The recalcitrant invention of X-ray images

ABSTRACT

This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

KEYWORDS:

• Invention
• Kenneth Burke
• new materialism
• recalcitrance
• rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As one might expect, some accounts of human encounters with the world’s resistance do not use the term “recalcitrance,” but address the same phenomenon. John Durham Peters uses the phrase “interruptions by matter” to characterize those occasions when the world pushes back against our extensions into it, identifying Burke’s recalcitrance as one account of it, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s commodity and C.S. Peirce’s notion of secondness (Peters, 1999, p. 156). The phrase “interruptions by matter,” however, implies something sporadically disruptive rather than fundamentally constructive about the world’s pushing back.

2. Andrew Pickering’s concept of the mangle has relevance here: “The practical, goal-oriented and goal-revising dialectic of resistance and accommodation is, as far as I can make out, a general feature of scientific practice. And it is, in the first instance, what I call the mangle of practice, or just the mangle. I find ‘mangle’ a convenient and suggestive shorthand for the dialectic because, for me, it conjures up the image of the unpredictable transformations worked upon whatever gets fed into the old-fashioned device of the same name used to squeeze the water out of the washing. It draws attention to the emergently intertwined delineation and reconfiguration of machinic captures and human intentions, practices, and so on. The word 'mangle' can also be used appropriately in other ways, for instance as a verb. Thus I say that the contours of material and social agency are mangled in practice, meaning emergently transformed and delineated in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (1995, p. 22–23).

3. It is also important to note the “radiology gap” between wealthier and poorer countries. There are more radiologists in a single hospital in Boston (126), for example, than there are in all of Liberia (2) (Silverstein, 2016).

4. In their argument to defend a minimal realism, J.E. McGuire and Trevor Melia offered one reading of Burke’s various types of recalcitrance (1989). More recently, Lawrence Prelli, Floyd Anderson, and Matthew Althouse (2011) developed a comprehensive, article-length delineation, drawing on all of Burke’s work on the term. See also, Prelli (2013).

5. As Latour himself suggests, even a domain as abstract as Greek math arises out of an interplay between extension and constraint (Latour, 2008).

6. For an introduction to X-rays, see Kevles (1997); Pasveer (1989); Pasveer (2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Gibbons

Michelle Gibbons is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the University of New Hampshire.