Disintegrating chronology

This paper utilises the rhetorical device of chronology, a device which helps to instantiate the ‘modern’ world, in order to demonstrate the “reversible imminence” of that world. It seeks to build upon other attempts at ‘postmodern’ writing which have relied on flouting modernist conventions to signify themselves as ‘innovative’. But rather than constructing another new ‘style’ that cuts across conventions in writing, the paper seeks to complement such ‘innovation’ through intensifying its reliance on one of these conventions. The paper illustrates how a diligent and detailed application of the demands of chronology can result in a history that deconstructs itself, or to put it another way, how a faithful adherence to one of the demands of ‘modernist’ writing can itself create a text that fragments into ‘postmodernist’ writing. The author examined participants’ accounts of the emergence of refinery based computerised oil management systems. These accounts sought to instantiate at least partially enduring organisational and self identities through rhetorics of progress in the face of disorder. However, much of this disorder may be seen to be an effect of extended ordering practices. The chief threat to the maintenance of identities thus turns out to be the ordering practices upon which these identities depend. An impression of progress was seen to rely upon a re-presentation of reflexive process as discrete events, as innumerable black boxes, enabling a (re)integration through separation. But when the author brought these boxes and their contents back together, ‘progress’ disintegrated. Who makes up real things, dad? Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don’t always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they’re too . . . messy.’ Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Aesthetics · Art · Business · Computer security · Epistemology · Literature · nobody · Postmodernism · Reflexivity · Rhetorical question · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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