clarity, as the existence of every style manual and every writer struggling to be clear exemplify, is also constructed and controlling. “Simplicity,” as novelist William Gass reminds us, “is not a given. It is a human achievement, a human invention …” (305). It is hard work to be clear, and clear authors ask/direct/coerce/manipulate the reader into looking at the meaning behind their words often hiding the act of writing, the medium of construction, and the author.
Yet, if the ethics of alphabetic writing style are often founded on clarity and transparency of language, the stylistic ethics of new media composition appear to be based on an entirely opposing standard. In new media composition, theorists since Marshall McLuhan have argued that “the medium is the message” and, thus, honest new media compositions make readers aware of materiality and how it affects an audience’s reception of a text. As Anne Wysocki explains:
I think we should call “new media texts” those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody. (2004, p. 15)
Consequently, the best style becomes the one that styles the most. But as Kenneth Burke reminds us, “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality” (1968, p. 45). “Every way of seeing is a way of not seeing,” so when new media authors ask/direct/coerce/manipulate the reader into focusing on specific points of constructedness, author, and medium, what is the audience distracted from (Burke, 1984, p. 70)?
Through comparing classical and new media stylistic theory, this chapter explores what stylistic venues become available when one acknowledges that every choice of style and every act of rhetoric is one of manipulation; when one understands that concealing in rhetoric is neither immoral nor escapable; when one gets beyond a singular “styles the least” or “styles the most” mindset and comes to understand that the best style is the one that serves the best. Thus, this chapter asks: If composition is style, and style is the manipulation of attention, what are the ethics and options for controlling an audience’s attention? Upon what values is the current system of stylistic ethics constructed? When is it appropriate and inappropriate to reveal one’s stylistic operations to an audience? And to what effect?
Though, as the rest of this collection illustrates, definitions of prose style are wonderfully multifarious, here I discuss style as the aesthetic control of an audience’s attention along three different “ethical” continuums—point of attention (where do the author’s stylistic devices direct the audience’s attention?); apparent mediation (does the rhetor’s style appear deceptive or just?); and felt agency (does the audience feel silenced or encouraged to analyze and critique the text’s construction, reasoning, etc.?).
In order to elucidate composition’s current anomalous notion of stylistic ethics I explore these continuums using a trio of classical and new media pairings—progressing from traditionally1 unethical to ethical styles. I begin with the Greek rhetorician Longinus’s “unethical” notion of the sublime, a stylistic concept that attempts to move listeners to action through an aesthetic arrest that “enslaves the hearer,” conceals stylistic device and orator, and makes the topic of oration appear to be present and in need of an immediate response (1972, p. 161). I compare this “unethical” sublime to new media theories of immediacy and erasure, which discuss how many technologies (virtual reality simulators, for instance) are designed to, or simply have the effect of, disappearing when the rhetor and audience use them, making the experience all the more real. Next, I move to Renaissance rhetorician Baldesar Castiglione’s slightly more “ethical” concept of sprezzatura or “the art of artlessness.” Sprezzatura focuses on disguising the preparation of art so that the orator can appear all the more natural, kairotic, nonchalant, and amazing in delivery: “He who does well so easily, knows much more than he does” (Castiglione, 2000, p. 38). As sprezzatura’s new media counterpart I discuss the web, magazine, and advertising design trend of mimicking analog technological markers by using digital technology, a simulacral style I term “leaked constructedness.” Finally, I move to an “ethical” conception of style in St. Augustine of Hippo’s concepts of confession and Christian oratory, which I argue seek to put the power of authorial and biblical interpretation into the hands of the audience rather than the orator. Similarly, exemplified in the reference to Anne Wysocki above, I compare such confession to several notions of new media construction (Wysocki’s new media, Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, etc.) that seek to empower the audience by giving them the ability to see, interpret, and construct multiple personal readings of a text.
I pair these classical and new media notions of style to highlight that ethical evaluations of style do not disappear as writers move from paper to screen and to ward off the notion that either a styles-the-least or a styles-the-most approach is always the best option in textual or new media construction.2 I hope such a pairing elucidates the contradictory nature of a fixed system of stylistic ethics, where “ethical” can mean both the revealing and concealing of textual construction, author, and medium. If notions of ethics change with audiences and mediums, style must also constantly adapt. Thus, multiple notions of style must always be taught seriously, escaping what might be seen as the binary—formal or creative3—stylistic system of many contemporary composition classrooms. On a more comprehensive note, I also pair these stylistic options in hopes of offering style as a bridge between classical and new media rhetoric, two fields that (as I hope this chapter illustrates) have much to learn from one another and that must necessarily come together to make a contemporary composition classroom whole.
Definitions
Before examining these stylistic pairings and continuums, however, I must establish a few definitions—attention, style, manipulation, and ethics. In his Economics of Attention Richard Lanham argues, “Information is not in short supply in the new information economy … What we lack is the human attention to make sense of it all …” (2006, p. xi). In such an economy, then, neither material possessions nor raw information are the capital; the human attention that interprets, focuses on, and deconstructs that data is. Whoever can get an audience to pay attention (and the right kind of attention) to his or her idea, product, or celebrity rules such an economy. Lanham posits that style (and this is the definition I build from here) is what directs such attention. Therefore, the best definition of rhetoric might be the stylistically focused “economics of attention.” The crux of Lanham’s argument is “oscillatio,” a rhetorical figure that illustrates how “we alternately participate in the world and step back and reflect on how we attend to it” (2006, p. xiii). We switch between looking at content and the stylistic devices that organize that content, but we have a hard time looking at both sides of the oscillation simultaneously. Manipulation, then, is the way in which writers attempt to focus their readers’ attentions on either the content of the argument or the style.4 Like all terministic screens, stylistic manipulation is inescapable because readers will always focus on something and good rhetors aid in that focusing. Something Lanham does not give much attention to, however, is the system of ethics that often gets applied to his concept of oscillatio.5
In this chapter I use the framework of manipulation and ethics in hopes of challenging the common misconception in rhetoric, composition, and the general public that style is attached in fixed ways to morality. The three continuums I examine are the unsteady formulas upon which these fixed notions are calculated. For too long because style and rhetoric (and specific styles and rhetorics in particular) have been misconstrued as unethical slights of hand in popular thought, compositionists and stylisticians have responded by studying and teaching style as neutral and ethically transparent. Such a fearful reaction to accusations of rhetoric as trickery (and these have been present since Plato6 at least) has perpetuated the notion of “plain style” and severely limited stylistic options, especially in student writing. In this chapter I offer three diverging but equally “ethical” ways of performing style to disrupt the notion that clarity, or any other style claiming universality, is always the best option. I thus define ethics, like style, as an always local