of who may be held accountable for language choices. As such, he made a case for representability in general, and more specifically, for representations that present a systematic order of cause and effect in which “good” reasons lead to “good conclusions.” Far from seeming like pure nonsense, Barr’s statement and the principles that he defended were both intelligible and representative of dominant discursive conventions, including those touted within rhetorical studies of style’s role in generating audience adherence. Within Barr’s call for simplicity was a presumed inclusionary motive made evident via the “plain” style that extends a democratic “welcome” to everyone and conveys a bona fide desire to reach as many in the audience as possible. The question, then, is whether and how Barr’s particular call for clarity differs from, for example, the Rawlsian or Habermasian idea that communication should be oriented towards producing understanding, or how it differs from the rhetorical concern with devising styles that signify one’s desire to communicate and to use language for the purpose of community formation comprised of mutually shared perspectives.
There are dissonances. When comparing Barr’s statement to rhetorical theorizing that positions rational and vernacular norms as signifiers of socially responsible communicative practices, we might observe that Barr’s demand for innocence expressed through the elimination of verbal excess is precisely at odds with a rhetorical framework that valorizes flexibility and representational inconstancy. Rather than advocate for particular representational forms, rhetorical approaches to language study address how context is an element within any decision about which forms are suitable to speech occasions. Hence, a rhetorical take on Barr’s justification for an impeachment would deem it unpersuasive because a majority would probably reject the allusion to a child’s perspective as being suitable in this case.
Further, while Barr conflated linguistic transparency with a kind of literacy that is elemental and denuded of strategic calculating, rhetors would note that this paean to rhetorical innocence represents its own specialized discursive practice, or what Stuart Hall would call “a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of knowledge and conduct associated with” knowledge production (see Webb 56). Hall’s account is congenial with Burkean studies in that both ask us to question how we draw relationships between “knowledge” (culturally defined) and the representational technologies that would presume to bring that knowledge to presence. None of this is artless. To understand Barr’s comment, audiences would have to know something about the value attached to the idea of innocence, and that it is common to configure the idea of innocence in the form of children at play. Barr’s presumably inclusionary “we’re all children at heart” premise also delivers a reprimand to those who practice verbal complexity, implying that they may be rightly judged as elitist, pretentious, out of touch, and worst of all, inauthentic. Audiences further will be expected to be able to sort through the interrelated premises that suggest that identifying how speakers should conduct themselves linguistically will also identify the audience’s coordinating obligations: to be on the look out to see if the “authentic” “simple” and “clear” (or vernacular) statement has made an appearance. Audiences would be expected to comprehend, if not commend, the idea that when we follow our hearts when judging, we endorse the most noble descriptor of “the American” democratic spirit—a spirit that fosters community by championing the plain style that speaks to all, does not exclude, patronize, confuse, or deviate from the goal of calling everyone an equal. The ability to understand all that Barr’s homily communicated is not achieved in any simple or direct way but by connecting in complex ways to experiential contexts that influence how we judge whose act of representation seems to be honest, presented for political purposes, or some mixture of both.
But even when rejecting the reductive trajectory informing Barr’s veneration of simplicity, its kinship with rhetorical claims about how to engineer language uses that will enact identification might give us pause. Barr’s investment in a specific version of representational normativity is oddly congenial with the rhetorical valorization of discursive normativity as being benevolent, well-intentioned, and democratic. Rhetorical positivism is not the same as the empirical positivism within Republican arguments that contended that propositional content trumps style. In rhetorical theories, both style and content matter to the endeavor to persuade. The positivism within rhetorical theorizing situates style as morality’s identifiable agent, albeit in ways that are not straightforward. Rhetoricians envision style’s role as helping to negotiate intricate interconnections between private individual interest and public concerns. Signs of eloquence, in particular, are expected to smooth over differences in perspective and craft affiliations that facilitate interpretive resolutions. The question, then, is whether a rhetorical appreciation of the eloquent representation has a different political effect than that of a Platonically-inflected positivism that valorizes stylistic transparency.
A look at the trajectory of Barr’s call to community helps to illuminate the ways in which rhetorical theorizing about how to use styles to promote social cooperation are informed by a subtle yet persistent faith in the priority of that which is representable; rhetoricians tend to trust in a narrative that maintains that enacting (orderly, eloquent) representations is tantamount to being socially responsible because it indicates one’s willingness to be held accountable for one’s ideas. Barr’s depiction of this premise may have been stylistically simplistic, but his argument propositionally concurred with the call to rationalist norms within rhetorical theories of style that would explain how audiences might know if “the reasonable case” has made an appearance. Rationalist norms are also “clusters (formations) of ideas, images and practices” that encourage particular types of rhetorical action that will (presumably) produce recognizably legitimate interpretive results. Comparing Barr’s nostalgia to rhetoric’s enthusiasm for rationalist norms helps to illustrate how the narratives we devise to organize conceptions of how to participate with language will engage acts of fantasy when they suggest that the use of the familiar form will facilitate the conversion of representational ambiguity into credible judgments about discursive aims. We are expected to believe those explanatory narratives as if they truly do tell us about how to enact inquiry that can be called democratic. But if responses to Barr’s justification for impeaching Clinton demonstrate anything it might be that signifying obedience to stylistic protocol will not definitively indicate if a speaker’s aim is either conscientious or socially beneficial.
Hence, the pertinence of Richard Lanham’s observation: styles do not just operate as vehicles that put verve into how we express ideas. They are also representative of value systems that will have emerged from disciplinary and social contexts. Lanham maintains that social contexts will dictate how styles will be evaluated while rhetorical styles will convey attitudes about a given culture’s sense of what is linguistically (stylistically) permissible. “By a sense of style we socialize ourselves. Style finally becomes . . . social custom. . . . Style defines situations, tells us how to act in them” (178).
Styles, then, reveal more than style when they disclose how hierarchies of value get attached to linguistic comportment. When styles are expected to be readable, familiar, a site for generating a sense of equity, and hence commonality, their appearance seems to signify a rhetor’s aim to get along with others and facilitate democratic communication. But judgments of aims require speculation about how to transform the apprehension of a given text into an evaluation of its meaning and significance. Any response to Barr’s homily—either acceptance or rejection—will have been influenced by narratives that situate stylistic protocols within social hierarchies and then underestimate the significance of style’s contribution to the interpretive conversions that will get made when speculation gets transformed into a conclusion about whose words are behaving reasonably and/or preposterously. Meanwhile, like Barr, rhetoricians who champion narratives that specify representational goals like “democratic participation” also express anxiety about whether representational inconstancy can be partnered with linguistic virtue.
Pragmatics Meets Inconstancy
If interpretive acts are social customs, they may be analyzed to consider how style’s deployment helps to naturalize ways of seeing what should have value and credibility. A circular logic
