to take part in life’s grand conversational give-and-take and when everyone has the same chances to invoke and respond to whatever is publicly displayed and subject to judgment. When all participate, many ideas will compete for public attention. Studies in rhetoric can effectively teach rhetors how to navigate an inclusionary discursive terrain to insure that one’s ideas will get noticed. Because debate is intrinsic to democratic culture, it is perfectly reasonable to teach people how to use styles effectively and avoid being cast out of the community to which one seeks to belong.
These premises will make sense if language is structured to allow everyone to access its force and knowingly channel it in civic-minded directions. If democratic equity infuses language’s very structure, then presumably, it may be tapped to oversee judgments of which language uses act sociably and which are uncommunicative. We should be able to understand the contours of deliberatory judgment and to put into practice ways of seeing and interpreting that are progressive, fair, subtle enough to contend with variance, general enough to be representative of a collective.
At this point, however, the authentic/pretense problem returns. We must still grapple with the enigmatic question of whether descriptions of interpretive processes tell us more than stories about how representations should be evaluated. Staking out competence means devising narratives that identify sanctioned repertoires of style. Narratives that place a premium upon rhetorical competency reinstall a binary logic to determine when competency makes an appearance. When it is absent, persuasive failure presumably follows. Stylistic markers of competency get treated as actualizations of the qualities that they would re-present, and, once so regarded, they appear to be necessary to accomplish the social purpose of constituting a democratic representational order that all can share and use at will. While rhetoricians acknowledge that cultural ideologies will influence judgments of issues, there has been less attention paid in rhetoric’s history to the ways in which intertextual histories of preferred styles will influence evaluations of which stylistic forms should be deemed legitimate agents for enacting community formation. Indeed, regard for the power of debate to flesh out “the best” claim does not necessarily address the particular ways in which issues come to be identified and then commonly recognized through discursive practices that may or may not be equitable. Rhetoric’s idealistic story of access, inclusion, and judicious evaluation does not address how to determine which forms of style constitute the kind of participation deemed to be properly “civic.” Nor does that story consider the ways in which prioritizing coded models of “sayability” affirms an exclusionary logic that dispenses punishments and rewards and ways of naturalizing those outcomes.
Postmodern Materialism
Rhetorical theories that attempt to reinvigorate studies in style to advance democratic inquiry effectively promote a singular goal for linguistic participation (i.e., the interpretive resolution). This is accomplished by installing standards of evaluation that effectively “correspond to a control over the processes of legitimation” (Panagia 9). Indeed, many language theorists habitually rely upon a restricted set of discursive norms to assess and validate the unstructured work of interpretive negotiation. Feminist theorists, on the other hand, have challenged the habit of invoking dominant narratives of legitimation when exploring how audiences are conditioned to accept their persuasive power. Susan Miller, for example, considers the ways in which audiences learn to trust discursive practices that correspond to already formulated “prescriptive networks” (2). Lynn Worsham explores how dominant ideologies are reproduced when audiences learn to identify emotionally and feel the validity of ideological perspectives. Kristie Fleckenstein outlines the contours of a materialist rhetoric that would explore “the complex processes of perception and articulation that persuade a community that a certain material reality, including the reality of the body, exists” (7). Each of these perspectives indicates how sociopolitical criteria for evaluating whether speech acts are powerful are construed in ways that entangle emotional receptivity with representational action.
This book builds upon these theories to consider how citizens are instructed emotionally to internalize preferences for those styles that have already earned cultural approval as they render judgments about whose words matter. Accordingly, a concern with style can be regarded as a paradoxical point of contact between culture and embodied experience, where the narratives that would describe preferred styles also shape audience preferences. Styles are acts of signification that have been positioned within a nexus of narratives that would explain, define, and establish what style means in relation to an epistemic conception of how language communicates meaning. Hence our grasp of any particular “failed” speech act is also produced by a “host of technologies” (Greene 52) that teach how to imagine and then recognize what constitutes a legitimate rhetorical formation. Judgments about who to expel make explicit the narratives that citizens are expected to internalize and reference to demonstrate that they are in accord with the social rules overseeing acts of linguistic comportment.
If style is a historical condition (see Huyssen 9-12) rather than an essential quality that conveys a self-sufficient force, then style demarcates a locus for mulling over the effects of cultural training on our assessments of whose language uses seem to be authoritative because powerful and compelling. When we acknowledge the significance of the intertextual on how we respond to language’s constitutive power, we may question which discourses have been granted the authority to condition our responses to the emotional power of style. At the same time, because styles do affect our sensibilities, their status is more than conceptual. While style is a locus for narratives that naturalize the embodied experience of political judgment, its analysis can also testify to the human capacity to refuse the lessons imposed by culture, particularly since our responses to rhetorical styles will also be partly spontaneous and experienced during our acts of reception. This lived part of our interpretive experience cannot be encapsulated within narrative and need not be explainable with reference to pre-established frameworks. In this regard, style functions as a site for theorizing the possibility of democratic dissent. For many contemporary theorists of rhetoric, style serves a critical role in enabling disagreements about whether a given version of an idea or event has validity. We may reject those premises that do not conform to our own “image” of what is at issue, the terms invoked failing to re-present what we think should be put forth for review. More generally, we can note that all representations are finally just that—narrative constructs and hence precisely not the same as facts. (On this point, see both Hariman and O’Gorman.)
A materialist rhetorical approach expands upon these ideas by envisioning language as a site of convergence between the agency of consent to symbolic artifacts, the influence of ideologies that have enculturated ways of seeing what is significant about any artifact put up for review, and the possibility of somatic responses that are not necessarily explainable with reference to cultural scripts. Materialist rhetorics dovetail with postmodern aesthetics in that both draw attention to the ways in which truth claims are perpetually disrupted once questions are raised about how, precisely, narratives about form influence perceptions of content. There are, indeed, consequences to language uses. But whatever reasons we devise to explain those consequences situates us right back in narrative and the aesthetic. Politics hovers within this paradoxical space of postmodern materialism. And so does style’s ephemeral-yet-substantial significance. Even as styles may assist in the endeavor to enact persuasive power, our interactions with styles will be subjected to representational ambiguities. We cannot predict when a style will incite affiliations or inspire action or prompt us to dismiss an utterance as a hackneyed cliché. Meanwhile, the fall out of those judgments will affect political life.
It might be helpful, then, to consider how narratives about style are caught within an oscillating dynamic that fluctuates between the power of cultural conditioning and the power to refuse ideology’s influence. Style is an especially fruitful topic to consider when exploring the parameters of that oscillating action because style’s effects are simultaneously tied to narrative and individually (spontaneously, somatically) experienced. On the one hand, then, we may study style to consider how techne can promote the reproduction of cultural hegemony. On the other hand, it is equally important to note that visceral responses to acts of representation cannot be ascribed solely to ideological influences. The dynamic
