En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. (Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera)

Introduction

In the early 1990’s, the issue of intercultural communication received a great deal of attention from technical communication scholars. Generally portrayed in business textbooks as communication situations in which the participants share differing national origins, the notion of intercultural communication is increasingly moving beyond this practical description into a more complex theoretical understanding in which communication itself is more or less intercultural (DeVoss, Jasken, and Hayden 70). Writers with pedagogical aims have offered suggestions for instructors who wish to enrich their courses by promoting intercultural awareness; at the same time, they have called for greater inclusion in textbooks of topics that arise when professionals communicate across cultures. In recent years, some authors have responded to these concerns by devoting more attention to the complexities of intercultural communication in their textbooks. However, thicker textbooks alone cannot accomplish the task of integrating a concern for intercultural competence into the technical communication course. Most teachers are likely hesitant to place the authority of their classroom pedagogies entirely in the hands of textbook authors, preferring to develop their pedagogies through a combination of scholarship, practice, and discussion with colleagues. In order to enhance their pedagogies by integrating a concern for intercultural competence in their courses, instructors should consider also developing pedagogical approaches to technical communication that allow for an understanding of intercultural communication as central to communication itself, an understanding that suits contemporary notions about communication but asks us to rethink some of our previous assumptions about the nature of language. One such approach as articulated by Thomas Kent, paralogic hermeneutics, recognizes communication as a social activity that is “beyond logic” because such an understanding “accounts for the attribute of language-in-use that defies reduction to a codifiable process or to a system of logical relations” (Kent, Paralogic Rhetoric 3). Because it offers the possibility of rethinking some basic assumptions about language while extending several important aspects of contemporary theory, paralogic hermeneutics deserves the consideration of technical communicators who wish to interculturalize their courses.

Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization

In the 1990’s, both scholars and practitioners were becoming increasingly aware of the impact of globalization on communication in the workplace. In the early 21st century, the phenomenon of globalization has been described as consisting of both “economic globalization,” or “the integration and rapid interaction of economies of other countries,” and “cultural globalization,” or “the transnational migration of people, information, and consumer culture” (Burn 167). Both economic globalization and cultural globalization impact the workplace and offer new challenges for technical communicators, who increasingly share their workplaces with colleagues from different linguistic, national, and cultural backgrounds and are often called upon to create technical documentation for ever more diverse audiences.

Diversity and the workplace

According to information published on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, diversity among the US labor force is increasing rapidly. In 1960, one in 17 workers was “foreign born”; by the early 21st century, this number has grown to one in eight (Mosisa 1). But the labor force within the United States is not the only site of rapid diversification. In the global economy, national boundaries have been blurred by the rise of transnational corporations, and international development efforts are influenced by global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Burn 167-171). In the context of such high profile cross-cultural enterprises, the famous image of the golden arches outside of Tiananmen Square takes on significant meaning as a metaphor for a dynamic, challenging, and potentially rewarding cross-cultural dialogue. Thus, globalization brings with it both challenges and opportunities for technical communicators and theorists. As Danielle DeVoss, Julia Jasken, and Dawn Hayden point out, “more than half of US businesspeople on long overseas assignments return home early because of their inability to adapt to other cultures” (Pfeiffer qtd. in DeVoss, et al. 69). The problem of intercultural professional communication clearly exists, and writers take varying approaches in their attempts to define and clarify features of intercultural communication (such as Constantinides, Amant, and Kamfp) and the ethical concerns that arise in a global communication context (such as Dragga). Detailed explanations of nuanced definitions of types of intercultural communications and the ethical implications of global communication are beyond the scope of this discussion. However, the realities of the situations that technical communicators find themselves in point to both the need to address intercultural communication in the classroom and the opportunity to reconsider our pedagogies, perhaps leading to new ways to think about communication and instruction. I’ll turn now to an overview of the contemporary concern for intercultural communication in the instructional context.

Pedagogical responses to a changing world

The emergence of the global economy has lead educators to question how effectively their pedagogies prepare their students for the situations they will encounter in their careers. In 1993, scholars such as Linda Beamer, Emily Thrush, and Dora Tippens published articles about intercultural communication directed at technical writing teachers, arguing that “technical or business communication courses need to be interculturalized to prepare students for effective productivity and humanity in the new global workplace” (Tippens 389). At that time, scholars agreed that “most textbooks provide little information on these topics, so the technical writing teacher needs to find ways to incorporate issues of international and multicultural communication into the classroom” (Thrush 271). In addition to the limiting of lack of information, scholars noted the importance of avoiding the tendency to overgeneralize about unfamiliar cultures in textbooks and in classrooms when intercultural communication is incorporated (Thrush 280). To address these concerns, instructors were offered abundance of models, strategies, activities, and resources for the purpose of developing the tools to address “intercultural communication competence,” defined by Linda Beamer as “the encoding and decoding of attributed signifieds to signifiers in matches that correspond to signs held in the other communicator’s repository” (Beamer 289). In particular, Beamer addresses the importance of acquiring intercultural communication competence, which she describes as “the ability to encode and decode meanings in matches that correspond to the meanings held in the other communicator’s repository” (285) and suggests a process for cultivating such competence (290). In a recent article reviewing the current status of intercultural communication pedagogy, DeVoss, et al., acknowledge that while several categories, such as intercultural communication, intracultural communication, and international communication may be used to describe communication situations in which participants share differing social and cultural identities, “business and technical communication textbooks often use intercultural communication as an umbrella term referring to the considerations we need to make when communicating with people from other countries” (70). However, the authors seem to prefer a more focused definition of intercultural communication as

a symbolic, interpretive, transactional, contextual process in which the degree of difference between people is large and important enough to create dissimilar interpretations and expectations about what are regarded as competent behaviors that should be used to create shared meanings. (Lustig and Koester quoted in DeVoss et al. 70)

Most importantly, they note that “every given instance of communication exists within a continuum of interculturalness” (Lustig and Koester paraphrased in DeVoss et al. 70, emphasis added). DeVoss et al. discuss the problems that previous work has found with the way intercultural communication is addressed in textbooks, analyzed technical communication textbooks published between 1996 and 2001. The authors note three positive trends among textbooks: “a move toward stronger definitions of culture and the identification of its complexities…the inclusion of published articles from experts in intercultural communication…[and] the inclusion of specific documents from particular cultures in context” (DeVoss et al. 71-74). Finally, the authors offer several approaches to developing effective intercultural communication pedagogies, all of which may be said to draw heavily on social theory with their student-centered, discussion focused orientation. DeVoss et al. have identified the early stages of a shift in the ways that intercultural communication is included in textbooks for technical writing students. The ways that both textbook authors and instructors respond to new challenges are often heavily influenced by the theories and assumptions about communication that underlie their pedagogies. Thus, an overview of some important theoretical trends in technical communication may suggest implications for intercultural communication pedagogy and the possibilities offered by paralogic hermeneutics for rethinking our theories and our pedagogies.

Theorizing the Intercultural Conversation

The early 21st century witnesses a complex and dynamic global and intercultural conversation that renders the transmission model of communication famously elucidated by Shannon and Weaver (with its dichotomous participants of static sender and passive receiver and its transparent signal) far from adequate for instructors of technical communication. But some of the theories that began to emerge in the mid- to late-20th century have offered increasingly complex notions of communication that inform our understanding of the present intercultural conversation.

Social views of discourse

Moving away from an emphasis on individual participants in a communicative event, theorists such as Stanley Fish and James P. Zappen stress instead the importance of community. For Fish, meaning exists not in the mind of interlocutors alone, but in the “interpretive community,” which he defines as “a point of view or way of organizing experience that share[s] individuals…[who are] embedded in the community’s enterprise, community property” (Fish 141). Zappen’s description of the “discourse communities” to which people belong shares similarities with Fish’s view, but Zappen notes that individuals maintain authority in their participation in multiple, self-reflexive communities. Both Fish and Zappen emphasize understanding how the communication practices of particular groups of people influence textual interpretation. At first glance, it would seem that an understanding of community-based approaches may prove useful for teaching intercultural communication. Such approaches seem to speak to the necessity of teaching students “not only to communicate within…several discourse communities but also…to develop the ability to step outside the boundaries of particular discourse communities and to participate in…conversations with others of problems of mutual interest” (Zappen 9). Indeed, the communication practices of communities have constituted an important concern for theorists since this move in the last century, and the notion of communication as a thoroughly social activity remains an important part of recently emerging concepts such as paralogic hermeneutics (Thralls and Blyler 260). However, as Thomas Kent points out, some scholars have challenged the centrality of communities. Kent invokes Donald Davidson, arguing that while

communitarians suggest that interpretive communities shape language, and, in a sense, enable different languages to come into being…[perhaps] an interpretive community does not create its own language; instead, language creates our sense of an interpretive community. (Kent, Paralogic Rhetoric 82)

Kent further maintains that “communitarians” assume that participants in a communication situation enter that situation fully prepared with the “linguistic competence” that marks them as members of the community. Again referring to Davidson, Kent notes that the very notion of linguistic competence relies on an understanding of language as systematized and conventional (Paralogic Rhetoric 87). Such an understanding of language as systematized is reflected in approaches to communication that attempt to address the problem of meaning through standardization.

The drawbacks of systems, standards, and codes

On the surface, standardization may seem to hold promise for technical communicators functioning in today’s ever more complicated intercultural milieu. Using social theory to explain the process of standardization, advocates of this approach, such as Patrick Moore, define standardization as community acceptance that certain words denote certain ideas or things. As Moore argues, “by virtue of an agreement about a standard, a certain thing or procedure is said to have one meaning unless the people agree later to change it. This process of agreement is called standardization” (Moore 109). Moore’s concept of standardization is implicit in the popularized “do’s and taboos” approaches to intercultural communication that some writers advocate. Such an approach provides for interesting discussion of cultural differences and raises awareness of the relative nature of many particular cultural practices, such as the relationship between eye contact and politeness (Tippens (392-3). However, even those who advocate this approach recognize the danger of reducing intercultural communication to generalizations and stereotypes. A standardized, prescriptive method of teaching intercultural communication assumes that cross-cultural discourse can be codified by distilling rules from an understanding of particular cultures. Such a method assumes that cultures are monolithic and their practices static and uncontested. It fails to recognize the centrality of participants in the contextual creation of discourse and reduces intercultural communication to a prescribed set of rules, a code that can be acquired. The criticism discussed above is central to Kent’s critique of the “communitarian” approach to linguistic competence. In challenging that communicative knowledge can be systematized or conventionalized, Kent again calls upon Davidson, who “argues that in actual linguistic communication, nothing corresponds to linguistic competence” (Kent, Paralogic Rhetoric 87). Thus, when we communicate, we make informed guesses about meaning; we engage in a kind of impromptu hermeneutic dance choreographed by our prior and passing theories” (Kent Paralogic Rhetoric 87). As such, according to Kent, communication is an uncodifiable activity beyond logic, or paralogic. If nothing corresponds to linguistic competence, then the same may be said for intercultural competence, given that the present definition of intercultural communication assumes that to every instance of communication belongs a certain degree of interculturalness. Thus, an approach that treats intercultural communication something “extra,” as systematic and codifiable, falls short of accommodating a contemporary understanding of communication.

A move toward complexity

While some theorists advocate an attempt to make sense out of discourse by reducing the communicative act to rules and standards (even socially constructed rules and standards), others take exactly the opposite approach. For example, late 20th century writers like Frederic Jameson and feminist scholars such as Susan Faludi describe views of communication that build on the social views proposed by earlier theorists but make room for multiplicity of interpretation. Befitting a “late capitalism” characterized by globalization, in his explanation of postmodernism, Jameson argues for an understanding of postmodernism “not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features” (Jameson 4). In his work, Jameson ultimately exposes the “master narrative,” a dominant but flawed belief about cultural history and trajectory, replacing it with a multiplicity of conditional narratives. Using a metaphor from architecture, Jameson describes a hotel with several entrances and seemingly endless opportunities for movement in space, leading to an uneasy sense of perplexity. If this is the condition of postmodernism, our recourse, then, is to consider our momentary and “de-centered” locations and create cognitive “maps” of our own (Jameson 44). But not only are individuals as subjects de-centered in the late 20th century. Several cultural, social, and academic movements, including feminism, are working to de-center entire institutions and cultural master narratives. In their introduction to their textbook Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World editors Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding note the following:

A considerable amount of feminist thinking today works across borders in ways that unsettle familiar philosophical and political frameworks. It cuts across the borders of traditional disciplinary epistemologies, borrowing, incorporating, and transforming…Moreover, feminist work is increasingly attentive to factors such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion that configure the lives of different groups of women and men in multiple ways within contemporary cultures and nation-states. This work also crosses regional, national, and continental boundaries, as feminists find they must “think globally, act locally,” as the popular slogan has it. (Narayan and Harding, xii)

Important to these projects are the intersections of identity (class, gender, nationality, and so on) that Narayan and Harding describe. An awareness of these factors helps theorists further advance communication from dichotomous relationships (such as sender/receiver) to de-centered, multiple, and dynamic. Feminist scholars such as Faludi seek to break down notions of dichotomies, and, in doing so, note that entities that exist in binary opposition also in hierarchical relationships with one another. Thus, the master narrative takes on new meaning in the feminist context of critiquing relationships of power and oppression. Feminism reminds us of the power implications, the ethical ramifications of constructing dichotomous participants in a communicative act as “self” and “other” and invites us to consider rich spaces of alternatives between these binaries. While Jameson’s theories may diverge on other points with feminist theories such as Faludi’s, the shared similarities with regard to de-centering dominant paradigms offer interesting implications for intercultural communication that can be extended to paralogic hermeneutics. Paralogic hermeneutics addresses interpretation that occurs between participants, not as binaries, but as complex actors in ambiguous spaces which are informed by the participants’ multiple identities and dynamic backgrounds, by what they bring socially, culturally, and epistemologically to a dialogue. As such, paralogic hermeneutics holds promise for those who wish to accommodate intercultural communication in their technical communication pedagogies.

The Possibilities of Paralogic Hermeneutics

Paralogic hermeneutics has received some attention on the part of technical communication scholars since Thomas Kent published Paralogic Rhetoric in 1993. In that same year, Thralls and Blyler offered an exploration of socially-based pedagogies and their promise for technical communication. In their discussion of paralogic hermeneutics, the authors explain that this approach recognizes that because “meaning and understanding derive from on-the-spot interpretations people make as they communicate,” communication is uncodifiable (Thralls and Blyler 260). Thus, “writing must be taught as unsystematic and paralogic (uncodafiable)” (Thralls and Blyler 260). The applicability of paralogic rhetoric specifically to intercultural communication was explored by Rue Yuan in 1997. Moreover, in July, 2005 a paper will be presented at the International Professional Communication Conference by Natalia Matveeva entitled “Paralogic Hermeneutics: An Alternative Approach to Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Technical Writing Course.” When paralogic hermeneutics is applied to intercultural communication pedagogy, the outcome is a move away from a focus on communities and their conventionalized behaviors, necessitating a move away from prescribing communication behaviors appropriate to interactions with certain cultural groups. While paralogic hermeneutics connects with many notions that we accept about language, this theory also asks us to reexamine our assumptions about language as a system, and to extend the implications into our pedagogies. Instructors should consider paralogic hermeneutics because this approach offers possibilities for thinking about our pedagogies that both match with and challenge several important contemporary views of language, in that it

• Suits understanding of discourse as a social phenomenon
• Recognizes the centrality of language function
• Acknowledges the ambiguous nature of language, and
• Accommodates multiplicity and fluidity in meaning and interpretation

Discourse as a social phenomenon

Paralogic hermeneutics suggests that in any communicative encounter, participants negotiate control to adjust and arrive at meaning. Interpretation is an important part of negotiation, which is evident even at the level of discourse production. For Kent, “discourse production…always embodies interpretation, for in order to produce discourse that will be comprehensible to others, we must first interpret the other’s code before we can match ours to it” (“Paralogic Hermeneutics” 26). Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon have put forth that “communication works better the more the participants share assumptions and knowledge about the world” (21). The ease with which effective communication occurs, then, may be affected by the amount of intercultural distance between interlocutors. It is important to recognize that Scollon and Scollon and Kent differ in their understanding of discourses as systematic and unsystematic respectively. However, in their extensive work on intercultural communication, Scollon and Scollon explore several ideas relevant to the project of paralogic hermeneutics. For example, they suggest that “when we are communicating with people who are very different from us…it is impossible to depend on shared knowledge and background for confidence in our interpretations” (Scollon and Scollon 22). In response to the question of interpretation, Kent again invokes Davidson: “In order to explain how we interpret the discourses of other…speakers and listeners adjust their hermeneutic strategies on the spot” (Kent 85-86). Thus, communication may be seen as a social activity not predetermined and constrained by socially constructed systems, but fostered in temporal and situational social contexts.

The centrality of language function

Growing in popularity especially in the field of linguistics is an emphasis on understanding language as it is used. Kent recognizes the contemporary importance of language function, suggesting that if paralogics were a discipline, it “would be the discipline that studies the nature of language-in-use” (Paralogic Rhetoric 5). This attention to language function seems to fit with Systemic Functional Linguistics, as developed by M.A.K. Halliday, which emphasizes how language is used in its context to achieve a particular purpose. However, Kent identifies the same problem with this approach as with other social constructionist approaches, which “assume that discourse production and analysis can be reduced to systemic processes and then taught in classrooms in some codified manner” (“Paralogic Hermeneutics” 25). Kent recognizes the importance of function, but asks us to rethink our “basic assumptions both about the acts of writing and reading and about the rhetorical tradition from which our current theories of writing and reading are derived” (“Paralogic Hermeneutics” 25). Kent proposes that “unlike the disciplines of linguistics and semiotics that treat language as a system of one kind or another, paralogics would accept as its first principle the claim that communicative interaction cannot be reduced to a logico-systemic framework” (Paralogic Rhetoric 5).

The ambiguous nature of language

Since Nietzsche’s discussions of language, truth, and metaphor (all language is metaphor; truth is illusion), scholars have enjoyed a rich conversation about language and meaning. Scollon and Scollon offer the following contemporary explanation about the ambiguity of language:

“When we say that language is always ambiguous, what we mean is that we can never fully control the meanings of the things we say and write. The meanings we exchange…are not given in the words and sentences alone but are also constructed partly out of what our listeners and readers interpret them to mean…meaning in language is jointly constructed by the participants in communication.” (Scollon and Scollon 7)

For paralogic hermeneutics, the key focus of this discussion is not the construction of meaning, but the interpretation of meaning. As Kent explains, again paraphrasing Davidson, “when we communicate we make informed guesses about meaning; we engage in a kind of impromptu hermeneutic dance choreographed by our prior and passing theories” (Paralogic Rhetoric 86-87). Stressing an unsystematic view of interpretation, paralogic hermeneutics proves useful in that it explicitly acknowledges that meaning must be treated as uncontrollable. Such a view further suits the often explicitly ambiguous nature of intercultural encounters.

Multiplicity and fluidity in meaning and interpretation

If language is understood as ambiguous, then so, too, can culture and communication be understood as multiple and fluid. As Scollon and Scollon point out, “there is hardly any dimension on which you could compare cultures and with which one culture could be clearly and unambiguously distinguished from another” (161). Theories of communication should take into account the multiplicity of culture. As Yuan argues, “it is especially urgent for an intercultural communication theory to be interaction based and to address the heterogenous, dynamic aspects of culture” (297). The need to acknowledge multiplicity has been articulated in postmodern theories such as Jameson’s and in feminist theories such as Faludi’s. Paralogic hermeneutics accommodates these dynamic aspects of both communication and culture in that it recognizes that our “cognitive maps” are descriptive and dynamic and that standardization, as feminist theory suggests, may have underlying implications of power. In actuality, an emphasis on standardization misses the mark; as Kent points out, “language makes convention possible; convention does not make language possible” (Kent 35).

Conclusion

If instructors are to consider the ways in which paralogic hermeneutics can inform our pedagogies, we need to rethink our basic assumptions about both communication and instruction. We need both to develop definitions that accommodate intercultural communication as an essential part of communication and to reconsider the foundations of our socially-based pedagogies. Paralogic theorists argue that

the differences among [other socially-based pedagogies] are less significant than their shared beliefs about the nature of communication and the sense in which writing is teachable. By challenging these shared beliefs, paralogic hermeneutic pedagogy thus poses a radical departure form the other socially based pedagogies…For those endorsing a paralogic hermeneutic orientation, writing courses should aim to reveal to students the external, social, interpretive, and unsystematic nature of communicative interaction. (Thralls and Blyler 259-261)

Even though Scollon and Scollon’s understanding of discourse as a system conflicts with the basic assumption of paralogic hermeneutics, the authors offer two approaches that are worthy of consideration for instructors who would wish to adapt these ideas to a pedagogy informed by paralogic hermeneutics. First, the authors stress that interlocutors must learn as much as possible about each other, which the authors term “increasing shared knowledge.” Second, interlocutors should assume that “misunderstandings are the only thing certain” in their interactions, which the authors call “dealing with miscommunication” (Scollon and Scollon 23). Our rejection of language as a system necessitates the rejection of pedagogical methods that seek to cultivate “linguistic competence” or seek to develop “intercultural competence” on top of the “regular” work of technical communication instruction. Some textbooks, as DeVoss et al. note, are beginning to address these concerns. However, instructors should consider incorporating paralogic hermeneutics by engaging students in the disciplinary conversations that can help them apply their interpretive skills. By entering these dialogues, students can engage in interpretation together, thereby learning how to make use of the background knowledge that they bring to their communicative interactions. In this way, students will be better served to enter the increasingly ambiguous, complex and dynamic workplaces that await them in their careers.

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