ABSTRACT
The postindustrial age recognizes the limits of the planet's ability to either provide endless virgin raw materials or accept endless streams of waste from industrial or biological processes. While recognizing the limits of industrialization, and searching for alternatives and for next-generation technologies, reliance and dependence continue to define the relationship to industrialized technologies and the industrial networks of resource procurement, logistics, expertise, and distribution. So in an attempt to describe the importance of place, this chapter discusses the numerous workplace sites in the American Midwest in the postindustrial age. The combination of seemingly disparate elements create both alloyed knowledge and alloyed practices that emerge both better equipped for contemporary context and the challenges of global postindustrial culture. Postindustrial technorhetoric needs Rickert's rhetorical attunement to recognize the technocultural assemblages that distinguish it from modern and pre-modern rhetorical action, if not relinquishing the desire for matching intent with outcome.
