first and is labeled apparent mediation because audiences react to mediation differently when it is or is not made evident.
Klosterman’s discussion of removing the author from the news and the idea of trusting confessors makes ready another important reality of stylistic ethics. In the first continuum I discussed how sublimity is viewed as unethical because it focuses the reader only on content; yet, shouldn’t a style that focuses a reader on the author be somehow more ethical? Of course, sprezzatura (and confession, as we will see below) demonstrates that what an author reveals about him or herself is not always the full truth and opens debates about whether the self is socially constructed or not. But shouldn’t we want more of the author so that we can decide for ourselves whether we trust their bias or not? Such a complication opens up numerous stylistic moves that are often excluded from “serious writing” because they reveal too much of the author and obviate such advice as “don’t use ‘I’ in a formal paper.” The balance between revealing and concealing mediation is a tricky and often contradictory proposition.
Writers, therefore, should consider when it is appropriate to reveal their subjectivity and mediating power and when they should be elided in a sprezzatura-like style. When will readers respond well to confession of bias and when does such a style become a distracting repetition of “seems to me,” “I think,” and “might”?
IV. Confession, Hypermediation, and The Continuum of Felt Agency
Confession
Progressing to a more typically “ethical” stylistic presence, Saint Augustine of Hippo’s (345-430 C.E.) De Doctrina Christiana and Confessions offer models of style (Christian oratory and confession) that do something few teachers of style had done before him; they give power to the audience through instruction on analysis as well as open the orator to critique and discussions on the subjective nature of confession.
Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was trained in, instructed on, and won declamation competitions through classical “pagan” oratory (Confessions). After he converted, he sought to take what he saw as a powerful rhetorical model (classical Greek and Roman oratory) and apply it to the radically differently styled Christian rhetorical tradition in order to convert pagans who often disdained the comparatively muted Christian style.
Although Augustine seems to take up Cicero’s divisions on the purposes of rhetoric (to teach, delight, and persuade) in his three divisions of style (subdued, moderate, and grand), Augustine’s discussion of ethos in Book Four of De Doctrina Christiana is somewhat more complex and radical than his classical predecessors. For Augustine the ethos of God, not necessarily the Christian orator himself, is what certifies the reliability and efficacy of the message:
Now Christ is truth and still, truth can be preached, even though not with truth… . Thus, indeed, Jesus Christ is preached by those who seek their own ends, not those of Jesus Christ… . And so they do good to many by preaching. (2008, 4.59-60).
Though Christian orators should strive to do justice to the word of God, corrupt people can still preach effectively because the power of Christian rhetoric is housed in God and the listener, not necessarily in the orator.
Indeed the idea of audience in Augustine’s works (and in the Hebraic rhetorical tradition more generally) differs from classical models because of the relationship between faith and persuasion. Faith cannot be induced in an audience through persuasion; the Christian rhetor must give his audience information and let God (and the mind of the would-be convert) do the rest, otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. As Christine Mason Sutherland explains, “For Hebrew rhetoric, persuasion is vested in the audience, not the speaker… . The object is to enlighten the audience, not to persuade, to empower by knowledge the individuals” (2004, p. 4, 10). Thus, Books Two and Three of De Doctrina Christiana contain instructions on “analyzing and resolving the ambiguities of the scriptures” with rules that may be distilled down to four basic concepts that leave room for multiple correct interpretations of the text:
1. The Bible cannot contradict itself;
2. The Bible always promotes love of God and neighbor;
3. Consider the sentence you are interpreting within the context of the sentences around it;
4. In order to interpret correctly, similar to what Cicero outlines in De Oratore, you need a broad background of knowledge (about snakes, metals, animals, astronomy, history, law, etc.) (Augustine, 2008, 3.2).
In his Confessions Augustine further elaborates on this concept of interpretation and readerly agency in Book Ten when he discusses his relationship with his audience and their belief: “Although I cannot prove that my confessions are true, at least I shall be believed by those whose ears are opened to me by charity… . Charity which makes them good tells them that I do not lie about myself when I confess what I am, and it is this charity in them which believes me” (2010, 10.3.4). Augustine cannot persuade his audience to believe his story but can only give them information to interpret in hopes that they take something from it. Thus, Augustine’s favoring of the subdued style and its purpose of teaching over the other two styles (though he ultimately concludes, as does this chapter, that one should mix and match styles): “This, of course, is elegance in teaching, whereby the result is attained in speaking, not that what was distasteful becomes pleasing, nor that what one was unwilling to do is done, but that what was obscure becomes clear” (2008, 4.26).
Augustine continues to explain that the content the confessor and Christian orator provide are flawed (similar to the content of the sprezzaturic orator) because of the impossibility of inclusivity in language: “For I pass over many things, hastening on to those things which more strongly impel me to confess to thee—and many things I have simply forgotten” (Augustine, 2010, 3.12). Like any autobiographer knows, recalling every detail of the past is impossible, and even if it were not, such a retelling would make for a tedious and unpurposeful text. Thus, every act of confession is necessarily selective and manipulative of an audience’s attention, despite whether confessional rhetoric makes an audience feel deceived or not. Augustine further elaborates on the subjectivity of memory in Book Ten of Confessions saying that “There, in the memory, is likewise stored what we cogitate, either enlarging or reducing our perceptions, or by altering one way or another those things which the senses made contact with …” (2010, 10.8).
Hypermediation19
New media theorists Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin describe their concept of hypermediation as media that “ask us to take pleasure in the act of mediation” and foster a “fascination with media” (2000, p. 14). Or, as Wysocki states with a slightly more ethical connotation, “What is important is that whoever produces the text and whoever consumes it understand—because the text asks them to, in one way or another—that the various materialities of a text contribute to how it … is read and understood” (Wysocki, 2004, p. 15). Thus true new media confess their materiality by calling the reader’s attention to themselves.
Such a style of media confession is fairly young in the rhetorical tradition and truly comes into power, as Bolter and Grusin, and Lanham discuss, with late-modernist art: “It was not until modernism that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of transparency was challenged,” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 38). For instance, in composer John Cage’s “4’33,” which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, Cage seeks to remind the listener that music is just sound, labeled differently: “I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner, just outer … I don’t want sound to pretend it is a bucket or that it’s president … I just want it to be a sound.” His work makes music confess itself. Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” objects that become art simply by the fact that they are displayed as art, have a similar effect. Such pieces place the burden of the art not on the composer but on the audience, asking whether art can simply be enjoyed as style.
