The idea that style should aid communication helps to sustain the convention that valorizes plain speech as a sign of a speaker’s integrity and suppresses consideration of how rhetorical indeterminacy is featured within political judgment. Discourses about style are always about more than mere style, marking instead a complex space at which embodiment, text, and ideology converge. Styles are public expressions that provoke private responses to representational power. In this sense, style signifies the felt experience of interpretation—an experience that cannot necessarily be translated into a narrative chronicling what happens as we contend with words. Style, then, marks a happening that is itself not fully representable but nonetheless noteworthy. To consider style’s significance to political judgment is to mull over commonplace visions of discursive participation, variously expressed in terms of how form relates to content, how narrative connects to lived experiences, how we endeavor to incorporate cognition, affect, and somatic responses into conceptions of deliberation that we would like to call democratic.
Rhetorical Interventions
Narratives about rhetorical style can be characterized as meditations about political access. Teach rhetors how to speak well and you give them tools for successful participation in social life. Such instruction need not be mercenary. Following Aristotle, style in rhetoric may be depicted as poetic’s pragmatic counterpart—a socially productive facilitator of civic-minded goals such as fostering mutual understanding and building consensus. The idea that people should be taught to use language to compel assent and then build community is taken for granted within rhetorical traditions, which helps to explain why, for example, eloquence, at least since the writings of Cicero, has been championed as a primary instigator of audience identification and approval. Rather than regard style as a discursive “extra,” as a superficial site of ornamentation inferior to poetic aesthetics and less significant than propositional content, rhetoricians historically have treated style as intrinsic to any concern with public welfare. For classical rhetoricians, style was central to the endeavor to persuade.
The recent return to style within composition studies pursues this trajectory by encouraging writing teachers to become more cognizant of style’s relationship to pragmatic approaches to language study. Hence, for example, Elizabeth Rankin’s important contribution from the 1980’s that reintroduced the idea that style involves more than attention to the surface features of language; style is a component within processes of invention wherein writers make choices about how to represent themselves on the page to audiences who will have their own preferences about which styles are suited to a rhetorical occasion. Learning about style gives writers and speakers the chance to harness persuasive power by incorporating models of effective communication into their own texts. More recently, Paul Butler calls upon compositionists to reinvigorate studies in style so that they may join public conversations about why the study of composing processes should be of general public concern. Like other compositionists, Butler endeavors to invalidate an epistemological tradition that has vilified rhetoric by characterizing persuasion as a force that manipulates audiences into assenting to ideas that serve nefarious interests. Butler argues for style’s importance to the work of interpretive collaboration, maintaining that it is through style that partnerships between rhetors and audiences get established. The thoughtful rhetor chooses styles that will produce favorable audience reactions, and in making such choices, he or she will be participating with language in socially redeemable ways: settling controversies, easing perceptual dissonances, establishing a means of identification. Styles execute a critical social function when put in the service of crafting shared perspectives about what matters and why.
There is a democratizing impulse within these formulations that clarifies how rhetorical conceptions of style differ from the aesthetic tradition that venerates authorial geniuses who devise representations with no concern for audience reception. In a rhetorical framework, it is precisely the care one has for one’s audience that indicates a rhetor’s integrity. Indeed, style is regarded as a kind of equipment in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term—a technology that offers a way to both acknowledge interpretive complexities and understand that one can purposefully attempt to use language to further sociability. One studies style not for the sake of art (or truth) but to be pragmatic—to determine how to use language to nurture a political sphere in which all agree that argument should replace war as a means of settling disagreements. A non-violent means of settling disputes will only work if all agree that the power of words should surpass that of physical violence. This perspective is bound by consent. It is, then, infused with rhetorical inconstancy. We might call its status fragile, if not precarious. Words are effective when all agree to the idea that a call to good argument is more authoritative than a call to arms. It is all too possible for citizens to change their minds and embrace war over argument as the right solution to a perceived threat. Consequently, when we talk about style in relationship to political legitimacy, the stakes are huge.
The conundrum imposed by narrative appears to be resolved via rhetoric’s pragmatic interest in getting things done—i.e., furthering robust debate, learning writing strategies that are stylistically effective. When style’s significance in rhetorical and composition studies is construed to be pragmatic it is, by implication, knowable, and what we think we know is that when rhetors think about how to style statements, they will become better communicators and, presumably, that knowledge will benefit the collective. This suggests that the validity of the civic-oriented study of style is itself demonstrable by looking at actual linguistic practices to see whether they accomplish the stated goal of furthering everyone’s chance to speak up and be heard. Democratic principles would seem to be actualized when all are invited to take part in life’s grand conversational give-and-take and when everyone has the same chances to invoke and respond to whatever is publicly displayed and subject to judgment. When all participate, many ideas will compete for public attention. Studies in rhetoric can effectively teach rhetors how to navigate an inclusionary discursive terrain to insure that one’s ideas will get noticed. Because debate is intrinsic to democratic culture, it is perfectly reasonable to teach people how to use styles effectively and avoid being cast out of the community to which one seeks to belong.
These premises will make sense if language is structured to allow everyone to access its force and knowingly channel it in civic-minded directions. If democratic equity infuses language’s very structure, then presumably, it may be tapped to oversee judgments of which language uses act sociably and which are uncommunicative. We should be able to understand the contours of deliberatory judgment and to put into practice ways of seeing and interpreting that are progressive, fair, subtle enough to contend with variance, general enough to be representative of a collective.
At this point, however, the authentic/pretense problem returns. We must still grapple with the enigmatic question of whether descriptions of interpretive processes tell us more than stories about how representations should be evaluated. Staking out competence means devising narratives that identify sanctioned repertoires of style. Narratives that place a premium upon rhetorical competency reinstall a binary logic to determine when competency makes an appearance. When it is absent, persuasive failure presumably follows. Stylistic markers of competency get treated as actualizations of the qualities that they would re-present, and, once so regarded, they appear to be necessary to accomplish the social purpose of constituting a democratic representational order that all can share and use at will. While rhetoricians acknowledge that cultural ideologies will influence judgments of issues, there has been less attention paid in rhetoric’s history