opportunity, opportunism, and progress:

Opportunity, Opportunism, and Progress: Kairos in the Rhetoric of Technology

CAROLYN R. MILLER

Department of English North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695 U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: As the principle of timing or opportunity, kairos serves both as a powerful theme within technological discourse and as an analytical concept that explains some of the suasory force by which such discourse maintains itself and its position in our culture. This essay makes a case for a rhetoric of technology that is distinct from the rhetoric of science and illustrates the value of the classical vocabulary for understanding contemporary rhetoric. This case is made by examining images and models of technological change that underlie and justify the thematizations of kairos that appear in so much technological discourse and by exploring the phenomenon of "technological forecasting," in which the characterization and construction of moments in the present are crucial to the projection of the future. One example of forecasting is examined in detail: the Japanese "Fifth Generation" computer project, which illustrates the twin themes of opportunity and threat.

KEY WORDS: Kairos, opportunity, Sophists, technological change, technological forecasting.

Just over ten years ago, the Japanese inaugurated a 10-year program to develop new computer systems that would combine artificial intelligence, new program- ming languages, and parallel processing to produce "intelligent" machines. Initiated by the government Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) with a projected government budget of $450 million, it was subsequently administered by the government-established Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (known as ICOT) (Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 1983, 13; Anonymous, 1983b, 47). The Japanese called this program the "Fifth Generation Computer System Project."

This project was formally launched in October 1981 with a conference in Tokyo, attended by about 300 researchers from all over the world. The reaction was intense, first in technical circles and somewhat later in political and industrial circles. Technology Review's account says that Westerners greeted the announcement of the project with "a cry of alarm" (Wood, 1988, 67); IEEE Spectrum noted that it "stirr[ed] the world's decision makers as few previous technologies have" (Anonymous, 1983b, 35); the Wall Street Journal quoted an IBM spokesman as saying "It 's way beyond what anybody else is talking about" (Lehner, 1981, 35); and Newsweek quoted an MIT computer lab director who looked at the initial Fifth Generation project plans: "I started panicking,

Argumentation 8.81-96, 1994. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

82 CAROLYN R. MILLER

panicking, panicking" (Anonymous, 1983a, 58). Indeed, the announcement spurred the creation of similar projects in the U.S., the European Common Market, and Great Britain (Anonymous, 1983a, 59-62; Anonymous, 1983b, pp. 28, 31). /

The ten-year project is now over, and its ambitious goals have clearly not been met. Natural-language processing, visual pattern recognition, emulation of human short-term memory, manipulation of knowledge databases, and concur- rent processing architecture have not advanced to the state where we can hold conversations with our desk-top unit to aid us in decision-making about investment, medical diagnosis, rush-hour traffic jams, and the like (these examples are used in the press reports). Even by 1987-88, the trade press was running headlines like these: "Japan's Fifth-Generation Failure" (Watts and Cross, 1988), "Next-Generation Race Bogs Down" (Anonymous, 1987), "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Edwards, 1988). And many now recognize that the Japanese project was intended not so much to achieve specific operational goals as to stimulate and focus development efforts and create needed research expertise (Wood, 1988, 73). One of the Japanese directors of the project has been characterized as "astounded" by the reaction to it: "He didn't expect the world would take Japan nearly as seriously as it did" (Anonymous, 1987, 28). Of particular interest is that this Japanese initiative had these effects even though two earlier projects of the same sort had very little international impact (Wood, 1988, 69-70).

The question I want to raise is why this project had such a threatening and galvanizing effect on the Western computer industry, why it was misconstrued, why the Fifth Generation concept affected the technical imagination so power- fully - even though it quickly became apparent that it was not the threat it had first appeared to be. I will claim here that these events can be understood as rhetorical ones. In particular, I will suggest, the rhetorical principle of kairos can help us understand the Fifth Generation story as an example of a central dimension of modern technological thought and discourse in general. As the principle of timing or opportunity, kairos serves both as a powerful theme within technological discourse and as an analytical concept that explains some of the suasory force by which such discourse maintains itself and its position in our culture. In addition to justifying and illustrating this claim, my goals, more broadly, are to make a case for a rhetoric of technology that is distinct from the rhetoric of science and to illustrate the value of the classical vocabulary for understanding contemporary rhetoric. This larger case will be made by examining the phenomenon of "technological forecasting," a discourse in which the

I' characterization and construction of moments in the present are crucial to the projection of the future. But before that, I will sketch out a number of images and models of technological change that underlie and justify the thematizations of kairos that appear in so much technological discourse. These provide the implicit warrants for much of the enthymematic argument in the discourse of technological forecasting, of which the Fifth Generation discussion is but a single example.

KAIROS IN THE RHETORIC OF TECHNOLOGY 83

Kairos is a term of rhetorical art that has recently been revived, after centuries of relative neglect. Central to the sophistic tradition, it is related but not identical to to prepon, or decorum, in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions. Decorum asks us to judge discourse according to whether it is fitting, or appropriate, to a particular moment; in presuming an objectively realist, post-Platonic notion of situation, it conceptualizes rhetoric as responsive, rather than constructive. But kairos is a pre-Socratic notion, less philosophically clear perhaps, but richer and more complex. It refers not to the specific responsiveness of discourse to situation but to the dynamic relationship between discourse and situation, to the qualitative nature of the situation itself as it is shaped in and by discourse. It presumes a relativism in which the nature of a situation is not objectively knowable - in which (as Gorgias apparently put it) deception is inevitable since language cannot truly report the world, and (as Protagoras apparently taught) contradictory arguments are possible in any case (Untersteiner, 1954). Kairos thus figures situation as inherently indeterminate and rhetoric as a momentary determination. John Poulakos' reconstruction of a sophistic definition of rhetoric makes kairos central: "Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible" (1983, 36).

Kairos tells us to look for the particular opportunity in a given moment, to find - or construct - an opening in the here and now, in order to achieve something there and then. Pointing as it does to the ways that situations change over time, to the relationship between past and future, to the ways that one moment differs from the next, kairos seems to be a natural tool for examining a discourse (indeed, a form of cultural life) that emphasizes change, development, progress - all notions central to the ways we conceptualize technology.

As an analytical concept, kairos has at least three useful dimensions. 1 First, it combines both realist and constructivist understandings of situation (as represented by Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz in contemporary discussions) and emphasizes the dynamic interplay between the two. It points both towards the ways in which opportunities may be perceived and responded to and towards the ways in which they may be defined or constructed. Second, kairos can figure change over time as either continuous or discontinuous, evolutionary or revolutionary. When change is conceived as discontinuous, kairos functions as it did in early Christian thought, as moments of miracle, when divinity manifests itself in the world, or more generally, as unprecedented times of radical change. When change is conceived as continuous, kairos functions as a constructive power: one has the opportunity to make an opportunity at any time, from situational resources that can be constructed in a variety of ways. Finally, kairos has a temporal-spatial dimension. As an image of situation, it includes the potentialities of a given time and place. The ancient Greek term is most often translated in temporal terms, as "the right time" or "timeliness," but it also carries a spatial metaphor, that of a critical opening. The earliest Greek uses of the term, in both archery and weaving, referred to a "penetrable opening, an aperture," through which an arrow or a shuttle must pass (Onians, 1951/1973,


345). As an opening, kairos becomes a rhetorical void, a gap, a "problem- space," that a rhetor can occupy for advantage. In this respect, kairos is much like Bitzer's definition of exigence as "an imperfection marked by urgency ... something waiting to be done" (1968, 6). But of course an opening can be constructed as well as discovered.

Technical discussions of the Fifth Generation project illustrate some of these resources of kairos at work. The report that a U.S. computer expert called the Japanese plan "at the cutting edge of computer research" (Lehner, 1981) exploits a common spatial image. An early report in an engineering journal raised the kairotic question of why the time was right for the Fifth Generation project: "Why has the merging of talent in [the] three fields [of microelectronics, artificial intelligence, and computer architecture] not occurred before now, and what makes us believe the next decade or two will bring about a new generation of intelligent computers?" (Anonymous, 1983b, 37). One of the major rhetorical~ forces that helped construct that belief was a 1983 book entitled The Fifth Generation by Edward A. Feigenbaum, an AI researcher at Stanford University, and Pamela McCorduck, a science writer. Their book's "Prolog" defines the moment: "The American computer industry has been innovative, vital, and successful. It is, in a way, the ideal industry. It creates value by transforming the brainpower of the knowledge workers, with little consumption of energy and raw materials. Today we dominate the world's ideas and markets in this most important of all modern technologies. But what about tomorrow?" The next sentence begins, threateningly, "The Japanese..." Feigenbaum and McCorduck describe the U.S. as complacent and unfocused, the Japanese as bold and forward-looking. "Are we about to blow it again?" they ask (1983, 1-3). But at the Tokyo conference Feigenbaum described the Fifth Generation computer not as a threat but as a positive revolution: "The Fifth Generation artificial intelligence machine is the machine we've all been waiting for" (Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 28). Similarly, an MIT computer researcher said at the same conference that "never before in history was there a better time for technological change" (Yasaki, 1982, 113). This moment in computer history, objectively distinct as it may seem, is constructed by some as opportunity and by others as threat. Defining the present moment allows you to define, if only by implication or negation, the next moment. It allows you to threaten and cajole, to mobilize a community, to win grants and contracts.

As the "Fifth Generation," the Japanese computer project attempted to define a moment in the development of computer technology and thereby to seize it. At a time when most computer systems in use were still "third generation" (based on integrated circuits, rather than Very Large Scale Integration [VLSI], which is generally considered to be the fourth generation [Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 1983, 17; Wood, 1988, 71]), the Japanese accelerated the pace of change by suggesting that the moment required developments that might otherwise have been considered premature. The concept of "generations" of technology, which is not unique to computers, is a kairotic one that combines both continuous and discontinuous versions of change. It suggests inevitable, natural, and necessary


change over time - a succession of differently enabled moments that constitute a predictable trajectory of increasing technical capacities; but it also suggests the arrival of a qualitatively and decisively different moment. Since each generation of a technology is "related" to the succeeding and previous ones, technological change seems continuous; it evolves incrementally and at least partially predictably, constrained by genetic heritage and environmental selective forces. At the same time, since each generation is separate, identifiable by its own distinct capabilities, change seems discontinuous; it proceeds by revolutions, by unpredictable "breakthroughs."

Technical discourse, of which the Fifth Generation incident is but one example, exploits the rhetorical resources of kairos in several ways. It relies on both spatial and temporal metaphors as well as on implied models of technological and economic change to position technology, to argue for or against policy, to arouse fear and desire, to instigate action. In the paragraphs that follow I examine technical discussions of technological change, in which the models and metaphors that underlie much technical discourse are made explicit or used with great frequency.

Spatial metaphors include images of gaps, like the "missile gap" of the 1960s, bottlenecks that inhibit change, and breakthroughs that herald it. We are also habituated to expressions such as the "state of the art," the research "front," "the cutting edge," all of which orient our understanding to the expansion of a territory; a relatively new and suddenly pervasive expression is the explicitly kairotic "windows of opportunity." The following extended example, from Ayres's correlation of economic cycles with major "technological transformations," makes the connection between spatial metaphors and well-timed opportunity explicit. Ayres proposes that each transformation (such as that from charcoal to coal or from steam to electric power) involves the overcoming of a technological "bottleneck" or "barrier" by some "breakthrough," which he defines as "a discontinuous and very dramatic improvement" (1990, 10) that "creates important new technical possibilities" (10-11). "Opportunity," he says, "is created both by 'breakthroughs,' which push back the limits of existing technology, and by the 'convergence' or 'fusion' of developments in different fields. Either way, the timing in most cases appears to be technologically determined" (1).

Another economic model based on a spatial image is the technology- push/demand-pull model. The basic idea is that technological change has two possible causes, supply and demand: it can be "pushed" along by the supply of discoveries and developments internal to technology itself, and it can be "pulled" by external forces, primarily market demand (Dosi, 1982). Economists assume that technological change is desirable, especially since the work of Nobel laureate Robert Solow suggested in 1957 that most increases in productivity were due not to capital formation, as classically held, but to changes in technology (Foden, 1989, 8). Since technological change seems to promote economic growth, the question that exercises the economists and policy analysts is which of the two causes of change is more important and whether government


policy should target "factors that influence the demand for or pay-off from innovation, [or] factors that influence the difficulty or cost of innovation" (Nelson and Winter, 1977, 49). The influential thesis by Schumpeter, developed in the late 1930s, that the clustering of major innovations during periods of deflation and recession helps to drive the following growth period (Ayres, 1990, 2-3) is an example of a "technology-push" thesis. Work by Schmookler in the early 1950s exemplifies the "demand-pull" thesis: changes in "demand for goods and services across industries chain back to influence investment patterns, which in turn influence the relative return to inventors working on improve- ments" in technology (Nelson and Winter, 1977, 49). The push-pull model finesses the problem of understanding technological change by assigning it to scientific research, on the supply side, and market economics, on the demand side, thus resolving the issue into more established and perhaps more familiar disci- plines. 2 For example, a recent textbook on technological change emphasizes the role o f the market: "Technological breakthroughs come in response to latent need" (Porter et al., 1991, 61). The model may draw its appeal from the clarity with which it poses just two econo-techno-rhetorical exigences, that is, the decisiveness with which it locates policy-makers clearly in one of two kairotic

spaces - on the supply side or the demand side - where decisions and actions may all be seen as required, or compelled, by an a priori need to fund basic research or an a priori need to stimulate markets.

Temporal metaphors are perhaps more pervasive in models of technical change. In addition to the generational metaphor discussed earlier, a similar image is widely used to characterize technological change, that of the "age" or "era": we speak of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, the jet age, the nuclear era. Historians of technology rely heavily on such kairotic periodization. 3 New eras are often said to be brought about by "revolutions," such as the industrial revolution or the computer revolution - an image that invokes the Kuhnian model of scientific change with its succession of distinct kairotic stages. 4 In addition, there are metaphors of organic time: prematurity, emergence, maturity, obsolescence - all of which are used to characterize the relationship between a technology and a moment (see for example, Dosi, 1982; Martino, 1987). Even characterizing a development as a "miracle drug" is a kairotic move recalling Christian uses of the term: the miracle can be understood as such only by comparison with what one would have normally expected at a given time.

Another cluster of temporal metaphors relies on images of movement and speed: technical systems are said to have "momentum" and "trajectories" (Dosi, 1982; Nelson and Winter, 1977); technological development is often described as a "race," and change is characterized as "acceleration." Underlying these images is a model of technological change that is usually presented as a graph of exponential growth or of such growth bounded by some upper limit, producing the familiar logistic or S-curve (Cetron, 1976; Hart, 1946; Kiefer, 1969; Quinn, 1967; Sanders, 1987). This pattern has been shown to characterize scientific growth, most notably in Derek J. de Solla Price' s bibliometric studies of science,


inspired, as he tells it, by the pattern made by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London stacked in 10-year increments against his wall (1986, xix); the pattern applies to the exponential rate of growth of scientific publications, as well as various other measures of scientific productivity (manpower, abstracts, known chemical elements or compounds, number of journals [1986, 5-6]). The characteristic period of rapid exponential growth, which can be described by a constant doubling time, is in most empirical situations preceded by a slow start-up phase and followed by a slowing of the growth rate, or "saturation," a pattern that yields the typical logistic or "S"- shaped curve. This pattern has been called the "natural law of growth" and was first noted in the early 19th century in studies of population growth (Hart, 1946, 280; Sanders, 1987, 164). 5 Perhaps the first precise formulation of this idea was by Henry Adams, who observed in his Education that a "law of acceleration" seemed to describe the progress of "science" (his notion of "science" includes technology, as most of his examples have to do with the production of power or tools and materials) (1918/1931, 489--498). Price suggested in one of his later studies that science and technology have parallel structures, even though technology can't be measured by the cumulation of its literature, as science can (1969, 91).

Four years earlier than Price's first report, however, sociologist Hornell Hart had noted the emergence over the previous 40 years of a "general sociological principle" of cultural acceleration. Many of the studies he cites and additional data he provides are measures of technological change, such as the destructive power of weapons (Hart wrote in 1946, just after the development of the atomic bomb), industrial outputs in Western countries, world speed records, and ranges of projectiles. Each of his data sets shows an overall exponentially increasing function, which can be decomposed into logistic curves for component technologies; for example, the data on speed include records for race horses, locomotives, automobiles, and airplanes. Hart's general hypothesis, which he illustrates with these data, is cast in terms of technological achievement: "Throughout the entire sweep of history and prehistory, the power of human beings to achieve their basic purposes has been increasing at accelerating speed, with local and temporary stagnations and setbacks. This long-run acceleration has taken place through a series of logistic ... surges, having higher and higher rates of increase" (1946, 281).

The S-curve has become a fixture, a literal topos, in discussions of technological change and growth. One particularly interesting recent discussion by Ralph Sanders, a professor at the National Defense University, focuses on the region of the curve where exponential growth is just beginning. That kairotic location, the period of maximum acceleration (according to some measure of performance), is a crucial time when the ideas for the next generation must be developed if "economic eclipse" is to be avoided when performance of the current generation reaches its limit; that is the time between the current generation's new product prototype (a workable and marketable innovation) and the development of a feasible concept for the next generation. The logistic curve can thus be taken as

8 8 CAROLYN R. MILLER

a map of time that tells you the nature of your opportunities at any given moment - if you know where (or when) you are on the map. It gives you a trajectory that domesticates change. Sanders makes this use of the logistic curve explicit: "Decision-makers must understand more than the significance of the slope of a technology curve. They should perceive the relationship between component technology patterns and the timing of decisions" (1987, 177). He offers a figure that "illustrates these timing considerations": the curve for any given technology will, he says, "provide national leaders with a glimpse into the connection between phases of technical development, and they indicate when to encourage or discourage technology transfer" (177).

Acceleration is a powerful and pervasive model of technological change. For some, like Sanders, it signals opportunity; for others, like Hart, it signals threat. Hart concludes that "the challenging fact about the new atomic age is not merely that aggressor nations can now demolish their victims hundreds of thousands of times more devastatingly than in past wars; nor merely that this can be done practically instantaneously ... [but that] the speed of increase is only a spec- tacularly dramatic expansion of technological developments which have been slowly accelerating for hundreds of thousands of years, and which now have a speed of increase which threatens to disorganize civilization" (1987, 290-291). The acceleration model for some becomes an image of technology as a monster out of control. Alarmist discourse based on this model presupposes a kairos defined by uncontrolled speed, of growth in a world of limits, of the looming asymptote at the top of the S-curve. Any number of critics have relied on this model, 6 but Jacques Ellul is perhaps the paradigm example. He describes technological systems (or what he calls "technique") as being "self-augmenting" (1954/1964, 85) and "self generative" (87). It grows, "not according to an arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression" and is "irreversible" (89). As Winner points out, Ellul's argument is a form of technological determinism, which makes technological change the primary cultural force. His determinism relies on the objectivist kairotic notion that for any given technical development "the preceding technical situation alone is determinative" (1954/1964, 90); hence, the frequency of simultaneous invention (86). This inevitability requires a continuous, incremental model of change that leaves no room for the revolutionary intervention of human genius: "What is decisive is this anonymous accretion of conditions for the leap ahead. When all the conditions concur, only minimal human intervention is needed to produce important advances" (86).

Elsewhere, Ellul uses the acceleration model explicitly: "Technological. development takes place by combining earlier technological elements. Logi- cally, when their number increases, the combination possibility grows in a geometric progression . . . . Thus, the more technologies we have at our disposal, the faster technological progress accelerates" (1977/1980, 291-292). 7 This explanation by the pessimist Ellul is remarkably similar to that of the optimist Herbert Spencer, who explained the lucky inevitability of progress in this way: "It will be seen that as in each event of today, so from the beginning, the decomposition of every expended force into several forces has been perpetually


producing a higher complication; that the increase of heterogeneity so brought about is still going on and must continue to go on; and that thus progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity" (1857/1966, 60). The ideology of progress and the ideology of technology out- of-control are thus complementary kairotic constructions: they both read from a series of changing moments a trajectory into the future and a message about appropriate action at the present. 8 They both create urgency, but they draw opposing conclusions about the nature of the moment, yielding on the one hand a rhetoric of opportunity or advantage and on the other a rhetoric of threat or disadvantage. In other situations it is sheer urgency that dominates, with advantage and disadvantage invoked almost indifferently.

Opportunity and threat are constructions of the future, and the discourse in which these constructions seem to culminate is that of the futures game, of the forecasters and projectors who read the "indicators" of today and yesterday and tell us what kind of time we are living in and what we can do to create a future of our choosing. Technological forecasting, an enterprise with its own literature and methods and a language that echoes much of what I 've pointed out here, aims to "identify and assess opportunities and threats" so that effective action can be taken (Quinn, 1967, 91). Technological forecasting is a discourse originating in the late 1950s, a manifestation of the Cold War. The first technical and trade publications calling it by name appear in the mid-1960s, and these appear to be spin-offs of military investment in forecasting'of a somewhat earlier time, since many of the authors had military affiliations (Cetron, Isenson, Kenz, Martino) and others worked for defense contractors (Ayres, Helmer, Lovewell and Bruce, Swager). 9 In addition, the World Futures Society, publisher of The Futurist, was formed in 1966; the journal Futures began publishing in 1968, in cooperation with the Institute for the Future; and the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change began publishing in 1969. 20 Much of the published literature is repetitious, introducing forecasting to different technical communities and listing the same set of admittedly imperfect methods (the collection in Bright, ed., 1968, is perhaps the most comprehensive introduction); a recent textbook (Porter, et al., 1991) covers much the same ground in the same way. The methods most often listed include trend extrapolation (projecting S-curves), analogy with the past, economic-resource models (push-pull models), "intuition," and expert consensus-building or the Delphi technique (Jantsch, 1967; Martino, 1972b).

Several features of these discussions are of interest here, and they add up to an implicit self-justifying argument. First, many emphasize that the need for forecasting arises in fundamental uncertainty, both about the present and about the future; it arises, in other words, in a kind of threat posed by lack of knowledge: "Today we have this new nemesis of the unknown ... It is the future. It is an unsympathetic Reaper who wields a scythe of technological progress, cutting down those who take unremitting root in the present" (Cetron, 1976, 83); "Of course it is difficult, if not impossible, to foresee the unforesee- able, the basic breakthroughs into the unknown" (Lessing, 1967, 98). And


recently: "The future is not predestined. It is unknown and unknowable," "The future is uncertain" (Porter et al., 1991, 12, 49). Given this fundamental condition, technological forecasting is acknowledged to be an art, rather than a science, a collection of methods that help reduce uncertainty but cannot dispell it: "Within the past decade or so, technological forecasting has progressed from something resembling a black art to the point where it is beginning to look like a science. It will probably never approach being an exact science" (Martino, 1972b, 23); "Technological forecasting has no established epistemology; no recognized theory or science of methods" (Isenson, 1966, B-74); "The art of technological forecasting is very new. Consequently, as of now there is no universally adopted approach to forecasting methodology" (Cetron, 1976, 84). "To improve decisions, the forecasts need not provide perfect information about the future. Complete precision is not a realistic demand" (Quinn, 1967, 106). Both these general conditions create a kairos of urgency: it is crucial to know the future but impossible to do so satisfactorily: 'There is an increasingly urgent need for better estimates of future technological changes. Business planners, market planners, R&D decisionmakers, fiscal directors - all~ need better estimates at all stages; all need technological forecasting" (Swager, 1966, 63). "Our nation, at this moment, faces one particularly vital challenge . . . . to probe the future ... whether we should or should not build an antiballistics missile (ABM) system" (Cetron, 1969, 83).

The cumulative effect of uncertainty in the environment and in the future, plus the inadequacy of methods for reducing uncertainty, is to make the need for knowledge seem more urgent and to create thereby a further need for forecasting and forecasters: "We must learn how to assess technological progress, to employ it, to delay it, and to defend our companies against technological change, if necessary" (Bright, 1963, 86). And one forecast is that "The future will see increased emphasis on technological forecasting" (Lovewell and Bruce, 1963, 373). This constructs a kairos of advantage; one might even call it opportunism.

The final step in the argument that is threaded throughout this literature is to validate forecasting by making it come true, to turn the description of the future into the construction of the future, prediction into control. An editorial in the first issue of Technological Forecasting called for "normative technological. forecasting" (Gabor, 1969, 1; see also Porter et al., 1991, 386). Air Force Col. Martino introduces his book by claiming that "The future is not up there waiting for us; the future will be what we make it" (1972a, viii), and the Head of Planning at the Naval Material Command expostulates, "In matters of great import, we must act on that which can be; we should not wait for certainties, for then it is far too late" (Cetron, 1976, 83). Jantsch, a consultant for the Organiza- tion for Economic Cooperation and Development, notes that "modemtechnol0gi- cal forecasting is connected wittr more than ... charting the range of possible or alternative futures . . . . It is also carried out to influence the direction and pace of technological development" (1967, 40). In this way, technological forecasting takes advantage of (or makes an advantage of) the realist-constructivist am- bivalence in kairos: the forecaster can threaten the objectively inevitable future


and simultaneously offer a way to reconstruct it. In retrospect, it is illuminating that the 1960s should produce a discourse like

that of technological forecasting. A time of cultural and diplomatic as well as technological uncertainty is hospitable to a discourse that emphasizes kairos, as we learn from the example of the Sophists. One of the founding texts of the forecasting movement highlights this concern with uncertainty; it is the rationale developed at the RAND corporation for the Delphi technique, the controlled use of expert judgment in decision-making under uncertainty31 This text, "On the Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences" by Helmer and Rescher, emphasizes that most natural and physical sciences are inexact, not just the social sciences, because they all require informal reasoning, rely on terminology with some inherent vagueness, and refer to "intuitively perceived facts or implications" (1959, 26). Such sciences yield what Helmer and Rescher call quasi-laws, and quasi-laws highlight an "epistemological asymmetry" (32) between explanation and prediction, which is that the logical strength of prediction is much less than that of explanation. Helmer and Rescher suggest on this basis that much more serious work should be done to develop "specific methodolog[ies] of prediction" (33), and they proceed to discuss the role of expertise and the Delphi method of shaping expert consensus because "background knowledge" of the unformulatable type that experts possess turns out to be crucial in the application of quasi-laws.

Although they arrive at different solutions, the Cold Warriors and the Sophists are struggling with similar problems: epistemological and political uncertainty and the need for reasoned action in the face of uncertainty. Helmer and Res- cher's "quasi-laws" are analogous if not identical to sophistic probabilities, and the reliance on opinion in the absence of logically confirmed knowledge reflects the sophistic conviction that doxa, rather than the illusory episteme, must be the basis for all judgments, including the determination of the kairos itself (Kerferd, 1981, 81-82). Finally, the background knowledge that gives experts their ability to make helpful predictions is unformulatable and based in experience rather than in system or method; Helmer and Rescher also note that the application of quasi-laws "requires the exercise of expert judgment" (1959, 51). Here again the emphasis on experience and judgment rather than on method or truth recalls sophistic rather than Platonic approaches to decision making, particularly the role of the Sophist as powerful rhetor. Although the Cold Warriors resist any suggestion of relativism whereas the Sophists seem to have accepted it as a general philosophy, the persistent connection among uncertainty, opportunity, and the projection of the possible, makes the forecasting movement an important contemporary manifestation of sophistic rhetoric.12

Technological forecasting has become a powerful discourse, no longer centered exclusively in the arms race but now also found in the general race for markets, both domestic and international. Its power is, I suspect, due to the same reasons that kairos is so pervasive in technology-talk. It promises the future to those who can use it rhetorically; it offers predictability, control, advantage. It holds together two contradictory aspects of the future: the deterministic and the

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probabilistic, the inevitable and the random. As a construction, the kairotic dimension of discourse offers both assurance about the unknown by extrapolation from the here and now and also control of the uncertain by opportunistic shaping of both present and future.

The kinds of kairotic constructions I have been discussing have become completely naturalized in a wide variety of technical and policy discourses, such as the following conveniently dense example, from Congressional hearings before the U.S House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology:

We are committed to winning the race to commercialize new science and technology. The new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should help us to compete with global giants, most notably the Japanese who forged ahead in bringing science and technology to the marketplace at an ever accelerating pace . . . . Today we need even more to rely upon the NIST to strengthen the science and technology base that is critical for our industry, for our jobs, our standard of living and our global competitiveness. The new Technology Administration of the Department of Com- merce could be a pivotal force in leading the U.S. charge to the forefront in science and technology. The new NIST should have a strong purpose at this - a very appropriate time. We need better coordination and collaboration in private sector research and development and cutting edge technologies, and the government can help to facilitate that. That's part of the secret of Japan's success in so many fields where the Japanese have caught up and taken the lead. (Ritter, 1989, 3, emphasis added)

Indeed, technological rhetoric like this so permeates contemporary political controversies that we cannot hope to comprehend fully their suasory dimensions and social import without detailed rhetorical examination of technological discourse.

This essay has been an exploration of what I call the rhetoric of technology, as distinct from the rhetoric of science. It examines discourse and patterns of thinking not in discipline-based research but rather in enterprises concerned with the development, production, and marketing of artifacts and practices. Just as inquiry into the history, philosophy, and sociology of technology has followed after the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, so studies in the rhetoric of technology have trailed after the rhetoric of science. This lag has in part to do with the prestige of science, I suspect - the greater respect we have for the making of knowledge than for the making of tools and techniques. It also has to do with the widespread tendency to consider technology as just "applied science," the direct use of the universalized knowledge created by science to solve specific practical problems. Most thoughtful observers of technology reject this characterization, holding that technology is not only a separate realm of action and discourse but also a distinct form of knowledge (Layton, 1974, 31-32; Skolimowski, 1966, 374; Vincenti, 1990, 5). Some might be tempted to assume that the rhetorics of science and technology are forms of "expert" discourse that are fundamentally similar, but the distinctively different goals, activities, and forums of discourse for science and technology all argue against that hypothesis. In addition, the distinctive function of kairos in technical discourse that I have demonstrated here constitutes another argument against that position. My earlier study of kairos in science showed its function in the


creation of "opportunities for belief" (Miller, 1992, 342), that is, current knowledge and the process of scientific change constrain and enable the making of new statements about new knowledge. In contrast, kairos in technical discourse functions primarily to create opportunities for opportunity.

My reliance on a concept from classical rhetoric to investigate a phenomenon as thoroughly contemporary as the discourse of high technology might seem questionable. This general approach has, of course, been used by rhetorical critics of scientific discourse (Gross, 1990; Prelli, 1989), and its demonstrated fruitfulness can be invoked to justify the putative anachronism. But another justification is that even now no conceptual vocabulary other than that of classical rhetoric makes it possible to attend to the suasory nature of discourse in its full, situated complexity. Even though classical concepts must often be adapted and extended in order to address discourse that couldn' t have been conceived by Gorgias or Plato, this process can also reveal aspects of classical theory and practice that had remained unrealized or undeveloped; the recent revival of sophistic rhetoric is one result of this process, as is the recovery of kairos as a central rhetorical concept. Without the concept of kairos, and its attendant rhetorical and philosophical assumptions, most of what has been noted here would not be seen as part of a single rhetorical pattern. The relationships among the models and images of technological change would remain fragmen- tary; the Fifth Generation project would be a technical failure, not a rhetoriqal success; the forecasting movement would seem a technical curiosity, perhaps, but one whose motive engine remained mysterious. The interaction of classical rhetoric and contemporary discourse is, I would say, not anachronistic' but timely.

NOTES

1 I have discussed these dimensions of kairos in somewhat more detail in an earlier paper on kairos in the rhetoric of science (Miller, 1992). 2 This movement has led to a large literature attempting to distinguish between science and technology and establish their relationship. At an early stage, it made attractive the notion that technology was merely "applied science." 3 For examples, see Ayres (1990) and Bell (1989). 4 Johnston (1972, 124) uses Kuhnian language to discuss technological change, and notes the similarity between "paradigms" and "generations." 5 Rescher (1978, 72) attributes the claim that material progress in human affairs is logistic to R.A. Lehfeldtin 1916. 6 Winner (1977) includes a comprehensive discussion. 7 Hart's explanation of why the general curve consists of logistic surges is similar: "When a new, highly potential element becomes available (such as the steam engine...) a certain number of potential combinations with this new element become possible. Each combination which proves effective becomes a diffusion center from which other combinations are propagated ... If the proportion of these possibilities which has been achieved is represented by p, and the proportion yet to be achieved is represented by q, the number of pregnant contacts at any given time is proportional to pq, and the cumulative number of combinations effective is proportional to the integral of pq" (1946,


282). 8 Pacey makes a similar point about the similarity between the optimist and pessimist versions of technological change, that they both rely on what he calls a "one-dimen- sional" or linear understanding of progress (1983, 24). 9 The '~rechnological Forecasting Bibliography" in Bright (ed.), (1968), lists a con- siderable series of secret and confidential reports prepared for the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy in the 1960s; Cetron and Dick describe the first Navy technological forecast, prepared in 1968 at a cost of $1.9 million (1976, 185). 1o In addition to the flurry of activity in the trade and technical press during the 1960s, there is a parallel movement in the popular arena during the same period, with future- oriented books published by Arthur C. Clarke, the Club of Rome, Peter Drucker, Paul Ehrlich, Jacques Ellul, Herman Kahn, and Alvin Toffier in the 1960s - but that is the subject of another essay. al The Delphi technique involves asking a set of experts who are isolated from each other to make predictions on a questionnaire and then providing them with "information and opinion feedback derived by computed consensus," possibly asking them to provide "reasons" for previously expressed opinions; the reasons and additional feedback about the group consensus may then be provided on a third questionnaire. Helmer and Rescher note that this process reduces "the influence of certain psychological factors, such as specious persuasion ... and the bandwagon effect of majority opinion" (1959, 47). 12 The classical appeal that Helmer and Rescher make, of course, is not to the masterful judgment of a Sophist, but to a mysterious source of true knowledge, the Delphic oracle.

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opportunity, opportunism, and progress:

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