A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (28 page)

If dialogue is one principal form of expression in dramatic discourse, another is narrative. In drama, the stories are told via a combination of the setting on the one hand, and what the characters say and do on the other. As with narratives in short story, novel, or oral form, the principle of
post hoc ergo propter hoc
obtains. But the narrative development is different from that in the printable forms. In dramatic discourse, the setting and what characters say and do take place within the confines of the framed set and within the time frame of the play. Some plays are a single scene and relatively short in duration; others are made up of a number of scenes and can take hours, if not days. As printable forms, a play can be divided into sections, such as acts and scenes. The relationship between these acts and/or scenes, especially their sequence, makes up the narrative flow and argument.

The third element of dramatic discourse is tension. This tension is generated between the characters, often in the form of differences of style (dress, speech, and other social markers) but also through ideology, values, and political positions. The power play between the characters (see
chapter 5
), especially those main characters whose story is told, is the
source of the tension that must be resolved in some way. It is thus that plays in performance manifest argument (the product) and argumentation (the process). Their rhetoric is designed to show how tensions are created and how they are resolved. Indeed, the very intensity of theatre is when the tension is evident, and the audience is fully engaged in feeling it and witnessing how it develops. It is possible to say that the enhanced tensions on stage—as in a sporting arena where contests take place—are a way of understanding and alleviating the tensions in everyday life. They can also serve to bring to the surface tensions that are buried within the audience. In these ways, plays operate by allowing the presentation of problems, often in the form of clashing ideological positions, and showing how these might be resolved, or how an action (which can also take the form of a speech act) can lead to another action, and then another, and so on.

Dramatic discourse is distinctive in these ways and, as has been discussed in the chapter on Moffett, presents in the here and now what
could
happen. The very framing of the action on a stage of whatever nature intensifies the action so that we look at it and experience it, expecting that it will provide us with some insight into our own lives.

Because dramatic discourse is framed, we experience it as we would a painting or a book; it is separated from everyday experience by a frame, however intangible. We often pay to enter the space—a theatre, an art gallery, the purchase of a book—that affords us the time and space to experience the potential intensity of the framing. Once in that space, we tend to slow down and pay more attention to the words, brush strokes, sculptural shapes, sounds, and other expressions than we would if they were unframed in the real world. We are attentive and receptive to the structures of feeling that are presented to us in these framed spaces.

What framing does, in addition to that described previously, is to provide the ground for aesthetic experience. The very drawing of a line and creation of a frame around artistic experience, in
order to define it as artistic experience
, brings a different kind of attention to what is inside the frame. We have already referred to the intensity of action within it and of the attention brought to it. There is also the sense that when looking at what is inside the frame, we are looking at possible worlds and comparing our own worlds to these projected worlds. The sense of causal connection is enhanced so that when we see action on the stage, for example, we expect there to be a higher degree of causal connectivity than in the real world.

In addition to these different states of attention, we will expect a greater sense of order, balance, and harmony than that experienced outside the
rhetorical frame. That orderliness is formal, that is, it takes formal shape. Whether the work is a painting or a book, or a play or musical score in performance, the sense of designed order is heightened. Such order can be symmetrical, or it can inhere in the relations between movements in music, between scenes and acts in a play, or between chapters in a novel. In theatre, the aesthetic dimension may not be beautiful in a conventional sense, but it may have a structure and pace and rhythm that is a combination of devices for eliciting and generating an emotional and/or intellectual response. Almost always—and often hidden from view—is the underlying formal structure of the piece that subliminally affects the response. The structure works by putting elements in relation to each other (com-posing) and saying, in effect: these are related to each other. Look at the connections that are offered. There is a design element that is deliberate and orderly. Such order, balance, and harmony operates at an unconscious level, informing the emotional and intellectual response.

When we “return” from such an aesthetic experience in a theatre (or from reading a novel, hearing a concert, or looking at an exhibition), back to the real world, we carry with us a memory of the ordered, intense, enhanced experience. There can be immediate parallels between the highly framed aesthetic world of the play on the one hand, and the less obviously (but still sociologically and politically) framed worlds of our everyday existence. But there can also be delayed responses, where the patterning that has taken place through the dramatic discourse informs future ways in which we might see, hear, and generally experience the real world. The territory of rhetoric is how the highly framed aesthetic worlds relate to the looser frames of the real world; what communities of interest and expectation are formed; what is
learnt
, not only within those different worlds but in the parallels and tensions between them; and what transformations take place in consciousness, and whether these transformations can be described at all, or whether they can be accounted for in degrees of transformation.

In a sensibility informed by the arts of discourse, perception becomes heightened so that patterns in experience are seen more readily. We can thus talk of a rhetorical consciousness and sensibility that is sensitive to the way things are framed, the way people talk, the way actions take place and impact on the world, and the way events unfold in the real world. There is much in the latter case that is beyond the limits of rhetoric; but rhetoric, as a humanistic discipline that maps the arts of discourse both in terms of what happens and what could happen, contributes to the way we deal with those events.

Finally, in considering how dramatic discourse operates, it is helpful to reflect on the institutional framings for theatre: built theatres, ranging from Greek amphitheatres to elaborate Victorian edifices; from converted barns or railway stations to temporarily adapted spaces in school
halls, on hillsides, or in naturally occurring framed spaces; from portable theatres to performances in town and village squares … all these framed spaces define an outer shell within which the dramatic performance itself takes place within an inner shell. We enter such outer shells with expectations: to be entertained, disturbed, amused, stimulated, transported, or any combination of these. There is no society that lives without such framed dramatic space, whichever cultural form it takes. For example, in the
Arts Directory
of the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks for 2012–13, in an area of wilderness with low density of population, as well as 44 gallery listings, there were the Adirondack Theatre Festival, Our Town Theatre Group, modern and classical ballet performances, a Shakespeare-in-the-Park festival, the Depot Theatre (a converted railroad station), a school of music, the Boquet River Theatre Festival, Essex Theatre Company's 20th season, Lake Placid Center for the Arts, a Pendragon Theatre program, The Community Theatre Players Inc., and many more. In amateur, community, and professional groups, it seems that the human need to create a rhetorical space in which the arts are presented fulfils much more than an expressive need; it also creates framed worlds in which social tensions and patterns are played out for consideration, reflection, and perhaps future action.

Of all the arts, drama and theatre (including opera) are the ones that most fully use the modalities of space, time, and the expressive faculties of voice, movement, the body, and gesture. Film, though a medium in itself, builds on drama. It could be said to derive from drama, though it has carved out special territories of its own. Drama also provides the fullest external and tangible representation of the dualities and tensions of the inner space: thought, reflection, dream, and physical tension. In this sense, the rhetoric of the public art form provides a “mirror” for the inner space; and before we explore this analogy any further, it must first be acknowledged that the process is two-way. As well as the inner operations and states being reflected in drama, dramatic discourse also prefigures and structures inner cogitation and feeling.

Based on the latter premise that the higher orders of thinking and feeling were once “real relations between people” (Vygotsky 1991, as discussed earlier in this book), how does rhetoric serve as a way of understanding and describing the transformation between “real relations” and inner operations? Although we are in the realm of social psychology, the problem of such transformations can be accounted for in rhetorical terms. To take the most obvious example: a debate takes place in a public meeting, or in the letter columns of a newspaper. It rehearses, over several hours or days, the lineaments of an argument, putting the case
for and against, say, the siting of a new cell phone tower near a village. The very parameters and lineaments of the argument rehearse what can be replicated in inner thought. Those thoughts might be assisted by notes made after the debate or after reading a sequence of letters in a newspaper, to map out the main points; or they may simply be remembered, adapted, and elaborated upon. Thought may stimulate a new perspective on the problem, just as a voice from a different perspective may do so in public discourse.

Issues of the relation of thought to public discourses, and
vice-versa
, can be evidenced also in the conventional written genres via which thought is represented in academia. For example, the default genre (in the sense of text-type) in the humanities and social sciences is the essay. The structure of the essay derives from classical models of argumentation in any number of parts: a two-part structure (statement and proof); a threepart structure (beginning, middle, and end); and then anything up from there, selecting from the range of identified parts of an argument:
exordium, narratio, disputatio
, arrangement,
refutatio, peroratio
, and other subdivisions and variations. The composer of the essay is free to put the elements in the order that he or she prefers (or that he/she thinks will have maximum persuasive power) and to include as many such elements as he/ she thinks are required for the particular argument in question. Such freedom in structural design reflects the freedom in thought and also offers templates and scaffolds that can be followed or broken and adapted to suit particular rhetorical needs.

This psycho-social, or socio-psychological composing process has swung between learning and composing theories that privilege either the social or the psychological. A different approach is to see the process as rhetorical. The principles of such a perspective are that the manifest products of communication are the result of thoughts, feelings, and other imperatives that (ideally) closely match them; that when the match is not close, the rhetorical process allows adjustment and revision; that meaning is conveyed as a social transaction between people, aided by social conventions; and that intention and purpose are shaped by the available resources. These principles are predominantly social and political in nature, as has been emphasized throughout the present book, but they also have a psychological dimension that is more than an “application.”

Rhetoric, we could say, maps out the network of possibilities for communication between the inner and the public domains. It provides conduits and channels through which such communication has been and is made, but it is always aware that there might be other possibilities, other connections that
could
be made. The “how to” manuals of medieval and Renaissance rhetoric do not fully account for the possibilities because there is no overarching rationale for the range and extent of the devices that are listed. The current book attempts to chart the larger territory of
rhetoric, suggesting that it is unified by an interest in the arts of discourse and communication within a socio-political context.

What
is not
rhetorical helps define what
is.
Beyond rhetoric are areas where human communication does not operate: silent walks in the mountains, the way beams are attached to pillars and joints made in wood, the immovability of objects, much of the material world. Furthermore, higher states of spirituality and religious consciousness are not the domain of rhetoric because they (tend to) inhabit a unified space or state in which there is no dialogue. But wherever these states and phenomena and experiences interface with communication, exegesis, articulation in the human world, there is rhetoric: in the design and execution of a map, in instructions for the making of a joint in carpentry, and in descriptions and categorizations of material phenomena. It so happens that these states are not those commonly explored in drama and theatre, other than via a dialogic route and in brief depictions (e.g., Beckett's
Breath
). Theatre provides not only the physical instantiation of how rhetoric operates in the world, but also a metaphor for how a multidimensional experience can be represented and also provide a template for possible action. We might also say that other art forms imply dramatic and theatrical tension and possibility: in reading a poem on a printed page, we supply the color, imagination, three-dimensional properties, and projection to make the imprint mean more than words on a page. Such transformations are silent but always rhetorical, operating at the interface of the public and private.