The consequences of this are legion. It means that protocological analysis must focus not on the sciences of meaning (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sciences of possibility (physics or logic)… (52)
This is from Alex Galloway’s Protocol, which I’ve been rereading during the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m currently working on. The primary difference is that I’m focusing on the relationship of protocol and standardization to writing and rhetoric whereas his argument focused on protocol and standardization through the lens of critical social theory.
This passage is significant in the way that it turns the interpretive method on its head. For Galloway, protocological (standards) analysis explores possibility rather than underlying meaning. This type of analysis explores possible worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored terminology: infrastructure.
Galloway calls this type of research hacking.
Before reading this, I’d formed an uncomfortable alliance with design study research, something I’m not trained in, but found useful because of the its focus on producing possibilities rather than interpreting existing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetorical studies hadn’t frequently taken the turn to possibilities and text production more enthusiastically. Rhetoric had historically at one point been focused on creating heuristics for producing new texts, not interpreting old ones. While a few rhetoricians pursue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for example) and others have suggested that rhetorical analysis is primarily a heuristic for production rather than interpretation (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infamous attack on the rhetoric of science), research in rhetorical studies in the modern university has largely remained a critical act of interpretation. I’m not sure why that is, perhaps there is more political power in the humanities for being an interpretive discipline rather than productive one. Anyway, I had taken to reading design scholarship because it embraces production as research rather instead of the interpretive critical approach.
Galloway’s work is motivating because he takes the productive perspective from within media studies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.
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