that have become too rigid. Acknowledging an aesthetic dimension to political discourse reminds us that illusory elements inhere within endeavors to certify methods of political adjudication. Docherty takes note of a formalizing impulse commandeering theoretical frameworks that repeat precepts about how we make meaning, an impulse able to render the stories told about how to judge the good man speaking well into ritualized performances rather than authentic experiences of critical inquiry. He then proposes a democratic aesthetic that countermands the formalizing dynamic by highlighting the narrative origins of routine conceptions of what we do with words. This approach incorporates a Lyotardian framework that aims to keep open the question of judgment and avoid the trap of conflating textual depictions of interpretive action with interpretive mastery. We may be reminded of their differences whenever we take recourse in explanations of how persuasive processes work to instigate audience adherence. When we acknowledge that we tell stories about who we are as citizens who judge, we interrupt the automatic reproduction of taken-for-granted commonplaces that describe how discourses organize a majority view of what has meaning and significance. Plain speech offers a case in point. It denotes a ritualized mode of expression that promises truth’s unadorned delivery. What audiences procure through its invocation may be something else entirely.
This book applies Docherty’s conception of a democratic aesthetic to commonplace conceptions of rhetorical style. Most studies of style offer advice about how to correlate language with civics when conceiving of the formation of, for example, “the national community.” I instead am concerned with the means by which people are kicked out—symbolically disqualified for failing to adhere to the stylistic protocols that appear to demarcate a representational integrity read as emblematic of a national character. Indeed, I am especially interested in those utterances that seem to provoke strong negative responses of consternation, resentment, and even anger.
Often, such responses are treated as if self-explanatory, especially within media narratives that report on public responses to stylized deliveries. I am less interested in examining the style of news reports themselves (although this does come up throughout my analysis) but in considering how such reports rely upon conventional conceptions of style’s role in political judgment. I argue that rather than act to aid or obstruct the delivery of meaning, signifiers of style can be examined to excavate the multiple points of tension within conceptions of language use and democratic access. Styles are provocations and integral to the judgments audiences make about who to believe and who to ostracize. Within the stories that we tell about what styles should do, we may locate cultural narratives that have staked out conceptions of how persuasive power works to achieve its effects. A study of style draws attention to the ways in which narrative constructions of persuasive action get treated as factual and evidentiary and then referenced as if automatically legitimate resources aiding public evaluations about who to believe, who to dismiss, and who to revere for speaking in ways that benefit the nation.
Expel the Pretender: Rhetoric Renounced and the Politics of Style addresses examples of discredited political speech and the cultural logics that endorse their dismissal. Specifically, this book analyzes well-known public speeches that not only failed to enact community but also triggered collective public ridicule, including arguments in 1998 proposing a presidential impeachment, President Bill Clinton’s responses to those arguments, his national apology after admitting that he had an affair with a White House intern, Linda Tripp’s first public statement in defense of her actions that launched the impeachment drive, and the 2008 press appearances of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Barack Obama’s former pastor who was subsequently ostracized by the Obama campaign. In each representative example, I demonstrate how rhetorical style was at the center of public concerns about whose speech could be trusted. Not only was style central to assessments of each speaker’s credibility, its significance was only noticeable when speakers failed to meet cultural expectations about what kind of speech is permissible on the occasion of its delivery.
Judgments of dismissal were fortified by the simplistic binary that depicts political truth-telling as opposite to the practice of deception. Style’s study challenges the validity of that binary and its rendering of an interpretive process that oversees how to discern differences between words that are trustworthy and those that lead citizens astray.
Style and Expulsion
Expel the Pretender gets its title from Scott Durham’s Phantom Communities, which questions whether the theoretical concept of simulation (simulacra) should be deemed an impediment to social justice. Conventionally, simulation is aligned with representational deception—when, for example, the act of voting for a reality television show is depicted as an authentic experience of political struggle or when consumer choice masquerades as democratic access. Simulacra empty representational signs of their reality and reduce them to mere appearances, a shell of what they promise to be. Durham points to a history of thought that has expressed anxiety about the inability to tell the difference between the real and the fake, and he explores those interpretive methodologies that promise to enable citizens to discern disparities and justify the practice of expelling anyone who “fakes it” by trying to pass off the inauthentic expression as truth’s representative. I will have more to say about Durham’s argument in the first chapter. (Ultimately, Durham rehabilitates simulacra with reference to postmodern theories that muddy the conceptual frameworks that enable distinctions between “the real” and “the simulated” to be made.) At the moment, however, it is possible to note that both the anxiety about the inauthentic expression and the proposed method of relief remain pertinent to U.S. political culture where, arguably, the dynamic of expulsion endures as a viable option when publics discern discursive threats.
When the political “gaffe,” for example, is invoked as a newsworthy event, it functions as way of shaming and then silencing whoever delivered a statement that raised eyebrows. Countless websites are devoted to tracking this phenomenon: “The Top Ten Campaign-Ending Political Gaffes in Modern U.S. History.” “They Said WHAT?! Politicians Most Notorious Science Flubs.” “The Nine Worst Political Gaffes of 2012.”2 At first glance, this kind of exposure seems to be useful and necessary. It draws upon the idea that speakers bear social responsibilities and that it is incumbent upon audiences to make sure that all people, especially politicians, are held accountable for what they say. But a closer look at what the act of shaming is supposed to accomplish helps to illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing simulacra from genuine democratic actions. Presumably, pointing out instances of bad speech performs important political work, revealing, for example, something true about the person whose language use prompted ridicule, especially those objectionable flaws that, as put by one ardent truth-seeking blogger, “cannot be washed aside by the world’s greatest spin masters.”3 The exposure of misleading attempts to escape accountability is presented as an ethical act itself, undertaken, presumably to enable citizens to determine who does not deserve their support. Confidence in this methodology may begin to waver, however, once we begin to question what, exactly, is revealed and then accomplished through the kind of self-righteous scrutiny that converts a gaffe into a spectacle. My point is not to discount the act of calling out the ridiculous things that politicians say. But it is important to note that the act of publicizing gaffes carries an implicit and vague demand for linguistic correctness—as if being correct should confirm a speaker’s credibility and as if the point of analysis is to take note of the gaffe itself. Meanwhile, giving exposure to “the gaffe” implicitly treats all gaffes as equal, leaving open the question of how audiences are expected to weigh the significance of whatever flawed statement makes its way to the headlines.
When undertaking a study of style’s significance to judgment, we will quickly discover the inadequacies of those cultural narratives that treat acts of revelation as expressions of an authenticating interpretive methodology necessary to the functioning of the democratic state. Too often the methodologies that we rely upon provoke habitualized judgments of what has validity. This is all the more significant given that rhetorical style itself is generally read as the agent of pretense and fakery and hence an obstacle to the endeavor to speak straight and insure that one’s audience can distinguish the hollow political platitude from the sincere utterance of conviction. Culturally sanctioned stylistic protocols are presented
