Centrality of Style, The. Группа авторов
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Christiana contain instructions on “analyzing and resolving the ambiguities of the scriptures” with rules that may be distilled down to four basic concepts that leave room for multiple correct interpretations of the text:
1. The Bible cannot contradict itself;
2. The Bible always promotes love of God and neighbor;
3. Consider the sentence you are interpreting within the context of the sentences around it;
4. In order to interpret correctly, similar to what Cicero outlines in De Oratore, you need a broad background of knowledge (about snakes, metals, animals, astronomy, history, law, etc.) (Augustine, 2008, 3.2).
In his Confessions Augustine further elaborates on this concept of interpretation and readerly agency in Book Ten when he discusses his relationship with his audience and their belief: “Although I cannot prove that my confessions are true, at least I shall be believed by those whose ears are opened to me by charity… . Charity which makes them good tells them that I do not lie about myself when I confess what I am, and it is this charity in them which believes me” (2010, 10.3.4). Augustine cannot persuade his audience to believe his story but can only give them information to interpret in hopes that they take something from it. Thus, Augustine’s favoring of the subdued style and its purpose of teaching over the other two styles (though he ultimately concludes, as does this chapter, that one should mix and match styles): “This, of course, is elegance in teaching, whereby the result is attained in speaking, not that what was distasteful becomes pleasing, nor that what one was unwilling to do is done, but that what was obscure becomes clear” (2008, 4.26).
Augustine continues to explain that the content the confessor and Christian orator provide are flawed (similar to the content of the sprezzaturic orator) because of the impossibility of inclusivity in language: “For I pass over many things, hastening on to those things which more strongly impel me to confess to thee—and many things I have simply forgotten” (Augustine, 2010, 3.12). Like any autobiographer knows, recalling every detail of the past is impossible, and even if it were not, such a retelling would make for a tedious and unpurposeful text. Thus, every act of confession is necessarily selective and manipulative of an audience’s attention, despite whether confessional rhetoric makes an audience feel deceived or not. Augustine further elaborates on the subjectivity of memory in Book Ten of Confessions saying that “There, in the memory, is likewise stored what we cogitate, either enlarging or reducing our perceptions, or by altering one way or another those things which the senses made contact with …” (2010, 10.8).
Hypermediation19
New media theorists Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin describe their concept of hypermediation as media that “ask us to take pleasure in the act of mediation” and foster a “fascination with media” (2000, p. 14). Or, as Wysocki states with a slightly more ethical connotation, “What is important is that whoever produces the text and whoever consumes it understand—because the text asks them to, in one way or another—that the various materialities of a text contribute to how it … is read and understood” (Wysocki, 2004, p. 15). Thus true new media confess their materiality by calling the reader’s attention to themselves.
Such a style of media confession is fairly young in the rhetorical tradition and truly comes into power, as Bolter and Grusin, and Lanham discuss, with late-modernist art: “It was not until modernism that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of transparency was challenged,” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 38). For instance, in composer John Cage’s “4’33,” which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, Cage seeks to remind the listener that music is just sound, labeled differently: “I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner, just outer … I don’t want sound to pretend it is a bucket or that it’s president … I just want it to be a sound.” His work makes music confess itself. Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” objects that become art simply by the fact that they are displayed as art, have a similar effect. Such pieces place the burden of the art not on the composer but on the audience, asking whether art can simply be enjoyed as style.
Moving to new media, Susan Delagrange’s hypertext, “Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Cannon of Arrangement,20” exemplifies hypermediation through the interplay of its construction and content by creating a digital wunderkammer on wunderkammer. Through a rich collage-like interaction of text and image that calls attention to its own construction, the reader of Delagrange’s “associative knowledge-building” space is encouraged to explore and wander through a history of curiosity cabinets, new media composition, and visual arrangement—propelled on by a design aesthetic that promotes “‘critical wonder’: a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery” (2010). Analogy, comparison, and juxtaposition are the stylistic tropes that perpetuate such exploration. Like Augustine’s Christian oratory, such tropes are created collaboratively between the author’s arrangement and the reader’s interpretation. Where digital metaphors designed with a sublime and sprezzatura stylistic aesthetic seek to focus the reader on content rather than construction, reviving a nostalgic physicality, those designed with a confessional aesthetic (such as Delagrange’s wunderkammer metaphor) seek to aid readers in deconstructing them through a freedom of interpretation and analysis.
Continuum of Felt Agency
Augustine’s Christian and confessional oratory, Delagrange’s “Wunderkammer” and similarly, Geoffrey Sirc’s “box logic,” all seek to empower the reader by, as Sirc explains, imagining “text as box=author as collector,” and, I would add, reader as collaborator (2004, p. 117). Rosanne Carlo’s discussion of the generative ethos and “enfolding” rhetoric of Jim Corder in this collection is another example of such an argument towards the power of a confessional style. In all these models readers seem more empowered to explore and create and less likely to be manipulated, hypnotized, coerced, and abused. True literacy becomes, as Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola explain, “the ability to make the instantaneous connections between informational objects that allow us to see them all at once” (1999, p. 363). This notion introduces our third continuum of stylistic ethics—felt or apparent agency.
On this continuum, sublime rhetoric and immediacy become unethical because readers “Lose themselves in reading (and so to come back with different selves that better fit a dominant culture)” (Wysocki & Johnson-Eilola, 1999, p. 366). Such a styling gives us no agency to resist, and we are brainwashed. Yet, such a totalizing view seems to give too much power to the writer and conversely, a viewing of confessional rhetoric as totally empowering might give too much power to the reader. When we delve into a text, we “suspend our belief”; we enter into a contract with the rhetor; and, conversely, we have the choice to refuse: we don’t need to fall in; we don’t have to enjoy and agree; if we have any sort of analytical training (formal or informal), we can resist.
In On The Sublime Longinus analyzes examples of sublimity (Homer, Euripides, etc.), to illustrate how the style functions. Thus, Longinus is able to be critical of the sublime. He can be “sublime on the sublime” (Lamb, 1993, p. 553). As Jonathan Lamb explains, “Being sublime upon the sublime is, according to [John] Dennis, the reader’s way of seizing the initiative, just as Longinus himself seizes it from Homer … converting the servitude of reading into the mastery of writing” (1993, p. 553). The sublime may function as an emollient during the rhetorical act (and even this may be a totalizing fiction), but its existence is largely kairotic; its true power is fleeting. Once the orator stops, the reader begins interpreting (I liked that movie; I hated that movie; etc.) and has agency.
We also must remember that there will always be situations where the rhetorical audience begins with more power than the rhetor, for example, when the writer is part of a minority and the reader is part of a majority. This is what Michel Foucault warns against in his discussions of the transformative nature of confession in his History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction:
One does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile … a ritual in which the expression