Haptic Visions. Valerie Hanson
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especially because the primary function of images in science is to convey data. (However, the functions of scientific digital images are not limited to expressing information, as is discussed in Chapter 3.) Studying in detail how informational images—images designed to convey data11–function rhetorically in discourse is especially important because informational images do not create an inherent relation between the image’s appearance or resemblance and what the image represents. For example, while the “IBM” images contain elements that “look like” atoms, the image elements are not actual depictions, like photographs; yet, the images are depictions—of data about objects built through interaction with the image and atoms. Digital, informational images blur the boundaries between presenting information and resembling objects—objects that cannot be visualized with the eye, or even with light microscopes, as atoms are smaller than the minimum resolution of light waves. Exploring how informational images such as STM images function rhetorically within discourse, given the blurred boundary between presenting information and resembling objects, can articulate how informational images function persuasively as well as how the images’ form and expression of information affect the arguments in which the images appear. Studying the rhetorical role of images important to the discourse of nanotechnology can thus show the impact of digital media on a field, as well as a field’s impact on digital media.
Toward A Visual Rhetoric of Digital Images in Nanotechnology
To explore the rhetorics of images in nanotechnology that exist at the intersection of emerging science and technology and digital data visualization, such as those Eigler and Schweizer created, Haptic Visions considers how instruments, scientific imaging practices, and image-viewing practices may influence and produce rhetorics. To do so, this book focuses on how, in addition to producing images, the particular configurations of practices that allow the STM to visualize and manipulate atoms also make for a new visibility. Atoms do not only become “visible” in the general sense of the word, showing up on the computer screen or in journal articles, but also more specifically become places within what Michel Foucault calls a field of visibility. As Gilles Deleuze explains in his book on Foucault, fields of visibilities are not only physical spaces, but also are ways of distributing light: “If different examples of architecture, for example, are visibilities, places of visibilities, this is because they are not just figures of stone, assemblages of things and combinations of qualities, but first and foremost forms of light that distribute light and dark, opaque and transparent, seen and non-seen, etc.” (Foucault 57). Thinking of what becomes visible in terms of a field of visibility expands inquiry from what is or is not seen to how it becomes possible to see what is seen—how forms of light that distribute light and dark, seen and non-seen, for example, make it possible to see interaction with atoms.
Following the practices that allow interaction with atoms to become visible requires following more than the rhetorics of published STM images such as Eigler and Schweizer’s; further insight into what and how STM images communicate also requires attention to the material and cultural conditions from which scientific knowledge about the nanoscale emerges. Richard Doyle’s coinage of the term “rhetorical software” to describe the interactions of rhetoric (in verbal or visual statements) with hardware (e.g., instruments, lab equipment, etc.) and wetware (i.e., human users) articulates how material and cultural conditions constrain and enable the others in the production of scientific discourse (7). The concept of “rhetorical software” also highlights how digital images can persuasively communicate about the nanoscale through rhetorical registers that may be new, as well as through those that may be familiar, as rhetorics interact with hardware and wetware. Haptic Visions’ study of scientific images’ rhetorical functions within the context of STM images’ production and use, as well as the field in which the images circulate, thus provides a detailed example of digital image rhetorics that expands the visual rhetoric of digital images beyond that which has been developed in conjunction with art, in new/digital media studies, or computer-mediated composition. This book also argues for the importance of material, embodied rhetorics of image production processes through focusing on the material and cultural conditions of image production and viewing, thus also contributing to scholarship of visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of science on production practices, and to scholarship on the embodied, material rhetorics of technologies. Haptic Visions extends analysis of the visual beyond representational analysis through studying images whose visual format does not always relate to what the images depict, so that analysis moves beyond how what an image looks like communicates its message. This book adds to recent work in visual rhetoric, such as the work of Bradford Vivian, who argues that we consider aspects of images besides representational ones as rhetorical. Vivian examines how images “produce and enact modes of spectatorship, subject-object relations, forms of affect, or grounds for competing attributions of sense and value in ways that cannot be explained in full by representational categories” (474). Though Vivian analyzes political images, his focus on the rhetorical aspects of images that reach beyond the representational, such as their productive capacities, is a focus that Haptic Visions shares. Following the operations of rhetorical software within the space in which the manipulation of atoms and interactions with the nanoscale become visible thus illuminates not only atoms, images, and the “software”—the rhetorics—but also the ways in which we are configured within that space of visibility.
The rhetorical dynamics surrounding STM images show how new visualization technologies and images become incorporated persuasively and understandably in communications. Studying the rhetorics of STM images also encompasses the study of how we are altered by the habit of interacting with STM images—we incorporate them into “our very humanity,” as scholars like Donna Haraway (183–201) and Langdon Winner (12) argue. How do digital visualization technologies extend our notion of seeing, and how do we change in order to see what we cannot see with our biological eyes? How do such changes affect information and objects of scientific study? These broader questions form the impetus for the more specific analysis of STM images in discourses of nanotechnology that Haptic Visions undertakes.
Organization of Haptic Visions
To articulate a space in which atoms and manipulations are made visible, this book presents a close study of nanoscale images such as Eigler and Schweizer’s to explore the rhetorical possibilities of STM images. At the same time, Haptic Visions traces the visual cultures from which the images emerge and in which the images circulate; this book also articulates the transformations occurring within science, knowledge production, and ourselves that allow us to see and manipulate atoms. I draw from work in rhetoric; the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology; visual studies (particularly the history and sociology of scientific images, art history, and digital media studies); cultural studies; and science studies. I also draw from primary texts in physics, chemistry, and nanotechnology; and from interviews I conducted in 2005 and 2006 with scientists who use the scanning tunneling microscope.
To focus on manipulation, each chapter in this book analyzes a different aspect of how interaction functions rhetorically in the case of nanotechnology—in the workings of the STM, in Chapter 1; in changing vision practices associated with the use of the microscope and its productions, in Chapter 2; in changing visual conventions used in STM images, in Chapter 3; and in common but changing scientific tropes that appear in both text and image in nanotechnology discourses, in Chapter 4. While each chapter can be read independently, the different topics of the chapters overlap at times; together, the chapters articulate complex dynamics of the rhetorics at play in nanotechnology discourses and scientific visualization discourses.
Chapter 1, “Imaging Atoms, Imagining Information: Rhetorical Dynamics of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope,” explores the question of how atoms become both visible and manipulable through focusing on the rhetorics of the visualization technology that Eigler and Schweizer used, the STM. In the chapter, I analyze the rhetorical possibilities inherent in the STM’s operating dynamics, and then situate these operating dynamics within wider scientific, medical, and digital visualization trends in order to highlight how the STM’s operating dynamics contribute to rhetorical actions and productions. I also follow the influence of the STM’s operating dynamics on the productions of the STM—images information, and atoms—in order to show how the rhetorics that the operating dynamics make possible help present atoms as able to be manipulated and as tangible, individual entities. I argue for my method of analyzing image production