Stasis Four for Literate Jurisdictions: Writing for an Art World Referee

Abstract

In classical stasis, jurisdiction questions are posed within a traditional institutional context where speakers share material proximity and a background consensus. However, in modern literate controversies, it can be difficult to assume either of these kinds of shared experience. This study shows how cultural professionals writing about the Brooklyn Museum controversy used referee design to help constitute the art world jurisdiction. Referee design can extend classical stasis frameworks to help explain jurisdiction in cases where ostensive participants are writers and readers who do not share proximity or a background consensus.

Notes

¹ I thank RR reviewers Andrew King and Jennifer Andrus for their helpful input and direction, and editor Theresa Enos for her guidance and patience. The analysis in this paper owes much to a series of discussions I had with Helen Hok-Sze Leung during 2013. Thanks to her and to Chris Eisenhart for critical feedback.

² See for instance: Vatz; Charland; Leff; Kaufer and Butler, Rhetoric and the Art of Design; Kaufer and Butler, Designing Interactive Worlds with Words; Andrus; Oddo.

³ There are considerable differences among classical models of stasis as propounded by Hermagoras, Hermogenes, Cicero, and Quintilian, differences that tend to turn on how to apply or interpret the stasis questions (Is the problem raised by a particular case a matter of conjecture or definition, for instance? How is the rhetor supposed to use stasis as a general procedure for analyzing problems raised by cases? In whose discourse does the stasis reside, that of the Defense, the Prosecutor, or in the interaction of the two?) (Heath).

⁴ To be materially relevant, a contribution should bear directly on the issue in dispute and help to resolve it, while to be topically relevant it needs only to address the topic in a general way (Walton 13–15).

⁵ This is a traditional approach to criticism that draws on “biographical formulae” portraying artists as heroes (Kris 65–66).

⁶ This is the kind of presumption that Weber describes in “Science as a Vocation”: “Consider a discipline such as aesthetics. The fact that there are works of art is given for aesthetics. It seeks to find out under what conditions this fact exists, but it does not raise the question whether or not the realm of art is perhaps a realm of diabolical grandeur, a realm of this world, and therefore, in its core, hostile to God and, in its innermost and aristocratic spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man.”

⁷ Some cultural professionals did address civic referees in the Brooklyn Museum case. For instance, Arnold Lehman, the museum director, held press conferences during the controversy and was regularly quoted in news coverage about the case, though less frequently or prominently than Mayor Giuliani. Schulyer Chapin was the Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs for New York City in 1999 and was involved to varying degrees in a number of behind-the-scenes phone calls and meetings with Mayor Giuliani and other central decision-makers in City Hall during the earliest days of the controversy.

⁸ Oddo highlights this challenge when he notes that “even small (and sometimes sub-conscious) language choices have an enormous rhetorical impact” (238).

⁹ This is the perspective that Wichelns adopted in his influential essay that set out the terms for rhetorical criticism as a method. He wrote that despite the presence of rhetorical action in other modes and media, face-to-face oratory is the primary concern of the critic. This is because “there is no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principal mode of exerting influence, whether in courts, in senate-houses, or on the platform. It follows that the critical study of oratorical method is the study, not of a mode outworn, but of a permanent and important human activity” (7).

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Peter Cramer

Peter Cramer is an associate professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. He is interested in the ways that writing and speaking contribute to our experience of situations and events, especially those associated with the rhetorical tradition and the study of argument. He welcomes feedback at [email protected].