Burke’s rhetorical theorizing about style’s role in judgment is wonderfully complex and difficult to pin down, unlike the convention that treats style as a coherent and uniformly conceived resource for decisions about who speaks authoritatively and truthfully. Arguably, a more complex conception of style’s role in judgment is better suited for contending with what the impeachment arguments show—judgments that appear to be substantiated by solid interpretive methods can quickly dissolve into the illusory and ephemeral. We project motives onto speakers and those projections are only speculations. But they are of the kind that can have significant political consequences. Because political speech cannot escape the aesthetic and socially constructed dimensions of evaluative methods, an ethics of representation cannot eliminate the contributions of rhetorical strategizing.
When we invest in interpretive frameworks to substantiate judgments, we should not lose sight of the ways in which acts of judging begin with artifice. Judgments begin with narratives that imply acts of conversion (and translation) that cannot themselves be represented and that remain paradoxically imaginary and substantial. As we engage with styles that aim to signify motives and attitudes, we enter into a dynamic of symbolic action that, in Ned O’Gorman’s reading of Burke, does not work in a definitive and singular way but might instead be envisioned as traveling along a spectrum that moves between the sublime and the ridiculous. According to Burke,
Some vastness of magnitude, power, or distance, disproportionate to ourselves, is “sublime.” We recognize it with awe. We find it dangerous in its fascination. And we equip ourselves to confront it by piety, by stylistic medicine, and by structural assertion . . . The ridiculous, on the contrary, equips us by impiety, as we refuse to allow the threat [of] its authority: we rebel, and courageously play pranks when “acts of God” themselves are oppressing us (qtd. in O’Gorman 452).
O’Gorman builds upon this quote to describe a democratic style that embraces the “sublime-ridiculous” spectrum as a component part of political judgment, “a continuum” that, when embraced, “equips people, whether political leaders or everyday citizens, to move with agility across it. . . . Democracy encourages movement across this continuum by cultivating a strong, albeit somewhat paradoxical, sense among citizens that appearances and surfaces matter even as they are dispensable” (453). When attending to conceptions of democratic inquiry and judgment, keeping an eye on precisely the continuum of a paradoxical spectrum of potentialities offers one way of countermanding dominant scripts that too often “confuse difference with negation” (Panagia 60) in an effort to resolve what is paradoxical and replace it with a representative and narrativized postulate. When difference is conflated with negation, then it would seem that we must decide between two opposing options. Does the issue have substance or is it insignificant? Does a speaker’s use of words bring about the sublime or the ridiculous? Presumably, only one quality may be chosen at a time. But keeping an eye on the paradoxical spectrum of possibilities that inhabits acts of translation would forestall the drive to differentiate the potentially sublime utterance from that which is potentially ridiculous within a narrative that would appear to enact a resolution but would be only able to manage this stylistically rather than authentically.
Of course positing an interpretive framework that recognizes paradoxes and interpretive ambiguities offers precisely the kind of “opaque” approach to language that agitated impeachment proponents, who doubled down on issuing big pronouncements that would explain, justify, and clear a path for language’s sublime power to travel and propel meaning and significance to the forefront of deliberations. Congressional leaders explicitly and directly declared a commitment to exalted and immaculate standards of evaluation, as if making that point over and over would definitively prove that the cause of their actions was not, as put by Hyde, “the ravings of some vindictive political crusade but a reaffirmation of a set of values that are tarnished and dim these days.”20 Republican leaders delivered solemn testimonials that aimed to convince audiences of their somber devotion to a sacrosanct “rule of law,” as if such declarations would inspire citizens to take seriously the GOP’s stated concern about the nation’s welfare.
“We must remain blind to bias and other distractions when applying the law—no matter whether we are applying it to an average citizen or to the President of our country” stated U.S. Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) at the October 5 judiciary committee meeting. Three days later, at the meeting of the House, U.S. Rep Asa Hutchinson (R-AZ) concurred: “People say this is not Watergate. That’s true. Every case is different. But the rule of law and our obligation to it does not change.” So did U.S. Rep. Charles Canady (R-FL): “It is our solemn responsibility under the Constitution to . . . set an example that strengthens the authority of the laws and preserves the liberty with which we have been blessed as Americans.” And so did U.S. Rep (R-TX) Tom Delay: “Let history judge us as having done our duty to uphold the sacred rule of law.”21
The articulation of a desire to be in accordance with the law would appear to make that desire present and in the process prove that one’s motives are not only politically innocent but also concerned with issues that are substantial, indeed, vital to the nation’s future. A testimonial to the rule of law, if genuine, would presumably act as a rallying point for anyone who agrees to uphold law’s sacred rule. And yet, like the Impeachment articles, it was precisely the endeavor to explicitly demonstrate the authenticity of “virtuous” aims that undermined the credibility of the proclamations and rendered them, at least for some citizens, as signifiers of the ridiculous. The form rendered formulaic through citational repetition, converted into a command to be literal, became ideologically suspect. The paradoxical element of “positive” negativity within those testimonials inspired not affiliations but suspicions about the motives of those pushing for this drastic political outcome, and the stylistic repetition contributed to solidifying that sense. In this case, the very phrase “rule of law” took on an incantatory quality that communicated neither true devotion to an ethics of representation nor transparency but an act of impersonation, a kind of engagement that might be called “aesthetic” in a pejorative sense—a formalized, indeed mechanized, mode of participation that veered into the ritualistic. In this context, the phrase “aesthetic engagement” recalls Terry Eagleton’s definition—a kind of participation processed in accordance with its own internal logic, rendering only an appearance of having truly engaged with the issue put before the public about how to judge errant speech acts.22 Mere style, we might say. Pure bombast.
Here is where conceptions of style become especially complex because those conceptions will be derived from cultural narratives that teach what to look for when assessing the legitimacy of representational forms. To push O’Gorman’s point a bit further, besides envisioning judgments as traveling between a spectrum charting the sublime and the ridiculous, we need also to attend to the question of how to determine where to land. When we decide whether styles let us soar beyond the worldly or trap us in the matter of the mundane, our judgments of style’s effects will