Rhetorical practices

Others, notably Musson and Robinson, have stressed the scientific nature of Watt s work, often by indicating his reliance upon, or at least his close association with, Blacks researches on heat. Most recendy Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart have endorsed this view on broader grounds.43 In much modern scholarship the boundaries between science/technology and between rhetoric/practice are not seen as being so readily drawn, if drawable at all. The contingent processes whereby such boundaries are constructed have become, for many, the object of study.44... 

This is a book about rhetorical practices, not mine safety, though mine safety is central to the questions 1 am asking. Rather, mine safety provides a rich technical and historical context where problems of rhetorical agency, narrative, and the negotiation of meaning have visible and tragic outcomes. When 1 am asked, What s at stake , 1 frequently answer, Miners lives. But that answer does not address what is at stake in rethinking technical dcK-umentation from the perspective of those who work in hazardous environments. 

But risk specialists can also benefit from an understanding of the rhetorical practices that influence how we document what audiences know. ... 

Hazardous environments are poorly understtK)d and difficult to manage, even with the best technologies. Workers and management face production pressures that frequently invite disaster. Even under the best circumstances, compliance is difficult and complex. Within the Cycle, no single document can include all of the information that individuals would need to provide a 100% certain level of safety underground. Each document is ultimately the product of many rhetorical actions that may be so naturalized that writers no longer see these acts as rhetorical choices. If we attempt to build a theory of rhetorical practice based solely on our analysis of mitten documentation at any moment in the Cycle, we may miss the important rhetorical work that takes place at critical moments of transformation within the Cycle. 

This potential for a better future drives agencies to produce new technologies that will improve the health and safety of workers. It should also drive us to rethink how technical and material uncertainty might challenge the rs-sumptions that drive our rhetorical practice... 

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, conventional written documentation may fail to capture an individual s embodied sensory experience. Conventional forms of workplace discourse like instructions and procedures can render invisible the diverse viewpoints of observers situated literally and physically in a different relation to risk. Written documents may also fail t(t capture knowledge embodied in speech and gesture. Before we can speak with confidence about what audiences know, we must find ways to fill the gaps in our own rhetorical practice. 

For rhetoricians, the profound uncertainty of hazardous environments ultimately challenges the conventions of technical writing in the workplace and causes us to rethink the fundamental assumptions that guide rhetorical practice. By identifying areas of uncertainty, social scientists can help scientists discover new areas for research and new questions for analysis. When rhetoricians articulate the uncertainty in scientific models and methods, they too help scientists discover new questions for analysis. What kinds of war-... 

The following chapters focus on the rhetorical transformation and re-transformation of experience at the boundaries between agencies and the sites they seek to regulate. In exploring these transformations, we begin to discover the full range of rhetorical practices that constitute the Rhetoric of Risk (Fig. 3.3). 

The interviews in this chapter remind us that agencies must learn to account for the ways that habitual and strategic rhetorical practices create uncertainty in the transcript even as they learn to use rhetorical strategies to create better representations of risk. In the final chapter, we explore the implications of our research more generally for rhetorical theorists. 

With the invention of three-dimensional perspective, print made possible the kinds of rhetorical practices (such as mapping) that were necessary for technological expansion in Europe." A new interest in tmth became possible because printed texts increased the dissemination of knowledge and revealed the contradictions, disagreements, errors and difference that were not visible in individual (and widely dispersed) manuscripts. It was easy to extend this research to draw parallels between the emergence of print culture and the emergence of new media at the dawn of the new millennium. 

Alchemy is ubiquitous, multiple, and self-repIicating. But what is alchemy A practice A theory Some combination of both A historical oddity or an atemporal spiritual mode Is alchemy primarily about the production of gold from a base substance If so, what does one do with the product Display it like a trophy Drink it in order to extend life infinitely Project it in order to make more gold And then what Like a coin that is passed around so often it is clipped, sweated, and worn, alchemy has entered our rhetorical circulation, so that the original circumstances of its... 

In this discussion, Marx refers to commodities of a practical nature, such as a garment, railroad tracks, or a house. Yet the model that he proposes is useful for understanding alchemy, even if the commodity—gold—is not something whose potentiality can immediately be exploited. Put another way, in the labour-process, therefore, man s activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the product (Marx 1867, 180). Isn t this precisely what the traditional alchemist struggles against with all of his rhetorical force ... 

This is especially important to mention since Revel s two-part book, as published in 1905, presently remains the single documented, published source for Duchamp s notorious preoccupation with le Hasard, or Chance. Curiously, in spite of so much ink spilled on the subject of Duchamp s theories of chance, no one ever cites what M. Revel had to say about the subject, even though—to repeat a rhetorical point—his book remains the artist s only documented source material for his celebrated aleatory researches. At that time, of course, Duchamp was scarcely unique in pursuing the artistic possibilities presented by the operations of Chance—but Duchamp remains the only avant-garde artist known to have perused Revel s treatise. - But first we must see what Duchamp himself actually said and did in practice concerning matters motivated by le Hasard. 

Almost every important French chemist in the middle years of the eighteenth century attended lectures that Guillaume Francois Rouelle (1703-70) gave at the King s Garden (the Jardin du roi) in Paris. He was a lively lecturer, dismissive of the theoretical excesses of other lecturers, and anxious to make his lectures be practical demonstrations of chemical phenomena. His style was scarcely that of traditional academics. In the heat of his experiments, he would roll up his sleeves, get his hands and forearms and sometimes his face and shirt dirty, and show how chemistry was above all a science of practice. This was not just rhetoric for Rouelle, practice was a crucial part of chemistry. Rouelle had more than important theoretical ideas to communicate. He had innovative views about principles and instruments, and these views brought together concepts that Stahl had kept distinct. 

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