Often, such responses are treated as if self-explanatory, especially within media narratives that report on public responses to stylized deliveries. I am less interested in examining the style of news reports themselves (although this does come up throughout my analysis) but in considering how such reports rely upon conventional conceptions of style’s role in political judgment. I argue that rather than act to aid or obstruct the delivery of meaning, signifiers of style can be examined to excavate the multiple points of tension within conceptions of language use and democratic access. Styles are provocations and integral to the judgments audiences make about who to believe and who to ostracize. Within the stories that we tell about what styles should do, we may locate cultural narratives that have staked out conceptions of how persuasive power works to achieve its effects. A study of style draws attention to the ways in which narrative constructions of persuasive action get treated as factual and evidentiary and then referenced as if automatically legitimate resources aiding public evaluations about who to believe, who to dismiss, and who to revere for speaking in ways that benefit the nation.
Expel the Pretender: Rhetoric Renounced and the Politics of Style addresses examples of discredited political speech and the cultural logics that endorse their dismissal. Specifically, this book analyzes well-known public speeches that not only failed to enact community but also triggered collective public ridicule, including arguments in 1998 proposing a presidential impeachment, President Bill Clinton’s responses to those arguments, his national apology after admitting that he had an affair with a White House intern, Linda Tripp’s first public statement in defense of her actions that launched the impeachment drive, and the 2008 press appearances of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Barack Obama’s former pastor who was subsequently ostracized by the Obama campaign. In each representative example, I demonstrate how rhetorical style was at the center of public concerns about whose speech could be trusted. Not only was style central to assessments of each speaker’s credibility, its significance was only noticeable when speakers failed to meet cultural expectations about what kind of speech is permissible on the occasion of its delivery.
Judgments of dismissal were fortified by the simplistic binary that depicts political truth-telling as opposite to the practice of deception. Style’s study challenges the validity of that binary and its rendering of an interpretive process that oversees how to discern differences between words that are trustworthy and those that lead citizens astray.
Style and Expulsion
Expel the Pretender gets its title from Scott Durham’s Phantom Communities, which questions whether the theoretical concept of simulation (simulacra) should be deemed an impediment to social justice. Conventionally, simulation is aligned with representational deception—when, for example, the act of voting for a reality television show is depicted as an authentic experience of political struggle or when consumer choice masquerades as democratic access. Simulacra empty representational signs of their reality and reduce them to mere appearances, a shell of what they promise to be. Durham points to a history of thought that has expressed anxiety about the inability to tell the difference between the real and the fake, and he explores those interpretive methodologies that promise to enable citizens to discern disparities and justify the practice of expelling anyone who “fakes it” by trying to pass off the inauthentic expression as truth’s representative. I will have more to say about Durham’s argument in the first chapter. (Ultimately, Durham rehabilitates simulacra with reference to postmodern theories that muddy the conceptual frameworks that enable distinctions between “the real” and “the simulated” to be made.) At the moment, however, it is possible to note that both the anxiety about the inauthentic expression and the proposed method of relief remain pertinent to U.S. political culture where, arguably, the dynamic of expulsion endures as a viable option when publics discern discursive threats.
When the political “gaffe,” for example, is invoked as a newsworthy event, it functions as way of shaming and then silencing whoever delivered a statement that raised eyebrows. Countless websites are devoted to tracking this phenomenon: “The Top Ten Campaign-Ending Political Gaffes in Modern U.S. History.” “They Said WHAT?! Politicians Most Notorious Science Flubs.” “The Nine Worst Political Gaffes of 2012.”2 At first glance, this kind of exposure seems to be useful and necessary. It draws upon the idea that speakers bear social responsibilities and that it is incumbent upon audiences to make sure that all people, especially politicians, are held accountable for what they say. But a closer look at what the act of shaming is supposed to accomplish helps to illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing simulacra from genuine democratic actions. Presumably, pointing out instances of bad speech performs important political work, revealing, for example, something true about the person whose language use prompted ridicule, especially those objectionable flaws that, as put by one ardent truth-seeking blogger, “cannot be washed aside by the world’s greatest spin masters.”3 The exposure of misleading attempts to escape accountability is presented as an ethical act itself, undertaken, presumably to enable citizens to determine who does not deserve their support. Confidence in this methodology may begin to waver, however, once we begin to question what, exactly, is revealed and then accomplished through the kind of self-righteous scrutiny that converts a gaffe into a spectacle. My point is not to discount the act of calling out the ridiculous things that politicians say. But it is important to note that the act of publicizing gaffes carries an implicit and vague demand for linguistic correctness—as if being correct should confirm a speaker’s credibility and as if the point of analysis is to take note of the gaffe itself. Meanwhile, giving exposure to “the gaffe” implicitly treats all gaffes as equal, leaving open the question of how audiences are expected to weigh the significance of whatever flawed statement makes its way to the headlines.
When undertaking a study of style’s significance to judgment, we will quickly discover the inadequacies of those cultural narratives that treat acts of revelation as expressions of an authenticating interpretive methodology necessary to the functioning of the democratic state. Too often the methodologies that we rely upon provoke habitualized judgments of what has validity. This is all the more significant given that rhetorical style itself is generally read as the agent of pretense and fakery and hence an obstacle to the endeavor to speak straight and insure that one’s audience can distinguish the hollow political platitude from the sincere utterance of conviction. Culturally sanctioned stylistic protocols are presented as positive markers that signify not only ethical representational action but also the desirable qualities of the people who use them. Indeed, when speakers and writers use styles that have earned cultural regard, we are expected to classify them as the kind of people who think and speak reasonably, who aim to communicate ethically, and who then are deserving of whatever accolades their speeches (texts) might generate. In political venues, candidates who highlight a commitment to straight talk imply that such talk may be positioned as the personification of the candidate’s moral character—a premise that conflates the qualities of seeming and being by suggesting that one’s regard for discursive protocol offers a demonstration of one’s commitment to being moral.
The question is whether the absence of culturally preferred stylistic markers necessarily indicates an absence of those qualities that have earned cultural regard (reason, common sense, good will, etc.) We might quickly downplay such a conclusion and maintain that when we judge, we weigh propositional content—the reasonableness of whatever political perspective is put up for review. Yet as my examples show, it is often the case that when valorized stylistic markers are absent, permission is given to audiences to deliver seemingly justifiable derisive judgments of whoever failed to follow the mandated methodology. When political speakers fail to follow discursive conventions, or worse, when they seem to purposely defy them, the styles associated with their noncompliance tend to be read as marking an absence of qualities that should be put on display. In effect, socially constituted, aestheticized discursive practices get conflated with real linguistic obligations.
My analysis of the politics of expulsion demonstrates that questions about style function as directives about how to participate with language. I use the word participate in the sense offered by Bill Readings, one that extends conceptions