the creation of territory, on strata, thus moving between making (territorialization) and unmaking (deterritorialization) on the Body without Organs. The other axis is the enunciation of signifiers, collectively, moving between technology (content, material) and language (express, non-corporeal effects). Assemblages are made and unmade along each of these dimensions (80).
For technical communicators, this offers them a chance potential to see their role as motivated by body and passion as well as where they have been and what they have done. While these factors are sometimes given lip service, there has been little discussion as to how these factors help define and determine the field. With the assemblage model, these factors become definitional instead of tertiary. As practitioners change and develop, a shift in professional interests and movement is normal. Similarly, neither the practitioner nor the workplace is the only force impacting their identity; instead, having multiple moves available on the axes presents change and movement as a very part of the field while acknowledging the power of non-human forces to influence the changes a practitioner experiences. While it is unlikely that practitioners or academics can or will fully embrace these as major influencing factors in their professional identity, assemblage theory provides an opportunity with an alternate set of criteria to determine how identity is created and defined.
As assemblages move on the tetravalent axes, their processes of territorialization and deterritorialization quantify assemblages’ forms and largely define what they as both material and enunciative (ATP 90,504). In terms of professional identity, this means that who a practitioner is and what they do is constantly changing; a practitioner need not, indeed cannot, create a fixed identity that remains in one place and engages in a fixed set of actions. Relevant to TC as a field is the point that assemblages are constantly shifting bodies which shift to produce signs, not language, and that an assemblage’s territory defines what it is. Language comes second. As an assemblage’s territory shifts, which is constant process, its identity transforms and as do the signs it produces. This constantly transforming nature is similar to the field because many practitioners and academics are constantly working with different professionals at different job sites while undertaking different tasks in changing organizational roles.
The constant shifts in territory underscore what Buchanan asserts is Deleuze and Guattari’s most utopian idea: that “one can think differently—not merely new thoughts, but an entirely fresh way of thinking” (117). This mode of thinking is nomadism. An assemblage makes nomadism possible because the assemblage “is able to articulate the slide into oblivion of one mode of thought together with the rise to dominance of another without having to explain it in terms of either succession or negation, but can instead stage it as a coadaptation” (118). This slide occurs on the tetravalent axes. The slide appears to remove the necessity for cause-effect explanation, evolutionary thinking of ideas, or arborescent models of thinking, power, responsibility, and/or development. This supports Buchanan utopian label because the slide occurs without having to justify, explain, or support human-centered perspectives or models of development and evolution. This can potentially empower practitioners by enabling them to see that shifts and changes in the field are not necessarily due to human action; this offers the chance to allow for or accept changes without having to explain or justify them in linear or causal language. In “real world” terms, it would not be as important or necessary to locate or assign blame or expend attention worrying about workplace or professional changes; accepting them and moving on could help avoid a great deal of personal stress. Additionally, technical communicators could conceive of their work as nomadic and attempt to fit in wherever it is appropriate as opposed to being concerned about whether or not their work resides in one binary or the other. Buchanan asserts that an assemblage’s value is that it avoids dualism and valuing by being in dialogue between the two poles (119). Assemblages are not simply arborescent or rhizomic; instead they move between the two models. Something that can be rhizomic or arboreal is considered an assemblage (120). Assemblages constantly adapt, mutate, and their constantly changing nature allows them to both create and adapt to numerous kinds of models, contexts, and situations. This adaptability seems ideal for technical communicators who work in diverse situations for an array of employers to fill ever-changing roles. Just as assemblage could encourage greater professional adaptability, the professional identity of TC could be seen more as an ability to adapt rather than to provide specific skills or values.
3 Application
Assemblages’ traits, their complexity and shifting territorilization in the fields of technology and language is similar to Technical Communication. Since its inception, TC has dispersed diverse practitioners in different environments. Attempting to limit TC to a simple or single definition limits the lessons learned and value obtained from this diverse historical experience. It also threatens to limit where and how technical communicators can operate. Assemblages’ non-human centered approach offers practitioners the potential to enjoy and thrive from these complexities and binaries as an inherent aspect of organizational and perceptual creation. Rather than focus on remaining fixed, technical communicators could seek out and work with flows of agency instead of attempting to resist them or freeze them with sterile or limited definitions. Temporary and contextual definitions are important for site-specific problem solving; however, those definitions should be considered temporary. Applying this historically, TC could be regarded as having been a skills-based practice which slid into a humanistic practice and which continues to slide. This acknowledges the value and contributions of both poles without installing them as definitional, limiting roles.
Many technical communicators with humanist agendas have decried the anti-human or “cruel” aspects of TC. While anthropocentric views comfort, it is useful to realize that there are structures, forces, and flows which operate beyond human creation, understanding, or control. Ironically, technical communicators have been operating within the milieu of non-human actors, large corporate, governmental, and non-profit agencies, since the field’s inception. As Cooper and Burrell indicate, these entities develop their own rationale which often makes it appear as if rationality created the organization thereby naturalizing the organization. Not all technical communicators will accept this postmodern perspective. Their resistance to Postmodernism and adherence to Modernism creates another line in the assemblage of TC along which practitioners can slide. Assemblage theory enables technical communicators to interact, react, and identify with these forces, Postmodernism and Modernism included, for what they are: forces and assemblages which continually change. Instead of spending valuable time, energy, and effort attempting to moralize, justify, or condemn the forces, practitioners could center their efforts on researching the field’s history to determine past assemblages, focus on their current work in order to satisfy current clients or audiences, or explore how one or several assemblages or forces appears to be changing or moving.
4 Conclusion
This paper has attempted to slide the line between the poles of anthropocentric values and non-human actors. In order to indicate a postmodern concept’s value, it is often necessary to demonstrate the practical impact that concept can have on an individual’s life or identity. No matter how much stock is placed in rich theories which decenter humanity and emphasize non-human actors, the fact is readers and authors are still human. We are the center of our awareness, and it is not possible for us to stop being human. Thus, by demonstrating how valuing non-human forces and agents can create direct value and better professional experience, this paper has attempted to move along the line between Modernism and Postmodernism.
Technical communicators, by using the assemblage concept, could see a vast territory to explore instead of a walled and disciplined discipline where they must remain. Binaries’ poles help define the territory where technical communicators operate as well as the lines of force upon which they can slide/move. Rather than simple acceptance of one binaric pole over another, with conscious and intentional awareness of binaries, another option arises: to understand the poles and then slide the lines between depending upon the context. For the field of TC, assemblages could help redefine the profession as a constantly shifting field where practitioners are but one of many territorializing forces. Rather than expending resources in attempts to retain rigid and fixed definitions and resist assemblages’ changing nature, it is possible for practitioners to apply the assemblage concept by centering efforts on exploring the territories between the various poles and by working to understand how they, as individuals and a profession, can and cannot impact the territory called Technical Communication. For the individual practitioner, assemblages offer not just the perspective, but an understanding that binaric poles exist, but that the individual is not obligated to be loyal to one or the other. Instead, the practitioner is free to explore all of the territory between the different binaries. In practical terms, this means being free from socially constructed notions of loyalty to humanism or skills-based thinking, not being confined to working only in academia or industry, or not thinking that they can only write certain kinds of texts. Recognizing that the poles’ control is constructed, sliding the lines between the binaries could potentially open up exciting new territory and help generate new kinds of practice, new research topics, and new methods.
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