Introduction
People in the United States are expected to cherish the idea of free speech, but not all speech acts are welcome within public venues. The responsible citizen is expected to guard against the false claims and manufactured “talking points” of politicians whose rhetorical flourishes give cover to an unsavory lust for power. Political candidates tend to be commended when they speak with a blunt candor that seems to get to the facts and avoid verbal complexities. John McCain made an explicit promise when campaigning for president in 2008 to board the “straight talk express” in an effort to present himself as the people’s humble servant committed to a forthright style, as if making this pledge was unquestionably commendable and distinctive. The idea that honesty in speech means advancing past any distractions contrived by rhetoric has a long history in U.S. political discourse, its potency retained in part because of the undertheorized yet durable metaphor that crafts a conceptual linkage between linearity and discursive integrity.
This metaphorical cluster encodes a seemingly basic premise: methods exist for ascertaining how and what words mean. A promise to “speak straight” seems obtainable if language is imbued with a power to convey who signifies with probity and if citizens believe in their own integrity (i.e., honest citizens will know an honest representation when they see one and may justifiably castigate any speaker who puts forth anything but). Such beliefs create expectations about how language should be stylized, namely, that styles should be transparent so that rhetors may convey ideas that exist independently of the languages used to represent them. By channeling ideas and logic through figurative forms that do not obstruct the clarity of meaning, the plain style seems to fulfill this expectation.
One can hear echoes of the same idea in books such as the impatiently titled On Bullshit that found a publisher in 2005 as well as a receptive audience. Or in a 2008 advertisement for a local Chicago news station: “No bull. Truth in politics with Mike Flannery.”1 It underwrites the endeavors of cable news hosts such as Anderson Cooper who devotes a portion of his nightly program on CNN to “keeping them honest” by comparing a given politician’s statements to “the facts.” And it is an element in every media commentary that praises frankness and clarity in political speech when speculating on how a given statement has been interpreted by “America.” Such commentaries call upon audiences to trust those representations that deploy a positivistic logic that seems to bypass the arts of rhetoric by actively refusing the politicized, the false, the desirous and the mercenary. Audiences, meanwhile, are expected to appreciate representations that are factual, reasonable, and compelling to a majority, and to feel like virtuous citizens for ferreting out any attempted manipulation.
This book takes a closer look at how discourses of nationalism are encoded within the appeal of an “innocent rhetoric” that implicates public expectations about how language should be used and credibility judged. We are encouraged to find words that grab onto a quality of “apolitical authenticity” and turn it into a representational real. But the persistent need to proclaim that one is using language honestly and sincerely also expresses anxiety about the possibility of doing so. Contemporary language theories have fed that anxiety by challenging commonplace assumptions about how persuasive power works to achieve effects. They alert us to the ways in which attempts to clarify how to judge the genuine also obscure by concealing irresolvable ambiguities that inhere within the interpretive technologies used to evaluate who and what is credible. Indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of discursive practices that seem to disseminate representations that are straight, honest, and logical are tied neither to logic nor to a structural grammar but to narrative. We tell stories about a nation committed to discursive integrity, peopled by citizens who speak freely and invoke innate wisdom when distinguishing the reliable speaker from the political hack. A closer look at the storytelling elements of our conceptual frameworks raises an analytical problem about how to validate the interpretive apparatus that would steer evaluations of which language uses should make us wary.
That problem is made even more complicated by the question of how to regard style’s role within judgments of who to believe. Rhetorical style presents a particularly vexed topic because its status as an object of inquiry is paradoxically and simultaneously material and insubstantial. Style, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric, is most commonly described as the artful expression of ideas. But in contemporary life, the word style signifies multiple meanings that range from the demonstration of basic grammatical competence to a repertoire of protocols to aid communication to thoughtfully arranged word choices that convey a quality that is noticeable, idiosyncratic (Edward Corbett’s word), potentially provocative, and also indescribable. While rhetorical style is considered to be basic and elemental, exactly how style acts to influence the exchange of ideas remains undertheorized. Literary traditions have belittled rhetorical style, depicting it as a bureaucratic tool, its purview merely practical and detached from the honorable sublimity of the poetic. In political venues, style is treated with overt suspicion, envisioned as an impediment to the authentic presentation of heartfelt political points of view. Both of these stances call for further review.
It is my contention that rhetorical style plays a crucial role in establishing a democratic aesthetic, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Docherty, who portrays aesthetics as a “founding condition” for “establishing social and political democracy” (back cover). Aesthetics, like rhetorical style, is a term that conveys multiple meanings that range from the sensual appreciation of signs of beauty to formalized conceptions of representational action that have become too rigid. Acknowledging an aesthetic dimension to political discourse reminds us that illusory elements inhere within endeavors to certify methods of political adjudication. Docherty takes note of a formalizing impulse commandeering theoretical frameworks that repeat precepts about how we make meaning, an impulse able to render the stories told about how to judge the good man speaking well into ritualized performances rather than authentic experiences of critical inquiry. He then proposes a democratic aesthetic that countermands the formalizing dynamic by highlighting the narrative origins of routine conceptions of what we do with words. This approach incorporates a Lyotardian framework that aims to keep open the question of judgment and avoid the trap of conflating textual depictions of interpretive action with interpretive mastery. We may be reminded of their differences whenever we take recourse in explanations of how persuasive processes work to instigate audience adherence. When we acknowledge that we tell stories about who we are as citizens who judge, we interrupt the automatic reproduction of taken-for-granted commonplaces that describe how discourses organize a majority view of what has meaning and significance. Plain speech offers a case in point. It denotes a ritualized mode of expression that promises truth’s unadorned delivery. What audiences procure through its invocation may be something else entirely.
This book applies Docherty’s conception of a democratic aesthetic to commonplace conceptions of rhetorical style. Most studies of style offer advice about how to correlate language with civics when conceiving of the formation of, for example, “the national community.” I instead am concerned with the