devices are neutral. In fact, style is never neutral. Because all style and language hides and reveals, all style is politically charged, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. Style, like language, is unavoidable, and all its manifestations should be embraced as rhetorical possibilities.
II. Sublimity, Immediacy, and the Continuum of Attention
Sublimity
The Greek rhetorician Longinus (fl. ca. 50 C.E.) is the devil of stylistics.7 He illustrates what every lay audience finds wrong with rhetoric and what every rhetorician finds wrong with the study of style. His willingness to throw off any guises of dialogic persuasion, embracing, rather, an oratorical force that “tears everything up like a whirlwind” and “get[s] the better of every hearer” perpetuates an ideology that a brilliant rhetor should not allow his audience any sort of agency, ability to resist, or even a chance to respond to an argument (1972, p. 144). Such an “unethical” treatment of style is, in part, what has lead to Longinus’s relative excommunication from the rhetorical tradition in favor of viewing him as a literary critic. Yet, Longinus discusses rhetoric and designs his sublime to serve rhetorical purposes: “addressing a judge … tyrants, kings, governors …”, “hitting the jury in the mind”—“[sublimity] enslaves the reader as well as persuading him” (1972, pp. 164, 166, 161). And if one looks closely at Longinus’s On Sublimity, one begins to discover not unethical madness but, rather, a serious mode of rhetorical style designed around engaging an audience.
Early in On Sublimity, Longinus defines the sublime:
A kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame. For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer. (1972, p. 143)
Sublimity trumps persuasion because persuasion is controllable and permits an audience response, whereas sublime rhetoric is uncritiqueable because it overwhelms the listener. But what is most interesting about the machinations of Longinus’s style is where sublimity seeks to keep the audience’s attention. Although Longinus says the goal of the sublime is the goal of any great piece of literature, “eternal life” for the author, the sublime act doesn’t focus the reader on the greatness of the author: “The speaker vanishes into the text” (Guerlac, 1985, p. 275). Rather, it is the greatness of the oratory that captures the reader—the attention of the listener is so fully transfixed on the world created by words that when the listener snaps out of this sublime ecstasy they are “elevated and exalted… . Filled with joy and pride … [and] come to believe we have created what we have only heard” (Longinus, 1972, p. 148). Within the Longinian system, the audience doesn’t know from where ideas originate. As Suzanne Guerlac explains, “The transport of the sublime … includes a slippage among positions of enunciation … the destinateur gets ‘transported’ into the message and the destinataire achieves a fictive identification with the speaker” (1985, p. 275). The aesthetic arrest created by the sublime is so great that the actual moment of hearing and the author appear to have disappeared: “The artifice of the trick is lost to sight in the surrounding brilliance of beauty and grandeaur, and it scapes all suspicion” (Longinus, 1972, p. 164). Longinus seeks to eliminate the constructedness of language by erasing the reader’s memory, “hitting the jury in the mind blow after blow” with majesty (1972, p. 166). The sublime is a stylistic concussion. The listener remembers solely the ideas as if they experienced the subject of the speech for themselves. Longinus creates this immediacy and reader absorption through the numerous stylistic devices he lists in On Sublimity—complexity of emotion, asyndeton, anaphora, hyperbation, and hyperbole to name a few.
Visualization (phantasia) is the first sublime device Longinus explores at length. He describes how image production through “Enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience… . There is much it can do to bring urgency and passion to our words…” (1972, pp. 159, 161).
Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is an example of such visual urgency. Antony is attempting to gain control of the Roman crowd in order to help him avenge Caesar’s death. The first part of Antony’s oration relies on rhetorical persuasion and logic, resulting in analytical responses from the crowd: “Me thinks there is much reason in his sayings… . Mark Ye his words” (3.2.108, emphasis mine). But once Antony begins his sublime phantasia, reenacting the scene of Caesar’s murder using Caesar’s corpse (“Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d”), there is a mass identification (3.2.176). The crowd becomes a mob, is elevated through a Longinian communal sublime, and seeks a somewhat mindless revenge,8 marked by the murder of the wrong Cinna. Antony uses the Longinian sublime to make Caesar’s death and the danger of Caesar’s murderers immediate to the audience.
Immediacy
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