a spectrum as well. Styles are both textually material and merely textual—merely the representative of a prior conception about how symbolic forms inform ways of seeing what has merit. But because styles do affect our senses, they are also imbued with awesome potentiality. Styles can help instigate “new” perspectives, “shocking” us out of complacent worldviews, as Kant would suggest. Or, as Burke suggests, styles can act to console us when familiar. Or, in the case of the impeachment, styles can act to alert us that something feels “off” about the purported connections between the propositional content of a speech and the motives underwriting its expression. By overlooking how we apply a sense of substance or its lack to our evaluation of style, we overlook a subtle but critical element of an interpretive encounter that can influence how we come to believe or lose faith in the languages that would speak on our behalf.
Pragmatism and Positivism
Rhetorical study engages in speculations about how to use language strategically to achieve desired ends. It’s not that truth does not matter. But facts are not necessarily available and even when they appear to be, their presentation does not necessarily persuade. In rhetorical formulations of how to use language, the act of speculating about what makes an argument effective is treated as an act of substance, as part of one’s civic duty. Rather than denounce speculation and then consign style to the realm of the superficial, style’s importance is reframed through the lens of the pragmatic. Accordingly, style acts to serve an identifiable social purpose. Its value is located not in its aesthetic qualities but in its ability to be socially productive by acting on behalf of the formation of a majority view.
As a starting point for an interpretive framework, this insight offers both a promising and a problematic way of contending with the paradoxical positive negativity that animates style’s place in judgment. Rhetoricians often endeavor to demonstrate that rhetoric’s contribution to acts of communication matter and are about more than “mere” style. How this outlook is validated allows for a consideration of significant differences between postmodern and rhetorical delineations of ethics in relation to acts of representation. For example, James P. McDaniel and Bruce E. Gronbeck maintain that it should be possible to both allow for civic disputes and find a path toward reconciliation by advocating “the imperative of the doxastic”—those “species of communal thought and values that must fill up the abstracted self of the citizen if he or she is going to have rhetorical efficacy in localist political environments” (36). Gerard Hauser, meanwhile, clarifies what “species” might mean when he promotes a specific style—vernacular rhetoric—as a central agent within political judgment that generates “a common understanding about the reality of experience, including its intended and unintended consequences” (297). To make rhetorical inquiry relevant, Hauser proposes that rhetorical models be based on actual discursive practices. “To overcome the reification of publics found in the Rational Deliberation model, a discourse-based theory of public opinion must widen its scope to include vernacular exchanges in addition to those of institutional actors. . . . A rhetorical model locates public opinion—a civil judgment—in the manifestations of common understanding within a public sphere,” which he adds, is “fashioned through the dialogue of vernacular talk” (297—original emphasis. See also, Ivie 455).
In practice, rhetorical attention to style has promoted the idea that styles should bear recognizable forms, especially those that have come to be regarded as signifying reason or rational norms. Vanessa Beasley makes an explicit case of “a democratic style” that “must foreground reasons, recognition and imagined relationship(s) to promote the discursive environment necessary for the most fundamental democratic processes to flourish” (466). She argues that “the public articulation of reasons promotes education, legitimation, and accountability . . . Democratic style should offer recognition to audience members” and should “activate certain relational commitments to other people whom one does not know” (466). (Beasley eventually wonders if she should reject this schematized approach but does not fully do so.)
We will find echoes of this kind of thinking within countless textbooks that advise college writers about how to represent their ideas on the page by adhering to discursive protocols that have been culturally sanctioned. In his opening chapter, “Understanding Style,” Joseph M. Williams begins by noting that his book on style, clarity, and grace is “based on two principles. It’s good to write clearly, and anyone can” (1). That democratic pitch to “anyone” delineates an ethics of equity that in turn bears upon the kind of style that presumably should be valued—that which assists the act of persuasion and the enactment of community. And that assist is typically given stylistic expression when one attempts to represent with clarity forms that follow a logical order, elucidate definitions, and invoke “if, then” clauses that are sensible. The cause and effect logic that structures an argument should enable a majority to tell where one’s thinking leads. Audiences should be relieved of the burden of having to struggle to understand what one is saying and why. Once freed from an interpretive struggle, audiences will be able to decide on the merits of a position put up for review. Paul Butler offers similar advice when he encourages compositionists to use the study of style as a way of claiming expertise about language issues and through that claim, to fashion the identity of the public intellectual contributing to public conversations about language controversies that take place outside of the academy. Butler traces how composition scholars lost an interest in style because of an association between style and a much-critiqued rhetorical tradition called “current-traditional rhetoric” that, scholars have argued, was too rigidly invested in Enlightenment mythologies. Because of this historical association, rhetoric and composition scholars “have failed to see the study of style for what it actually represented . . . a set of innovative practices used to generate and express language through the deployment of rhetorical features” (143). He adds that returning to a study of canons of style as a mode of invention “could be used profitably together in current discourse” (143).
To render style’s role as pragmatic means discarding the expectation that one should chart a path back to universal truth. Rather, language use aims to activate audience consent. Accordingly, meanings evolve as audiences decide whether to adopt a particular version of truth in spite of a perpetual representational inconstancy. (See Hariman on this point as well.) Without the capacity to choose whether to believe in the validity of any given representation, the democratic part of public argument is effectively annihilated. Hence, rather than function as a reflection of meanings that are already intact, styles act as agents that generate the reasonable, democratic give and take of ideas, the kind that allows ideas to be represented, weighed, judged, and also abandoned. Styles help audiences evaluate whether representational forms facilitate actions that engage democratic practices, like aiding communication or showing concern for the nation and the citizenry.
While this reflexive approach to language studies is supple enough to allow for the possibility of dissent, it does not necessarily address the question of which specific styles will be anticipated, accepted, or dismissed, for what reasons, and to what effects. And while the acknowledgment of representational inconstancy also addresses style’s significance to democratic processes in ways that expand conceptions of political judgment beyond the simple logic of substitutions, it nonetheless retains allegiances to the scopic paradigm that it presumably challenges. It affirms a hierarchy of values that delineates what kind of styles should receive cultural preference—i.e., those that identifiably serve specific purposes, that may be “used profitably” to signify qualities that have been culturally sanctioned, such as being reasonable. If it is “profitable” to convey styles that get read as reasonable, that is because there is a preset conception of what reason will look like linguistically and how its look will facilitate judgments about whether “reasonableness” has, indeed, appeared.
The “use language profitably” premise also implies an inherent connection between the idea of accountability and the priority of representability. Any judgment about “the look” of reason will then influence a secondary judgment about what cannot be seen: whether the rhetor is motivated to use language responsibly and with a reasonable attitude. The metaphor of vision reappears to support the idea that accommodating audiences means presenting those reasonable forms that, presumably, are recognizable and that, because communally accepted, get around the problem of ambiguity by generating thought processes that all have agreed to call “reasonable.”