Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
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But what a given style conveys is conspicuously (and perhaps tortuously) ambiguous. Meanwhile, because that curious blend between the idiosyncratic and the conventional cannot be standardized to guarantee interpretive results, it contributes to the contemporary tendency to downplay style’s role in political judgment.
But as we move from apprehension to dismissal, we are apt to lose sight of a critical moment of interpretive conversion. Style’s role in judgment is minimized when meaning and significance get ascribed to entities that appear to have substance. This apparent order of cause and effect offers another occasion for considering how interpretation engages acts of translation. Our encounters with the domain of “the substantial” would seem to require no translation at all, as substance would seem to be self-evidently present, unambiguously noticeable, forging a clear and direct relationship between the signifier of substance and its substantial quality. The judgments we make about what has substance seem to be organized by the terminology we’ve devised to designate that quality, while the possibilities for identifying what has substance seem to rely upon the procedural—a neutrally deployed process that constitutes the experience of feeling (knowing) what has weight.
Arguably, this tidy model is packaged for easy consumption, but it overlooks component parts of interpretive technologies that are significant yet impossible to substantiate. Elizabeth Grosz explores one example of the ways in which an insubstantial significance inheres within conceptions of narrative’s relationship to interpretation in an article that considers whether the discourses of philosophy and those of architecture can speak to each other in discussions that consider how to conceive of space. There are radical differences between these discourses. One aims to design material objects that will inhabit a physical landscape while the other imagines the mind as an object, a landscape that may be mapped, traveled upon, situated, and occupied. We draw connections between these two discourses as if their associations are automatic, but any correlation will be conceptual only. Any (virtual) comparison will contain unanswerable questions about whether concepts have inherent relationships to reality and whether the virtual ever gets converted into the actual. If a shared conceptual space can be forged between these disparate discourses, its status will be tentative, perpetually unsettled and not hospitable to clearly enunciated indications of what is shared.
The tentativeness of any formulation about what these divergent discourses share calls attention to a dynamic of conversion within the interpretive processes that enable a proposed possibility to be treated as an actuality. In tracing what that conversion entails, Grosz contemplates the significance of the time of translation that seems to establish its own substantial dimension occupied by mental processes that get activated as an aspect of contemplation. This time/space is ephemeral as well as multifaceted. It involves (at least) the time of “before” that encapsulates preconceived notions, the time in which thought emerges, takes note of, assesses, etc., and the time of deliberation wherein we consider whether an object of representation has merit, significance, gravitas.
I bring up Grosz’s argument because it foregrounds an aspect of interpretive action that tends to go unnoticed. In the context of political disputes, the dynamic of time also includes the time it takes for an apprehension of a particular material/stylized marker to emerge into a judgment of its quality and significance. Within that time of transition, the ephemeral potentiality of a style to mean any number of things will be converted into a narrative declaring its actual significance (whether it is classified as idiosyncratic, conventional, helpful, an obstruction, etc.). These judgments occur in the time of “retrospect”—when we appear to look back at a prior (preconceived) order of meaning to determine the significance of any signifier made anew. The endless possibilities of meanings that might be derived from style’s idiosyncratic features get domesticated within interpretive orders that look for stylistic conformity in order to put forth a narrative about standards. In that particular time of conversion, we will likely forget those other potential meanings, especially when we are encouraged to connect the act of finding meaning with that of being ethical. We will also likely forget what occurred during the interval of time between the possible and the actual, “an interval that refuses self-identity and self-presence to any thing, any existent. This interval, neither clearly space nor time but a kind of leakage between the two, the passage of one into the other” (Grosz, “Future of Space”) will be forgotten once the final judgment takes hold and becomes the point of reference in subsequent narratives about the judging event. Within that realm of leakage between space, time, and judgment, we undertake acts of translation that then inform the decisions we make about whether a given style fits the occasion of its use, decisions that are perhaps flitting and transitory, but remain radically consequential to estimations of what seems to exist.
Judgments of what exists (such as whether legal language identifies just causes for impeachment) engage an aesthetic dynamic wherein narratives appear to correspond to experiences of deliberatory processes only when we overlook what cannot be represented—the very act of converting an apprehension into a resolution. Such conversions entail drawing connections between diversified discursive elements and then neglecting to consider the stylistic strategies that get deployed to enable them to appear to connect to judgments of meaning. Arguably, we do not consider how that time of conversion influences judgments of what exists because of the tendency to conflate the act of naming an interpretive result with the act of apprehending its significance. Rather than remember that narratives have contributed to how we convert the possible to the actual, we instead align an idea of actualization with an idea of “being substantial,” and then attach that conceptual connection to specific representational forms that we have learned to regard as having substance. In the process, style’s specific contribution to how potential meanings get channeled into resolute judgments of what has merit or fails to carry weight disappears. Indeed, we mostly ignore the particular ways in which our sense of what has substance emerges partly because we are prone to look for “the substantial” and overlook all that will not settle into any recognizable form —time, the action of conversion, style’s potential and ineffable ability to affect our senses.
The thicket of debate that arose in the 1998 impeachment proceedings demonstrates that taken-for-granted conceptions of deliberative time did not work in conclusive ways to clarify what was at issue and how it should be addressed. The question of who was doing what with language created numerous messy entanglements, all of them poised for judgments about which, if any, had significance. The act of categorizing what was at issue did not automatically propel citizens toward a neutral time of deliberation in which all considered the legitimacy of terms being thrown around to name what was at issue. Instead, the potential categories conveyed attitudes about how to ascribe substance. Was perjury at issue? A linguistic evasion? A deft response to political theater? The terms established how to “look” at potential meaning, and the look (the “surface” appearance) influenced what happened in the deliberatory time that then generated judgments about the impeachment’s (lack of) significance.
Style and Significance
This is, of course, Kenneth Burke’s point. Burke attends to the constitutive role of language that delivers meaning neither transparently nor neutrally but by provoking audiences to experience an embodied sense of identification to signs that they will potentially accept (and with which they will become “consubstantial”). Any form of discourse engages a representational dynamic that facilitates not only an act of recognition but also the potential for shared participatory responses. Words constitute communities not because they reflect connections that already exist but because they offer sites for inducing shared perceptions about what matters. Unlike Plato, Burke does not banish the aesthetic from the serious work of political judgment but emphasizes its centrality to facilitating the appearance of having shared perceptions of whether something as amorphous as significance is on hand. Hence Burke positions rhetorical style at the center of the discursive give and take that comprises democratic deliberation, and he effectively revises conceptions of how styles influence judgments about which representations should earn our intellectual and emotional commitments. Not only do styles establish the textual protocols and grammatical conventions that craft cultural productions, more importantly, rhetorical style is key to the social practice of communication.
Hence, a crucial difference between positivistic views of representation and rhetorical ones can be located within attitudes about style’s significance to judgment. While