and transitory, but remain radically consequential to estimations of what seems to exist.
Judgments of what exists (such as whether legal language identifies just causes for impeachment) engage an aesthetic dynamic wherein narratives appear to correspond to experiences of deliberatory processes only when we overlook what cannot be represented—the very act of converting an apprehension into a resolution. Such conversions entail drawing connections between diversified discursive elements and then neglecting to consider the stylistic strategies that get deployed to enable them to appear to connect to judgments of meaning. Arguably, we do not consider how that time of conversion influences judgments of what exists because of the tendency to conflate the act of naming an interpretive result with the act of apprehending its significance. Rather than remember that narratives have contributed to how we convert the possible to the actual, we instead align an idea of actualization with an idea of “being substantial,” and then attach that conceptual connection to specific representational forms that we have learned to regard as having substance. In the process, style’s specific contribution to how potential meanings get channeled into resolute judgments of what has merit or fails to carry weight disappears. Indeed, we mostly ignore the particular ways in which our sense of what has substance emerges partly because we are prone to look for “the substantial” and overlook all that will not settle into any recognizable form —time, the action of conversion, style’s potential and ineffable ability to affect our senses.
The thicket of debate that arose in the 1998 impeachment proceedings demonstrates that taken-for-granted conceptions of deliberative time did not work in conclusive ways to clarify what was at issue and how it should be addressed. The question of who was doing what with language created numerous messy entanglements, all of them poised for judgments about which, if any, had significance. The act of categorizing what was at issue did not automatically propel citizens toward a neutral time of deliberation in which all considered the legitimacy of terms being thrown around to name what was at issue. Instead, the potential categories conveyed attitudes about how to ascribe substance. Was perjury at issue? A linguistic evasion? A deft response to political theater? The terms established how to “look” at potential meaning, and the look (the “surface” appearance) influenced what happened in the deliberatory time that then generated judgments about the impeachment’s (lack of) significance.
Style and Significance
This is, of course, Kenneth Burke’s point. Burke attends to the constitutive role of language that delivers meaning neither transparently nor neutrally but by provoking audiences to experience an embodied sense of identification to signs that they will potentially accept (and with which they will become “consubstantial”). Any form of discourse engages a representational dynamic that facilitates not only an act of recognition but also the potential for shared participatory responses. Words constitute communities not because they reflect connections that already exist but because they offer sites for inducing shared perceptions about what matters. Unlike Plato, Burke does not banish the aesthetic from the serious work of political judgment but emphasizes its centrality to facilitating the appearance of having shared perceptions of whether something as amorphous as significance is on hand. Hence Burke positions rhetorical style at the center of the discursive give and take that comprises democratic deliberation, and he effectively revises conceptions of how styles influence judgments about which representations should earn our intellectual and emotional commitments. Not only do styles establish the textual protocols and grammatical conventions that craft cultural productions, more importantly, rhetorical style is key to the social practice of communication.
Hence, a crucial difference between positivistic views of representation and rhetorical ones can be located within attitudes about style’s significance to judgment. While impeachment advocates condemned the bad attitude Clinton conveyed when refusing to forego rhetorical flourishes and straighten out his speech acts, rhetoricians rehabilitate conceptions of style by configuring stylized speech as ethically motivated speech. The seemingly surface features of rhetorical styles provide a gateway to a most important element within judgments of who is doing what with words—our perceptions of how people participate with language. We read styles as exhibitions of that which remains invisible: one’s intentions, aims, attitude about how language should be used. Indeed, as rhetoricians have long argued, it is through style that we determine whether a rhetor seems to be communicating genuinely, is concerned about us, the nation, or even approved modes of expression. Our entrée into acts of judging begin with our readings of a speaker’s motives. If we do not trust or believe the speaker’s motives, we probably will not be convinced by what he or she says, even if the ideas might otherwise seem perfectly reasonable. Style is neither superficial nor an obstacle to truth’s delivery but endemic to communicative action. Styles convey ways of seeing what matters within a scene of representation and enable audiences to get a sense of what a speaker (writer) cares about when putting forth a premise that others might share. For Burke, style is a means for getting others to collaborate with you when determining what to esteem and/or overlook. “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, ideas, identify your ways with his” (Rhetoric of Motives 55). One learns to speak in ways that audiences will recognize to encourage their acceptance of one’s point of view.
Burke’s rhetorical theorizing about style’s role in judgment is wonderfully complex and difficult to pin down, unlike the convention that treats style as a coherent and uniformly conceived resource for decisions about who speaks authoritatively and truthfully. Arguably, a more complex conception of style’s role in judgment is better suited for contending with what the impeachment arguments show—judgments that appear to be substantiated by solid interpretive methods can quickly dissolve into the illusory and ephemeral. We project motives onto speakers and those projections are only speculations. But they are of the kind that can have significant political consequences. Because political speech cannot escape the aesthetic and socially constructed dimensions of evaluative methods, an ethics of representation cannot eliminate the contributions of rhetorical strategizing.
When we invest in interpretive frameworks to substantiate judgments, we should not lose sight of the ways in which acts of judging begin with artifice. Judgments begin with narratives that imply acts of conversion (and translation) that cannot themselves be represented and that remain paradoxically imaginary and substantial. As we engage with styles that aim to signify motives and attitudes, we enter into a dynamic of symbolic action that, in Ned O’Gorman’s reading of Burke, does not work in a definitive and singular way but might instead be envisioned as traveling along a spectrum that moves between the sublime and the ridiculous. According to Burke,
Some vastness of magnitude, power, or distance, disproportionate to ourselves, is “sublime.” We recognize it with awe. We find it dangerous in its fascination. And we equip ourselves to confront it by piety, by stylistic medicine, and by structural assertion . . . The ridiculous, on the contrary, equips us by impiety, as we refuse to allow the threat [of] its authority: we rebel, and courageously play pranks when “acts of God” themselves are oppressing us (qtd. in O’Gorman 452).
O’Gorman builds upon this quote to describe a democratic style that embraces the “sublime-ridiculous” spectrum as a component part of political judgment, “a continuum” that, when embraced, “equips people, whether political leaders or everyday citizens, to move with agility across it. . . . Democracy encourages movement across this continuum by cultivating a strong, albeit somewhat paradoxical, sense among citizens that appearances and surfaces matter even as they are dispensable” (453). When attending to conceptions of democratic inquiry and judgment, keeping an eye on precisely the continuum of a paradoxical spectrum of potentialities offers one way of countermanding dominant scripts that too often “confuse difference with negation” (Panagia 60) in an effort to resolve what is paradoxical and replace it with a representative and narrativized postulate. When difference is conflated with negation, then it would seem that we must decide between two opposing options. Does the issue have substance or is it insignificant? Does a speaker’s use of words bring about the sublime or the ridiculous? Presumably, only one quality may be chosen at a time. But keeping an eye on
