Art for Art’s Sake
William K. Rawlins
We are gathered here today to celebrate a thriving scholar, who has offered and continues to offer radically constructive insights and possibilities to the field of humane communication. Art Bochner is like Van Morrison – both have unique voices, unquenchable thirsts for life’s moments and lessons, a penchant for risks – and after more than thirty years of performing, even inventing, different genres of scholarly expression, my cherished friend and teacher still has the fire in his belly. A warm fire, an illuminating fire, a dancing fire.
Knowing Art as I have since 1975, I’m here to tell you that he has been blazing trails and causing widespread panic among faint-hearted and shallow-minded colleagues in our field for beaucoup years. At first, Art’s misgivings were pious. We learned about stuff like scale construction and experiment-wise error from psychometrics texts. And it felt good for a while to understand this stuff, and to hear someone, like Art, who really knew what he was talking about, dismantling the pretensions of various sophomoric efforts at using numbers to describe people. He even wrote a chapter with somebody on MANOVA for one of the Communication discipline’s first and thankfully few texts on multivariate statistics. And then one day, Art was asked by a reviewer, who was responding to a paper using multiple regression that Art had submitted to a journal, if Art couldn’t think of a better phrase to use in his methods section than “dummy variable?” Art and I discussed this and reached a few possible conclusions: (a) this reviewer was not especially well read about the variables describing his or her own work; (b) even traditional social scientists could admonish others to be politically correct; and (c) maybe it was high time we took the metaphorical nature of what we were doing seriously.
So about that time, Art wrote an essay entitled, “On Taking Ourselves Seriously,” which appeared in a bristling new journal called Human Communication Research (1978). In this compelling essay, among other things, Art had the audacity to list metaphor among the key issues that communication researchers needed to get smart about. Then the loud whispers began, “Was Bochner a closet rhetorician? Some kind of pinko humanist?”
Now the plot thickens – this is because, reminiscent of life itself, a whole lot of things were going on at once in young Professor Bochner’s world (as they still are going on). For one, some time earlier he had published a brilliant essay, which has arguably provided the initial conceptual basis for studying and teaching family communication in our field (Bochner, 1976). For another, he was working diligently on a monograph that comprehensively and painstakingly outlined and critiqued the available approaches for conceiving and researching the functions of communication in interpersonal bonding. This piece was to appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Rhetoric and Communication. This tour de force provided guidance and pioneering insights for studying relational communication in a rich, contextual, dialectical, and temporally unfolding manner. Regretfully, this path breaking work, written in the late seventies, was tied up in production and didn’t come out until 1984. As a result, in my judgment, Art has not received much of the credit he deserves for the groundbreaking architectural work he accomplished for the discipline in that essay. On a positive note, it remains an indispensable resource for an in depth conceptual understanding of communication in interpersonal relationships (Bochner, 1984).
Around this time, I was thinking about quitting grad school. Although I’ve always loved reading and conversations about ideas, I was noticing that most of my friends were either making a lot of money, or playing rock and roll music – or both. Meanwhile, I was becoming a geek. It was at this point that Art assigned a book in our graduate class called Pathways to Madness, the brilliant critical ethnography of American family life by Jules Henry (1965). We spent a lot of time talking about Henry’s writing and the existential gravity of this book. We were captivated by Henry’s ability to link the details and events of daily life with conceptual development and critique. Henry told vignettes of his experiences with troubled families; meanwhile these stories were tightly yoked to his searing criticisms of the grasping ethos and everyday violence of American culture. Significant seeds of narrativity and reflexivity were beginning to sprout in ground fertilized by Gregory Bateson, R.D. Laing, and numerous other chewy and challenging books, novels, and essays that Art is always discovering and sharing.
But long before our hero, Art Bochner -- Ulysses as philosophical anthropologist -- could come home to narrative and ethnographic alternatives -- a chiasmus of sorts that I believe and trust our other speakers will be addressing here today -- his destiny led him to and through a decade-long series of tasks – essays -- if you will, which I of necessity must characterize all too briefly.
For me, the spiritual launching of this period occurs with Art’s piece, “Forming Warm Ideas,” his tribute to our mutual hero, Gregory Bateson, which Art presented in Bateson’s presence at the legendary Asilomar conference and published in its proceedings (Bochner, 1981). What takes place in this essay is vintage Bochner. We are treated to an erudite review of the recursively human symbolic activities necessarily involved in the creative endeavor known as science. Ever generous, Art (with Bateson) is educating would-be social scientists about how their shopworn epistemological notions are being transformed and re-positioned by increasingly influential philosophies of science. He is simultaneously challenging them, for better or worse, to recognize themselves in their own work. Culminating the piece, Art begins hitch-hiking towards active, unapologetic interpretivism by holding out “Bateson’s Rules of Thumb” (p. 76) for fellow travelers to notice: “Study life in its natural setting… Think aesthetically… Live with your data” (an injunction he was later to take to poetic and romantic reaches with Carolyn Ellis). “Be a detective. Mull, contemplate, inspect. Think about, through, and beyond. …Don’t be controlled by dogmatic formalisms about how to theorize and research. …Be as precise as possible but don’t close off possibilities. … Aim for catalytic conceptualizations; warm ideas are contagious.” (pp. 76-77, my emphasis)
Soon after, Art commenced a deep engagement with Richard Rorty and pragmatism that has left important traces in Art’s writing even as he continues to clarify their significance for the communication field. (1) There are necessary links among our speaking, writing, feeling, and thinking. All of these doings are embodied, communicative activities shaping and reflecting our very possibilities as people drenched in the discourses that give our potentialities their social life and moment. (2) Meanwhile, acknowledging the radically contingent capacities of our words finds us breaking with the quest for representation, with trying to get it right once and for all, with latching onto or seeking to enforce the precise words with which a convergent world speaks itself. In contrast, we recognize that differing communities take up different discourses for different purposes. Our most salient commonality as peoples may indeed be our distinctly situated needs to cope with our humanity. (3) As we enact these inescapable connections between learning and living, we should recognize and experiment with different ways of being and communicating as persons, inquirers, authors, families, departments, and academic fields. (4) Trying out these possibilities should always occur, however, with a careful eye to the consequences of our actions for the moral ecology of our activities, the potential for becoming better persons, for social progress, for dwelling in peace.
As I write these remarks, I realize that in no way can I do justice to the portion of Art’s career I’m discussing, during which appears in 1985 the first of three essays addressing “Perspectives on Inquiry” in different editions of the Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (1985; 1994; 2003). I can suggest here, however, that all three, which traverse some eighteen years of scholarly effort, should be collected in a single volume depicting the rigorous spadework Art has been doing for those of us who live for alternative approaches to understanding human being, becoming, and communicating in the world. In the first essay, Art presents an enormously useful discussion of three distinctive approaches for learning about social life, including: representation a la empirical social science; conversation a la hermeneutic inquiry; and, reflection a la critical theory. In the second piece Art builds on the assumptions of multiplicity established in the first and strongly asserts the contrasts between world views informed by stories versus theories. In the latest installment, having fully embraced the virtues of narrative, Art meditates upon the moral responsibilities of telling stories about and as social life.
Art Bochner has labored diligently for a number of years to create strong argumentative rationales as well as lucid conceptual possibilities for interpretive work -- not to mention spaces for conversation and narration, and multiple legitimate outlets we currently enjoy in the communication field, including the Ethnography Division of NCA. I am not saying he did these things alone, even though he did publish a host of extensively researched and vehemently argued solo-authored essays during what he semi-affectionately refers to as his “handbook period.” I am saying that Art Bochner has noticeably carried the battle -- and make no mistake about it, it has assumed and continues to assume the form of a battle, if not a good old-fashioned dogfight on many occasions -- right into the heart of mainstream discourse and power structures, right into venues, programs, and journals where he has been forming wonderfully warm ideas in regrettably cold company.
In heartening contrast, I was delighted to receive an excited phone call from Art during the dawn of the next decade, the 1990s. He told me he had attended a colloquium presented by a colleague in Sociology at the University of South Florida, called “Emotion in Sociology.” He said he felt more than at home in the presentation, that, in fact, “I felt as if I could have been giving the talk myself.” Time not permitting, I will leave it to others close at hand to tell us about the further unfolding of Art’s work in the realm of narrative and auto-ethnography in the company of his colleague and soul mate, Carolyn Ellis.
I would like to conclude with what I consider to be key components of Art’s legacy that have become a part of my own life as a scholar:
1. Go where your intellectual curiosity takes you, not where people say you should go, or worse, try to browbeat you into going. Read widely and deeply whatever texts bear upon your questions. Stay tuned to the reasons you have wanted to study social life in the first place.
2. Connect your work with your own life. There are many alienated and dour scholars out there. Allow your work to speak to and nurture the concerns and relationships that feed your passions and make you who you are.
3. Build concern for others into your own work. Remain aware of how what you do affects your students, colleagues and others’ lives. How might your words and activities affect others’ opportunities to hear their own voices?
4. Live, study, and write with courage. From my earliest recollections, I hear Art describing and witness him enacting what we do as an honorable “way of life,” an opportunity to live with integrity. It is one of my fondest and most enduring images of this precious man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that it was the scholar’s duty to pass life through the fire of thought. Thank you, Art, for the ways in which you perform and instruct others to embrace this duty. But thank you even more for the ways you encourage us scholars, who enjoy the privilege of working with you, to have our thoughts sifted through the warm fires of your life.
REFERENCES
Bochner, A. P. (1976). Conceptual frontiers in the study of communication in families: An introduction to the literature. Human Communication Research, 2, 381‑397.
Bochner, A. P. (1978). On taking ourselves seriously: An analysis of some persistent problems and promising directions in interpersonal research. Human Communication Research, 4, 179‑191.
Bochner, A. P. (1981). Forming warm ideas. In C. Wilder & J. Weakland (Eds.), Rigor and imagination (pp. 65-81). New York: Praeger.
Bochner, A. P. (1984). The
functions of communication in interpersonal bonding. In C. Arnold & J. Bowers (eds.), The Handbook of Rhetoric and Communication
(pp. 544-621). New York: Allyn and
Bacon.
Bochner, A. P. (1985). Perspectives on inquiry: Representation, conversation, and reflection. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.) Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 3-58). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Bochner, A. P. (1994). Perspectives on inquiry II: Theories and stories. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed.) (pp. 21-41). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bochner, A. P. (2003). Perspectives on inquiry III.: The moral of stories. In M. L. Knapp and J. Daley (Eds.) Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 73-101.
Henry, J. (1965). Pathways to madness. New York: Vintage Books.
