Disruption, Spectacle, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

This article examines how 18th-century technical communicators used spectacular science displays to critique audiences’ existing knowledge and advocate for alternative perspectives and technical practices. In addition to using disruptive rhetorical strategies such as amplification and contrary opposition, historical technical communicators heightened the wonder of their displays by disrupting audience expectations for the extended material and social scenes, including the objects, spaces, bodies, and cultural performances like gender that surrounded the demonstrations.

KEYWORDS:

• Public science
• rhetorics of display
• spectacle
• technical communication history

Notes

1. Historical texts often contain irregular capitalizations, italics, and punctuation. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases are in the original.

2. The windmill described by Martin could be rotated about an axis to adjust the position of the sails.

3. The sun is in motion relative to the Milky Way Galaxy. However, from the perspective of objects in the solar system, such as the earth and Euphrosyne, the sun is a fixed point.

4. J. Blake Scott (2003) defined disciplinary rhetorics as “bodies of persuasion that work with extradiscursive cultural forces and actors to shape subject positions and the ways that they are materially inhabited” (p. 33).

5. “Planned incongruity” is an intended instance of “perspective by incongruity,” as defined by rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke. Burke claimed that “perspective by incongruity” was a method for “verbal ‘atom cracking,’” in which a “word belongs by custom to a certain category—and by rational planning you wrench it loose and metaphorically apply it to a different category” (1937/1984, pp. 308–311).

6. Inventing arguments through contrary oppositions can be traced back to the Sophists in ancient Greece, as Susan Jarratt (1991) argued in her rereading of the historical group. She claimed that the Sophists relied on the figure of antithesis, a playful pairing of opposites, in their style and arguments to disrupt “complacent givens” (p. 23). The sophistic use of antithesis, according to Jarratt, was not about “exposing or discovering the unknown, but rearranging the known” (p. 28). Kenneth Burke (1937/1984) theorized “perspective by incongruity” as an inventional strategy that relies upon mismatched as well as antithetical combinations to gain insight. I am deliberately using a broad conception of contrary opposition in this article to allow for the diversity and complexity of its use within eighteenth‐century science spectacles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chelsea Redeker Milbourne

Chelsea Redeker Milbourne is an assistant professor in the Department of English at California Polytechnic State University.