Haptic Visions. Valerie Hanson
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of rhetorical analysis: productions such as STM images.
Chapter 2, “Camera Haptica: Blindness, Histories, and Productions of Haptic Vision,” examines another set of practices associated with generating STM images: the vision practices that STM users and other viewers engage in while viewing STM images like the “IBM” series. After discussing how seeing can be understood as a practice that is itself derived from culturally and historically specific practices, I argue that the practices the STM user and the STM image viewer employ should be considered practices of haptic vision, practices that fuse the senses of vision and touch. Haptic vision practices found in STM use are themselves partially formed by other practices of seeing; including practices associated with microscopy, informational imaging, and digital vision. Haptic vision practices also affect image viewers through the constitution of a different and dynamic relation between the observer and the observed than dominant vision practices that involve perspective. As I demonstrate in this chapter, these haptic vision practices thus also affect the composition and rhetorical impact of STM images.
Chapter 3, “Haptical Consistency: Emerging Conventions of the STM Image-Interface,” builds on the first two chapters as it explores some of the rhetorical effects on images brought about by engaging in the interactive, haptic practices inherent in STM use, image creation, and image viewing. I focus on how the use of STM images as interfaces affects visual conventions of STM images, thus accounting for the ways interaction affects image production and reading practices. While STM imaging conventions include references to the dominant convention of linear perspective, STM imaging conventions also exceed dominant conventions, revealing a disjunction between how images function to communicate information and the current cultural conventions for reading informational, scientific images. I argue that other visual conventions are developing, and analyze what the emerging conventions reveal about the persuasive elements of STM images. This chapter also presents a framework for understanding how the reading practices of digital, informational images and their attendant conventions create effects in readers that should be considered a crucial component of how digital, informational images function rhetorically in discourses.
Chapter 4, “Visual Intelligence: Reading the Rhetorical Work of STM Imagesin Tropes,” shifts my level of analysis of the rhetorics of STM images to specific tropes. I follow two established scientific tropes that occur frequently in scientific and nanotechnology discourses: the trope of writing that Eigler and Schweizer’s “IBM” images exhibit, and the conventional microscope trope of tiny worlds made visible. I demonstrate how the expression of these two tropes mutates in STM images, linking the change in the tropes to the image production and viewing practices that microscope users and image viewers undergo. The alteration of common scientific tropes suggests changes in the formations of scientific knowledge and the field of nanotechnology, affecting our positions in relation to the nanoscale.
Finally, the conclusion, “Haptic Visions of Science and Rhetoric: Interaction and its Implications,” explores the rhetorical elements identified in the previous chapters for how the elements may suggest possible changes in rhetorical strategies, given the deeply interactive nature of image-making, image-viewing, and the practices of haptic vision. In addition to signaling a change in rhetorical practices to include more persuasion through the experience of the image as interface, I explore why understanding more experiential, visual persuasion is important for understanding nanotechnology and other emerging sciences, especially in relation to the production of scientific knowledge. Such considerations become particularly important as practices of envisioning and arguing shift as we respond to changes such as those brought about by developments in digital media and visualization technologies, in addition to the ensuing changes in how we view, envision, and interact with the world from atoms on up.
1 Imaging Atoms, Imagining Information: Rhetorical Dynamics of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope
A curious thing happened to scientific concepts of atoms around the time that D. M. Eigler and E. K. Schweizer published the “IBM” images. Discussions of atoms drifted from the dominant quantum-mechanical perspective in which individual atoms cannot be measured because, as quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger explains, “The individual particle is not a well-defined permanent entity of detectable identity or sameness” (qtd. in Regis 155). According to this view, atoms do not occupy one place at one time, do not have boundaries, and cannot be measured singly: atoms can only be measured in collective quantities. After the 1980s, however, scientists studying atoms returned to talking about atoms as individual, bounded entities—similar to how Isaac Newton envisioned atoms, although with a twist: now atoms were manipulable, almost tangible. The shift towards conceptualizing atoms as manipulable has important consequences for how we understand and move within the world around us. The shift towards the manipulable atom also forms a rich site for examining rhetorical practices in technologies, scientific fields, and the cultures in which the technologies and fields exist.
Why the shift towards the manipulable atom happened is not entirely clear. In a popular history about the early development of nanotechnology, Ed Regis contends that the events that helped spur what he calls a paradigm shift in the concept of atoms in the early 1990s include Richard Feynman’s 1960 speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and Robert Van Dyck, Philip Ekstrom, and Hans Dehmelt’s capture of individual electrons in 1976 (Van Dyck, Ekstrom and Dehmelt 776). However, Regis and others also suggest that the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), and related scanning probe microscopes, played a part. Science studies scholar Jochen Hennig, for example, argues that the STM has occasioned a shift in the definition of atoms (“Images”). Regis claims that Eigler and Schweizer’s “IBM” atom manipulation proved that atoms “were in fact and could be treated as mechanical, Newtonian entities. They were objects that could be made to do things” (269).
Scientists also point to the development of the STM and related microscopies when accounting for the shift toward understanding atoms as manipulable, individual entities. For example, one scientist I interviewed in 2005 explained the conceptual change in terms of the development of techniques:
When people first started thinking about surfaces and working on them scientifically, they thought in very atomistic ways, but they didn’t really have techniques to look at them. They just kind of came up with ideas. And then as techniques developed, the techniques tended to be what was called reciprocal space [as opposed to “real space”], so they’re diffraction measurements and people started thinking about periodic structures and then trying to guess what those structures were and compare them to their data. And then when scanning probes [that collect real-space data] came along, two things happened. [One was that] [t]he view flipped back to the atomistic view. . . . 12
In another example from the journal Science, two scientists who use the STM, James K. Gimzewski and Christian Joachim, summarize the impact of STMs on scientists’ relations to atoms: “By the early 1980s, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) . . . radically changed the ways we interacted with and even regarded single atoms and molecules” (1683). Gimzewski and Joachim’s implication that scientists expect to interact with atoms—so much that interacting with atoms is ranked as more important than regarding atoms—indicates the importance of interaction. In Gimzewski and Joachim’s view, supported also by Eigler and Schweizer’s images among other instances, atoms are not simply solid masses; atoms are also masses with which humans can interact.
The assertion that humans can interact with individual atoms affects scientists working with the STM as well as the development of nanotechnology, as mentioned in the introduction. While rhetorics of arguments that use atom manipulation as justification for developing and funding nanotechnology reveal fascinating dynamics of policy and field formation, the rhetoric of atom manipulation through interaction with the nanoscale also functions at the level of everyday scientific practice, including imaging. The fact that discourses about atoms came to include assumptions of interaction for scientists also prompts further questions for rhetoric. Statements from the scientists and historians mentioned above, for example, suggest the STM is a key player in this change, although the STM did not create the first views of atoms—Erwin Müller first photographed atoms in 1955 with a field ion microscope (Müller and Bahadur; Müller). Whether or not the STM affected the shift towards understanding atoms as manipulable, the fact that the STM is mentioned in discourses