A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (20 page)

The location of sculpture is critical. Its immediate context is a space that informs the way the specific sculpture is seen in that space, in terms of angle, distance, background, ambience, and whether there are other people around. Seeing Henry Moore sculptures of this scale in the Gagosian Gallery, London, in a converted, white-painted warehouse gallery, is different from seeing them, for example, in Yorkshire Sculpture Park in rolling countryside. There are analogies of form with people in a gallery or an outside space; but there are different analogies that offer themselves if the sculpture is located in a rocky landscape.

Even more site-specific in terms of sculpture is the work of Andy Goldsworthy (e.g., 2004). In
Passages,
for example, Goldsworthy records sculptures made from natural materials, or found patterns in nature—all based around actual or metaphorical journeys or passages (also of time).
What is distinctive about Goldsworthy's work is that it is so site-specific that it is often allowed to change, decay, and disappear in the natural course—for example, if an artwork is created on a beach between tides, or is made of ice that melts, or decomposes in natural weather conditions.

Site-specificity can also be applied to the use of verbal language and is a key dimension to be considered in contemporary rhetorical understanding and composition. A joke does not always work the same way with a different audience, or in a different space; Eliot's
Four
Quartets and Fitzgerald's
Tender is the Night
might read as different works if (a) read at different points in one's life or (b) read on location, as it were, in Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages; or respectively on the Côte d'Azur in the south of France.
Situated
language theory suggests much the same: “context” has considerable bearing on the meaning and interpretation of signs. The key question as far as
context
is concerned, however, is what exactly do we mean by “context”? Is it the immediate time-space intersection of a particular place at a particular time? Is it the same location/space over a specified period of time? Is the “location” the immediate one (say within human reach of the phenomenon) or some other parameter, extending to a building, a landscape, a country, the world, the universe?

Such elasticity of context brings us back to the notion of framing as a powerful tool in contemporary rhetoric, for both the composer and the audience, in determining the range and significance of the work in question. There are no set, definitive frames. Frames can always be set within other frames. The key question is which frames do we wish to bring to bear on the act of communication? Which frames are at play, are suggested by the work (act of communication) itself, or impinge upon the work itself? Who has agency to determine which frames are deployed?

Another example of framing in space and time is a rehearsed “showing” of
Measure for Measure
in a London theatre/drama school—that is to say, an undergraduate level academy or conservatoire for the performing arts. Rehearsed showings are not public performances: they are part of an education in acting and direction in that they are shown to a limited and invited audience (tutors, fellow students, parents, and close family) as work in progress or unpolished rough-cuts. The intention is to give the students experience of learning, rehearsing, and performing, but also to minimize production values and to invite feedback. In this particular case, one of the rehearsal rooms was set up in traverse fashion, with the performing space set between two banks of seating for the audience, each facing the other. At the two open ends of the acting space were screens to mask entrances and exits from the “stage.”

In a modern dress version, the actors wore costumes to suggest a boardroom setting in a (potentially) corrupt state. Action proceeded as in a fully fledged production, with an interval in the middle of a roughly two-hour performance. At one stage, the director intervened to ask the
actors to re-do one of the parts of scenes. Clearly, this intervention broke the “suspension of disbelief” and magical absorption in the production—however provisional—that the play induced. What is the nature of that engagement in the fiction of the play? Live theatre or drama can be seen as engagement in the present moment, enacting in the moment a particular vision that draws on reference to the past and future. But the very
presence
of the actors—their physical proximity, their delivery of lines, their movement in relation to each and to the audience—reinforces the sense of abandonment or suspension in the
present.

There is one more aspect of space that needs to be addressed, and it pertains to a key question or two in relation to rhetoric: where does rhetoric not operate? What are its parameters ? Because rhetoric is broadly defined in this theory as the arts of discourse, it should, by definition, not operate where there is no discourse (as in all discourse there will be an
art,
whether conscious or unconscious, evident or hidden). There is usually discourse, wherever people congregate, even if that discourse is not verbal. But space in which there is no discourse moves us into the territory of uninhabited landscape, or its equivalent in the mind: Zen, transcendence of the human condition, ecstasy, the sublime.

Let us deal with uninhabited landscape first. Putting aside the philosophical question of whether it “exists” if there is no human perception or recognition, we can say with confidence that in one or more senses it does exist—people have seen it, experienced it, and bring reports back from it; maps that have been charted by explorers, though symbolic and rhetorical representations in themselves, have recorded it; and landsat and other photographs from space prove its scale, nature, and existence. But within a mountainous region or a great forest, or any wilderness region, there is no rhetoric because there is no human communication. Poets, using rhetoric in a transformed and metaphorical sense, can talk of the rhetoric of the forest as if there is a network of communication and rhetorical possibility in the ways that the ecosystem operates. But it can be said that, unless there is a single person in the wilderness who is talking to him/herself or others, there is no real rhetoric.

In the internal
tabula rasa
that is characterized by great stillness and silence, as in moments of ecstasy, spiritual enlightenment, catharsis, or
sartori,
and also the less grand states of meditation, peace, and quietude, rhetoric also ceases to operate. There is no communication
per se,
other than in religions where there is a deified higher presence and assumed or imagined commerce with that being. Such communication with a higher being itself is worthy of study in rhetorical terms, as an inner dialogue is projected by the rhetor into an outward form of communication. One could say that rhetorical moves are those that are employed as a means to an end, as scaffolds for the real building that is being constructed. But as soon as the spiritual or religious experience interfaces with the real world
and the world of ritual, rhetoric is brought back into play. Rhetoric is the great mediator between humankind and the rest of experience, as well as the principal engine of humanism.

Framing, the topic of the present chapter, is a tool in the application of rhetorical theory. The theory of contemporary rhetoric can be described as the overarching (or underpinning, according to metaphorical preference) set of ideas that enables us to (a) make connections between different kinds of communicative experience; (b) place rhetorical activity in relation to philosophical, actual, and other kinds of activity; (c) provide a social and political dimension to communication; and (d) define an aesthetic and design dimension to communication. Framing is not a theory. It is a “servant” to rhetoric in that it is (a) the activity via which meaning is made and communicated; (b) a creative and critical resource for the rhetor and the audience; (c) a lightweight form of “scaffolding” that, once the meaning is communicated, becomes invisible and superfluous to need; and (d) flexible, adaptable, breakable, and transgressable.

It is almost impossible to conceive of a theory of rhetoric without the operational function of framing to enable meaningful communication to take place. The
what, why, when, where,
and
how
of rhetoric are enacted and shaped by framing. Similarly, when a reader or viewer is accessing a work or on the receiving end of communication, he or she is using these same devices to make sense of the signals that are coming through; communication thus becomes a dialogic act.

Equally, framing acts in a vacuum unless it is informed by functional purposes that are defined by rhetoric. Power relations, social relations, equities, and inequalities in communication are accountable in rhetoric. Although the act of framing looks to be a neutral act, it is always informed by the rhetor's intention and the audience's preparedness.

Framing is often invisible or hard to see. The way the present book has been framed—by the publisher, by the stages of preparation that have been undertaken, by the individual, as well as the collaborative and collective endeavor that has gone into its making—are not made explicit. Indeed, the fact that a book is as much a collaborative act as the making of a film is not recognized in the “credits” in quite the same way. This invisibility or partial visibility in creation and production makes it difficult to give a full account of the framing that goes into the production of such a form of communication.

In such a situation, and in cases where the way in which an act of communication is framed is not always evident, the best way to start to teach a notion of framing is via clear and concrete examples of framing: a painting in the visual arts, a garden design “framed” by walls or the parameters of the space, a theatre or dance stage on which the action takes place, or the place of a poem on a page, surrounded by white space and bound by conventions of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and shape on the page. How the communication fits the frame is the first stage of understanding its nature: what is inside and outside the frame; what happens, and what is implied when the frame is transgressed; what the actual design of the material inside the frame is like. The important next stage is to demonstrate that received and conventional frames (schemata, frames, genres) are only temporary manifestations of an act of framing. The frames themselves are a result of framing—but it is a chimera to believe that the frames can be taught without a considerable loss of flexibility in communication.

It is through awareness of the concrete operations of the act of framing that a sense of the power and possibilities of framing as a rhetorical device can be built. Rather than build an impossible edifice of “frames within frames”—which do exist but are not a useable or useful analytical tool—the emphasis has to be on the
act
of framing that brings about such frames.

In very simple pedagogical terms (there is more in
Chapter 13
on rhetoric and education), the
what, where, when, why
questions are followed by the key rhetorical question: how? This question is
key
in the sense that rhetoric is concerned with
how
communication takes place. The why question tends toward philosophical justification; the what, when, and where are concerned with substance and with the temporal/spatial dimensions.

Framing has been neglected in rhetorical studies, other than through the work of Tannen (1993) and Goffman (1986) in their respective fields, all of which could be seen as drawing on rhetoric in some respects. Its dynamic possibilities, revealed by making the move away from fixed and concrete frames to the act of framing, reconnect it to rhetoric and to the moves that take place in everyday life to enable communication to take place and for the world to proceed (cf. Habermas). Framing thus plays a key part in the formation of a theory of contemporary rhetoric—and more so than it did in classical and medieval theories of rhetoric. This is necessary because the manifold possibilities of communication in the contemporary world—via media, modes, and in “flattened” social structures—require some means of determining how meaning is to be constructed and how meaningful communication can take place. That is why
framing takes a central role in the present book: it sits between chapters that set out the lineaments of a theory of rhetoric on the one hand and chapters that explore rhetoric's application in various fields on the other. It is this generative function that enables rhetoric, through framing, to ground itself in real world situations and thus make it a powerful theory of communication. Without framing, rhetoric could be seen as ethereal, academic, and irrelevant to the operation of the world; with it, rhetoric becomes closely connected to all forms of human communication, from the literary and artistic to the mundane, from operatic scores and their realization in theatres to the exchange of tickets on a bus or train. If rhetoric is to have credibility in a fast-changing world, the way in which framing operates to shape the problems that are encountered, the debates that take place on them, and the solutions that are generated that in turn lead to consensus and action is crucial. Framing is the engine and principal operating device of rhetoric in the twenty-first century. It makes rhetoric happen.

8

This chapter uses a collection of initial case studies—of the nature of doctoral students' work—to set the scene for discussion later in the chapter on multilingual rhetorical theory.

There are increasing numbers of Asian students in universities in the UK, the United States and Canada, and western Europe. Equally, there are increasing numbers of “Western” students in universities in China and east Asia. It is often assumed that the approach to argumentation—a quality highly prized in essay and dissertation composition in the West—is different among Asian students brought up in the Confucian-heritage education systems.