A look at the trajectory of Barr’s call to community helps to illuminate the ways in which rhetorical theorizing about how to use styles to promote social cooperation are informed by a subtle yet persistent faith in the priority of that which is representable; rhetoricians tend to trust in a narrative that maintains that enacting (orderly, eloquent) representations is tantamount to being socially responsible because it indicates one’s willingness to be held accountable for one’s ideas. Barr’s depiction of this premise may have been stylistically simplistic, but his argument propositionally concurred with the call to rationalist norms within rhetorical theories of style that would explain how audiences might know if “the reasonable case” has made an appearance. Rationalist norms are also “clusters (formations) of ideas, images and practices” that encourage particular types of rhetorical action that will (presumably) produce recognizably legitimate interpretive results. Comparing Barr’s nostalgia to rhetoric’s enthusiasm for rationalist norms helps to illustrate how the narratives we devise to organize conceptions of how to participate with language will engage acts of fantasy when they suggest that the use of the familiar form will facilitate the conversion of representational ambiguity into credible judgments about discursive aims. We are expected to believe those explanatory narratives as if they truly do tell us about how to enact inquiry that can be called democratic. But if responses to Barr’s justification for impeaching Clinton demonstrate anything it might be that signifying obedience to stylistic protocol will not definitively indicate if a speaker’s aim is either conscientious or socially beneficial.
Hence, the pertinence of Richard Lanham’s observation: styles do not just operate as vehicles that put verve into how we express ideas. They are also representative of value systems that will have emerged from disciplinary and social contexts. Lanham maintains that social contexts will dictate how styles will be evaluated while rhetorical styles will convey attitudes about a given culture’s sense of what is linguistically (stylistically) permissible. “By a sense of style we socialize ourselves. Style finally becomes . . . social custom. . . . Style defines situations, tells us how to act in them” (178).
Styles, then, reveal more than style when they disclose how hierarchies of value get attached to linguistic comportment. When styles are expected to be readable, familiar, a site for generating a sense of equity, and hence commonality, their appearance seems to signify a rhetor’s aim to get along with others and facilitate democratic communication. But judgments of aims require speculation about how to transform the apprehension of a given text into an evaluation of its meaning and significance. Any response to Barr’s homily—either acceptance or rejection—will have been influenced by narratives that situate stylistic protocols within social hierarchies and then underestimate the significance of style’s contribution to the interpretive conversions that will get made when speculation gets transformed into a conclusion about whose words are behaving reasonably and/or preposterously. Meanwhile, like Barr, rhetoricians who champion narratives that specify representational goals like “democratic participation” also express anxiety about whether representational inconstancy can be partnered with linguistic virtue.
Pragmatics Meets Inconstancy
If interpretive acts are social customs, they may be analyzed to consider how style’s deployment helps to naturalize ways of seeing what should have value and credibility. A circular logic animates the idea that styles help to express representational goals and instigate the interpretive methodologies that allow us to substantiate when those goals are met. The potential of a given style to provoke any number of responses appears to be subdued once the explanatory narrative directs conceptions of how to negotiate what can be known with what is impossible to know about any motives propelling where an act of representation is headed. When we believe that style helps us assess whether a speaker has fulfilled an intangible aim such as “taking responsibility,” we are effectively tasked with deciding if a contemporary representational act is in accord with past models and preestablished standards that exhibit stylistic forms that have earned cultural regard because we’ve already seen them circulating in public discourse. But this method of comparison can also prompt us to glide past the speculative question of how precisely representative styles communicate purposes in ways that will be recognized.
The shortcomings of this interpretive framework were evident in one of the more notorious public moments in 1998—when Clinton testified (via satellite) before a Grand Jury, the first sitting President who was called upon to do so. Grand Jury testimony is one discursive practice that seems capable of achieving the goal of converting an idea of accountability into a reality. When Clinton met on August 17 with Deputy Independent Counsel Solomon L. Wisenberg, many believed that the legal proceeding would create the conditions that would force the president to be held accountable—finally—for his words. Clinton’s detractors most likely hoped that putting him under oath in this context would compel him to come clean about having perjured himself when he denied his relationship with Lewinsky during the Paula Jones proceedings. That goal appeared to guide the direction of the questions posed by Wisenberg, which included the following memorable exchange:
PROSECUTOR: Mr. President, I want to . . . briefly go over something you were talking about with Mr. Bittman. The statement of your attorney, Mr. Bennett, at the Paula Jones deposition . . . “Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky has filed—has an affidavit which they are in possession of saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner shape or form, with President Clinton.” That statement was made by your attorney in front of Judge Susan Webber Wright, correct?
CLINTON: That’s correct.
PROSECUTOR: That statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was “no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,” was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?
CLINTON: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. If the–if he—if “is” means is and never has been that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.25
Derision, seemingly universal, followed. This was testimony? Under oath? By elaborating on multiple ways of reading the “if-then” clause, Clinton seemed to violate the basic obligation to speak directly and purposefully and then be held accountable for a prior misdirected act of representation. In posing a question of definition, Clinton seemed to rebuff the expectation that he take responsibility for the confusion caused by a prior act of speech (which also failed to responsibly convey what really happened) and hence he indicated an unwillingness to abide by the communal rules overseeing linguistic comportment in a legal proceeding. So loathed was the “is is” phrase, it has been immortalized in Bartlett’s Famous Quotations to connote insufferable equivocation. Those two simple words became a lightening rod for everything that seemed wrong about Clinton and what his presidency represented. It was referenced by U.S. Rep Howard Coble (R-NC) in his opening statement at the impeachment hearing to justify Coble’s vote to impeach: “When I return to my district, I sometimes motor south on Highway 29 through the fox and the wine country of Virginia. And as I approach the North Carolina boundary line, my mind begins to clear, as I am at that point removed from the Beltway spin. All of a sudden I am aware of the definition of ‘sex.’ All of a sudden I know the meaning of ‘alone.’ I know what ‘is’ is, as do the majority of my constituents” “(soft laughter).” Journalists joined in the mockery. As Timothy Noah of Slate.com observed, “Years from now, when we look back on Bill Clinton’s presidency, its defining moment may well be Clinton’s rationalization to the grand jury about why he wasn’t lying . . . Bill Clinton really is a guy who’s willing to think carefully about `what the meaning of the word “is” is.’ This is way beyond slick. Perhaps we should start calling him, ‘Existential Willie.’”26
By failing to deliver a response that clarified a meaning that could be grasped for immediate review,