action but also the desirable qualities of the people who use them. Indeed, when speakers and writers use styles that have earned cultural regard, we are expected to classify them as the kind of people who think and speak reasonably, who aim to communicate ethically, and who then are deserving of whatever accolades their speeches (texts) might generate. In political venues, candidates who highlight a commitment to straight talk imply that such talk may be positioned as the personification of the candidate’s moral character—a premise that conflates the qualities of seeming and being by suggesting that one’s regard for discursive protocol offers a demonstration of one’s commitment to being moral.
The question is whether the absence of culturally preferred stylistic markers necessarily indicates an absence of those qualities that have earned cultural regard (reason, common sense, good will, etc.) We might quickly downplay such a conclusion and maintain that when we judge, we weigh propositional content—the reasonableness of whatever political perspective is put up for review. Yet as my examples show, it is often the case that when valorized stylistic markers are absent, permission is given to audiences to deliver seemingly justifiable derisive judgments of whoever failed to follow the mandated methodology. When political speakers fail to follow discursive conventions, or worse, when they seem to purposely defy them, the styles associated with their noncompliance tend to be read as marking an absence of qualities that should be put on display. In effect, socially constituted, aestheticized discursive practices get conflated with real linguistic obligations.
My analysis of the politics of expulsion demonstrates that questions about style function as directives about how to participate with language. I use the word participate in the sense offered by Bill Readings, one that extends conceptions of language beyond that of communication. To communicate is to consider purpose and message, and to be concerned with protocols that assist the conveyance of one’s message. Participation broadens those concerns by attending to the intertextual dynamics that play out when cultural conceptions of what language is and does influences conceptions of what language should do within specific occasions of its use. It is my contention that commonplace narratives about rhetorical style put constraints upon judgments of how and which language uses enact virtuous political participation. Indeed, this book encourages scholars in rhetoric and composition to discard the idea that style’s main purpose is to further effective communication. As part of a democratic aesthetic, narratives about style can instead be refashioned to highlight the storytelling elements of political life that influence perceptions of how ethics and language meet. Indeed, when we restrict our understanding of style’s purposes, we also restrict conceptions of rhetoric’s significance to political life.
The idea that style should aid communication helps to sustain the convention that valorizes plain speech as a sign of a speaker’s integrity and suppresses consideration of how rhetorical indeterminacy is featured within political judgment. Discourses about style are always about more than mere style, marking instead a complex space at which embodiment, text, and ideology converge. Styles are public expressions that provoke private responses to representational power. In this sense, style signifies the felt experience of interpretation—an experience that cannot necessarily be translated into a narrative chronicling what happens as we contend with words. Style, then, marks a happening that is itself not fully representable but nonetheless noteworthy. To consider style’s significance to political judgment is to mull over commonplace visions of discursive participation, variously expressed in terms of how form relates to content, how narrative connects to lived experiences, how we endeavor to incorporate cognition, affect, and somatic responses into conceptions of deliberation that we would like to call democratic.
Rhetorical Interventions
Narratives about rhetorical style can be characterized as meditations about political access. Teach rhetors how to speak well and you give them tools for successful participation in social life. Such instruction need not be mercenary. Following Aristotle, style in rhetoric may be depicted as poetic’s pragmatic counterpart—a socially productive facilitator of civic-minded goals such as fostering mutual understanding and building consensus. The idea that people should be taught to use language to compel assent and then build community is taken for granted within rhetorical traditions, which helps to explain why, for example, eloquence, at least since the writings of Cicero, has been championed as a primary instigator of audience identification and approval. Rather than regard style as a discursive “extra,” as a superficial site of ornamentation inferior to poetic aesthetics and less significant than propositional content, rhetoricians historically have treated style as intrinsic to any concern with public welfare. For classical rhetoricians, style was central to the endeavor to persuade.
The recent return to style within composition studies pursues this trajectory by encouraging writing teachers to become more cognizant of style’s relationship to pragmatic approaches to language study. Hence, for example, Elizabeth Rankin’s important contribution from the 1980’s that reintroduced the idea that style involves more than attention to the surface features of language; style is a component within processes of invention wherein writers make choices about how to represent themselves on the page to audiences who will have their own preferences about which styles are suited to a rhetorical occasion. Learning about style gives writers and speakers the chance to harness persuasive power by incorporating models of effective communication into their own texts. More recently, Paul Butler calls upon compositionists to reinvigorate studies in style so that they may join public conversations about why the study of composing processes should be of general public concern. Like other compositionists, Butler endeavors to invalidate an epistemological tradition that has vilified rhetoric by characterizing persuasion as a force that manipulates audiences into assenting to ideas that serve nefarious interests. Butler argues for style’s importance to the work of interpretive collaboration, maintaining that it is through style that partnerships between rhetors and audiences get established. The thoughtful rhetor chooses styles that will produce favorable audience reactions, and in making such choices, he or she will be participating with language in socially redeemable ways: settling controversies, easing perceptual dissonances, establishing a means of identification. Styles execute a critical social function when put in the service of crafting shared perspectives about what matters and why.
There is a democratizing impulse within these formulations that clarifies how rhetorical conceptions of style differ from the aesthetic tradition that venerates authorial geniuses who devise representations with no concern for audience reception. In a rhetorical framework, it is precisely the care one has for one’s audience that indicates a rhetor’s integrity. Indeed, style is regarded as a kind of equipment in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term—a technology that offers a way to both acknowledge interpretive complexities and understand that one can purposefully attempt to use language to further sociability. One studies style not for the sake of art (or truth) but to be pragmatic—to determine how to use language to nurture a political sphere in which all agree that argument should replace war as a means of settling disagreements. A non-violent means of settling disputes will only work if all agree that the power of words should surpass that of physical violence. This perspective is bound by consent. It is, then, infused with rhetorical inconstancy. We might call its status fragile, if not precarious. Words are effective when all agree to the idea that a call to good argument is more authoritative than a call to arms. It is all too possible for citizens to change their minds and embrace war over argument as the right solution to a perceived threat. Consequently, when we talk about style in relationship to political legitimacy, the stakes are huge.
The conundrum imposed by narrative appears to be resolved via rhetoric’s pragmatic interest in getting things done—i.e., furthering robust debate, learning writing strategies that are stylistically effective. When style’s significance in rhetorical and composition studies is construed to be pragmatic it is, by implication, knowable, and what we think we know is that when rhetors think about how to style statements, they will become better communicators and, presumably, that knowledge will benefit the collective. This suggests that the validity of the civic-oriented study of style is itself demonstrable by looking at actual linguistic practices to see whether they accomplish the stated goal of furthering everyone’s chance to speak up and be heard. Democratic
