The Art That Hides Itself

Moves that do not look like moves.

A course on the thought of The Art That Hides Itself.

Course outline

1. The five rooms — Before a word is chosen, diagnose which of five kinds of case you are in — honourable, mean, ambiguous, obscure, discreditable. The opening move is different in each, and the plain direct statement…
2. Coming in sideways — The covert opening. When the cause is discreditable — the ask is one they think you have no right to make — a straightforward request for goodwill is refused before it is finished. Quintilian's…
3. The room that already agrees with you — The hardest audience is not the hostile one. It is the room that grants the principle and lives comfortably without the practice. Rochester, 5 July 1852: an anti-slavery society invites Douglass to…
4. The burden — A rule from the law of evidence, carried into ordinary argument for the first time by a churchman who needed it. A presumption is not a probability but an occupation of the ground: it stands until…
5. Break their test, not their conclusion — In 1819 Whately took the fashionable sceptical criteria of his day, applied them to Napoleon — then alive, and the most reported man in Europe — and showed they disposed of him. Do not attack the…
6. The room you are not entitled to be in — One occasion, run end to end: a discreditable ask, the sympathy of the room against you, and a burden someone has already placed on your side of the table. No new move is taught. You choose which of…

Part of the Symposium course library.