Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
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doubts, at least for some citizens, about whether this issue deserved attention at all. Indeed, rather than provoke recognition of a severe crime, the legal language highlighted the difference between narrated descriptions and lived perceptions of Clinton’s behavior. Humiliating? Yes. Disgraceful? To adherents of a particular version of propriety, yes. But was a lie about a sexual liaison equal to a violation to protect The Constitution? Should a refusal to fully cooperate in an inquiry about one’s sexual dalliances be represented as an “obstruction of justice”? To some, Clinton’s responses to the grand jury in the Paula Jones case had to be measured against the dubious merit of that proceeding. If Clinton did lie (fudge?) about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, then was that a crime at all? A high crime?
Arguably, the Articles of Impeachment failed to enact a logic of substitutions. For many readers of House Resolution 611, the words did not seem to correspond with the deeds being described. Nor did they seem to retrieve and bring forth any esteemed abstract qualities such as a higher order of reason. Indeed, one could make the case that the verbs in the Articles seemed to be stylistically excessive, even hyperbolic, and hence dismissible for failing to execute a systematic and neutral method that allowed for the identification of the issues and their importance. And if legal language—that which promises objectivity and equity—can seem excessive, then what does that suggest about the prospect of formalizing abstract conceptions of how to think in other, less narrowly defined contexts?
The Articles exposed a rift between the generalized narrative that depicts democratic inquiry as an act of scrutiny and the specific material practice of scrutiny exercised in this particular case. Many citizens may have wondered about whether this was the kind of look that vigilant citizens should be expected to take when inspecting the comportment of their national leaders. When puzzling that out, they encountered the textual limits to acts of translation, where the implicit rational order arranged through narrative encounters the potentially unwieldy experience of human interpretation. In rejecting the claims of neutrality by those who wrote up the formal charges, there was a simultaneous refusal to see a straightforward connection between the legal language used to name this issue and give it visibility and the enactment of justice.
A number of polls suggested that voters instead read the drive to impeach as political theatre. Immediately following the December, 1998 vote to impeach, pollsters endeavored to register the mood of the citizenry and found expressions of discontent. As put by a headline in USA Today: “Public Likes Clinton More, GOP less in Wake of the Vote.” The article cited a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll that showed “public support for Clinton jumped to a personal high of 73 percent” and that “fewer than one in three has a favorable view of the GOP, its lowest since 1992.” Other polls concurred. A CBS-New York Times poll taken after the vote to impeach found that sixty-six percent of those polled said that Clinton should not resign; thirty-one percent said that he should. In an NBC poll, seventy-two percent of respondents approved of the job Clinton was doing, while twenty-five percent disapproved. Sixty-two percent maintained that Clinton should complete his term, a number that had risen eleven points from the previous Tuesday.18
Because the charges were not demonstrably valid, they appeared to be baseless and hence the case itself was “logically” dismissed. This, of course, was a relief to those of us who viewed this event as a journey into the land of the surreal. But that response did not contend with the problems of representation that impeachment discourses otherwise raised. Embedded within purported explorations of “the facts” of criminality was a speculative question about how discursive practices manifest intangible qualities such as guilt. Arguably, the possibility that ambiguities are embedded within speculations about how language communicates meaning was exactly the point of contention within impeachment debates. Any exploration into the guilt or innocence of a person charged with lying under oath raises a philosophically opaque conundrum about whether it is ever possible to tell the difference between “the spin” and its presumed opposite.
Given that the vote to impeach Clinton was rejected because, to those polled, the charges seemed to be excessive, then it is possible to conclude that style plays a formidable role in determining representational legitimacy. Rather than clarify why Clinton deserved to be impeached for an aberrant act of speech, arguments that called for straight talk instead illustrated that a strange doubling accompanied public discussions about crime and representation. The strange part included the sense that a principle of negativity permeated the presentation of the issues, wherein the style of pro-impeachment arguments promising to deliver straight talk seemed instead to call out its absence. Every attempt to establish an indisputable “reality” about Clinton’s criminal activity or the authenticity of the impeachment inquiry itself veered into what might be called the gestural, theatrical, and aesthetic aspects of political discourse. Warnings about the dangers of Clinton’s linguistic impropriety simultaneously registered a query about how to read the language use of those making the accusations. Indeed the very style of those claims contributed to their rejection.
After the impeachment effort failed, for example, Hyde repeated the idea that impeachment proponents were motivated by a noble desire to uphold standards, and this time referenced history when defending his actions in a Chicago Tribune editorial:
The impeachment . . . was not a political struggle . . . but a historic constitutional test. A bedrock principle of democracy, first formulated by our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition in the Magna Carta, was a stake: the principle that no person is above the law. Birth, wealth and social position do not put someone above the law. Neither does public office. . . . This was a constitutional test of whether the United States government remains a government of laws, not of men.19
This kind of pronouncement, one that aimed to seamlessly organize political life by connecting past to future, instead called attention to itself via the attempt to craft an equitable correspondence between this sorry event and that awe-inspiring document from a historical past that stands as an emblem of human progress toward shared governance and individual freedom. Indeed, this was exactly the kind of comparison that was regarded (by that apparent majority) as violating the correspondence theory that seeks resemblances between terminologies and the ideas words would represent. By formulating dissonant linkages, Hyde’s commentary became stylistically noticeable for its overreach rather than for his argument’s ability to nail a point of view and demonstrate how straight talk ought to appear. Once a representational mode becomes noticeable, then how to situate it within the organizing logic of substitutions is not immediately apparent.
But rather than mull over this conundrum, we tend to consign such stylistic dissonances to the realm of the unpersuasive and dismissible. This outcome is a byproduct of the value system that prioritizes the delivery of substantial content by characterizing style as a surface feature of language, its concerns relatively meager and insubstantial, both qualitatively different from information and knowledge and potentially an impediment to their apprehension. We are expected to uphold the idea that rhetorical styles should be invoked to guard citizens against “two kinds of corruptions—vagueness and artificiality” (McCrimmon 6) that indicate that the rhetor has “settled for a superficial view” (6). Typically, after deciding that a given style, like that of Hyde’s, is “artificial,” we draw upon such perceptions to determine what happens next, which usually means losing interest rather than deliberating about how styles affect evaluations of an utterance’s content and significance.
How to theorize style’s role within acts of persuasion is a question that rhetoricians have puzzled over since antiquity and found difficult to answer. As Edward P.J. Corbett observed, style is a “vague concept” that we think we grasp but then find impossible to encapsulate within neatly sorted descriptions. To characterize style, we often borrow familiar descriptors such as “‘lucid,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘labored,’ ‘Latinate,’ ‘turgid’ or flowing” (209). Or, as phrased within impeachment discourses, “plain” and “honest.” Our conceptions of style, Corbett concludes, include “a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). When idiosyncrasy and convention blend, then a question is raised about the purpose of stylistic standards and whether their application helps to identify what a style is and does. Styles may be identifiable when discursive protocols are followed, but the effects (or consequences) of re-presenting forms of representation are not. Styles are present. They are material embodiments of ways of seeing