strategy. The dissonance of the “is is” phrase is remarkable not because the phrase deserves either derision or praise but because it offers an illustration of the meeting point between a speech act and the expectations that inform a collective sense of what language is supposed to do to constitute legitimate purposefulness. When we don’t question the legitimacy of the idea that we should speak with purpose and make use of recognizable styles to clearly represent purposes, then the demand that we be purposeful and show that aim by adopting normative styles will stand as legitimate, inevitable, and not itself abusive. Clinton’s “is is” phrase did not easily fit into any preestablished identity category that would legitimate its articulation. It was not especially witty. Few would likely regard it as a courageous example of “speaking back to power.” As President, Clinton was not being oppressed in any conventional sense of the word; his words continue to be influential. Evaluating his “is is” phrase according to a preestablished hierarchy of values that has staked out what counts as a salient purpose gives “the community” permission to disregard and effectively render insubstantial any locution that refuses to go along with enforced institutional conventions.
When we are speculating about a speaker’s purposes, we not only make judgments as if we have, indeed, identified those purposes, we also make judgments about whether identified purposes seem to be significant (or have “substance”). But given that ways of reading and evaluating significance have been shaped by cultural imperatives—including the one that effectively counsels rhetors to show significance by obeying discursive protocols—the answer to the question of whether and what kind of significance actually appeared will carry the imposition of cultural ideologies. And while that observation may be itself familiar to readers of critical theory, what may not be as common is a more specific meditation about how rhetorical technologies of evaluation that promise access to all instantiate biases by conflating particular acts of representability with accountability and then drawing upon that conflation when converting speculation about motives into judgments of who is credible.
When engaging in rhetorical analyses of who is doing what with language, we should not lose sight of the ways in which rhetorical responses to Platonic logocentrism also counsel punishments for speakers who fail to represent viable purposes and that these punishments also include acts of expulsion, albeit in more subtle ways—expel by rendering insignificant. Much of the exchange between Clinton and the Independent Counsel involved skirmishes about the way that Clinton responded to questions and included the complaint that Clinton’s responses were too long, as if to suggest that his responses were designed to distract listeners and turn their attention away from the heart of the matter. In the following exchange, the President and the Independent Counsel interrupted each other but eventually, Clinton began to offer the short responses requested from counsel, and those responses followed legal protocol that allowed him to exercise his right to refuse to incriminate himself. On the other hand, that wrangling also included what is perhaps the most merciless exchange of the entire impeachment proceedings:
PROSECUTOR: I want to go over some questions again. I don’t think you are going to answer them, sir. And so I don’t need a lengthy response, just a yes or no. And I understand the basis upon which you are not answering them, but I need them for the record. If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched her breasts, would she be lying?
CLINTON: Let me say something about this—
PROSECUTOR: All I really need for you, Mr. President—
CLINTON: I know—
PROSECUTOR: is to say—
CLINTON: But you—
PROSECUTOR: I won’t answer under previous grounds, or to answer the question, you see, because we only have four hours and your answers . . . have been lengthy. . . .
CLINTON: I know that. I’ll give you four hours and thirty seconds if you let me say something general about this. I will answer to your satisfaction that I won’t – based on my statement, I will not answer. I would like 30 seconds at the end to make a statement, and you can have 30 seconds more on your time, if you’ll let me say this to the grand jury and to you. And I don’t think it’s disrespectful at all. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. But go ahead and ask your questions.
PROSECUTOR: The question is, if Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area, you touched her breasts, would she be lying?
CLINTON: That is not my recollection. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Miss Lewinsky, and I’m staying on my former statement about that.
PROSECUTOR: If she said—
CLINTON: My, my statement is that I did not have sexual relations as defined by that.
PROSECUTOR: If she says that you kissed her breasts, would she be lying?
CLINTON: I’m going to revert to my former statement.
PROSECUTOR: Okay. If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area, you touched her genitalia, would she be lying? And that calls for a yes, no, or reverting to your former statement.
CLINTON: I will revert to my statement on that.
Prosecutor: If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid in the Oval Office area, would she be lying? Yes, no, or won’t answer?
Clinton: I will revert to my former statement.27
The Prosecutor’s stated intent, to pose questions “for the record” in spite of his belief that Clinton would not answer, was, at the very least, strange for those of us unaccustomed to legalese. It suggested that his interrogation was a lawyerly, procedural one, meant to be reviewed in a future context in which “the record” would stand as a pristine document and allow for an objective evaluation of testimony by objective judges familiar with the conventions of courtroom proceedings. On the other hand, because Clinton’s Grand Jury appearance was eventually broadcast to citizens (the transcripts were released to the public one month later by the House Judiciary Committee), it was impossible to delimit how “regular folks” would react to the content of those questions. Given that audiences were promised evidence of perjury, some may have wondered if there were other reasons for this exchange. Perhaps the team of prosecutors organizing this inquiry thought that a verbal “probing” into details of intimate physical contact would exercise due diligence. Maybe they aimed to force Clinton to finally crack and admit what presumably everyone could already see. Or perhaps the prosecutor thought that Clinton would avoid the risk of being ridiculed for maintaining a representation of what happened that seemed to be at odds with the detailed picture that Lewinsky had apparently provided. Presumably, the repetition, the “frank” exposure of sexual terms aimed, through their explicitness, to both get to the truth and coerce an honest response from a known equivocator. Meanwhile, that same constellation of devices may have signified to audiences the designs of a too-ardent prosecutor who failed to consider that his version of how to enact a truth-seeking process might raise questions about its legitimacy. And yet, interestingly, many of us who remember the “is is” statement may not have remembered the specifics of this exchange and the ways in which it was contextualized in terms of adhering to representational formalities specifically aligned with the law.
Arguably, the Prosecutor’s brutal questioning could be called “neutrally legal” because of a play of appearances. One can appear to be responsible and ethical by adhering to discursive protocol that promises to represent reason and neutral analytical thought. One may deploy such protocol as if doing so is intrinsically responsible and ethical, and use that general regard for linguistic accountability via representational responsibility as a way of providing insidious cover for an abuse of power. Here, we might locate that abuse exactly in the space of an interpretive
