Haptic Visions. Valerie Hanson
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on scientific practice and discourse.
This chapter explores what is persuasive about the STM and the rhetorics of the STM’s operating dynamics in visualizing the nanoscale, contributing to a partial13 account of how it is that atoms become both visible and manipulable. I identify rhetorical possibilities the STM includes and encourages through identifying and analyzing STM operating dynamics in the context of the STM and broader scientific, medical, and digital visualization trends. I also track the influence of STM dynamics on images, information, and atoms to demonstrate rhetorical links between the operating dynamics and productions of the STM. In so doing, I present (and argue for) a method for studying the rhetorics of visualization technologies that includes analysis of productions and production practices. Insights developed from analyzing STM dynamics individually, and in connection with STM productions, can further inform analyses of STM images as well as the scientific and other discourses to which the images contribute, including analyses found in this book. Before turning to the STM’s dynamics, I demonstrate how scientific and medical instruments make rhetorical contributions to scientific and medical discourses, and articulate the STM’s relationship to other recent scientific visualization technologies to show the significance of the STM for rhetoricians of science, medicine, and digital technologies.
Visualization Technologies as Rhetorical Instruments
Instruments contain much more than springs, circuits, and film, and they are certainly not (pace Bachelard) merely reified theories. Instruments embody—literally—powerful currents emanating from cultures far beyond the shores of a master equation or an ontological hypothesis.
—Peter Galison
Optical devices constitute “points of intersection where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses overlap with mechanical techniques, institutional requirements and socioeconomic forces.”
— Jonathan Crary
Historian of science Peter Galison and art historian Jonathan Crary’s comments on scientific and optical instruments exemplify some of the ways in which scholars from science studies, history of science and technology, art history, and related fields analyze how instruments develop and operate within complex systems of social and technical knowledge production. However, not many scholars have focused on the rhetorical aspects of instruments within knowledge-producing systems. Instead, most rhetoricians focus on either the productions of scientific or medical instruments (such as specific images or texts associated with knowledge produced by instruments) or the practices afforded by tools or technologies of instruments more directly related to composition (such as the computer).14 However, elaborating on how scholars have studied the functions of such instruments offers support for an argument about how scientific instruments, such as the STM, include rhetorical functions. While researchers using new instruments can use an appeal to novelty to argue for the significance of the instrument, rhetorical appeals based on newness are limited in time and scope. Instruments can function in more potent rhetorical ways and influence the generation and practice of rhetorics that affect discourses surrounding knowledge production.
Instruments as Rhetorical Entities
Scholarship in the history of science, science studies, and art history features arguments for considering instruments as situated within the complexities of practice. For example, scholars within laboratory studies, a subfield of science studies, have generated ethnographies of the work of scientists that situate instruments within everyday practices, and describe how instruments function within complex systems of knowledge production.15 While not focused on rhetoric, studies that situate instruments within the context of practice are also useful for understanding the rhetorical contributions of instruments within the context of scientific practice. Two ways that historians, science studies scholars, and art historians situate and analyze instruments also demonstrate the significance of analyzing the rhetorical aspects of instruments.
First, many scholars of science studies and related fields have used Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s theorization of laboratory work in their classic ethnography, Laboratory Life, to structure analyses that account for the wider cultures that Galison and Crary mention, as well as the daily complexities of scientific practice. Latour and Woolgar conceptualize the goal of laboratory work as the production of inscriptions—textual or visual marks on paper in scientific journals. The practices that produce inscriptions are the work of the laboratory; inscriptions form part of how scientists convince other scientists that statements produced by scientists are scientific fact, are worth passing along, and are worth citing (Latour, “Drawing” 24). Indeed, Latour claims that inscription practices lead towards rhetorical as well as epistemic goals: Significant uses of writing or visualization in science are “those aspects that help in the mustering, the presentation, the increase, the effective alignment, or ensuring the fidelity of new allies” (“Drawing” 24).
Focusing on inscriptions while analyzing scientific practice highlights the rhetorical possibilities of instruments, especially as inscription practices can include devices (such as instruments) as well as communicative methods: material and social practices inform and contribute to scientific knowledge production, and also influence scientific method.16 Some rhetoricians also acknowledge the usefulness of Latour and Woolgar’s concept of inscriptions. Jeanne Fahnestock, for example, calls for rhetoricians to “come to terms with the many techniques of visual inscription used to generate evidence” in order to develop a visual rhetoric of science (“Rhetoric” 284). In a recent article, Chad Wickman uses the concept of inscription to analyze technical laboratory practices and text production, focusing on how visual representations become rhetorical objects in scientific practice (“Observing” 152). While Wickman focuses on visual representations, Latour and Woolgar’s concept could also be used to analyze technical practices used in the laboratory and in image production, with attention to how instruments become part of the rhetorical process inherent in inscription practices.
Second, as part of their function as inscription devices in the laboratory, the operation of instruments requires that users engage in practices specific to the instruments. Over time, instrument users become habituated to the practices necessary to use instruments.17 The fact that users do become habituated experientially to certain practices through instrument use is another reason to look carefully at instruments as rhetorical entities: Instruments help establish repeated, everyday practices of knowledge-making, or may employ practices already used by a community. Media studies scholar Scott Curtis presents a fascinating example of the influence of a community’s habits of observation in the introduction of photography as an observational technique in medicine. Curtis argues that the adoption of photography depended not only on its automation, but also on its presentation of “a set of features that spoke to established and emerging principles and habits of observation” (85). Habituated practices of using instruments may influence users in ways that subsequently affect the development or use of an instrument, or that affect the expression or formation of the inscriptions an instrument produces. Thus, how specific practices become habituated, and how practices affect the uses of other instruments or other practices, becomes relevant to understanding how science works. Understanding how habituated practices of instrument use inform rhetorical practices then becomes important in order to fully account for the rhetorics of visual inscriptions. (Chapter 2 discusses the establishment and habituation of one set of vision practices.)
Attention to habituated practices of instrument use also contributes to the rhetoric of scientific processes and practices. Wickman and Heather Brodie Graves argue for considering scientific practices and processes as analytic objects of study for rhetoric, including the rhetoric of the processes of scientific inquiry (Wickman, “Rhetoric;” Graves, 81-142). Graves, for example, analyzes the language physicists use when engaged in the process of making science; Wickman includes nonlinguistic modes in his analysis, discussing and extending Aristotle’s concept of techne to argue that processes of scientific inquiry are rhetorical. Doing so creates a space for the rhetorical analysis of scientific practice amidst changes to that scientific practice that are spurred by changing technologies (23), including a focus on how “visuals and other nonlinguistic modes contribute to scientific meaning-making and persuasion” (23). Arguments from Wickman and Graves sketch some ways in which scientific practices and processes are rhetorical; a focus on instruments such as the STM extends the argument for analyzing processes