“Understanding Style,” Joseph M. Williams begins by noting that his book on style, clarity, and grace is “based on two principles. It’s good to write clearly, and anyone can” (1). That democratic pitch to “anyone” delineates an ethics of equity that in turn bears upon the kind of style that presumably should be valued—that which assists the act of persuasion and the enactment of community. And that assist is typically given stylistic expression when one attempts to represent with clarity forms that follow a logical order, elucidate definitions, and invoke “if, then” clauses that are sensible. The cause and effect logic that structures an argument should enable a majority to tell where one’s thinking leads. Audiences should be relieved of the burden of having to struggle to understand what one is saying and why. Once freed from an interpretive struggle, audiences will be able to decide on the merits of a position put up for review. Paul Butler offers similar advice when he encourages compositionists to use the study of style as a way of claiming expertise about language issues and through that claim, to fashion the identity of the public intellectual contributing to public conversations about language controversies that take place outside of the academy. Butler traces how composition scholars lost an interest in style because of an association between style and a much-critiqued rhetorical tradition called “current-traditional rhetoric” that, scholars have argued, was too rigidly invested in Enlightenment mythologies. Because of this historical association, rhetoric and composition scholars “have failed to see the study of style for what it actually represented . . . a set of innovative practices used to generate and express language through the deployment of rhetorical features” (143). He adds that returning to a study of canons of style as a mode of invention “could be used profitably together in current discourse” (143).
To render style’s role as pragmatic means discarding the expectation that one should chart a path back to universal truth. Rather, language use aims to activate audience consent. Accordingly, meanings evolve as audiences decide whether to adopt a particular version of truth in spite of a perpetual representational inconstancy. (See Hariman on this point as well.) Without the capacity to choose whether to believe in the validity of any given representation, the democratic part of public argument is effectively annihilated. Hence, rather than function as a reflection of meanings that are already intact, styles act as agents that generate the reasonable, democratic give and take of ideas, the kind that allows ideas to be represented, weighed, judged, and also abandoned. Styles help audiences evaluate whether representational forms facilitate actions that engage democratic practices, like aiding communication or showing concern for the nation and the citizenry.
While this reflexive approach to language studies is supple enough to allow for the possibility of dissent, it does not necessarily address the question of which specific styles will be anticipated, accepted, or dismissed, for what reasons, and to what effects. And while the acknowledgment of representational inconstancy also addresses style’s significance to democratic processes in ways that expand conceptions of political judgment beyond the simple logic of substitutions, it nonetheless retains allegiances to the scopic paradigm that it presumably challenges. It affirms a hierarchy of values that delineates what kind of styles should receive cultural preference—i.e., those that identifiably serve specific purposes, that may be “used profitably” to signify qualities that have been culturally sanctioned, such as being reasonable. If it is “profitable” to convey styles that get read as reasonable, that is because there is a preset conception of what reason will look like linguistically and how its look will facilitate judgments about whether “reasonableness” has, indeed, appeared.
The “use language profitably” premise also implies an inherent connection between the idea of accountability and the priority of representability. Any judgment about “the look” of reason will then influence a secondary judgment about what cannot be seen: whether the rhetor is motivated to use language responsibly and with a reasonable attitude. The metaphor of vision reappears to support the idea that accommodating audiences means presenting those reasonable forms that, presumably, are recognizable and that, because communally accepted, get around the problem of ambiguity by generating thought processes that all have agreed to call “reasonable.” In effect, political participation is positively measured through the evaluation of forms that signify invisible aims and motivations. Style continues to be situated as evidence of whether a speaker desires to be held accountable for his or her language practices. One’s willingness to participate with socially sanctioned modes of representation is read as evidence of having good motives, while the motives that are good presumably coincide with socially redeemable aims. So that, even though attitudes are invisible, we tend to believe that making something representable means being accountable and that accountability is communicated stylistically.
It is style, then, that we rely upon to represent a moral image of thought. Having a commitment to styles that appear to be moral seems to tell us about what the speaker/writer intends to do with his words and whether those intentions are nefarious or honorable, and we make such determinations by deciding whether formalized expressions are cogent, orderly, pointed, etc. Such stylistic features seem to tell us whether a speaker, for example, aims to communicate rather than seduce, be earnest rather than playful or ironic, inform rather than please.
But is there a difference between the aim to use language to constitute a community of agreeable listeners and the expressed aims of GOP legislators to find a shared language that would communicate noble representational purposes?
Consider, for example, the following statement from U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), delivered at Clinton’s impeachment trial in December 1998, to justify Barr’s vote to impeach:
You know as children, all of us believed certain things with all of our hearts. We knew there was a difference between good and evil. We knew it was wrong to lie, and equally important, that if we got caught, we would be punished. . . . What happened to these simple truths that we all knew in our hearts just a few short years ago? Why do so many adults now find it so hard to call a lie a lie, when as parents, teachers, and employers, we have no hesitancy?23
What to make of this expression of yearning? Arguably, it articulates a longing to find a way back “home” to truth, the same longing that has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and priests, many of whom have also longed for signs of origins, evidence of a continuance between this life and another, past and present, a connection between what we can imagine and what we can know. And yet, while it is possible that Barr’s statement conjured such reflection, it is equally possible to imagine many of us sitting there on our couches watching the impeachment hearings unfold, the second one in the nation’s history, having a less than sublime response, muttering, perhaps, something along the lines of, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Dismissing the value and significance of Barr’s locution does not necessarily translate into a rejection of the value system informing his perspective. Presumably Barr, described by one reporter as “leading the charge to impeach a popular president,” 24 offered his rendition of a common enough motif in this proceeding to repudiate interpretive ambiguity that could interfere with the goal of being a straightforward, objective, and fair adjudicator of the issue. But for anyone who was hoping to witness justice at work, what may have seemed notable was a sense of dissonance between an expectation and an experience—expecting to bear witness to the exhibition of reason’s signs; encountering instead a nostalgia-inflected homily about simplicity and innocent children as a way of justifying a draconian outcome. In a legal proceeding that purported to address presidential misconduct, this blend of convention and idiosyncrasy may have been curious if not bizarre, offering (to some of us) absurd imagery when juxtaposed against preconceived notions of what form reason should take. Nonetheless, there are plenty of cultural practices—including those from rhetoric’s traditions—that lend support to Barr’s larger claims about the need for speakers to speak clearly and get to the point. Indeed, borrowing from Hayden White, it is possible to consider how the propositional content of Barr’s statement compares to discourses of history that claim to engage models of discourse “purged of all figurative and tropological elements, and subjected to tests of logical consistency as an argument and of predicative adequacy as a body of fact” (5).
Barr
