Brenton Faber
Technical Communication
Clarkson University
Discourse, technology, & change
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To identify and analyze singularities however is by no means
to deny their contemporary status and consequently their
interconnections with many other things in the world
- Paul Rabinow, French DNA, p. 180
Proclamations are delivered in unique and ideal rhetorical contexts. As a ritual conjoining of an audience's relative weakness to effect a situation and a writer's unquestioned right to issue a decree, a proclamation appears uninhibited by the whimsical necessities of persuasion. And, so it was, on a small college campus, in a remote corner of the United States during the final days of July 2002. Here, the college's 15th President proclaimed a new corporate-university partnership with a multi-national computer firm. This book is about the implementation of this proclamation: The strategic use of a discourse used to explain, compel, and drive the partnership; the discursive tensions that occurred as the implementation context became more complex and resistant; and the unique forms of persuasion used to convince people to accept the changes this partnership created.
At the same time, this book is concerned with more than just this one relatively minor event. In highlighting this singular example, this study is also concerned with an emerging form of language use associated with the problem of change and more specifically with the implementation of intended and unintended changes within social communities and organizations. While this book's focus is the implementation of a new software system at Northeastern Tech, the singularity of this event occurs simultaneously within several different intersections: discourse and change, language and context, universities and corporations, technology and social change.
Persuasion, deliberation, and argument are key components of social life, vital aspects of a modern democracy, and a crucial reason why we learn to use sophisticated forms of language. As Kenneth Burke often repeated, humans are “symbol using animals” (1966, p.3) and persuasion is a long-practiced symbolic activity. The act and process of persuasion, Burke writes, is important because “persuasion involves choice, will.” It is directed to someone only because that person is free to choose among different options (1969, p. 50).
Given this assumption, that language enables and encourages deliberation and participation, I am using the phrase the technology of change to describe two separate but related processes of social change. The first process uses language to construct a world in which participants do not appear to have choices. The second refers to contexts in which choice is materially limited but the process of persuasion, argument, and deliberation are used to hide this material condition. Both situations enact what Burke called peithananke, “compulsion [enacted] under the guise of persuasion” (1950, p. 50) and it is this act of discursive compulsion that I am associating with technologized discourse. By examining the interplay between discourse and compulsion, between strategies of discourse that situate change as necessary or compulsory, and necessary situations that are presented as choices or options, I want to examine and raise questions about how change is planned, implemented, and sustained in social contexts.