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p. 61-62)
As Carlo, in this volume, reminds in her analysis of Corder, “Enfolding is about vulnerability of self,” “a vulnerability which is not appropriate to expose in all rhetorical situations.” Is it necessary to give even more power to an audience and open oneself up to a critical reading by the majority? Must the writer always play according to the rules set by the audience?21 Offering any one fixed set of stylistic rules limits authorial moves of resistance as well as those of power. Such thought complicates Joseph Williams’s22 advice that, “We write ethically when as a matter of principle, we would trade places with our intended readers and experience the consequences they do after they read our writing” (2007, p. 215).
In addition, just because a writer uses a confessional style doesn’t mean that the audience is empowered through, or will want to accept, the power of analysis. Being constantly analytical and explorative is exhausting. Though it may or may not be the best thing for one to do, readers can choose to ignore, choose to participate, choose to lie back, choose to be active, choose to be lazy—it is true that the rhetor can create an openness to participate or can try to encourage the audience to plunge into the sublime or can seek praise through nonchalance, but the audience doesn’t have to respond. As Williams reminds us, “We ought not assume that they [our audience] owe us an indefinite amount of their time to unpack it” (2007, p. 221). Andrew Feenberg espouses a similar view in his Critical Theory of Technology surrounding how the democratization of labor “presupposes the desire for increased responsibility and power,” and requires “a culture of responsibility,” that we can see developing in techno-rhetorical culture through the call for multiliteracies23 (1991, p. 17). Such a breakdown of power and a reminder that, as Foucault states, “in order to be a movement [of power] from above to below there has to be a capillarity from below to above at the same time” make my definition of style transform from “the manipulation of attention” into the attempted manipulation of attention (1980, p. 201).
Confessional rhetorics, because they are rhetoric and contain a guiding author or editor, no matter how hard they try, can never entirely cede power to the reader. Hypertext fiction, similar to Delagrange’s wunderkammer, are groupings of links and nodes through which authors allow readers to explore and often “choose their own adventure,” roving through seemingly random collections of media, creating their own interpretations as they proceed. Such freedom seems to turn readers into authors, but most times the numerous circuits readers roam through are planned in advance. Readers can’t navigate outside of the hypertext. New media theorist Lev Manovich calls the inability for an author to ever fully give up control of their text, “the myth of interactivity”; he argues, “interactive media ask us to identify with someone else’s mental structure … to click on a highlighted sentence to go to another sentence … we are asked to follow pre-formed, objectively existing associations” (2001, p. 61). Again, similar to the transport of the Longinian sublime, “we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own” (Manovich, 2001, p. 61).
This final breakdown of the traditional continuums of stylistic ethics confirms the argument that there is no fixed relationship between style and morality, no most ethical style, thus, welcoming a plurality of styles. As Wysocki states, “I do not want the instructions on my kitchen fire extinguisher to ask me to stop to think about how the instructions compose me as a rational, modern, gendered, raced, classed, fire-fearing, early twenty-first century individual … I hope that the fire extinguisher is transparently useful without them …” (2004, p. 22). Writers must ask, then, when space for interpretation and attention needs to be purposefully constructed and when it is to be brought by the audience. When should texts be immediate and when should they confess and complicate themselves? Which audiences will automatically be critical of which texts? Which audiences need to be urged to pay attention to which points? And when does a critical eye destroy an immersive experience? Certain conditions call for certain styles, and we will only discover those most effective through experimentation with as many styles as possible.
V. Bringing Pluralistic Style and Manipulation to the Composition Classroom
This chapter has asked you to consider what commonly eschewed avenues of style become available when one acknowledges that each choice of style and each act of rhetoric is one of manipulation and thus equally valid for ethical use. In conclusion, then, I offer three pluralistic and manipulative stylistic classroom activities that attempt to reintroduce composition students to a more complex notion of style, purpose, and exigence. In doing so I also, admittedly, argue for my own personal composition classroom exigencies: to teach students to be critical of their style and communication methods, to purposefully adapt to and control numerous audiences (whether that means to intrigue, disgust, incense, or hypnotize), and to enjoy experimentation in language.
Basic questions in a classroom of pluralistic styles:
• How do you want the audience to participate in the text?
• How does your audience want to participate in the text?
• What stylistic choices will mediate between these two desires?
1. The Found Object: Absorbed in Materiality
Style: Sublimity, Immediacy, and the Continuum of Attention
Goals: Learn to capture and focus an audience’s attention, create identification between author and reader, and present issues as in need of immediate action.
Activity: Many writing assignments ask students to make the assumption that the audience will have some knowledge of the writer and his or her exigence: a memo written for a boss, a speech delivered to the city council, an opinion column composed for the local newspaper. The found object assignment, however, asks students to design a message that must engage an unsuspecting audience with no assumed familiarity of the students or their exigences.
For instance, students might create a “shopdropped” item, a consumer good that is redesigned to subvert its original materiality.24 A shopdropper might buy a sugary children’s cereal, take it home, and use a computer program (or simply markers and paste) to redesign the packaging to highlight the cereal’s unhealthy content by the addition of images of rotting teeth and obese children. The shopdropper then places the box back on the shelf for the unsuspecting audience to encounter. Through visual interest and interactivity the object is designed to engross the audience in a type of participation similar to that of a confessional object, but rather than directing the audience’s critical eye at the construction of the item or the rhetor, it directs attention to the negative elements of the original product.
Thus, the goal of the found object assignment is to create a materially and stylistically engaging object (a dvd, sign, pop-up-book, comic, sticker, game) which will be found by a rhetorical audience, somehow gain their attention, and immediately absorb them in an understandable argument through interactivity.
Beyond wise object design, I ask students to come up with a hypothetical plan of distribution that explains where their object will be placed, how they will get the object there, what legal considerations might affect the placement of their object, and how the location of the object relates to the immediacy of the argument (arguments about nutrition are placed in the grocery store, arguments about fashion are attached to clothing racks, etc.).
Finally, I ask my students to explain the rhetorical choices they made in their object and placement designs: how ethos, pathos, and logos work in this object, how the context in which they place their object will affect their audience’s reception, how they designed their object to avoid misreadings, how they think their audience will respond and why.
The purpose of this activity is to prompt students to think critically about audience interaction and immersion in composition. It also asks them to consider how medium affects such immersion. Students must consider the benefits of one medium over another in terms of the exigence of the author, the point of attention, and the continuums of felt deception and agency. Finally, this assignment asks students to consider the ethical implications of surprising an unsuspecting audience, using public/private space, and redesigning/subverting someone else’s composition.
Further Question to Consider: When do audiences enjoy immersion in an artificial environment and when do they feel such