It is style, then, that we rely upon to represent a moral image of thought. Having a commitment to styles that appear to be moral seems to tell us about what the speaker/writer intends to do with his words and whether those intentions are nefarious or honorable, and we make such determinations by deciding whether formalized expressions are cogent, orderly, pointed, etc. Such stylistic features seem to tell us whether a speaker, for example, aims to communicate rather than seduce, be earnest rather than playful or ironic, inform rather than please.
But is there a difference between the aim to use language to constitute a community of agreeable listeners and the expressed aims of GOP legislators to find a shared language that would communicate noble representational purposes?
Consider, for example, the following statement from U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), delivered at Clinton’s impeachment trial in December 1998, to justify Barr’s vote to impeach:
You know as children, all of us believed certain things with all of our hearts. We knew there was a difference between good and evil. We knew it was wrong to lie, and equally important, that if we got caught, we would be punished. . . . What happened to these simple truths that we all knew in our hearts just a few short years ago? Why do so many adults now find it so hard to call a lie a lie, when as parents, teachers, and employers, we have no hesitancy?23
What to make of this expression of yearning? Arguably, it articulates a longing to find a way back “home” to truth, the same longing that has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and priests, many of whom have also longed for signs of origins, evidence of a continuance between this life and another, past and present, a connection between what we can imagine and what we can know. And yet, while it is possible that Barr’s statement conjured such reflection, it is equally possible to imagine many of us sitting there on our couches watching the impeachment hearings unfold, the second one in the nation’s history, having a less than sublime response, muttering, perhaps, something along the lines of, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Dismissing the value and significance of Barr’s locution does not necessarily translate into a rejection of the value system informing his perspective. Presumably Barr, described by one reporter as “leading the charge to impeach a popular president,” 24 offered his rendition of a common enough motif in this proceeding to repudiate interpretive ambiguity that could interfere with the goal of being a straightforward, objective, and fair adjudicator of the issue. But for anyone who was hoping to witness justice at work, what may have seemed notable was a sense of dissonance between an expectation and an experience—expecting to bear witness to the exhibition of reason’s signs; encountering instead a nostalgia-inflected homily about simplicity and innocent children as a way of justifying a draconian outcome. In a legal proceeding that purported to address presidential misconduct, this blend of convention and idiosyncrasy may have been curious if not bizarre, offering (to some of us) absurd imagery when juxtaposed against preconceived notions of what form reason should take. Nonetheless, there are plenty of cultural practices—including those from rhetoric’s traditions—that lend support to Barr’s larger claims about the need for speakers to speak clearly and get to the point. Indeed, borrowing from Hayden White, it is possible to consider how the propositional content of Barr’s statement compares to discourses of history that claim to engage models of discourse “purged of all figurative and tropological elements, and subjected to tests of logical consistency as an argument and of predicative adequacy as a body of fact” (5).
Barr advocated for the use of recognizable modes of speech to allow for determinations of who may be held accountable for language choices. As such, he made a case for representability in general, and more specifically, for representations that present a systematic order of cause and effect in which “good” reasons lead to “good conclusions.” Far from seeming like pure nonsense, Barr’s statement and the principles that he defended were both intelligible and representative of dominant discursive conventions, including those touted within rhetorical studies of style’s role in generating audience adherence. Within Barr’s call for simplicity was a presumed inclusionary motive made evident via the “plain” style that extends a democratic “welcome” to everyone and conveys a bona fide desire to reach as many in the audience as possible. The question, then, is whether and how Barr’s particular call for clarity differs from, for example, the Rawlsian or Habermasian idea that communication should be oriented towards producing understanding, or how it differs from the rhetorical concern with devising styles that signify one’s desire to communicate and to use language for the purpose of community formation comprised of mutually shared perspectives.
There are dissonances. When comparing Barr’s statement to rhetorical theorizing that positions rational and vernacular norms as signifiers of socially responsible communicative practices, we might observe that Barr’s demand for innocence expressed through the elimination of verbal excess is precisely at odds with a rhetorical framework that valorizes flexibility and representational inconstancy. Rather than advocate for particular representational forms, rhetorical approaches to language study address how context is an element within any decision about which forms are suitable to speech occasions. Hence, a rhetorical take on Barr’s justification for an impeachment would deem it unpersuasive because a majority would probably reject the allusion to a child’s perspective as being suitable in this case.
Further, while Barr conflated linguistic transparency with a kind of literacy that is elemental and denuded of strategic calculating, rhetors would note that this paean to rhetorical innocence represents its own specialized discursive practice, or what Stuart Hall would call “a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of knowledge and conduct associated with” knowledge production (see Webb 56). Hall’s account is congenial with Burkean studies in that both ask us to question how we draw relationships between “knowledge” (culturally defined) and the representational technologies that would presume to bring that knowledge to presence. None of this is artless. To understand Barr’s comment, audiences would have to know something about the value attached to the idea of innocence, and that it is common to configure the idea of innocence in the form of children at play. Barr’s presumably inclusionary “we’re all children at heart” premise also delivers a reprimand to those who practice verbal complexity, implying that they may be rightly judged as elitist, pretentious, out of touch, and worst of all, inauthentic. Audiences further will be expected to be able to sort through the interrelated premises that suggest that identifying how speakers should conduct themselves linguistically will also identify the audience’s coordinating obligations: to be on the look out to see if the “authentic” “simple” and “clear” (or vernacular) statement has made an appearance. Audiences would be expected to comprehend, if not commend, the idea that when we follow our hearts when judging, we endorse the most noble descriptor of “the American” democratic spirit—a spirit that fosters community by championing the plain style that speaks to all, does not exclude, patronize, confuse, or deviate from the goal of calling everyone an equal. The ability to understand all that Barr’s homily communicated is not achieved in any simple or direct way but by connecting in complex ways to experiential contexts that influence how we judge whose act of representation seems to be honest, presented for political purposes, or some mixture of both.
But even when rejecting the reductive trajectory informing Barr’s veneration of simplicity, its kinship with rhetorical claims about how to engineer language uses that will enact identification might give us pause. Barr’s investment in a specific version of representational normativity is oddly congenial with the rhetorical valorization of discursive normativity as being benevolent, well-intentioned, and democratic. Rhetorical positivism is not the same as the empirical positivism within Republican arguments that contended that propositional content trumps style. In rhetorical theories, both style and content matter to the endeavor to persuade. The positivism within rhetorical theorizing situates