Let Us (Not) Theorize the Spaces of Contention

In 1991, Tom Goodnight undertook a search of the literature for theories of controversy, and was surprised to return empty handed. Even collections of controversy studies focused on "local attachments to a dispute" and included no "overall statement on controversy" (3). He was "astonished by the absence of theoretical reflection" on the subject (3), and found it necessary to make a "vast, open challenge" to argumentation scholars to "extend theorization of contemporary controversy" (8). Today, Goodnight offers a new challenge, initiating a process of inquiry that undertakes the theorization of science and technology controversy. Of course, this call to action is not without controversy of its own. As Goodnight himself admits, the field is so rich with potential that "one is tempted to resist" those who would "establish protocols and modes of analysis" ("Science" 26). "Instead, let us not theorize the spaces of contention, but leave the field of controversy study open, and not a little unorganized--without decisive categories, unreduced to predictive processes (initiation, development, resolution, and revision), and free from genre constraints" (26). Of course, what Goodnight takes away with one hand, he replaces with the other. "It indeed may be the case that each science/technology controversy is itself a singularity, drawing into the vortex of disagreement procedural methods, substantive claims, intersubjectively shared assumptions, personal and political risk configurations, legal authorizations, social presumptions, and institutional prerogatives" (26-27). This list of items that Goodnight plucks from the vortex sounds suspiciously like a set of categories for studying a controversy, for reducing it to processes and identifying the genre constraints that influence its development. Although Goodnight inveighs against decisive categories, when he goes on to approvingly describe and extend Randall Collins' three types of scientific controversies, and then lays down five pronouncements about science and controversy study as a field of inquiry, his purpose to initiate the theorization of science and technology controversy becomes apparent. Like Goodnight, I find myself torn between the desire to proclaim that "[o]ur studies should resist the reduction of controversy to ... a problem with identifiable patterns and predictable strategies of advocacy" ("Science" 27) and the desire to develop theoretical conclusions that appraise the "generative power of science and technology controversies" as a conflict between persistent forces such as "modernity and traditional culture" (27). I am a scholar of the humanities committed to the art of rhetoric in an academic world that values the methods of science above all else; in this setting, I find the tension between traditional culture and modernity, between lifeworld and systems-world, between prudential reasoning and epistemic strategies to be fundamental and pervasive. The rhetorical critic in me resists the temptation to theorize controversy, preferring to study each individual controversy with a desire to hear what it can tell me about itself, attuned to theory and the literature only insofar as conceptual tools or similar studies can help me to scrutinize the particular case by whispering to me about analogical responses to similar exigencies. At the same time, the Research-I communication scholar in me recognizes the need to theorize controversy, to develop nearly universal pronouncements about how controversies arise and develop, perhaps by channeling my observations through the philosophy of a prominent social theorist who can explain and predict the direction of the vast weather systems and disturbances of contemporary science and technology controversies. (1) Perhaps one way partially to satisfy both impulses (to promote the flexibility of the individual case study while recognizing the need to theorize) is to engage periodically in a systematic review of the various isolated case studies that have been completed to determine what we, as a community of scholars, already know about the subject and what remains to be said. …