Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
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will influence evaluations of which stylistic forms should be deemed legitimate agents for enacting community formation. Indeed, regard for the power of debate to flesh out “the best” claim does not necessarily address the particular ways in which issues come to be identified and then commonly recognized through discursive practices that may or may not be equitable. Rhetoric’s idealistic story of access, inclusion, and judicious evaluation does not address how to determine which forms of style constitute the kind of participation deemed to be properly “civic.” Nor does that story consider the ways in which prioritizing coded models of “sayability” affirms an exclusionary logic that dispenses punishments and rewards and ways of naturalizing those outcomes.
Postmodern Materialism
Rhetorical theories that attempt to reinvigorate studies in style to advance democratic inquiry effectively promote a singular goal for linguistic participation (i.e., the interpretive resolution). This is accomplished by installing standards of evaluation that effectively “correspond to a control over the processes of legitimation” (Panagia 9). Indeed, many language theorists habitually rely upon a restricted set of discursive norms to assess and validate the unstructured work of interpretive negotiation. Feminist theorists, on the other hand, have challenged the habit of invoking dominant narratives of legitimation when exploring how audiences are conditioned to accept their persuasive power. Susan Miller, for example, considers the ways in which audiences learn to trust discursive practices that correspond to already formulated “prescriptive networks” (2). Lynn Worsham explores how dominant ideologies are reproduced when audiences learn to identify emotionally and feel the validity of ideological perspectives. Kristie Fleckenstein outlines the contours of a materialist rhetoric that would explore “the complex processes of perception and articulation that persuade a community that a certain material reality, including the reality of the body, exists” (7). Each of these perspectives indicates how sociopolitical criteria for evaluating whether speech acts are powerful are construed in ways that entangle emotional receptivity with representational action.
This book builds upon these theories to consider how citizens are instructed emotionally to internalize preferences for those styles that have already earned cultural approval as they render judgments about whose words matter. Accordingly, a concern with style can be regarded as a paradoxical point of contact between culture and embodied experience, where the narratives that would describe preferred styles also shape audience preferences. Styles are acts of signification that have been positioned within a nexus of narratives that would explain, define, and establish what style means in relation to an epistemic conception of how language communicates meaning. Hence our grasp of any particular “failed” speech act is also produced by a “host of technologies” (Greene 52) that teach how to imagine and then recognize what constitutes a legitimate rhetorical formation. Judgments about who to expel make explicit the narratives that citizens are expected to internalize and reference to demonstrate that they are in accord with the social rules overseeing acts of linguistic comportment.
If style is a historical condition (see Huyssen 9-12) rather than an essential quality that conveys a self-sufficient force, then style demarcates a locus for mulling over the effects of cultural training on our assessments of whose language uses seem to be authoritative because powerful and compelling. When we acknowledge the significance of the intertextual on how we respond to language’s constitutive power, we may question which discourses have been granted the authority to condition our responses to the emotional power of style. At the same time, because styles do affect our sensibilities, their status is more than conceptual. While style is a locus for narratives that naturalize the embodied experience of political judgment, its analysis can also testify to the human capacity to refuse the lessons imposed by culture, particularly since our responses to rhetorical styles will also be partly spontaneous and experienced during our acts of reception. This lived part of our interpretive experience cannot be encapsulated within narrative and need not be explainable with reference to pre-established frameworks. In this regard, style functions as a site for theorizing the possibility of democratic dissent. For many contemporary theorists of rhetoric, style serves a critical role in enabling disagreements about whether a given version of an idea or event has validity. We may reject those premises that do not conform to our own “image” of what is at issue, the terms invoked failing to re-present what we think should be put forth for review. More generally, we can note that all representations are finally just that—narrative constructs and hence precisely not the same as facts. (On this point, see both Hariman and O’Gorman.)
A materialist rhetorical approach expands upon these ideas by envisioning language as a site of convergence between the agency of consent to symbolic artifacts, the influence of ideologies that have enculturated ways of seeing what is significant about any artifact put up for review, and the possibility of somatic responses that are not necessarily explainable with reference to cultural scripts. Materialist rhetorics dovetail with postmodern aesthetics in that both draw attention to the ways in which truth claims are perpetually disrupted once questions are raised about how, precisely, narratives about form influence perceptions of content. There are, indeed, consequences to language uses. But whatever reasons we devise to explain those consequences situates us right back in narrative and the aesthetic. Politics hovers within this paradoxical space of postmodern materialism. And so does style’s ephemeral-yet-substantial significance. Even as styles may assist in the endeavor to enact persuasive power, our interactions with styles will be subjected to representational ambiguities. We cannot predict when a style will incite affiliations or inspire action or prompt us to dismiss an utterance as a hackneyed cliché. Meanwhile, the fall out of those judgments will affect political life.
It might be helpful, then, to consider how narratives about style are caught within an oscillating dynamic that fluctuates between the power of cultural conditioning and the power to refuse ideology’s influence. Style is an especially fruitful topic to consider when exploring the parameters of that oscillating action because style’s effects are simultaneously tied to narrative and individually (spontaneously, somatically) experienced. On the one hand, then, we may study style to consider how techne can promote the reproduction of cultural hegemony. On the other hand, it is equally important to note that visceral responses to acts of representation cannot be ascribed solely to ideological influences. The dynamic of flux opens a conceptual space in which to revise conceptions of linguistic labor.
Style demarcates a quality, perhaps unnamable, that emerges where artistry meets craft and the legacies of cultural conditioning. Its significance to political judgment is finally elusive. Acknowledging that part of our interpretive experience eludes understanding provides an occasion for reconsidering what we mean when we turn to rhetoric and rhetorical interventions as a way of engaging a democratic ethics. When exploring the discursive networks through which meaning is made and assigned significance, we might describe style an “ambivalent rupture” (J. Kelleher 78), a mode of representation that demarcates a space between the categorical divisions that would separate language and experience, signs and referents, poetics and rhetoric, practices and metadiscourses that seem to gauge whether language uses work. Style is not an object or type of representation but a way of talking about how we think form crosses borders to connect private predilections with public codes to constitute communal ways of seeing and believing.
The complex and contingent cultural forces that produce dominant conceptions of style can be examined to consider how chains of affect come to be embedded within interpretive frameworks that generate the emotions they would describe, and in the process, install a particular kind of political literacy that seems to adequately address the question of how to negotiate representational indeterminacy when we are called upon to judge another’s credibility. This is not the same as saying that we just make things up as we judge. But it is to say that any attempt to delineate “responsible judgment” about who to embrace and who to castigate will not escape the problem of narrative and the training we’ve received to regard some styles as harboring more signifying power than others.
Chapter Summaries
In the chapters that follow, I identify how a rhetoric of value-neutrality and cultural impartiality was disseminated within media narratives that simultaneously broadcast stories about speech failures that presumably engendered emotional outrage. Each chapter explores how media narratives naturalized the idea that speech acts may be discredited