balancing rocks

The Selfie and the Send:  The Two Rhetorics We Teach

Caleb stands in front of his webcam wearing a crazy t-shirt depicting an orange moose climbing up the topside of a triangle (some kind of visual pun, which I could figure out if I remembered my geometry). Bright green headphones are clamped to his head and he is ready to begin his speech. Because he is comfortable in this setting, Caleb stands in the framed video image of the Adobe Connect classroom making it look like he is a giant as he starts performing what we call in Rhetoric 1, “The Balancing Act.”

“The Balancing Act” is designed to test Caleb’s brain, his will and most especially, his emerging sensibility for rhetorical strategy. He is required to balance insistence with restraint. More specifically, he must first identify a controversial issue and press upon its significance. The second part, however, is tricky: he must control the common human tendency to take sides on a controversial issue important to him. In The Balancing Act, Caleb must resist certain impulses that come very naturally to everyone of us while cultivating some new ones that do not. At all costs, he must not slip out of objectivity and into bias.

Theoretically speaking, the Balancing Act assignment is training in that part of classical rhetoric the ancients called “kairos,” learning to discern what is suitable to say in light of historical context (which requires research), audience predisposition (which requires empathy) and a range of arguments in circulation (which induces a breadth of rhetorical awareness). This sounds intimidating, and it would be, but since Caleb and his fellow students know they all must attempt the same feat, they feel fairly relaxed. Even though they are walking a razor’s edge, they are as safe among friends as they would be if they were snapping a Selfie during a workout.

But this Selfie is not sent. The construction of this self-image is a protected enterprise not a public one. After Caleb is finished, the class is impressed because he’s nailed it (as all of them have done or will do soon); they hit their “applausicons” and begin to congratulate him on his success with careful comment supporting their approval, one by one. The ritual repeats itself with each student performance of The Balancing Act. But the class archive remains locked to everyone but the members of this class.

The next morning, students in Rhetoric 2/Senior Thesis face a very different task. Instead of reveling in a safe circle of friends cheering them on in their exercises, each speaker must address the cold glare of a mock audience greeting them with either indifference or hostility.   Here, another Caleb rises to the virtual podium to try and sell the idea of abstract postmodern art to an audience predisposed to reject such an appeal. (I will call the first one Caleb the Younger, this one Caleb the Elder). It doesn’t matter if Caleb the Elder’s actual classmates truly reject this kind of art. They have been instructed to play the part of the hostile audience and that’s just what they do before, during and after his performance.

In the process of facing this tough crowd, Caleb the Elder mentions very favorably the artwork produced by some of the usual suspects, including Jackson Pollack and Marcel Duchamp (of infamous “Fountain” fame). From the speaker’s perspective, Caleb the Elder knows full well that the thesis is probably inimical to the mock audience. That was his intention after all. His task is to try and attract dubious listeners to a form of art that is easily dismissed or despised, or at least to justify it to them as art. Each student in Rhetoric 2/Senior Thesis is learning to perform the functions of careful rhetorical strategy suitable to real-world conflict.

The contrast between these two “screenshots” from our high school curriculum at WHA illustrates something important about the last phase of learning in the classical Trivium-based approach, often called the “rhetoric stage.” Instead of being a set of courses merely dedicated to polishing up the students’ manners of self-expression, rhetoric at WHA is designed to achieve two polar functions that might at first seem contradictory. On the “closed” side of this curriculum, the object is to instill confidence by edifying budding rhetors with the rigors of art and technique; on the “open” side, the task shifts to determining if the Selfie is ready to Send. The Rhetoric 1 side of this polarity provides a safe speaker-centered environment for learning the rudiments of the rhetorical art; Rhetoric 2 then tests the students’ resolve and resiliency before a more resistant counterforce, helping them to become audience centered.

When these two learning environments are placed into succession, they mutually complement each other in a way that is significant. Such a succession of learning environments may be called, respectively, the rhetoric of the self and the rhetoric of the other. These are the two rhetorics we teach.