Although Greg Wilson brought up many pertinent and interesting points in his essay, “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy,” I found one of the major terms that he used to outline his argument problematic. For instance, in the essay, Wilson uses the term modernism to mean “cultural patterns that follow from the Enlightenment metanarrative of science and technology as the path of human progress and efficiency” (73). This definition could technically work – modernism, in its broadest sense, can be used as a synonym for the word modern – and it could be argued that the modern world has embraced the Enlightenment Period’s scientific optimism.

But the term modernism is used so often in art and literature, and carries such rich connotations, that it seems risky to apply it in such a broad sense in an academic paper. Modernist literature (and art) is significantly different from Enlightenment literature. Whereas the Enlightenment embraced science and technological progress as a solution to the world’s problems, Modernist writers and artists often depicted the industrial world in negative terms. They emphasized the alienation, isolation, and fragmentation of the mechanized, modern world. (Click here for my source). So it seemed like a bit of a stretch to portray Modernism as an extension of the Enlightenment metanarrative.

With that being said, I thought that Wilson’s argument was an interesting refashioning of a recurring debate in the technical communication field: the debate between viewing technical communication as the objective transfer of facts (the transmission view) versus viewing it as a more problematic enterprise.

One of the claims that Wilson makes is that technical communication, at least in 2001, was too bound up in the scientific and engineering epistemologies: “Despite the inertia and potential of these valuable efforts [the efforts to observe workplaces and to forge professionally relevant composition courses], we still find ourselves and our students relying mostly on scientific and engineering epistemologies that suggest that language can reflect concrete facts unproblematically – epistemologies and pedagogies that, I fear, fate technical communicators as scribes and not as agents in the representation of technology.” Wilson goes on to link the field’s reliance on the myth of scientific objectivity explicitly to modernist epistemologies: “Because of these modernist epistemologies and assumptions about how to write and think about technology, technical communication pedagogy has focused for the most part on a limited set of skills. Too many corporate seminars focus on checklists such as 10 things you can do today to improve your technical writing” (75).

In other words, Wilson critiques several views of technical communication at once: he questions the existence of total scientific objectivity, contests the view that technical communication is merely the work of a scribe, and distrusts practical approaches which are grounded in mechanistic, prescribed steps. Wilson’s piece explores several of the binaries that our class has covered so far: scientific objectivity versus social constructionism, the transmission and translation views versus the articulation view, and practical-based approaches versus humanities-based approaches. Ultimately, Wilson critiques scientific objectivity, the transmission and translation views of communication, and practical-based approaches to technical communication.

 

Wilson, Greg. “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.1 (2001): 72-99. PDF.