rhetoriC: writing, reading and ProduCing the visuaLlaureate, Barbara mcClintok claims her discoveries in plant cytology are due to her
ability to acquire ‘a feeling for the organism’ in which she opens herself up to ‘what the
material has to say’ (Fleckenstein 2007: 14). The close identification provided her the
insights, rather than she laying over her observations an explanation already grounded
in traditions of science. her new vision produced new knowledge. This is often the
creative flow in which a performer or artist finds herself in the moment of production;
it can also be the space in which an observer or viewer finds himself. By adopting both
stances an art practitioner can provide insight with/in two vocabularies. Knowledge of
which rhetorical stance one takes at any moment can be used to perform an analysis
of an artefact as well as to purposefully create an edginess, dissonance or cohesion in a
creative work, upsetting assumptions and expectations of viewers known to be lodged
within a Cartesian perspective. Conversely, a Western rhetorical researcher or artist
might examine their positioning in order to ask how an ‘allopathic,’ deep engagement
with an object or an analytical study, produces new results, questions or objectives,
freeing them from their contained perspective (or not).
perhaps a simple parallel can now be drawn: concerned with human sign- making
as communication, rhetoric can be considered a method by which one defines and
presents a perspective (point of view), describing it (picturing) by articulating (creating)
a narrative (composition) that, through the medium of marks (paint, movement, stone,
sound), causes an audience (viewer) to respond (react) to the declamation (artefact).
it is with this in mind that rhetorical research, with its historical pedigree lodged in the
interplay of oral presentation, the visual and the performative (goldhill 1996) is now
quite commonly applied to the practices and products of multimodal work. among
rhetoricians who study the visual, there is more and more consensus that lines between
the visual and verbal have blurred, not only for the rhetorician, but between rhetorician,
museum patron and art practitioner; between also the rhetorician and artisan, and
even between the rhetorician and denizens of Facebook – between those who look
at and those who create. For many rhetoricians the key concern is now one in which
art practitioners can engage: developing a common vocabulary for examining images
which would foster ‘a collaborative venture, in essence for the disciplining of the study
of visual phenomena ... [that] would bring together a wide variety of disciplines’ (hill
and helmers 2004: 19), visual, aural and performative. The call for rhetoric to join
other disciplinary perspectives that make up composing/designing/art research would
also contribute to, or be, the subject of artistic production, raising questions from the
physical (what role does the eye movement play in the production of multimodal or
multi- movement communication?) to the abstract (what affective response do viewers
exhibit and how do they describe it in relation to what they see?).
Words about art: rhetorical processing and creative productionBesides the development of concepts and vocabulary through rhetorical- art-
practitioner perspectives, another result of research using rhetorical strategies in the
arts is educational. The scholarship of teaching and learning would examine how art is
produced so an artist herself as well as others can communicate more explicitly what
they do and why and how they do it (e.g. international society of the scholarship of
Teaching and learning).^3 phds in creative writing, in the same relationship to research