Warnings about the dangers of Clinton’s linguistic impropriety simultaneously registered a query about how to read the language use of those making the accusations. Indeed the very style of those claims contributed to their rejection.
After the impeachment effort failed, for example, Hyde repeated the idea that impeachment proponents were motivated by a noble desire to uphold standards, and this time referenced history when defending his actions in a Chicago Tribune editorial:
The impeachment . . . was not a political struggle . . . but a historic constitutional test. A bedrock principle of democracy, first formulated by our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition in the Magna Carta, was a stake: the principle that no person is above the law. Birth, wealth and social position do not put someone above the law. Neither does public office. . . . This was a constitutional test of whether the United States government remains a government of laws, not of men.19
This kind of pronouncement, one that aimed to seamlessly organize political life by connecting past to future, instead called attention to itself via the attempt to craft an equitable correspondence between this sorry event and that awe-inspiring document from a historical past that stands as an emblem of human progress toward shared governance and individual freedom. Indeed, this was exactly the kind of comparison that was regarded (by that apparent majority) as violating the correspondence theory that seeks resemblances between terminologies and the ideas words would represent. By formulating dissonant linkages, Hyde’s commentary became stylistically noticeable for its overreach rather than for his argument’s ability to nail a point of view and demonstrate how straight talk ought to appear. Once a representational mode becomes noticeable, then how to situate it within the organizing logic of substitutions is not immediately apparent.
But rather than mull over this conundrum, we tend to consign such stylistic dissonances to the realm of the unpersuasive and dismissible. This outcome is a byproduct of the value system that prioritizes the delivery of substantial content by characterizing style as a surface feature of language, its concerns relatively meager and insubstantial, both qualitatively different from information and knowledge and potentially an impediment to their apprehension. We are expected to uphold the idea that rhetorical styles should be invoked to guard citizens against “two kinds of corruptions—vagueness and artificiality” (McCrimmon 6) that indicate that the rhetor has “settled for a superficial view” (6). Typically, after deciding that a given style, like that of Hyde’s, is “artificial,” we draw upon such perceptions to determine what happens next, which usually means losing interest rather than deliberating about how styles affect evaluations of an utterance’s content and significance.
How to theorize style’s role within acts of persuasion is a question that rhetoricians have puzzled over since antiquity and found difficult to answer. As Edward P.J. Corbett observed, style is a “vague concept” that we think we grasp but then find impossible to encapsulate within neatly sorted descriptions. To characterize style, we often borrow familiar descriptors such as “‘lucid,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘labored,’ ‘Latinate,’ ‘turgid’ or flowing” (209). Or, as phrased within impeachment discourses, “plain” and “honest.” Our conceptions of style, Corbett concludes, include “a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). When idiosyncrasy and convention blend, then a question is raised about the purpose of stylistic standards and whether their application helps to identify what a style is and does. Styles may be identifiable when discursive protocols are followed, but the effects (or consequences) of re-presenting forms of representation are not. Styles are present. They are material embodiments of ways of seeing that can carry forceful persuasive effects by provoking our senses. But what a given style conveys is conspicuously (and perhaps tortuously) ambiguous. Meanwhile, because that curious blend between the idiosyncratic and the conventional cannot be standardized to guarantee interpretive results, it contributes to the contemporary tendency to downplay style’s role in political judgment.
But as we move from apprehension to dismissal, we are apt to lose sight of a critical moment of interpretive conversion. Style’s role in judgment is minimized when meaning and significance get ascribed to entities that appear to have substance. This apparent order of cause and effect offers another occasion for considering how interpretation engages acts of translation. Our encounters with the domain of “the substantial” would seem to require no translation at all, as substance would seem to be self-evidently present, unambiguously noticeable, forging a clear and direct relationship between the signifier of substance and its substantial quality. The judgments we make about what has substance seem to be organized by the terminology we’ve devised to designate that quality, while the possibilities for identifying what has substance seem to rely upon the procedural—a neutrally deployed process that constitutes the experience of feeling (knowing) what has weight.
Arguably, this tidy model is packaged for easy consumption, but it overlooks component parts of interpretive technologies that are significant yet impossible to substantiate. Elizabeth Grosz explores one example of the ways in which an insubstantial significance inheres within conceptions of narrative’s relationship to interpretation in an article that considers whether the discourses of philosophy and those of architecture can speak to each other in discussions that consider how to conceive of space. There are radical differences between these discourses. One aims to design material objects that will inhabit a physical landscape while the other imagines the mind as an object, a landscape that may be mapped, traveled upon, situated, and occupied. We draw connections between these two discourses as if their associations are automatic, but any correlation will be conceptual only. Any (virtual) comparison will contain unanswerable questions about whether concepts have inherent relationships to reality and whether the virtual ever gets converted into the actual. If a shared conceptual space can be forged between these disparate discourses, its status will be tentative, perpetually unsettled and not hospitable to clearly enunciated indications of what is shared.
The tentativeness of any formulation about what these divergent discourses share calls attention to a dynamic of conversion within the interpretive processes that enable a proposed possibility to be treated as an actuality. In tracing what that conversion entails, Grosz contemplates the significance of the time of translation that seems to establish its own substantial dimension occupied by mental processes that get activated as an aspect of contemplation. This time/space is ephemeral as well as multifaceted. It involves (at least) the time of “before” that encapsulates preconceived notions, the time in which thought emerges, takes note of, assesses, etc., and the time of deliberation wherein we consider whether an object of representation has merit, significance, gravitas.
I bring up Grosz’s argument because it foregrounds an aspect of interpretive action that tends to go unnoticed. In the context of political disputes, the dynamic of time also includes the time it takes for an apprehension of a particular material/stylized marker to emerge into a judgment of its quality and significance. Within that time of transition, the ephemeral potentiality of a style to mean any number of things will be converted into a narrative declaring its actual significance (whether it is classified as idiosyncratic, conventional, helpful, an obstruction, etc.). These judgments occur in the time of “retrospect”—when we appear to look back at a prior (preconceived) order of meaning to determine the significance of any signifier made anew. The endless possibilities of meanings that might be derived from style’s idiosyncratic features get domesticated within interpretive orders that look for stylistic conformity in order to put forth a narrative about standards. In that particular time of conversion, we will likely forget those other potential meanings, especially when we are encouraged to connect the act of finding meaning with that of being ethical. We will also likely forget what occurred during the interval of time between the possible and the actual, “an interval that refuses self-identity and self-presence to any thing, any existent. This interval, neither clearly space nor time but a kind of leakage between the two, the passage of one into the other” (Grosz, “Future of Space”) will be forgotten once the final judgment takes hold and becomes the point of reference in subsequent narratives about the judging event. Within that realm of leakage between space, time, and judgment, we undertake acts of translation that then inform the decisions we make
