In new media composition, such a proximity and a transparency of style is apparent in Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s discussion of immediacy: “The ultimate mediating technology … Is designed9 to efface itself, to disappear from the user’s consciousness” (2000, p. 3). Marshall McLuhan expands upon this effect with his concept of technologies as “extensions of man,” illustrating how mechanisms (for better or worse) become our body parts through immediacy (2003, p. 67). Video game designers, for instance, create controllers that fade away, becoming actual extensions of players’ hands as they are absorbed into the game and the virtual environment becomes more immediate. Only when the technology fails, we drop the controller or a button sticks, does the player again become conscious of the mechanism.
The connection between Bolter’s immediacy and the Longinian sublime is, perhaps, best seen in virtual reality environments: “In order to create a sense of presence, virtual reality should come as close as possible to our daily visual experience. Its graphic space should be continuous and full of objects and should fill the viewer’s field of vision without rupture” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 22). The best virtual reality (like the best sublime oration) occupies all the participant’s senses so that the device is forgotten, and the virtual experience approaches the real, as if the gamer’s own senses, not the machine, are creating the sensorial world. Like the Longinian sublime disguises its own artifice, most websites are designed so that the surfer can easily navigate through beautiful content, unaware of the code or the designer behind the art. Operating systems are designed around metaphors of windows and desktops that make the content easily navigable and more apparently “there,” but that also disguise the code that perpetuates them. Immediate technologies, just like sublime stylistics, are designed to make stylistic mediation (alphabetic, oral, or technological) disappear.
Continuum of Attention
In Longinus’s sublimity and digital immediacy, we discover our first continuum upon which ethical evaluations of style and manipulation are judged—the object of attention. The Longinian sublime, and to a lesser extent technological immediacy, are sometimes seen as unethical because the orator/programmer seeks to focus the reader’s attention on content and message rather than how knowledge of media or rhetor affect and shape that content. Under the aegis of narrative theory, Erik Ellis labels this rhetorical move a closeness of “psychic distance” in his chapter in this collection. A familiar ethical critique of these tactics might be: If something is being revealed, then something is being concealed; if something is being concealed, then something unethical must be going on. Critics may liken such a focus to the sleight of hand of a magician—look at the shiny kerchief, not the rabbit coming out of the magician’s sleeve. In alphabetic writing Lanham calls this effect “an aesthetics of subtraction”: “Print wants us to concentrate on the content, to enhance and protect conceptual thought. It does this by filtering out all the signals that might interfere with such thinking … By choosing a single font and a single size, it filters out visual distraction as well. Typographical design aims not to be seen or more accurately, since true invisibility is hard to read, to seem not to be seen …” (Lanham, 2006, p., 46).
But is such an aesthetic unethical? We like to lose ourselves in books. We often get annoyed when speakers are too self-critical in speeches. When typing in a word processor we don’t want the programmer constantly diverting us from our writing.10 When we go to the movies we don’t like to see boom mics hanging in the shot, fake props and settings, or other such signifiers of constructedness that call attention to artificiality. DVDs are designed with the ability to turn director’s commentary on and off. One of the biggest questions for a stylistician regarding the continuum of attention, then, is when do audiences enjoy immersion in artificial environments and when do they feel such an immediacy is unethical? Alternatively, when do audiences enjoy viewing the constructedness of writing, and when is such a focus distracting?
The problem with point of attention, as Lanham, Burke, and McLuhan all argue, is that it is difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. It’s hard to become absorbed in a book’s plot, proofread its grammar, analyze its binding quality, and apply theoretical interpretations simultaneously. This may be the origin of the literature student’s common complaint of “you ruined my favorite book!” Once an instructor teaches a student to read in an analytical manner, the point of attention shifts from plot to construction and theory, and the level of absorption changes. This is the “economics of attention.” This is why sleight of hand magicians can perform their tricks. We have examined the Longinian sublime as focusing the audience’s attention on content and as being “unethical,” but the “clear” and ethical style discussed in the opening of this chapter does a shockingly similar thing.11 Each seeks immediacy of content, but in opposite ways. As Strunk and White direct, “Write in a way that draws attention to the sense and substance of writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author” (1979, p. 70). If a style of transparent immediacy is offered in so many style manuals, a sublimely immediate style could easily be offered as an “ethical” option as well.
The two other styles this chapter explores, which seem to get more and more traditionally “ethical,” similarly direct the audience’s attention to two other places. Sprezzatura places the audience’s attention on the rhetor and the act of writing, whereas confession places the audience’s attention on the medium and the audience’s relationship to the text. Each is an act of concealing and an act of manipulation yet, to their champions, each one appears more ethical than the sublime, perhaps because what each conceals, especially in confession, is less apparent than in the sublime. Though Longinus uses some ethically troubling phrasing, “get[s] the better of every hearer,” “enslaves the reader,” “hitting the jury in the mind,” proponents of the more “ethical” styles should investigate whether their style of choice does the same thing. If “Art [and rhetoric] is whatever the artist wishes to call our attention to,” every rhetor needs to ask what is and is not being focused on in their composition (Lanham, 2006, p. 43).
Thus, before writing, rhetors should consider what they want their audience to pay attention to at each point of their text and choose a style accordingly. At points where writers want their audience to participate emotionally, a sublime and immediate style is the strongest; where writers want their audience to examine the author and their ethos, a sprezzatura style can be invoked; where writers want their audience to participate in logical and critical analysis of production, a confessional style might be more appropriate.12
III. Sprezzatura, Leaked Constructedness, and the Continuum of Apparent Mediation
Sprezzatura
Renaissance stylistician Baldesar Castiglione (1478-1529) wrote his Book of the Courtier to educate courtiers on how to speak, perform, and impress in the presence of royalty. Much of Renaissance rhetoric, especially that of Castiglione’s Italy, which underwent massive court restructuring with the invasion of Louis XII in 1499, was built on a system of kairos. A true courtier needed to know how to identify the opinions of the shifting center of power and to adapt not only his speech but also his entire identity to the delight of that authority in order to gain its patronage. Founded upon this intense kairos is Castiglione’s primary stylistic point of counsel, sprezzatura:
To use possibly a new word, to practice in everything a certain spezzatura that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought. From this I believe grace is in large measure derived, because everyone knows the difficulty of those things that are rare and well done, and therefore facility in them excites the highest admiration; while on the other hand, to strive … is extremely ungraceful, and makes us esteem everything slightly, however great it be. (2000, pp. 35-36)
Sprezzatura, often defined as “the art of artlessness,” requires a rhetor to be well-prepared to argue but also well-prepared to disguise the effort it took to gain and organize that argument. It is key that one’s identity not appear constructed to please the court but instead give the impression
