of linguistic labor.
Style demarcates a quality, perhaps unnamable, that emerges where artistry meets craft and the legacies of cultural conditioning. Its significance to political judgment is finally elusive. Acknowledging that part of our interpretive experience eludes understanding provides an occasion for reconsidering what we mean when we turn to rhetoric and rhetorical interventions as a way of engaging a democratic ethics. When exploring the discursive networks through which meaning is made and assigned significance, we might describe style an “ambivalent rupture” (J. Kelleher 78), a mode of representation that demarcates a space between the categorical divisions that would separate language and experience, signs and referents, poetics and rhetoric, practices and metadiscourses that seem to gauge whether language uses work. Style is not an object or type of representation but a way of talking about how we think form crosses borders to connect private predilections with public codes to constitute communal ways of seeing and believing.
The complex and contingent cultural forces that produce dominant conceptions of style can be examined to consider how chains of affect come to be embedded within interpretive frameworks that generate the emotions they would describe, and in the process, install a particular kind of political literacy that seems to adequately address the question of how to negotiate representational indeterminacy when we are called upon to judge another’s credibility. This is not the same as saying that we just make things up as we judge. But it is to say that any attempt to delineate “responsible judgment” about who to embrace and who to castigate will not escape the problem of narrative and the training we’ve received to regard some styles as harboring more signifying power than others.
Chapter Summaries
In the chapters that follow, I identify how a rhetoric of value-neutrality and cultural impartiality was disseminated within media narratives that simultaneously broadcast stories about speech failures that presumably engendered emotional outrage. Each chapter explores how media narratives naturalized the idea that speech acts may be discredited when they stray from normative standards of legitimation expressed stylistically. Failure to abide by norms of stylistic protocol engendered public responses of ridicule, indicating how a dynamic of expulsion has itself become normalized. Not only do dominant conceptions of what rhetorical style is help to reproduce this norm, attitudes about style help to ratify the idea that the practice of publicly shaming those who fail to obey conventions of style is a natural byproduct of audience responses to signs of failure.
Chapter 1 analyzes the arguments used by Congressional leaders that claimed that President Clinton’s “silver tongue” posed a national threat. Officially Clinton was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, but public debate about his speech acts involved larger questions about how to signify truth. Impeachment debates offer an occasion for considering whether to continue to trust positivistic analytical models when assessing who is doing what with words. The call to linguistic clarity advanced in pro-impeachment arguments failed to persuade a majority to remove the President from office but the logic of those arguments was never challenged. Indeed, rather than generate a national debate about what kind of arguments should be available to support political outcomes, this historical event has been effectively trivialized. This response, I suggest, was made possible by cultural attitudes that underestimate rhetorical style’s importance to judgment.
Chapter 2 examines two failed speeches: Clinton’s notorious four minute national apology, delivered to TV viewing audiences once evidence emerged that proved he had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky; and the first public statement from Linda Tripp, who asked citizens to regard her act of taping private phone conversations as a performance of her civic duty. Both speeches were reviled and Clinton and Tripp were each accused of being inauthentic when looking for public sympathy. I examine how those failures can be understood with reference to rhetorical theories of propriety that envision style not as a conduit for truth but a means through which speakers locate words that fit the occasion of speech. But I also argue that even though propriety’s transactional model of judgment usefully challenges some aspects of positivistic logic, it nonetheless carries vestiges of that logic by implying that “fittingness” is a quality that may be discerned and then confidently referenced when evaluating the legitimacy of a speech/text put forth for public review. The rhetoric of propriety sanctions a technology that would gather diverse elements together to craft a working theory of ethics and criteria for judgment, as if such criteria are inherently ethical. Drawing upon the work of feminist theorists such as Lynn Worsham and Wendy Hesford, I propose a feminist materialist rhetoric that would instead argue that any attempt to identify whether language fits the occasion will have emerged from the encounter between complex, historically marked narratives and habituated embodied responses.
Chapter 3 explores the ways in which protocols of style are embedded within rhetorical theories of ethos. I locate versions of ethos-as-style within the celebratory discourses formulated in response to the 2008 primary campaign of Barack Obama, whose ethos was esteemed by many in the mainstream press, especially after he delivered his famous speech on race in March of that year. The speech was offered in response to the negative media portraits of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, who was ridiculed for making controversial statements about national politics when delivering religious sermons. I explore how public responses to Wright’s sermons referenced his style of delivery, and how a binary logic was crafted that created a discriminatory comparison between Obama’s style and Wright’s that influenced ways of reading their respective characters. This chapter also considers how theorizing ethos will benefit from both feminist materialist rhetorical theories as well as studies in rhetoric from scholars of African American communicative practices.
Chapter 4 explores the limits of rhetorical theories of genre that call for the replication of normative styles to facilitate audience recognition of categorical types of speech able to engender audience identification. I return to Obama’s race speech to consider it from the perspective of genre studies, and then look at the 2008 public appearances of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as he attempted to rehabilitate his public image. Those public appearances were condemned and Wright was officially and publicly expelled from Obama’s campaign. Drawing upon studies from African American Rhetoric and Communication scholars, this chapter demonstrates how the apparent logic valorizing the replication of norms within genre studies was invoked in 2008 to affirm the chain of reasoning that seemed to justify and naturalize the act of denouncing Wright and the representational ethics that he promoted.
1 Authenticating the Liar
There is a curious exchange recorded in the October 5, 1998 transcripts of the House Judiciary Committee debate about whether to pursue the possibility of impeaching the forty-second President of the United States. Perhaps thirty minutes after the hearing opened, after six House members, mostly Democrats, spoke for or against the idea of officially investigating whether Bill Clinton perjured himself and obstructed justice, a speaker identified as “unknown” made the following point of order: “Mr. Speaker, this is a fairly important issue. It seems to me that if members are going to vote on it, the least they could do is be here in the chamber when it’s debated.” According to the transcripts, this statement generated a rousing round of applause.1
Arguably, this short statement encapsulates the strange atmosphere surrounding this “fairly important” historical event, its odd presence emblematic of the ways in which talk about impeaching Clinton strayed from idealized representations of conscientious deliberation. Ideally, any contentious issue is adjudicated through reasonable debate that facilitates evenhanded compromises. Public debate would seem to offer a clear method for generating the interpretive actions that could be called democratic, including reviewing what is at issue, finding facts, judging their value and significance, and from there, determining what should happen next.
The President of the United States was accused of committing an act of perjury. His job was on the line because many believed (or claimed to believe) that the nation’s chief representative had abandoned his authority to lead the nation once he broke the law by lying
