for example, regularly draw upon the idea that there is a mode of speech that can be characterized as “straight” and because straight, effective and honorable. “Straight Talk Wins Votes in Wisconsin” ran a headline in U.S. News and World Reports three weeks before the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.6 On the other hand, it is also true that the GOP has crafted a party identity that is wedded to a preferred style of speech called “straight talk”—the kind that seems to be most invested in delivering “the hard facts” to audiences. “Sign up for Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk” declares the Congressman’s official website, which, in issuing this invitation, links Paul’s identity to his mode of delivery. Similar qualities are attributed to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who, according to CNN, was expected to deliver at the 2012 Republican Convention a “straight-talk speech that Republicans have come to expect from the straight-talking Christie.” “Laura Bush Delivers Feisty GOP Straight Talk” ran a 2008 People Magazine story favorable to the first lady at a time when her husband’s White House tenure was largely ridiculed.7
Presumably, unlike Clinton, the straight talker has nothing to hide. Emboldened by the courage of his convictions, he expresses ideas without pandering and without fearing the backlash that his perspective might generate. Clinton’s unwillingness to get his words straight not only refused to engage virtuous mimicry, many believed that he purposely twisted words in a resolute attempt to mislead citizens with statements that gave the appearance of being forthright while only pretending to do so. As put by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and panelist on ABC’s “This Week”:
Bill Clinton has acted for the past year on his deepest beliefs: that law is merely politics, that the truth is merely spin, that an oath is merely rhetoric, that justice is merely power. These doctrines are deeply corrosive of free government. They corrupt us and degrade our constitutional order in a profound way. This fundamental disdain for his presidential oath is Bill Clinton’s highest crime and misdemeanor. And the remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors is impeachment.8
According to Dallas Morning News commentator Richard Estrada, “Like Nixon, Clinton is his own worst enemy. He is an equal opportunity bully, smirking at political enemies and the victims of his personal whims. He may survive the latest threat to his political life, but his reputation will not survive his diminishment of his presidency, nor his hubris.”9
The idea that speakers should be punished for misrepresenting reality is not unique to the events of 1998. Here we can take a cue from Scott Durham who notes that historically, many cultures have devised narratives about ideal speakers and a corresponding injunction against those who claim to enact a cultural ideal but only pretend to do so. Indeed, the idea that democratic life demands a kind of vigilance that will unmask charlatans has been deemed so vital to maintaining social order that punishments have been devised within Western philosophical traditions for those who fail to demonstrate a commitment to establishing resemblances between speech and Truth. Durham’s observations about this dynamic are worth quoting at length:
In the metaphysical and theological traditions, the appeal to narrative is made by the philosopher or ‘truthful man,’ whose attempt to grasp the ‘beyond’ of the image is formulated as a problem of passing judgment on the image as a truthful or deceptive representation, which either reaffirms or subverts the founding truths of the prevailing order of things. Does the lineage of the image participate in the essence of the original or is it merely a sophistic counterfeit or a demonic usurper? Does it lead us back to our foundation in the Good and the True or does it cause us to lose ourselves in error and perversity? (19).
Media reports circulating in 1998 often expressed exactly the concerns outlined by Durham, including the following op-ed that ran in the Philadelphia Enquirer:
Doublespeak, particularly of the political and legal kind, of the Clinton kind, is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is the product of clear, calculated thought, intended from the outset to control and pervert reality. It is language that avoids or shifts responsibility and undermines honest public debate. It is an oppressive form of communication that ultimately confines our thought and suffocates our ability to express ourselves freely. It breeds suspicion, distrust, cynicism and ultimately hostility.10
The remedy to the threat of perversion: expulsion. Expel the pretender—the one who promises to speak truly but instead steers listeners away from truth’s domain (Durham 19). Expel those who fail to adopt proper purposes and banish the desire to engage in language practices that forsake the honorable and principled. “Most officers of my acquaintance would have resigned their commission had they been discovered violating their oath,” declared Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) during the Senate debate that followed the House impeachment. “The President did not choose this course of action. . . . As much as I would like to, I cannot join in his acquittal.”11
The act of expulsion attempts to make the problem of representational indeterminacy disappear by doling out punishments to those who fail to demonstrate that they have endeavored to secure the “lineage of the copy” (Durham 19) and through that process, take part in a ruling interpretive order that guarantees that distinctions between meritorious and abusive speech will be unambiguously maintained. But while GOP arguments rested upon the idea that an a priori representational order (or self-evident logic) prefigures any cultural production and should govern how language is used, in the wake of poststructuralist challenges to the metaphysics of presence, questions arise about how to distinguish the existent a priori from the cultural signifiers people invent to describe representational action. Interpretive technologies are also representations and the processes they delineate are linguistic descriptions that function like any other discourse that is historically situated and socially sanctioned. And because discourse cannot escape the social, meanings are not conveyed via a straightforward lineage but when words are positioned within rhetorical contexts and in relationship to other socially sanctioned terms. The technologies we use to enact interpretive processes are fully mired in these complex acts of positioning, unable to stage an act of independence that would separate representational forms from their meanings. This principle applies to all of those words that seem to have self-evident content—logic, reason, straight talk. The content of such terms cannot be categorically distinguished from the signifiers that would give that content expression.
With no ability to escape narrative, all methods of interpretation engage acts of translation. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard has observed, a problem of translation will be raised whenever we communicate because the attempt to delineate what a given representation has conveyed will not encounter a question about truth’s appearance but a question about how to perceive where we think a given representation aims. Is the representation attempting to re-present truth or only pretending to or perhaps aiming somewhere else entirely? Baudrillard’s attention to perpetual translation underscores a critical caveat within the narratives that engage metaphors of vision to describe interpretive labor. Even Plato maintained that language is incapable of displaying truth’s raw essence. True visions of truth are only available to the gods. Since humans cannot discern whether truth’s essence is present, when they judge, they assess whether it seems that an interlocutor’s language use has attempted to mimic a priori forms. (On this point, see Panagia and Durham.) In other words, when we assess a representational aim, we “look at” that which remains stubbornly invisible—an attempt at a kind of participation that would align with the divine realm that is unavailable for human review. We’re at least three steps removed from any straightforward vision of truth’s presentation. Hence, when gauging ethical comportment, we can only evaluate what cannot be seen: whether a rhetor harbors a goal of being true to the idea that one should attempt to convey what is genuine and authentic.
Baudrillard’s use of simulacra calls attention to this knotted but crucial caveat. Because interpretive methodologies cannot definitively locate truth’s presence, procedures overseeing judgments about whose speech aims in the right direction are based upon speculations, not facts. “Simulacra” confound orders of representation by introducing the possibility that pretense—the fake show of obedience to an order
