A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (19 page)

Following the lecture, requests for audio versions, or of slides, were attempts to capture vestiges of the occasion itself. These residual texts are traces of what happened. They give a partial window on to the occasion and on to the multiple meanings generated by the lecture.

Second, the speaker from the public lecture series was invited to undertake a” lunchtime conversation” with an interlocutor at an art gallery. This occasion was part of a series titled “Culture Now.” Apart from the publicity online and in the gallery, and via its networks with schools, there was little in the way of framing apart from (a) a chance to eat an informal lunch with the audience beforehand, (b) an opportunity to meet gallery staff who were setting up and filming the conversation, and (c) a brief introduction to the conversation from the host. The actual event, attended by 40 or so students and members of the public, took place on the stage of a small cinema in the gallery. The seats were arranged to face each other and the audience. In an hour's session, 35 minutes were devoted to the two-way conversation, and 20 minutes or so to questions-and-answers.

The framing for this occasion is clear. Rhetorically, the occasion is interesting in that it sets an ostensibly informal
conversation
on a more formal stage. The genre is more like a live radio or television interview. The confines of the genre did not prevent some breaking of the frame: a rap included in one of the “answers”; the tables turned in the interviewer–interviewee relationship at one point in the conversation. Indeed, “conversation” manifested itself more in the American sense of a semi-formal dialogue on a particular matter rather than an informal, improvised conversation. What was captured is the apparent (and, to a degree, actual) improvised nature of the exchange, based not on a script, but on a few topics agreed before by the participants. The order of these topics, and the way the exchanges flowed, was improvised. In research terms, the nearest genre would be “semi-structured interview.” Audience questions were given more time than in the public lecture, leading to a more in-depth and more extensive conversation between the audience and the interviewer/interviewee. But after an hour, because of scheduling, the occasion was brought to a close, continuing afterwards, as with the lecture, in entirely informal conversation.

Degrees of formality are important to rhetoric and framing, not least in
performances
that are more highly framed than the two occasions described here. In the rhetoric of music performance, a recent concert by the London Symphony Orchestra of two works by Stravinsky
²
will serve as the third example in this exemplification of the role of framing within rhetoric. It is, in many ways, typical of classical music concerts worldwide, although it is acknowledged there are variations on such framing. Taking into account the publicity, posters, programs, and attendant build-up to the actual concert—including the fact that it was part of “Gergiev's Stravinsky Festival” that spring in London—the concert is immediately framed by the location and timing: in one of the main concert halls at the Barbican, and, like many framed events, at a particular time. The framing is accentuated by entry to the concert hall, with its orchestra stands and instruments laid out on stage. Seats are numbered (unlike the other two occasions described previously). As the audience fills the seats, the musicians wander on stage and take up their positions. The beginning of the concert itself is signaled by the arrival on stage of the first violinist, the leader of the orchestra. He (in this case) bows to the audience, they applaud, and he proceeds to lead the tuning up of the orchestra—a sonorous cacophony of sound. After a moment of two of silence, the conductor walks on stage, acknowledges the orchestra, bows to the audience, and shakes the hand of the leader of the orchestra. More silence ensues before the music itself begins.

Even the musical performance itself is subject to rhetorical framing, notwithstanding the internal structural and compositional elements of the piece itself. In some countries, it is customary to sit in silence through
the performance; in others, not. In some, the breaks between movements are an opportunity for applause; in others, a sacrosanct silence obtains. Yet further, particularly pleasing and/or moving parts of the composition itself can be applauded in some contexts (even triggering reprises or improvisations), and yet not in others. The variations in convention are important to understand for composer, conductor, player, and audience alike. At the end of the piece, it is customary for the conductor and principal violinist to walk off stage together and to come back two or three times (or more) to applause, until it dies down. An encore or two might be demanded and played. Finally, the conductor and first violinist leave the stage completely, signaling (with or without house lights) that the performance is over, and the rest of the performers and audience leave the auditorium.

The formality of such an occasion is unlike the lecture or “conversation” described earlier. And yet each is framed in particular ways, on a spectrum of formality-informality that requires understanding and interpretation.

The framing is partly determined by power relations, partly by convention, and partly by an agreed contract between the “performers” and the audience—or, more broadly, the rhetor and the audience.
Composition
is a term that is helpful in this regard because the communication takes various modes and media but is always informed by a composer. In music, that term is reserved for the author of the piece to be played, the “writer” of the score. And yet, despite their role as interpreters of the score, the conductor and his or her musicians recompose the piece for a particular occasion and/or for a recording. The term
composer
is used generally in the present book as an alternative to
rhetor
given the archaic nature of the technical term from rhetoric. There is a reason for this choice in the twenty-first century: composition needs recognition as the central act in the creation of communication. “Composition” requires, as has been suggested in
chapter 4
, the putting together of a number of elements in an arrangement that is intended to make meaning to be conveyed to another, or to others. It can use elements that have been used before and include quotations and other material that has previously been used. But essentially, it will be new in the sense that the context, the arrangement, and the particular intent have not been instanced before. This “making new” is essential to a theory of rhetoric because it not only demands a theory that can account for such social, creative communication, but also grounds the theory in the actualities of present demands for communication.

The window allows one to link the outside to the inside of a room. It provides a frame through which insight into a room, or from a room to the outside, is made. This apparently simple building device, with its
functions of letting in air and light to a room, defines the borderland or the frame between the interior and the exterior. Such abstraction enables us to think of the implications of that distinction: interiority/what is “other” or outside; what is familiar on the one hand, and what is less familiar on the other. These binary generalizations soon become unworkable as exceptions to the rule can be easily found. For example, when looking into an unfamiliar room from outside (as a fox or a stranger may peer into a room) one can be on familiar ground. Equally, a perspective from the inside may be just as familiar as one from the outside, for example in looking out from a kitchen window to a well-loved garden, or from a New York apartment window to a familiar view.

However, the inside/outside distinction is valuable in that it allows us to see how one perspective opens out on to another. It certainly “frames” the view each way, as the window is finite and (usually) rectangular; built in wood, steel, or other durable material; and a permanent fixture designed for viewing one space from another.

The window itself is a membrane, a plane of transparency between the two worlds: a means of transference, of passage for eyesight, air, imagination.

The window provided inspiration and a recurring motif and framework for a series of paintings by Bonnard, Matisse, Manguin, and Camoin, brought together in an exhibition, “Bonnard et son amis” at le Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, in 2012. A subsection of the exhibition was devoted to “Variations on the window.” As the catalog suggests, “The window, situated somewhere between reality and imagination, draws out of this duplicity an inspirational power and contributes undeniably to the construction of an aesthetic, poetic and symbolic space” (Navas 2012, 93).

Let us draw out, in general, the qualities of paintings with windows. First, the
canvas
(a term we will use to convey the ground on which the painting is made, whether it is paper, canvas, or other material) is limited and rectangular in shape—a frame unto itself. (Later, this canvas will be further framed within a wooden frame to be transported, hung in a gallery, stored, etc.). Second, the painting itself incorporates a window, or part of a window. The inclusion of the window often gives the painting its title: for example, Matisse's
Open window at Collioure,
Bonnard's
The Window,
Camoin's
Open Window at Cannes,
and Manguin's
By the Window.
Through the window we see a landscape, or darkness, or elements of sky, or even abstract designs, that are always figured in relation to what is inside the room. Almost never in this collection of paintings does the interior or the exterior merely serve as a neutral framing or lack-of-commentary on the other. Almost always, the one comments on, reflects in some way, or is a version of the other. Furthermore, there are structural properties in windows that assist the structuration of the compositions as a whole, for example, in Camoin's
Lola on the Terrace of
the Hotel Bellevue in Toulon
in which the shutters of the window provide the vertical framing, and the balustrade on the balcony provides a strong horizontal line, dividing the painting into a third sky, two-thirds seated figure and table; or in Bonnard's
Vase of Flowers
(circa 1922), which uses the upright frame of the window to separate a painting of vases of flowers into two distinct panels.

What does this combination of framing and windows suggest? One message is to draw attention to the act of framing itself. The artist frames what it is we see. He or she selects from an infinite range of possibilities and presents us with a selected viewpoint. By including windows within a painting, the artist is saying: “I am in the business of framing, and here, included in my painting is recognition that this act is central to my creations. I hereby acknowledge and reveal to you part of the secret of my art.” Another is to set up the relationship, symbolically but also in sheer textural and color form, between the inside and the outside. Yet another is the actual technical challenge that is demonstrated: often the window is at a different angle from the view of the painter him-/herself, for example. Another is the “geometry of framing”: the provision of a grid, a form of structuration, on the canvas via which the various elements can be arrayed and brought together to interrelate with each other. Perhaps most importantly, there is an aesthetic and emotional connection between what is outside and what is inside. Matisse, in a letter to Teriadeune, stated:

If I have managed to reunite in my painting what is outside, that is to say the sea, with the inside, it is because the atmosphere of the landscape and my room are one and the same … I don't have to bring the outside and the inside together, the two are reunited in my emotion. I am able to associate the armchair that is near me in my studio to a cloud in the sky, to the stirring of the palm tree on the sea front without having to differentiate their locations, without separating the different elements of my motif that are one in my mind. (Navas 2012, 93)

In terms of how one looks at these paintings,
³
questions arise: What do you look at first? What is through the window? What is inside the room? What is the nature of the whole composition in terms of framing? It is probably fair to say that what is inside the room is the least foregrounded element. Of the two remaining “framings,” the whole picture is most likely to be the first framework of attention, followed soon after by what is perceived through the window. The eye then returns to the room and from there to the whole picture again. Finally, one can say that the presence of reflecting glass in the windows or shutters, or indeed of mirrors in the room, further complicates the perspectives that the artist brings to the composition—and the reception—of a work. In a very different way
from the multiple angles of Cubism, the window as a motif in paintings seems to suggest the multiplicity of ways of seeing, bringing the invisible to the visible, recognizing the complexity of vision, and using framing to focus and refocus, as well as to negotiate the relationship between inside and outside, the unconscious and the conscious, the human/constructed and the relatively unconstructed.

One of the most challenging aspects of a theory of contemporary rhetoric is this: how does rhetoric account for three-dimensional space? We have already seen that two-dimensional, or roughly speaking, “flat” forms of communication, such as print, digital signs on a computer screen or smart phone, paintings, and films, can be accounted for well by multimodality and/or digitization. Even time-based forms of communication such as films, narratives of different kinds, videos, radio plays, and other programs can be accounted for in terms of the temporal dimension of rhetoric.

Space, however, presents a particular problem and challenge. Let us think, first, in terms of the rhetoric of sculpture. Works by any sculptor exist in three dimensions, even if they begin as drawings/sketches on paper or screen. A recent exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery
⁴
at King's Cross, London, placed a number of Henry Moore's large forms within the white space of the gallery. There were no words or other distractions to mediate the experience of the sculptures, other than the space and spaces they inhabited and their relation to each other within the gallery space. Perhaps the only other mediating factor was that of people looking at and through the sculptures. Notions of rhetoric are thus extended to include not only “who is speaking to whom about what?” but also to “how”: In what medium (e.g., bronze)? In what mode(s) (e.g., sculptural form)? And crucially,
where?