Jennifer Daryl Slack

The Technical Communicator as Author Meaning, Power, Authority

The authors explore the parallels to be found by comparing descriptions of the technical communicator with differing views of the communication process—the transmission, translation, and articulation views of communication. In each of these views, the place of the technical communicator and of technical discourse shifts with respect to the production of meaning and relations of power. The authors argue from the standpoint of the articulation view for a new conception of the technical communicator as author and of technical communication as a discourse that produces an author.

RESISTING ECOCULTURAL STUDIES

Ecoculturalism ought to have transformed cultural studies over a decade ago. Yet it has not. I examine the troubled articulation of cultural studies and the ‘eco,’ focusing on what I perceive to be cultural studies’ resistance to, and difficulties with, ecoculturalism. In the end, I seek to make good on the transformative potential of the ‘eco’ by advocating a seemingly counterintuitive move: that ecoculturalism be jettisoned in favor of a revitalized commitment to cultural studies.Ecoculturalism ought to have transformed cultural studies over a decade ago. Yet it has not. I examine the troubled articulation of cultural studies and the ‘eco,’ focusing on what I perceive to be cultural studies’ resistance to, and difficulties with, ecoculturalism. In the end, I seek to make good on the transformative potential of the ‘eco’ by advocating a seemingly counterintuitive move: that ecoculturalism be jettisoned in favor of a revitalized commitment to cultural studies.

Duel to the Death

When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois Institute of Communication Research, a noted professor from a prominent university visited and gave a presentation to faculty and graduate students. In the question and answer session, the professor said a remarkable thing. Although I do not recall the exact question that provoked it (it had something to do with the difficulty of coming up with ideas for new research), the response was etched in my memory as if a tree was struck and scarred by lightning. Allowing for the vicissitudes of memory, the scholar shall go unnamed; besides, the import of the statement far exceeds the career of a single individual. The professor said something very close to this:

Intellectual and political hygiene: The “Sokal Affair”

Physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a “hoax” on the journal, Social Text, by submitting a fraudulent article and criticizing the journal for publishing it. Sokals hoax is said to demonstrate the corruption of the humanities. Cultural studies, multiculturalism, science studies, feminism, and “new social movements” have all come under attack. Analysis of coverage of this affair reveals evidence of a dis‐ease with contemporary theory in the humanities that challenges allegiances to an oversimplified conception of the relationship between reality and representation. The Sokal Affair is overdetermined by four currents: anti‐liberalism, anti‐intellectualism, debates among the left about what constitutes a legitimate left, and the often‐perceived incompatibility of the scientific world view with humanistic views of the world. The totalitarian response revealed in this incident‐similar inform to the earlier de Man scandal‐seeks to cleanse the culture of this dis‐ease.

The Development and Use of Communication Technologies: Critical Issues

Jennifer Daryl Slack is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Purdue University. This paper was firstpresented at the 34th annual International Communication Association Conference, May 24-28, 1984, San Francisco. In attempting to articulate a critical position on the relationship between communication technologies and society, critical communication scholars have been struggling with and against a powerful technological apparatus. In that struggle, critical scholars have made some significant theoretical advances, but they have also encountered some particularly difficult theoretical problems. In this paper, I will discuss the most significant advance made in and by that research: its critique of autonomous technology. I will also confront the particularly problematic position engendered in that advance: the reduction of complex relationships to correspondences between the development and use of communication technologies. Finally, I will suggest a direction for rearticulating those complex relationships in order to understand the complex interplay of unity and difference in what I will call the &dquo;technological apparatus.&dquo;

Hope for the Future: Cultural Studies in the Enclave

This article explores the development of cultural studies in the United States as affected in its relationship with the Philosophy of Communication Division of the International Communication Association. It considers both what has been enabled and disabled, with significant implications for the practice of cultural studies now and in the future.This article explores the development of cultural studies in the United States as affected in its relationship with the Philosophy of Communication Division of the International Communication Association. It considers both what has been enabled and disabled, with significant implications for the practice of cultural studies now and in the future.

Culture in-colour

ABSTRACT Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relations of colours. These two regimes – colour and colours – fold back onto and interpenetrate one another to constitute culture in complex, multiple, contradictory, constitutive relations that are potentially open to change. Theorizing culture in-colour draws on and beyond the image of the cyborg to insist on in-colour as neither a thing, a property of an object, nor a neurological process, but an active verb, a lived event: of interminglings and articulations, of repetitions, struggles, rearticulations, and becomings. The Dress, a 2015 controversy over the colour of a dress in an image circulated over the Internet, reveals how colour is typically thought of – as surface, artifice, and ornament; as a scientific fact; and as a neurological phenomenon – and how it is lived affectively. The anxieties produced by The Dress suggest a tension between the typical explanations of how colour matters and the less-accessible, but far more consequential, ways that both colour and colours matter. Colour and colours are often used to designate community belonging, but a closer look at the perceived threat in seeing colour differently reveals an underlying trust both in what colour is and in the reliability of colour to negotiate/constitute community in relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. Neuroscientific and technological explanations affectively discipline colour by asserting thingness and sameness, and by erasing the traces of the powerful articulatory work of colour. Yet it is the system of colour itself that makes the dismissal of the significance of colour possible. Acknowledging that we live in-colour demands recognition that not only do we live deeply in-colour, but that different cultures in-colour are possible, that different forms or systems of colour are lived affectively, and that the disciplining of colour can be resisted with effects more open to indeterminateness.

Cultural Studies in Black and White

ABSTRACT Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture.

The Information Age

A FEW GOOD MEN FROM UNIVAC by David E. Lundstrom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987—

The theory and method of articulation In cultural studies

19.95) DYNAMICS OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES edited by Indu B. Singh and Vic M. Mishra (Norwood, N j: Ablex Publishing, 1987—