Breaking Down the Binary: Teaching Differance as Social Cognizance in Technical Communication.
One of the major ideas we emphasize in technical writing classes is to be ethical in our writing. Students hear this from technical writing teachers and usually in their own, more-likely-scientific discipline. We tech writing teachers show students examples of when ethical situations go awry, cite the shuttle examples no doubt, and remind students that they must always be aware of their own values, their company’s values, and the values of their intended audience. We teach them to discover these values in a first-hand manner when possible, consulting groups through trials like usability tests to determine how potential audiences might react.
This practice is important and mostly affective, but it doesn’t necessarily address deeper social issues that exist within the scientific and technical writing communities. One of these issues is the hierarchical and privileged binary established between gender roles in the scientific community. In “Feminist Theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication,” Mary M. Lay posits that issues within feminist theory “inform the pressure to redefine technical communication that comes from exposing the myth of scientific objectivity, adapting ethnographic research techniques, and studying collaborative writing” (151). Lay believes part of this issue with technical writing under the established hierarchy is that “As the distinctions between science and rhetoric disappear, truth is defined as agreement within a community, not as discoverable and describable reality. Technical communication then offers culturally based perceptions to the audience, rather than objective information and data” (151).
The problem with offering culturally based perceptions to an audience then is both that the writer has power over these perceptions, and if the ideology of this particular kind of writing is dominated by mindset that places masculinity in a privileged place, that may not recognize the role of a feminine kind of thinking or a feminine audience. Just as Lay indicates, “As technical communicators convince their audiences to accept a version of reality, they develop persuasion strategies by identifying with their audiences” (156) and if the writer and audience are divorced over a rigid gender divide, the effectiveness of the communication may be altered.
Near the end of her article, Lay wonders, “should technical communicators stress the similarities or differences between men and women? In doing so, can they avoid the labeling that contributes to dualistic thinking or binary opposition?” (157). This brings us back to the original notion that being aware of the cultural values of the audience and the writer is often a matter of being aware of different levels of ethics affected by these communicative interactions.
The answer to Lay’s question is neither to stress differences or sameness but instead to teach technical communicators the deconstructionist idea of differance and encourage them to apply it to their own thinking about hierarchy and social order as they engage in writing towards multiple different audiences. Differance is an idea posited by Jacques Derrida: in our attempt to assign differences between one another, through acknowledging differences we actually accept those differences as part of our own definitions. Derrida shows that it isn’t the Truth that will set you free, but rather knowing that there is no such thing as the Truth (meaning the transcendental signifier) and that we come to notions of meaning not by discovering absolutes, but rather by choosing to assign meaning to the thing. In that regard, the technical writing community may benefit from either assigning different ideas to the status of gender roles in the sciences that move away from hierarchy and towards collaboration or admitting that the current system is unfounded: in this regard, enforcing differences does not actually lend itself to enforcing a social good.
Obviously Derrida and differance deserve more unpacking than I will be able to give them here, but for now we should explore how this particular deconstructionist method could help break down the established hierarchical binary within the sciences and science writing to encourage both writer and audience to move away from a model of thinking that acknowledges the feminine as the other or the disempowered, and that feminine ideas (like the ethnographic ideas of collaboration Lay advocates for) are actually already part of audience and author, and need to be acknowledged in order to uphold an ethical ideal.
We stress with our students that they must be ethical in the documents they write and in their engagement of their multiple audiences. We show them case studies and introduce them to articles that show the results of ineffective communication or communication breakdown as a result of ethical issues, but we don’t necessarily take the time to teach them the actual theories they may be able to intellectually apply to the different rhetorical situations they encounter in their professions. It’s likely we assume this is the role of a different teacher or a different class, but maybe it’s time to expose our students to theories like differance first hand in order to further augment their ethical engagement of multiple audiences with technical communication.
Works Cited:
Lay, Mary M. “Feminist Theory and The Redefinition of Technical Communication.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 146-159. Print.