I think I am an Art Teacher
I think that I am an Art Teacher
Oxford University Press wants me to buy their books at a discount, just like every other university press that emails me nearly daily. But today, OUP wanted me to buy drawing books.I know I cannot draw, paint, or do any kind of art. I am a little frightened that OUP knows I’m a terrible artist, I’m a little touched they want to help me out, and I’m a little confused that on the email they want me to request “desk copies” of these drawing books.
Maybe I’m confused because I, like the rest of the American rhetoric field, have never spent adequate time facing the truth about the field that we teach and work in an art. Rhetoric is an art. There’s no way around this understanding of what rhetoric is and what it should be considered.
Rhetoric is no social science; it’s not political analysis, it’s not history, and it is certainly not epistemology. It’s the art of conveying and creating reality with and among other people, many of whom are very happy with the reality they are carrying currently. It’s the art of making connections with others who really have no interest in connecting with you, particularly given what they think you are going to say. It’s even the art of connecting to people who think they know what you want to share better than you do (perhaps the most difficult audience I’ve faced). It’s about making, constructing, and building things in cooperation with other people who don’t realize at first that they want to do this and become shocked at the point they realize how much work they have put into the art at the end of your attempt to persuade them – even if that work is pushing you off, tearing you down, or just staunchly believing you are wrong.
There’s a lot to unpack in this definition, not sure I’m going to be able to do it all in just one post. The thing I’d like to start with is something I’m facing right now – resistance. There’s resistance in my keyboard, my inability to touch-type fast enough for my inner voice, my desire to jump on Amazon and look for cooler, clackier, smoother, pricier keyboards (I do love my Logitech though), also I need a KVM switch (again) because I need to take that old PC and make it into a Linux box, then I could have both here running and swap between them –
All of this is resistance, some of it more productive than other kinds. I imagine in the visual arts, the mixing of pigment and the application of pigment to canvas is a form of resistance that can be quite frustrating. Resistance can come from other tasks in the creation of rhetoric. You have other things to do than type or record or outline.
There is good resistance when you imagine the artist pushing the graphite pencil against the sketchbook. That feeling helps them create; they know the pressure they want. Or they work to get the line just so. The painter uses the light as resistance, they want the light to express the pigment just so – what is shared here is the audience. I feel the artist has the advantage of similarity in the human eye. The light won’t work that differently between their eyes and the viewer. But perhaps I’m wrong about that. There’s a biology there for sure but more importantly there is the cultural teaching of how to look, what to see – what to notice, what to ignore. What counts as valuable information, beautiful colors, defined lines, a nice picture, ad nauseum.
That productive resistance is in the art of rhetoric, for sure. I think that the theory of the Universal Audience is a great source for this kind of resistance. Much like trying to get the graphite line just so on the page, the Universal Audience is the pressure against speech or words that we use to make the line of argument as dark, scattered, or scarce as we need. It’s too simplistic in a non-artistic view of rhetoric to say that the Universal Audience is a lever we pull to avoid errors; it’s much more than the red, blue, and green lines I find all over my Microsoft Word document. The Universal Audience is no corrective, it’s the materiality of canvas, the chemistry of pigment mixed, the way the light in the gallery or from the window will change things. I must be aware of that when I construct my rhetorical position because those are the places where meaning appears.
From the artistic standard, we must explore the very notion of what makes an audience do anything. When an audience appears (some like James Crosswhite would argue we are always being audienced, that it’s a verb), we must ask after it and what it assumes itself to be. We have to work with the material given to us.
When I was new at coaching debate, I expressed to a mentor that trying to teach debate was like being a sculptor and being forced to work with whatever material was brought to you from the quarry. I came up with that on a whim and I still think about it from time to time. Can you be an artist and not be allowed to select your medium? Your paint quality? The colors? The surface? These are selected for you always within rhetoric it seems. But not to the extent many think.
Without the artistic view, the understanding that rhetoric is an art that we teach and practice, instructors believe that speech cannot exist without a verified bibliography, that is, the practice of rhetoric is just a veneer on a practice of sourcing information that has been verified and produced by an approved system of epistemology. This to me seems backwards. There are instructors out there failing students for not providing the proper, verified sources but giving speeches that move their peers.
This is the biggest distinction between thinking of rhetoric as an art and calling it something else. But in art there were movements and there was the academy, the salon. People were saying what the limits and sources of painting should be. Those paintings are respected today, of course. The paintings that are revered are those that violated those norms and practices. They are the ones that moved the concepts of thinking and creation forward. Although the spirit behind “fail the student who provides no bibliography” is to help create or preserve a world where people make better decisions, this decision isn’t helping to advance practices that lead to a world of profoundly radical thinking. A lot of this is tied to bell hook’s observation that many instructors are too scared to fully engage their students because they think they can never say, “I don’t know” in the classroom. This seems like a practice of resistance we can do without.
Resistance in the classroom, as a place where everyone is pushed against the canvas, seems better. The resistance of the Universal Audience, the creation of a position, a case, and a view of the world that resonates with others can be done in many ways. One of the tools is to take inventory of resistance and see how it works or fails. I'm not sure I need the drawing books, but I am pretty sure that I need the rhetorical equivalent of the charcoal against the linen paper.