Spurious Coin: a History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing.

By Bernadette Longo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 204 pages.

This book is described by its subtitle as a history, but it is also a cultural critique--and a much-needed one, according to its author. Even relatively recent studies using a social constructionist framework to analyze the role of writing in producing scientific knowledge, Longo argues, have not fully explored cultural, ideological, economic, and political factors in the production of the writing itself. Early in the first chapter of Spurious Coin, Longo describes Carl Herndl's 1993 call for a cultural studies approach to the study of technical writing. The call was, in fact, answered by a number of scholars who were already turning away from traditional case study methods toward a cultural analysis of technical writing (Doheny-Farina, 1992; Kleimann, 1993; McCarthy & Gerring, 1994; Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985). But these efforts, according to Longo, fell short of considering the wider contexts in which such writing is shaped, focusing instead on the cultures of individual organizations.

Longo answers Herndl's call by reversing the lens and looking at the big picture: two thousand years of technical writing history beginning with the Greek encyclopedic tradition in the first century B.C. Her companions on this lengthy journey are twentieth-century critical theorists Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, who provide Longo with the postmodern infrastructure upon which to construct her critique. Readers already familiar with these theorists will not be surprised by Longo's prose. Her travels through the history of technical writing often double back upon themselves and are flavored throughout by the argumentative density characteristic of postmodern criticism. This is not an easy book to read, but it is, I believe, a worthwhile one. For those of us laboring at the edges of the academy, for those troubled by the characterization of business and technical communication as "soft skills" in a culture enamored with "hard evidence," Spurious Coin hits a nerve. It may not be news to acknowledge our marginality, but Longo sets herself the task of discovering when it started, how it happened, and, finally, what to do about it. Longo's subtitle promises a history of Science, Management, and Technical Writing, but the book is also a history of writers. Some are familiar figures from Western intellectual history, such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Bertrand Russell, or from the history of business, such as Frederick Taylor. Others may be little known to contemporary readers, but have had a disproportionate effect on the privileging of scientific knowledge in the world as we know it.

One such figure is Georgius Agricola, the sixteenth-century author of De Re Metallica, a technical manual of sorts for Renaissance miners and metallurgists. In Chapter 2, Longo presents De Re Metallica as a transitional genre drawing upon two textual traditions: the Hellenic encyclopedia and the "book of secrets," a handbook of occult techniques and recipes for controlling the natural world. Longo traces the origins of this ancestral genre to Greece during the first three centuries A.D. and the tradition of Hermetics, a body of knowledge purportedly revealed by divine sources and recorded in books of secrets that were passed among (and carefully guarded by) the ancient elite. These revelations were both philosophical and practical; the Hermetic texts contained stores of technical information about medicine, astrology, alchemy, and other methods of dealing with the physical world-practices that were to ultimately develop into what we now call science.

Longo tells us that Agricola departed from the Hermetic tradition in De Re Metallica by distinguishing technology from the occult. Longo's account of Agricola's text also introduces the controlling metaphor of her book, knowledge as a precious substance "mined" from nature and "minted" by the tools of language into the currency of our knowledge economy. This metaphor holds up well when Longo makes her case for using a critical approach to study the history of technical writing. Knowledge, like precious metals, is malleable; its value and the uses to which it is put are shaped by those with the power to control political and social institutions. Since this is a critical history, Longo argues for the significance of De Re Metallica, not only as an example of transitional science writing, but also because of its cultural effects.

While books of secrets were available only to a privileged few, De Re Metallica, and other descendants of the genre began to appear in increasing numbers following the invention of moveable type. Practical handbooks on subjects such as animal husbandry and accounting provided experiential knowledge and replicable practices to a laity eager to be let in on the secrets of managing the physical world. Thus, Longo uses De Re Metallica to introduce another ongoing theme of the book: the relationship between pure and applied science.

In the chapter leading from Georgius Agricola to Francis Bacon and the origins of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, Longo lays the groundwork for an examination of the tension between science and other forms of knowledge. Longo casts Bacon's scientific "project" as a summons to replace scholastic knowledge with knowledge derived from the direct observation of nature. By identifying the goal of such knowledge as the betterment of humankind, Bacon's version of scientific inquiry was anchored in the Christian bible and justified by theological reasoning. Through fulfilling God's charge to subdue nature (Genesis 1.28) and express love of one's neighbor by improving human living conditions, the pursuit of science became a means of religious worship. But when Bacon's manifesto implanted science in the public sphere, it paved the way for science to be used as a controlling force upon other human beings as well as upon nature. Longo identifies two cultural consequences of Bacon's project: enlisting the masses in cultivating the fruits of science (or, in the author's parlance, mining the natural world for information to be minted as technical advances) and using science to justify the suppression of native peoples during the period of English imperialism. Though the latter theme is addressed within the relatively limited context of John Locke's writings at the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of using science to rationalize and empower human hierarchies reverberates throughout the rest of the book.

Longo's history leads from Bacon and Locke to the British Royal Society, which gave the official imprimatur to science as a separate branch of study, to David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher who argued that all knowledge is empirical, effectively cementing the break between science, philosophy, and religion. A hundred years later, with the industrial revolution well underway, the ideas of the English practical philosophers were reunited in the work of Thomas Huxley, an influential professor, lecturer, and president of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885. It was in his capacity as a visible and persuasive advocate of technical education that Huxley advanced the argument for a hierarchical division of workers. Like Bacon, Huxley's idea of public science involved a vast social project. But where Bacon called upon the public to become scientists, Huxley differentiated true scientists from those who used science to achieve practical outcomes. Longo describes Huxley's vision of the scientific-industrial enterprise as decidedly militaristic: armies of workers under the leadership of "captains of industry" engaged in "industrial competition," the success of which "lies in the discipline of the troops and the use of arms of precision" (p. 56). Such discipline and precision could only be achieved through public education, a cause championed by Huxley and carried forward by his student, T. A. Rickard, in the early years of the twentieth century.