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which are probably digitally created, such as seemingly hand-scripted fonts, crayon and marker drawings, collage aesthetics, photocopier mimicry, and smudged inks. Highly complex digital design programs are carefully employed to replicate the smear of a fountain pen or a hapless collage in order to cater to an audience that is nostalgic for signs of less mediated personal connections in an impersonal digital world. Thus, leaked constructedness plays to its audience through sprezzaturic styling that has the look of art that was created with ease or through accident. Such a Do-It-Yourself (rather than digitally) aesthetic plays a key role in what is often dubbed “hipster culture” with its postmodern code of radical nonchalance and can be viewed in such magazines and websites as Adbusters, Found magazine, and the websites of most “indie” music labels and “zines.” Though it seems inaccurate to claim that digitally created texts aren’t DIY or handmade, analog art often holds a more “authentic” appeal, possibly because it is less mediated and somehow represents the artist more immediately.
But sprezzaturic nostalgia has also been harnessed since computers went personal as seen, again, in the metaphors that govern it—the desktop; the dashboard; the trashcan; the folder and file; copying, cutting, and pasting; space on a hard drive; etc. Just as the metaphor on the computer seeks to focus the reader on content rather than construction, it seeks to revive the physicality of those metaphors through familiar images like the trashcan and the folder. Such a nostalgic immediacy15 keeps the user’s attention away from the fact (and fear) that he or she has no idea how the device is actually operating and focused on the idea that it might be functioning as easily as the metaphor that represents it. Thus, the connection to sprezzatura—the technology seems to be working at a much simpler level than it really is.16
Continuum of Apparent Mediation
Through Castiglione’s sprezzatura and the concept of leaked constructedness we begin to explore another continuum upon which ideas of stylistic ethics are formed: apparent mediation and manipulation. Since the time of Sir Francis Bacon, Petrus Ramus, and empiricism, scientists have sought to purge rhetoric and style from language because they felt it obscured truth; it deceived; it mediated too much. Thus, plain style was born because people don’t like being, or more precisely feeling, deceived. But in examining the U.S. population’s hatred of “The Media” we can complicate this continuum as well.
We often don’t like too much mediation in our media because we want to create our own views of the news from objective evidence. We want to get as close to pure objective data as we can—we want language to be immediate. Thus, newspapers usually seek to keep the opinion of the writer, and many times any reference to the author, out of journalism.17 As veteran journalist and pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman explains, “Being a news reporter forces you to adopt a peculiar personality: You spend every moment of your life trying to eradicate emotion. Reporters overcompensate for every nonobjective feeling they’ve ever experienced” (2003, p. 205). Reporters and editors purge opinion in order to avoid libel and media bias, but, as Klosterman further discusses, such a quest for objectivity, “really just makes them [news stories] longer and less clear. The motivation for doing this is to foster objectivity, but it actually does the complete opposite. It makes finding an objective nearly impossible, because you’re always getting facts plus requisite equalizing fiction” (2003, p. 209). Rather than producing objective facts for the reader to interpret, equalizing fiction (like transparent language) functions as sprezzatura, creating the appearance of easy objectivity and disguising another layer of mediation. Such an artificial objectivity smacks of deception and the spin that Americans hate and has a somewhat contradictory effect: “Skeptical news consumers often find themselves suspecting that deeper truth can be found on the newspaper opinion pages, or through talk radio…. The assumption is that—since these pundits openly admit their biases—you can trust their insights more” (Klosterman, 2003, p. 209). Thus, an audience trusts confession as a rhetorical style because it makes its deception and spin readily available where sprezzatura, although based on similar selectivity and styling, hides its bias.
But at some point as we begin to trust such confession and the focus of attention switches from spin back to content, do we forget the spin? When bias is confessed, sometimes an audience no longer feels the need to criticize that bias, and when people aren’t critical of bias, it fades to the background. This is true, for instance, of both conservative and liberal news programs—at some point, to liberals The Daily Show seems less and less biased because it admits its bias; to conservatives, the O’Reilly Factor has a similar effect.18 Sometimes it seems that an audience is more aware of bias and willing to pick it apart when it isn’t confessed. Thus, the second continuum of stylistical ethics is related to the first and is labeled apparent mediation because audiences react to mediation differently when it is or is not made evident.
Klosterman’s discussion of removing the author from the news and the idea of trusting confessors makes ready another important reality of stylistic ethics. In the first continuum I discussed how sublimity is viewed as unethical because it focuses the reader only on content; yet, shouldn’t a style that focuses a reader on the author be somehow more ethical? Of course, sprezzatura (and confession, as we will see below) demonstrates that what an author reveals about him or herself is not always the full truth and opens debates about whether the self is socially constructed or not. But shouldn’t we want more of the author so that we can decide for ourselves whether we trust their bias or not? Such a complication opens up numerous stylistic moves that are often excluded from “serious writing” because they reveal too much of the author and obviate such advice as “don’t use ‘I’ in a formal paper.” The balance between revealing and concealing mediation is a tricky and often contradictory proposition.
Writers, therefore, should consider when it is appropriate to reveal their subjectivity and mediating power and when they should be elided in a sprezzatura-like style. When will readers respond well to confession of bias and when does such a style become a distracting repetition of “seems to me,” “I think,” and “might”?
IV. Confession, Hypermediation, and The Continuum of Felt Agency
Confession
Progressing to a more typically “ethical” stylistic presence, Saint Augustine of Hippo’s (345-430 C.E.) De Doctrina Christiana and Confessions offer models of style (Christian oratory and confession) that do something few teachers of style had done before him; they give power to the audience through instruction on analysis as well as open the orator to critique and discussions on the subjective nature of confession.
Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was trained in, instructed on, and won declamation competitions through classical “pagan” oratory (Confessions). After he converted, he sought to take what he saw as a powerful rhetorical model (classical Greek and Roman oratory) and apply it to the radically differently styled Christian rhetorical tradition in order to convert pagans who often disdained the comparatively muted Christian style.
Although Augustine seems to take up Cicero’s divisions on the purposes of rhetoric (to teach, delight, and persuade) in his three divisions of style (subdued, moderate, and grand), Augustine’s discussion of ethos in Book Four of De Doctrina Christiana is somewhat more complex and radical than his classical predecessors. For Augustine the ethos of God, not necessarily the Christian orator himself, is what certifies the reliability and efficacy of the message:
Now Christ is truth and still, truth can be preached, even though not with truth… . Thus, indeed, Jesus Christ is preached by those who seek their own ends, not those of Jesus Christ… . And so they do good to many by preaching. (2008, 4.59-60).
Though Christian orators should strive to do justice to the word of God, corrupt people can still preach effectively because the power of Christian rhetoric is housed in God and the listener, not necessarily in the orator.
Indeed the idea of audience in Augustine’s works (and in the Hebraic rhetorical tradition more generally) differs from classical models because of the relationship between faith and persuasion. Faith cannot be induced in an audience through persuasion; the Christian rhetor must give his audience information and let God (and the mind of the would-be convert) do the rest, otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. As Christine Mason Sutherland explains, “For Hebrew rhetoric, persuasion is vested in the audience, not