Orange County has just launched a Toilet To Tap water program to reclaim flushed waste, distill it, and return it into the drinking supply after a few years. The scientific side of the debate is a crush: even ignoring the Southern California water crises, the tap water is cleaned until it's near-bottle quality and certainly better than alternative sources. OC residents have not gone as far as citizens in other areas who shut down similar programs - San Diego (twice) and Los Angeles being the two nearby examples - but objections have not exactly been muted. In a lot of cases, no amount of scientific argumentation has been able to overcome citizens' initial visceral repulsion.
Among the oldest concerns of the rhetoric of science, at least the closer we get to the science literacy pole of the science-literacy vs. science-theory spectrum, is how technical-to-deliberative communication occurs and why it often fails. At least within the last half-decade - in a disciplinary turn with which issue can be taken - the pendulum has sometimes swung all the way to explicitly advocating that rhetoricians cooperate with scientists in influencing (steamrolling?) public deliberation. Viewed from a more abstract and sympathetic perspective, this might be seen as a reemphasis on the practical tradition in rhetoric.
But the theoretical side of the discipline is also implicated in this controversy. Before addressing how these failed persuasive encounters can be fixed, the reasons for their failure have to be probed. The theoretical question is two-fold. First, what is the nature of the judgment, pursued argumentatively and rhetorically, that's doing the work in this particular controversy - how does individuated judgment get molded into an epistemic statement that then slips into public deliberation as a valid argument? Second, why do citizens, in the moment of deliberation, choose to emphasize that particular – visceral – register of judgment rather than a more cognitive one? Judgment turns out, for semiotic and psychoanalytic reasons, to be much more bodily than technical partisans, deliberative democrats, and epistemologists would prefer.
In a neat example of how dramatically technical-to-deliberative communication can go awry, Los Angeles KROQ’s Kevin and Bean invited Shivaji Deshmukh onto their morning radio show last Tuesday to justify the program. Deshmukh is officially OC’s Groundwater Replenishment System program manager (there's actually a revelatory little bit where he tries to get Kevin and Bean to recognize that calling it Toilet To Tap program is a "misnomer" - with predictable results). Before we go on: this is one of the clearest artifacts regarding deliberative judgment in scientific controversies that we've ever come across. Everything is laid out here: the inadequate persuasive force of technical argument in deliberative controversies, the psychoanalytic links between libidinal investments and the structure of belief and then back again, and the reflexive rhetorical recuperation of what seems like vulgar anti-intellectualism but emerges as a relatively sophisticated defense of the corporeal dimensions of cognition. It's simply a wonderful artifact. After the jump, links to the podcast and a multi-page, should-have-been-working-on-our-prospectus-instead-of-this semiotic and psychoanalytic unpacking of the interview.
