The Boundaries of the New Frontier: Rhetoric and Communication at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (review)

On 19 July 2006 Joanna S. Ploeger died of cancer at the age of thirty-nine. We are lucky that she left this smart, thought-provoking book. Ploeger's portrait of the Chicago-area high-energy physics laboratory is incisive, original, and telling. Understanding Fermilab, she explains, requires confronting "its boundaries and spaces." Ploeger's intention is not only to explore the laboratory's physical borders and interiors in line with the recent scholarly trend in history of science, medicine, and technology, but also to determine the laboratory's rhetorical construction, that is, the ways in which all those connected with Fermilab—employees, visitors, politicians, taxpayers—shape definitions of the laboratory and its work through their interactions and collective experience. She argues that it is crucial to study these "rhetorical boundaries" because they "help determine the outcomes of economic, political, and symbolic disputes about the laboratory and its mission." Even more important, such boundaries "determine the power and importance of the national laboratories as institutions, justifying their work and negotiating their symbolic importance in debates about the role and reach of science in society" (p. 2).

Since it is impossible in this short review to explain all of Ploeger's insights, a couple of examples must suffice. Especially interesting for historians of technology is her conclusion about the nature of Fermilab. Although Fermilab's scientists see their work on the fundamental constituents of matter as concrete and judge that it is expressed most importantly in words to other experts, Ploeger argues that in fact the crucial rhetoric of the laboratory is almost entirely a visual sublime meant for the tax-paying public. The reason is the bottom line: "Visitors, perhaps initially motivated by curiosity about how their tax dollars are being spent, are invited into the extraordinary transcendent world of particle physics where questions of 'why' and 'how much' suddenly seem odd and even irrelevant." "The sublime experience," in particular of the large and exotic technology of particle detection, "directs attention away from seemingly obvious realms of pragmatic inquiry and critique." Since the visitors include politicians—and since the high cost of Fermilab science requires a high level of public and political support—this tactic "is a unique and at times quite effective way to manage the laboratory's rhetorical boundaries" (p. 55), that is, the barriers that protect its interests and allow the laboratory's continued existence.

Ploeger insists that another attempt at boundary construction has been less successful. Fermilab, she explains, "sought to deny its connection to the military-industrial complex" by creating pure research spaces meant to "shelter both their occupants and their visitors from outside threats of contamination" in an attempt "to resolve individual ethical and ideological angst" of its antiwar, politically left-leaning community. However, such efforts were undermined because large accelerators are funded through a government-run laboratory system originally constructed by wartime contacts that included weapons laboratories. Another problem for deniers is that Fermilab has continued to justify its existence based on the promise of payoffs, which necessarily includes (at least in the public view) military applications now that the United States is engaged in the war on terror. Therefore, Ploeger argues, the "knowledge and technology produced" by Fermilab "can never be segregated from the world of weapons and defense in any meaningful way" (p. 162).

This book is a must-read for all those interested in exploring a new view of the social and political interplay that drives the development of expensive government-funded science and technology. Heartfelt gratitude to all those at the University of South Carolina Press, Fermilab, and the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa (including four of Ploeger's students) who created this book from a manuscript that was not quite completely revised at the time of Joanna's death. David Depew, who spearheaded the work, says the purpose was to erect "a...