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The Evil in Technical Communication: Katz, Ward, Moore, and Overnaming

Matthew Boedy 1

Abstract

Ethics and technical communication have a long history. Much of the discussion has

ignored, though, the evil in language—overnaming. We see clearest this evil in what

some have called “administrative evil.” Technical communicators, like all good rhet- oricians, need to understand how to respond to it. Overnaming as part of “admin- istrative evil” is that evil which grounds all other evils. It is a certain understanding of language and what naming can do. When we overname, we try to control words to

mean one thing eternally. Rhetoric is a move of renaming those words that have been

overnamed. Such invention is needed as part of any rhetorical education for technical

communicators.

Keywords

evil, ethics, naming

There has been something ignored in the important conversation that last appeared in this journal in 2010. In that appearance (a series of two articles), Mark Ward attempted to defend his long-ago graduate advisor Steven Katz from the criticisms of Patrick Moore who wrote in 2006 that Katz’s “Ethic of Expediency” (1992) among other faults gave a bad name to technical

Journal of Technical Writing and

Communication

2015, Vol. 45(3) 213–225

! The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/0047281615578844

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1 Rhetoric & Composition, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Boedy, Rhetoric & Composition, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA.

Email: [email protected]

communication. That conversation, I claim, is grounded in a concept that is vitally important to technical communication and rhetoric in general and yet remains underdeveloped: evil.

Many may wonder outside the long-used judgment of rhetoric as evil by Plato, what connections there are to rhetoric in general and technical com- munication for evil. One connection between evil and rhetoric is this: One of the ways that rhetoric as intellectual work gets done is naming that “object” of thought (theory, concept, or process) that should matter now, in our present times. My overall claim in this essay is that there is an evil to be named for technical communication. Before I name such and so give evil a present exigency, a short history of that very act is needed. In the same era that produced Plato’s unwarranted charge, there is the key to one of our classic forms of rhetorical education: Isocrates’ “present evils.” The phrase appears again and again in his texts as that to which his students respond. It named that civic burden which showed itself in the evils most destructive to the fledgling democracy: political tyranny, corrupt taxation systems, and “teachers” selling their “trivial” education, all grounded in a kind of evil language. Nearly 2,000 years later, Erasmus echoed Isocrates by emphasizing evil speech—backbiting, gossip, but also royal and religious declarations of self-righteousness that led to wars—as the most destructive force in European Renaissance society and so that to which his rhetorical education aimed to respond. Jump ahead to the 20th century and evil becomes that to which the world goes to war (twice). And the world is introduced to a new type of evil: a banal one, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, one that exists in the ordinary human, not the monster, one that is best seen in the language of clichés and the absence of thought. What is common to these examples (and others not told) is how evil is renamed, redefined for the “present generation” over and against other definitions that had strangled productive thought about evil.

And that bring us to Katz. “Evil” does not appear in Katz’s original 1992 article, but it is important to his insights about technical communication. The word is the ethical basis for a 1989 article that Katz cites both in his original College English article and a 1993 follow-up in the Journal of Business and Technical Writing. That article—“Aristotle and the Ethics of Business Communication” by Craig and Carol Kallendorf—argues that Aristotle’s delib- erative rhetoric was never meant to be framed amorally. The Kallendorfs argue that Aristotle did not see rhetoric solely as a “value-free” techne but as a carrier of values. They write:

Because language is also a carrier of values in the world of action, Aristotle qua-

lifies [rhetoric as techne] by saying that we should not choose language ‘with a view

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to putting both sides into practice - we must not advocate evil . . . ’ (Kallendorf &

Kallendorf, 1989, p. 57 quoting Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1355a)

Ways to “advocate evil” include “sham enthymemes” (Kallendorf & Kallendorf, 1989, p. 65) and “any effort to manipulate the audience” which includes stirring “up emotions inappropriate to the circumstances” or concealing “motivations and intentions” (Kallendorf & Kallendorf, 1989, p. 58). One is reminded of Quintilian’s good man speaking well.

It should be made clear that these ways to “advocate evil” is linked for Aristotle to what might be called advocating for evil. That is, this line suggests one cannot advocate ethically for evil and one cannot of course advocate evilly for something ethical. (Here, the Ross translation is helpful: “one ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong.”)

1 The Kallendorfs, Katz, and readers of

this journal certainly know that claiming a universal ethic or evil is sadly the cause of many a great evil. The Kallendorfs write, transferring Aristotle into our modern capitalistic era: “In a society as fragmented and centrifugal as ours, there is little chance of being able to impose a fixed, immutable Platonic truth onto even a small company, much less onto a corporate giant like IBM or Texaco . . . ” (Kallendorf & Kallendorf, 1989, p. 59). Yet, the above line from Aristotle indirectly argues that while we must not advocate for evil, we must name evil, and Aristotle named some that were destructive to his society. Aristotle understood the impossibility of naming that universal should not stop humans from doing just that.

A reader might respond here with two objections. One is the use of impossi- bility. Surely such universal naming is very difficult, especially because of the highly situated/contextual “site” of any naming. But I do not mean to say naming universals is impossible because all universals are based in particular situations (they are). I mean to say naming a universal is impossible because no “name” can hold that which we set out to name, evil perhaps being the best example. And yet we ignore this impossibility; in fact, we speak as if we can name something, we speak with a hubris of naming. The second objection can be summed up this way: Evil is not a must as a moral descriptor. These objectors cry rightly that the word has been used not only to name horrible human actions but also to regulate agents of such actions as nonhuman, a kind of abuse. Recall the monster, the snake, and the devil. Similarly, they insist the word has rightly become taboo in academic circles, a long-ago tossed-aside essentialist term that crops up every now and then (see Bush and 9/11) and those who use it need to be given their comeuppance if it ever appears again. In fact, one might argue that Katz deliberately did not use the word “evil” in his article to move away from its uses as that which ends all debate, as that religious uber-signifier and cliché. These objectors might add that we do not need it; we call such “events”

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something less connected to religion, something more connected to psychology (i.e., a pathology) or politics (i.e., crime or injustice).

Let me answer both objections by outlining the rest of the article where I work toward naming a “present evil” for technical communication and offering a way to respond. Walter Benjamin called naming with a hubris “overnaming.” He wrote in “Language as Such and the Language of Man” that naming is the “innermost nature” of language, and yet because of the “fall of the spirit of language,” naming is always “overnaming.” What is overnaming? An “overprecision” that works from the certainty that a “name” can “hold” the object of that name. This hubris is a “character trait” in human language, and this trait according to Benjamin is the “deepest linguistic reason for all melan- choly” (Benjamin, 1996, p. 73). It is a fundamental evil. Benjamin is not the only one to name this evil as central. Kenneth Burke noted the analogy between the Word (words about the divine) and the word (language used to describe the human realm) in his phrase “god terms”—overnames for elements in the human realm. This “linguistic entitlement” or “fiat” (Burke, 1970, p. 33) is seen when our names for events, attitudes, or people (and institutions and structural sys- tems) become the only names that matter. This causes conflicts large and small, political and social, religious and secular.

And like any other mode of communication, the evil of overnaming affects technical communication. And so rhetoric’s role in responding to (and within) this evil comes into play: It must rename, rework, reinvigorate those overnames that have become too commonplace, too accepted, and that tragically have done so much evil. And evil, sadly, is one of the most powerful overnames we face. And this intellectual work must persist on a perpetual basis, a kind of consistent social-epistemic function that is slowed or sometimes even stopped by powerful cultural forces, the overnames. This is one insight in Katz’s 1993 follow-up to “The Ethic of Expediency.” What Katz calls “technical-professional rhetoric” in “Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Hitler’s Program, and the Ideological Problem of Praxis, Power, and Professional Discourse” is “aware only of its own values” and so “only technical criteria” can lead to what is culture-wide named “ethically cor- rect” (Katz, 1993, p. 55). And in Nazi Germany and the West, this “techno- logical ethos is secure enough that it can demand to be accepted on its own technical terms” (Katz, 1993, p. 55, my emphasis). Here “technical-professional rhetoric” is the overname (or at least has “selected” some overnames) and so needs to be rhetorically destabilized.

But why not some other word? As I noted earlier, evil was a “present absence” in Katz’s article, and so we need to stop ignoring it. In my frame, Katz refused (rightly) to continue the overnaming of evil. Katz was responding to a Western (largely American) culture that had dehumanized evil and created evil “Others” like Russian villains (i.e., Reagan’s “evil empire”). Katz was also

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responding to a multigenerational cultural shift away from the word that had become known as something “beyond” human intercourse. More directly, he was responding to the powerful “stability” in the word, the overname that had so overpowered any critique of its use. Yet, in a fundamental way, Katz was doing what rhetoricians had always done with evil: renaming it for the present generation. In that manner, he was responding to the evil of overnaming. How so? His “new” evil was grounded in overnaming: The “ethic of expediency” was evil because in some manner it allowed no other names, no other “value” to exist—only that which brings the most efficient end. That he did not use the word evil in either article—or for that matter, overnaming—is to me fact of its importance. He wrote in a culture deeply entwined with the good/evil dualism and about a culture that has been the picture of evil for many decades.

Besides Katz, technical communication has not been completely silent on evil. One person to address this in the field is Mark Gellis in his 2002 article “Leadership, Rhetoric, and the Polis.” There Gellis nods toward overnaming as he links modern civic leadership and Isocrates’ rhetorical education. He writes that “what we need is a citizenry who can accomplish for our world what the polis was supposed to accomplish” in the Athens inhabited by Isocrates and others (Gellis, 2002, p. 204). Isocrates trained others on how to appeal “to communal values, interests, and desires, stimulating the arts of civilized life” (Gellis, 2002, p. 56, citing Thomas Benson). In the same manner, Gellis argues that we should teach students to become “active” citizens who are not “passively obedient to a central authority” however “benevolent or enlightened that authority might be.” And why is this active citizenry needed “against” the authority? The latter is “still human and subject to the corruption of every human evil” (Gellis, 2002, p. 56). Gellis’ exemplar of Isocrates echoes my history in the introduction. Isocrates teaches his students to be active creators of dis- course. Why? We must work within the evil of overnaming by renaming. And the renaming we must do is of the word evil lest we give up on the one of the most powerful analytic weapons we have.

The “problem of evil” has been a theological, philosophical, or psychological one. This seems to be the context in which Ward wrote “Katz’s thesis suggests the many possibilities for rhetorical theorists and technical communication scho- lars to . . . lend their researches to what is arguably the central question of our age” (Ward, 2009, p. 219, my emphasis). The “problem of evil” can be inter- rogated by rhetorical theorists only if the evil of overnaming is that which grounds all others. And yet we have not done this or have ignored the way that Katz has done so. Part of the failure is that we have gone to some lengths to “unname” evil—not use the word

2 —and to disabuse ourselves of the notion

that it needs to be named. Sadly, this has led to a missing moral language both in

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the classroom and in research. Evil has value in the “postmodern” age because it connects our perhaps tossed-aside moral languages to technical communica- tion’s current fascination with ethics (Katz’s article a primer in that move). But it also has value because it can name that central linguistic problem I am calling overnaming.

3 Overnaming is an evil because it is based on a totalitarian

idea, the idea that an “I” is at the center of the world, that the names that this “I” gives are the only names that matter. This “I” could be the infamous tyrant or the banal ego, Hitler or Eichmann. Overnaming is clearest in what some call “administrative evil.” This is what I show in the next section.

Administrative Evil and Technical Communication

Katz identified a “present evil” in Nazi Germany and the West. I want to extend his concept into “administrative evil.” It is this evil I want to claim as the “pre- sent evil” for technical communication. Administrative evil is not my phrase, but one I am borrowing from another discipline. Six years after Katz’ original art- icle, Unmasking Administrative Evil was published and since then has become an important piece of scholarship in public administration, winning awards and currently in its third edition. Administrative evil for Guy Adams and Danny Balfour is when “ordinary” people commit “acts of dehumanization” through their “normal” professional roles. They too, like Arendt, cite Adolf Eichmann as an example as one who like other German public servants worked within a “subversion of language” and “atrophy of thought” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. xii) to commit evil. These two elements were grounded (and remain so in our era) for Adams and Balfour, echoing Katz, in the cultural mindset of “technical rationality.” This “narrows” reason, professionalism, ethics, and politics as con- cepts in favor of a pursuit of an enlarged “technical progress and processes” that do not emphasize “human values and dignity” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. xxv). The “narrowing” is a form of overnaming. This mindset though is not limited to public administration but is grounded in “all professions and for practitioners of all kinds whose activities are within public life in its most general sense” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 5).

4 This was Katz’s most controversial point, one that is at

the heart of the “problem of evil” for technical communicators and what kind of education should they receive.

Unmasking Administrative Evil gives us a blueprint for understanding the importance of studying this “present evil” in communication studies. It is in this frame we should read Adams and Balfour as they argue they do not aim for “any particular formation” of their field’s identity, but “more at what has not been written – the failure to recognize administrative evil as part and parcel of the identity of public administration” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 6). Evil is “a vitally important concept” in that field, and yet there is a “tendency to lament acts of administrative evil while dismissing them as temporary and isolated aberrations or deviations from proper administrative behavior” (Adams &

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Balfour, 1998, p. 6). In that manner, the lack of “evil” in technical communi- cation (and I recognize it is a young field, comparatively) occurs with a proper “lamenting” but wrong frame (evil as excess to or even absent from any com- munication model). If we take evil as “part and parcel” of the communication process (technical or otherwise), it disabuses us of the notion that we can do as some in public administration had done: “safely wall” off evil from “our own time and space, and from ordinary people in ordinary times” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 6). Overnaming is the evil of communication and that means of course that evil has become “part and parcel” of that process that we believe grounds many other areas of knowledge.

As I mentioned above, Katz—without using the word—showed us a way to rename evil so that it does productive work for this field, as Ward suggested we take his work. Katz did not so much fault “technical communication” and lionize “instrumentalism” as he, albeit indirectly, named language as deeply affected by the evil of overnaming. And going more “instrumental” does not solve the problem of overnaming. In fact, it may only hide it more (and this seems to be Katz’s central response to Moore). Instrumental language is an effect for Balfour and Adams of a certain way of thinking produced by admin- istrative evil. Adams and Balfour note that “the human capacity to participate in evil” is a “certain kind of mental state . . . marked by a very concrete, narrow, rigid way of thinking” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 16). This mental state—where overnames are the only names—is a “contextless, or timeless practice” and produces an ahistorical consciousness of “the professions and disciplines” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 37).

It is this lack of context that has “precluded meaningful engagement with the larger ethical and political concerns” of our society (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 37). Such a lack of context can come from certain organizational cultures. In this frame, Adams and Balfour tackle the Challenger disaster (a subject familiar to our discipline) and argue that the “dynamics of (NASA) organizational culture” (where three space centers fought for primacy in the NASA hierarchy) led to evil. That culture included a probable phone call from President Reagan (or perhaps a top aide) to the NASA administrator ordering the shuttle launch despite concerns from less empowered engineers about the impact of the abnor- mal freeze on the shuttle’s problematic O-rings. “Would that action be fairly called evil? Perhaps” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 121). Also the book claims, albeit admitting it is difficult to do so, those “obedient to duly constituted authority” enabled evil to surface. Amid this culture, even if the shuttle had not launched, “it was just a matter of time” before a disaster struck (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 121). This was because there had developed a “pattern of censoring problematic or negative information for higher-ups within NASA” and, as Linda Driskill notes in her discussion of the Challenger disaster in “Understanding the Writing Context in Organizations,” this empowered certain people to define the rhetorical situation against and over others. “The definition

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of the rhetorical situation controls to a large extent which events or perceptions count as facts, which concepts apply to these facts, an which assumptions are used to evaluate them” (Driskill, 2004, p. 116) to the extent that such definitions “determines which words are chosen as appropriate” (Driskill, 2004, p. 116). This is the evil of overnaming. It precipitated the tragedy.

Another example of the evil of overnaming and so then “administrative evil” in the book is euphemisms, akin to Katz’s Just who used such euphemisms as “pieces” and “load” to name the humans being gassed inside the vans he was making more efficient. Euphemisms are sometimes thought to obscure ethical dimensions, much in the same way that some see evil as an aberration or lack of ethics. But as Katz suggested, evil is not a lack but an “outgrowth” of values, and values are named practices or habits. For those who see evil as nonexistent or outside humanity, Katz’s claim is important to read again. Evil comes from a way with human language, not inserting itself from the outside. As many his- torians have pointed out, the memos of the Nazi regime did not use euphemisms to hide their evil because they thought what they did was evil; in other words, they did not see the euphemisms as euphemisms. They saw the humans inside the vans as “pieces” and “load.” In that manner, the memos revealed the evil of overnaming in an evil administrative culture.

5

Overnaming is when those we name (humans especially) cannot be other than the name we choose. It is evil precisely because it dehumanizes, disallowing a certain freedom that grounds being human, excluding a certain life that is given to us to become, to live fully. In popular language, we might see someone as a “jerk” and so exclude him from other names. Yet, in reality, we are always multiple “names”—husband, father, loving friend, to cite a form of many a tombstone. When we are named singularly, especially when those names have their life taken away (the “load” certainly was “free” to move in the van, though that was not life) we overname. In other words, Just the memo writer saw the humans inside those vans as only “merchandise” who have a “natural tendency to rush to the rear doors [when the process begins] and is mainly found lying there at the end of the operation” (Katz, 1992, p. 255). It is not merely enough to name the vans as evil, but we must also as communication scholars name the overnaming here as evil. If we do not, the vans may never come again, but the users will. In this manner, then evil is not excess to the human condition (i.e., in the technological object), but central to it. Interestingly, this is the message of Balfour and Adams. They note that language plays a role as a value carrier, echoing Katz and the rhetorical tradition.

What makes the “new” phenomena of administrative evil “administrative” for Adams and Balfour is it is embedded in the “modern, complex organization” that diffuses responsibilities. Its “technical rationality” “tends to drive” ethical considerations “out of the picture altogether” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. xxiii). This leads to the tragic conclusion that some evils cannot be judged by inten- tions. In fact, like Arendt’s Eichmann, the lack of “evil intentions” is a key

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element in this new, modern evil. And so then one must look to the language as the first place that evil emerges. For Balfour and Adams, evil emerges linguis- tically through “moral inversion, in which something evil has been redefined convincingly as good” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. xx). This is not, unfortu- nately, what it sounds like: a “180-degree” of moral judgments, but a “narrow- ing” of broad concepts such as torture as to allow evil.

This is the method of those who committed the evil at Abu Ghraib, Balfour and Adams and a third scholar argue in a 2006 article. In a paradoxical way, a “nar- row” view of torture combined with a “lack of clearly established written proced- ures” provided the space for the torture (Adams, Balfour, & Reed, 2006, p. 687). Part of the administrative evil there was the ways in which certain key “moral concepts” like torture and human were so “overnamed”—here ironically a form of tightening the definition, but nonetheless making the definition “totalizing”—as to allow “excess” to be performed and not be called illegal or evil. Or in another way they argue the emphasis given to patriotism and national security (as over- names) lessened the impact ethics might have on the actions inside the prison. And so yet again, those who violated the “boundaries of morality and human decency” did not believe they were doing anything wrong (Adams et al., 2006, p. 690), in part because of the evil of overnaming and the way this broader evil becomes embedded in a particular “administrative” culture. The “few bad apples” theory must be interrogated by the “many more and much less obviously evil organiza- tional activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior” (Adams et al., 2006, p. 690). Overnaming is the central “organizational activity” and so needs to be studied by technical communicators as an administrative evil. In the next section, I offer some roadmap for that call.

Responses to Administrative Evil

If I have made my case that overnaming is an evil and that this evil grounds at least in part the administrative evil described by Balfour and Adams and Katz, then the question becomes response. Balfour and Adams note in their article about Abu Ghraib that even if we aim to eliminate cruelty first, this does not give moral comfort. This is only a “minimalist public ethic” that does not and cannot account for “the strenuous ethical demands on citizens” to “live with contradictions, unresolvable conflicts” (Adams et al., 2006, p. 691). What is that unresolvable conflict? Naming is always overnaming, even the naming we do of torture, ethics, human. In other words, the overnames remain in the “min- imalist” ethic. We live under the power of overnames when we refuse this conflict, most directly the paradox that naming can never fully name anything. Part of the response might be a minimal acknowledgement that all our naming is overnam- ing. Calling out hubris is always a good thing.

Many companies and perhaps academics have argued a good and enforced code of ethics can lessen unethical and perhaps then evil behavior. Yet, one of

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the ways Balfour and Adams argue that we refuse the paradox of naming (and so overname) is with codes of ethics. They write that codes of ethics—especially as framed by our culture’s mindset of “technical rationality”—“focuses on the individual’s decision-making process” and are meant to “safeguard the integrity of the organization by helping individuals conform to professional norms” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 163). But hardly ever are these codes recognized as merely “safeguards.” They are seen as “fail-safes against unethical behavior”; yet they do not “necessarily help individuals resolve tough moral dilemmas that often characterized by ambiguity and paradox” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 163). In fact, the authors note despite extensive literature in their field on ethics, “there is little recognition of the most fundamental ethical challenge to the technical-rational approach to administrative ethics . . . ” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 166). That challenge: how one can be an “efficient and effective” pro- fessional and “at the same time commit or contribute to acts of administrative evil” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 166). This is one area—if administrative evil is taken as important by technical communication—that technical communication can respond with its humanistic arts. Katz hit Balfour and Adams’ challenge head on through his study of memo writing and the larger ethic. And this is why his article deserves to be a heuristic to discussions of administrative evil. But it also highlights the connection between naming and evil.

Yet, an ethical response is never merely an individual response. Balfour and Adams note that even if an individual “finds the strength to resist administrative evil” (after suggesting history shows that often does not happen), “technical rationality” “provides little in the way of guidance for how to act effectively against evil” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 168). Balfour and Adams’s response includes “recognition of community life” against our Western minds grounded in individualism, especially as it is seen in how professionals seem themselves as cut off from any cultural or social forces (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 174). In this “rethinking,” ethics “emerges from the relational context within which people act – within the public square” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 176). They are nodding toward pluralism in some fashion and a kind of heterogeneous public square where “public” as a name means something. The “public” seeks to understand its interdependency and so “public servants” would be unethical if they did not speak publicly to issues (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 177). This “speaking” is a kind of “critical and active citizenship”—which “makes demands on individuals, and on individuals acting together in the public interest” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 178). In such “strong communities,” administrative evil may not be fully erased (because evil is “part of the human condition”). But when public servants who in prior eras masked evil now work with “a critically reflex- ive sense of the context of public affairs . . . with a mission to educate and build an inclusive and active citizenry” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 181), there is built “an inevitably small and fragile bulwark against things going really wrong” (Adams & Balfour, 1998, p. 180).

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According to George Reed, Balfour and Adams’s book placed “the onus for unmasking administrative evil squarely on the shoulders of the public administrator” who has the status, power, and perspective to “observe down- stream effects of” their organization’s activities (Reed, 2012, p. 193). Technical communicators may not have the same “perch.” But they too can intervene in administrative evil as “public servants.” As Reed notes, “the responsibility [of response] rightly extends to all of those that serve the larger system” (Reed, 2012, p. 194). And how these “public servants” are educated becomes key to their “rhetorical ability” to respond (and their recognition of that as a “pub- lic” burden). Communication scholars have also tried to describe this “public” criticism. Mary Hoffman and Debra Ford argue in their 2009 book Organizational Rhetoric: Situations and Strategies that “critical approaches to organizational communication” can interrogate and provide a robust edu- cational ground for responding to administrative evil. Such an approach is effective because it aims at overnaming. Such approaches seek to examine “how organizations try to impose or fix meanings to advance the organiza- tion’s interests,” interests “often privileged at the expense of the other, less powerful interests” (Hoffman & Ford, 2010, p. 82). Katz himself hopes for a way forward in the last line of his 1993 essay when he conceives of a “sophistic ethic for technical and professional communication” (Katz, 1993, p. 59).

How might one begin to teach this “critical approach” or “sophistic ethic?” Perhaps one can begin with this: There is real suffering in this world, and sadly, even words like suffering, injustice, and evil cannot hold it all. But because we overname, we must rename, if only to begin to create a responsive “space” in language where we interrogate the names that have become stale, powerless to change minds. One of those overnames is evil, especially in our post-9/11 era. It may be lacking nuance to say that the only way to resist the evil of overnaming is with new names. Yet, this is what Balfour, Adams, Katz, and Arendt and so many other “intellectual workers” did. This means a reactivating of that word for new uses in the present. And hope that this kind of intellectual work has success. This is the kind of intellectual work that we should place in our technical communicators, if we can. To educate for this may mean pedagogical ethics centered on the evil within language. It may also mean beginning with the state- ment that we do not understand language, let alone the evil within. It may begin, finally, with the admission that evil will never be erased from the earth, but should be fought against in perpetuity.

Notes

1. Aristotle does not use the most common negative descriptor in Greek here, kakos. He uses qualos. But that should not eclipse that he names some “object” “evil”—the “evil”

advocacy or that “evil” which is advocated for.

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2. This journal’s archives reveals 31 uses of the word since 1979. The word appears 13 times since 1987 in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. No reference

since 1993 in Technical Communication Quarterly. A lot of the references are in trans- lations of ancient texts.

3. Patrick Moore’s “recorded chorus of agreement” is part of the tradition of overnam-

ing. Concepts “govern, guide, and control human actions” as he wrote (Moore, 2006, p. 386), but they can become generic, and so act as an overname. Moore calls these— echoing others—“totalizing definitions” (Moore, 2006, p. 387).

4. As an example, one scholar in public administration wrote “in a business ethics

course” students were asked whether “administrative evil” (as defined by Balfour and Adams) was a problem for business entities. “After two years of classes and hundreds of discussions,” the answer was an emphatic “yes” (Reed, 2012, p. 193).

5. Not to be too simplistic, but seeing the “pieces” and “load” as persons might have altered some from “doing their job.”

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica- tion of this article.

References

Adams, G., & Balfour, D. (1998). Unmasking administrative evil. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

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Author Biography

Matthew Boedy is a 2015 graduate of the University of South Carolina with a PhD in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition.

Boedy 225

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