A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (12 page)

Composition takes place in time. The beginning of a composition can take various forms: from a rhythmic signature that becomes a poem or a musical composition; from a phrase that becomes a novel or the beginnings of an dissertation; or from a chance spatial alignment (for example, a colored scrap of fabric next to a structural feature) that becomes a new interior design for an architectural project. There is both transduction (the movement from one mode to another) and transformation (a broader category involving change on a number of fronts) at play in the
developmental composition
of a work.

Almost all artistic creations, including the construction of buildings, are the result of a series of drafts. Once the idea is sparked, the gradual development of the idea is managed over time in drafting and re-drafting. Sketches and small studies become a painting; maquettes and other early forms of modeling become sculptures; jottings and notes become a short story or an article. At the early stages of composition, ideas are brainstormed and marshaled; one idea may inspire another. As the work takes shape, further ideas are either adapted or rejected. The process is managed by the composer, who makes decisions along the way about what makes for unity of purpose and design; what works (in the case of buildings, what engineering factors need to be taken into account to make the building safe, robust, sustainable, efficient, and useable); and what is elegant. Rhetoric, in the stages of composition, is not merely an add-on at the end of the process in terms of performance, flourish, or decoration. It is fundamental to the design of the whole because of the rhetorical choices that have to be made along the way. Rhetorical choices in composition are choices about fitness for purpose, proportion, beauty, available modes and media, available resources, the balance and function of product and performance, the nature of recording and archiving, and location in space and time.

Rhetoric is thus deeply implicated in the act of composition, from start to finish. Whereas composition deals with the actual process of putting things together to make new meaning, rhetoric provides the theoretical framework and resources, and awareness of the wider social, economic, and political exigencies, that make the composition a success.

The composer is often assumed to be a single person. The myth derives from Romantic notions of authorship, and the idea of a single fount of inspiration that engenders and subsequently shapes a work of art. It is, indeed, often the case that a single person is the principal source of the
work and that the “creative” aspect of the making of a work is valued out of all proportion to the actual process of making. Thus we see architects credited for landmark buildings Foster + Partners' Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong, or Renzo Piano's Shard in London (“Renzo Piano's creation, the tallest building in western Europe, finally opens its 69th-floor viewing platform to the public” in
The Guardian
, December 30, 2012), with hardly a mention for the structural engineers and project managers who often are involved with the projects from the start. Similarly, a book is assumed to be authored by a single or joint writer(s), with little recognition for the editors, book designers, typesetters, and others involved in the making of the final work. Visual artists depend on canvas and paper makers if they are painters, developing houses or digital tools if they are photographers, and workshops if they are sculptors.

We can take the principle of collaborative production to the very heart of the single-author myth. We have already referred to Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic imagination, with no new voice being created without reference to the wealth of existing voices in oral and written form. We could extend his argument to apply to all the arts. Every new work takes reference from what has gone before and responds to it. But let us take this idea further, and right back to the stereotype of the Romantic author. Even a lone writer in a garret, penning a poem or a novel in solitude, cannot escape the fact that he or she is part of the social fabric; that the tools of production—pen, ink, paper—are made objects that have been designed, sourced, fashioned, and produced; and that he or she writes for an (hoped for) audience, even if that audience is the writer him- or herself.

Composition is a collaborative act, even when the author/maker appears to be working on his or her own. This is not to say that all aspects of composition, from initial conception through to the final product, are rhetorical. Rhetoric reserves itself for the description and analysis of the social conditions of the arts of discourse, both in their making and in their reception. It does not encroach upon—though it is influenced by—economic issues such as the availability of resource, the choices made about capital, or the cost-benefit analyses of choice.

Composition thus sits firmly within the conception of rhetoric that is being forged in this book. The rhetor, in communicating something to an audience in whatever modes and media, is shaping communicative resources with the help of historical genres, with collaboration from others, and in a full social context. Because the social is implicated in the political and economic, the compositional act is not merely an individual one. Yeats's statement that a poem might be made from “a mouthful of air” is a late Romantic conceit.

In a later chapter, the relationship between rhetoric and education is explored. Here, following the discussion of composition and its place in rhetorical theory, we consider the pedagogies of composition. We are not talking of instruction, textbook approaches, or of the psychologies of learning to compose, but rather of the conditions for learning and the heuristics for composition.

A “writing classroom” or any other kind of workshop designed to provide a space for making in the arts is a collaborative space. First, there needs to be a sense of a community of learners who will learn from each other as well as from the teacher. The teacher herself needs to
see herself
and
act
as a learner as well as a teacher, not only modeling practices that might be followed or adapted, but also working alongside the learners as they create, fashion, and finish their work. The learners need to own the space so that their confidence can be established. Such learning takes place in formal institutions, with accreditation leading toward awards and certificates; it also takes place informally in “make spaces.” Several of these less formal spaces are springing up across London during the writing of this book: shops in which after-hours workshops take place; spaces where a sewing machine can be rented for one or two hours to work on a particular project; parties where the focus is on making something. In each of these situations there is a collective will to make something and to enjoy the process of doing so.

Second, the actual moments of learning, of transformation in knowledge and skill, are engendered by the conditions for learning described previously, but also by “heuristics” or strategies and devices that make learning come about. These constitute the art of pedagogy and include working individually, in pairs, or in small groups as well as in whole groups; coaching; inventive ways of presenting a topic; making connections; teaching methods for constructing and resolving arguments; problem solving; practicing a new skill; research skills; and the use of various media.

What is distinctive about the pedagogies of composition is that it is accepted that learning is collaborative and that the learner need not be confronted by a blank slate when entering the classroom. He or she brings experience, framings, personal resources, and the connections that provide social resources (“capital”) to bear. Others who join the social encounter of the workshop or classroom bring similar resources. The actual materials for composition are provided by the class/workshop teacher, and the aim of the workshop or series of workshops is to collaborate in the making of new knowledge/products, and thereby the development of new perspectives and skills. The alignment of the frames provided by the learner, and the frames provided by the teacher, make for
progression within those frames of a compositional nature. The very act of “putting things together” in new ways is an act of learning.

Any mention of resource, (re)making, and choice brings economic as well as rhetorical issues to bear on the matter of composition. To date within the book, we have charted the relationship between communicative acts, rhetoric, and politics, but the economic dimension has hardly been addressed. At a macro- and disciplinary level, what rhetoric and economics have in common is that they provide a way of understanding how choices can be and are made from a limited set of resources for particular purposes. Although the ultimate end of economics may be the health and well-being of a nation, the reasonable distribution of wealth within a nation, or supra-national issues of global production and consumption, one area of common ground with rhetoric is the maintenance of the social fabric. While economics does this in terms of the distribution of wealth and resource, rhetoric does so by ensuring that the channels of communication are kept clear and free-flowing, that communication is fit for purpose, and that ideas, thoughts, and feelings have proper currency and movement within society (locally, regionally, nationally, and globally).

Economics impinges upon rhetoric if the distribution of wealth is unfair or disproportionately unequal, exacerbating social division and damaging social cohesion. Such stratification, with limited means of movement (social mobility), even through the education system, will make for a breakdown in the discourses that connect one person to another. Lanchester (2013), in an article titled “Let's Call it Failure” in the
London Review of Books
, looks at the state of the British economy in the wake of the 2008 crash—otherwise known as “the Great Recession (or, as the Chinese never fail to call it, the ‘Western Financial Crisis’)” (5). Aspects of this crisis include tax increases, an increase in the structural deficit, a shrinking of the economy, reduction in gross national product(ivity), public spending cuts, and other “austerity measures,” as well as a hardening of the attitude toward social welfare. Similarly, in the United States, the beginning of 2013 brought a short-fix agreement to avert the American economy from going over a “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and public spending cuts. Measures included tax increases on the top 2% of American wealth-owners, thus (to a small extent) closing the gap a little between the rich and the not-so-rich and favoring the majority of “working families.” In addition to tax increases and spending cuts (on education and the military), the following measures were included: increases in inheritance taxes from 35% to 40% after the first $5m for an individual and $10m for a couple; increases in capital taxes—affecting some investment income—of up to
20%; a one-year extension for unemployment benefits, affecting two million people; and a five-year extension for tax credits that help poorer and middle-class families (BBC 2013).

We are not so much concerned with the surface rhetoric of economic and political discourse, in the sense of the diction used to describe and ameliorate the nature and effects of these financial crises (“recession,” “slump,” “fiscal cliff,” etc.), but more so with the nature of rhetoric in a declining economy. Does a declining economy require better use of rhetoric? Does it damage rhetoric? The answer is that it is the political implications of economic downturn that have the bigger impact on rhetoric: there is less chance of reaching agreement on ways forward; discussions and negotiations at the national and international political level go right up to the wire, often through all-night sessions; the lack of social cohesion makes for discourses that “do not speak to each other”; centrist political parties look weak and helpless in the face of economic downturn, while the extreme left and right gain support as they chart ideological and single-idea solutions to problems; the language of planning, management, and reconciliation becomes less meaningful so that language and discourse are separated, seeming to have little effect on action and actuality. While it might be said that rhetoric is neutral from economics and politics, it cannot help but reflect the social attenuation that takes place in a declining economy.

In this chapter, we have tried not only to delimit what is meant by composition, but also to show how fundamental it is to communicative acts in a number of modes and media. Composition is the act of bringing things together to make meaning within framings that are created by the maker and the audience. A rhetorical perspective is essential to understanding the social and political nature of composition; in turn, composition provides the multimodal engine of making in a theory of rhetoric. Composition uses existing materials but adds something new by creating different configurations of the material, different juxtapositions, and different alliances that themselves create a meaning generated from coincidence and/or from tension. The gaps between elements in a composition are as important as the material elements themselves as they indicate a space for the audience to fill.

Thus, learning to compose—and its reciprocal activity, learning to “read” composition—are the key skills for the communicative arts in the twenty-first century. It will no longer be adequate for someone to learn to write in a particular language, or to learn the language of mathematics or music, or to learn the art of photography. Although we may not
have the capacity or time to learn to compose in all the various modes and media, we will learn, by necessity, how to read and navigate our way through these different types of composition. Understanding the fundamental principles of composition will help us to do so and also help us to retain the aesthetic sense that is important to clear communication and to due propriety, elegance, subversion, and harmony in social relations. Perhaps, then, composition in all its senses will play an even greater part in social grouping, curricula, and individual well-being than it does in a dis-aggregated, fissured society.