Читать книгу Expel the Pretender - Eve Wiederhold - Страница 10

1 Authenticating the Liar

There is a curious exchange recorded in the October 5, 1998 transcripts of the House Judiciary Committee debate about whether to pursue the possibility of impeaching the forty-second President of the United States. Perhaps thirty minutes after the hearing opened, after six House members, mostly Democrats, spoke for or against the idea of officially investigating whether Bill Clinton perjured himself and obstructed justice, a speaker identified as “unknown” made the following point of order: “Mr. Speaker, this is a fairly important issue. It seems to me that if members are going to vote on it, the least they could do is be here in the chamber when it’s debated.” According to the transcripts, this statement generated a rousing round of applause.1

Arguably, this short statement encapsulates the strange atmosphere surrounding this “fairly important” historical event, its odd presence emblematic of the ways in which talk about impeaching Clinton strayed from idealized representations of conscientious deliberation. Ideally, any contentious issue is adjudicated through reasonable debate that facilitates evenhanded compromises. Public debate would seem to offer a clear method for generating the interpretive actions that could be called democratic, including reviewing what is at issue, finding facts, judging their value and significance, and from there, determining what should happen next.

The President of the United States was accused of committing an act of perjury. His job was on the line because many believed (or claimed to believe) that the nation’s chief representative had abandoned his authority to lead the nation once he broke the law by lying under oath. Given the seriousness of the accusations against the nation’s Commander in Chief, one might have expected a rousing discussion from critically informed political leaders weighing the evidence while patriotically contemplating the needs of the country. One might at least have expected a gathering of riveted participants and spectators acting as national witnesses, fighting for seats to behold an extraordinary and historically rare event. How strange, then, to read the transcripts and discover that someone found it necessary to scold his colleagues and urge them to engage in democratic inquiry’s most basic practice: pay attention.

Perhaps Congressional leaders had already given this issue a lot of thought. Impeachment arguments had been circulating for months, as had evidence to inform judgments about Clinton’s fate. But there was also a perception of partisanship overshadowing these deliberations. Many voters believed that House members had their minds made up before any formal debate ensued. To the skeptical, the impeachment proceedings seemed to be propelled by theatrical performances from Congressmen who engaged in an act of pretense—playing the role of concerned and inquiring national leaders while intending to cast a vote that conformed to party dogma. This is, in fact, what happened. On December 19, 1998, the vote to impeach on grounds of perjury was approved by a 228–206 vote and on the grounds of obstruction of justice by a 221–212 vote. Had the Democrats controlled the House, there would have been a different outcome.2

That result, along with the nameless comment recorded in the transcripts, is notable for encapsulating the problem the impeachment raised: how to distinguish appearances from reality, a problem that reverberated through every facet of this event. Was the discussion at those preliminary meetings for real? Organized as a true attempt to excavate a scene of high crimes and misdemeanors? Or, as opponents argued, was the impeachment a political stunt orchestrated by one political party to undermine the authority and credibility of the opposition? Indeed, the endeavor to differentiate appearances from reality implicated the very charges against the President who, many agreed, might have misrepresented facts when testifying, but did not commit a bona fide impeachable offense.

Contemporary critical theories (philosophical, feminist, rhetorical) have left us “spinning in ‘textuality’” (Pollock 114), unable, it would seem, to do much but observe that appearances and realities are theoretically indistinguishable. How this premise implicates political life has raised concern for those who are invested in the idea that standards of judgment exist and should be consulted by citizens facing contentious issues. Indeed, while the impeachment inquiry investigated a specific speech act delivered by a particular person, it also posed a general question about whether and how conceptions of political discourse should incorporate the perplexing idea that, as put by Della Pollock, “words don’t stick. They are `Janus-faced,’ `fickle,’ indifferent to discourses of truth and meaning” (114–15). If words don’t stick, then the very charge of perjury would seem to be impossible to prove. And with no standards to reference, we may be confounded about how to judge arguments that seem to be contrived. The question the impeachment raised is whether that all or nothing perspective is the only option available to us when we evaluate political controversies.

In this chapter, I argue that impeachment discourses staged two epistemological encounters. In one, the styles associated with representations of realism collided with those rhetorical elements that signify inconstancy and mercenary strategizing. The other staged an encounter between rhetoric’s “practical” aim to use language for desired ends and postmodern theorizing about language’s incapacity to be pinned down to meet desires. In both contact zones, rhetorical style had a central role to play but its status was paradoxically central and ambiguous. Because style’s influence on judgment is undertheorized in both conventional and theoretical conceptions of political debate, the point of public debate gets characterized as the endeavor to distinguish mere style from arguments of substance and through that process, identify what really matters, which will inevitably be the argument over the mode of delivery. Indeed, democratic deliberation itself could be described as the endeavor to distinguish the substantial and significant from the sham appearance, to take note of and dismiss the mechanistic production of stylized platitudes and contrived realities. The technologies of evaluation that appear to facilitate those practices would seem to be substantial themselves, giving us the tools we need to differentiate between reality, pretense, what has merit or may be ignored.

Such interpretive maneuvering, however, brings us back to the polemics intrinsic to any endeavor to determine what should matter. Because even as we might want to believe, in general, that public debate is a bona fide practice that truly enables democratic inquiry, we will be beset by the power struggles inscribed within any attempt to step “beyond” language when explaining how our interactions with language should organize our interpretive experiences, including that of judgment.

Given that the impeachment provoked anxieties about whether it was possible to know who was doing what with language, we can look to the discourses that circulated in 1998 to see how they exposed the limits of our ability to see beyond “mere” appearances when called upon to definitively render a verdict about whether any statement fails to exhibit commendable discursive obedience. Impeachment discourses explicitly addressed questions about how to differentiate false claims from true ones and how to determine if a given speech is genuine, as if that quality is itself identifiable and valuable. Public arguments relied upon dominant interpretive methodologies that work by preserving the binary that would distinguish the stylized political platitude from the statement of substance. But the question of authenticity proved to be an unctuous one. Rather than demonstrate that we have the capacity to see clear differences between substance and style, impeachment discourses ventured into a world of fun house mirrors and their myriad distortions.

This chapter explores the ways in which style is invoked within narratives about political judgment as a placeholder for a complex and ephemeral interpretive process whereby speculations about language’s persuasive power get transformed into judgments of the significance of any given representation put up for review. At the center of this work of translation is a narrative depicting style as a provocateur that indicates whether a given representation is acting responsibly. In effect, styles act as metaphors for conceptions of how we think language functions to facilitate communication itself. But when it comes to style, we tend to confuse the metaphorical with the real. To look at rhetorical style is not only to explore conceptions of how language acts to communicate, style’s study also reveals how cultural preferences for particular representational modes get sanctioned when we pretend that reigning interpretive technologies move us past the speculative to the authentic.

The Straight Path and the Spin

In 1998, Clinton faced several charges. He was accused of lying under oath when testifying in a prior case led by Paula Jones, who alleged that Clinton, when Governor of Arkansas, had sexually harassed her. The impeachment, however, did not address sexual misconduct but speech misconduct. At least that was the official distinction, but it soon became apparent that when arguing for Clinton’s removal, the two categories often blurred. Had the president perjured himself when he testified that he never had a sexual affair with another young woman, Monica Lewinsky? Clinton was also accused of obstructing justice by attempting to cover up their affair. A summary of Clinton’s linguistic infractions included, among other charges, that the President coached false testimony from witnesses speaking on his behalf; that he obtained gifts, then hid them once they were deemed to be evidentiary and subject to subpoena (hence a lie of omission); that he continued to lie about his liaison with Lewinsky in both public statements and to his staff, leading them to then give false testimony in subsequent legal proceedings; and that he bought Lewinsky’s silence by obtaining a job for her after convincing her to sign an affidavit in the Arkansas Federal Court that falsely testified to the status of their relationship.

Each of the charges linked criminal behavior to an act of representation, suggesting that methods are available to identify the kind of linguistic comportment that should be penalized. From the GOP perspective, there should have been no dispute at all. Perjury would seem to be a discernible crime, requiring a straightforward act of adjudication. Either a person lied under oath or did not. The evidence will be clear. This stance relies upon a conventional view of representation: that it involves an act of substitution in which words stand in for and hence re-present a prior, already established referent, imagined, for example, as a concept, a concrete phenomenon, a historical past. The work of representation means bringing the prior referent “to presence” within whatever symbolic medium one is using (speech, writing, film, etc.).

Hence, when testifying, the President took an oath to re-present the truth but instead made statements that misrepresented what really happened when he claimed that there was no sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And he repeated that same stance to the public once news of an investigation into his testimony became public. Of all of the memorable televised moments brought to us in 1998, many will likely recall that January 26 news conference during which Clinton stood, finger pointed, hand hitting the podium as he ardently denied the rumors that were circulating. “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinsky.” No ambiguity there, it would seem. His subsequent recanting of precisely that statement seemed to prove the GOP argument: The President’s initial representation of a historical past failed to match a prior reality and we had evidence of the disconnection.

But the attempt to pin down the fact of criminality and then the accompanying consequences remained as slippery as a wet bar of soap. The very arguments supporting impeachment equivocated when naming what was at issue, and incorporated reasons that addressed concerns other than the execution of a crime. Clinton’s punishment was necessary not only because he needed to pay for his actions but also because citizens needed to know that there are enforceable laws governing language practices. Impeachment proponents referenced a positivistic view of representation when they portrayed those laws as immutable and transcendent rather than as social constructions, and their concern about presidential misconduct was pitched as a moral concern about social order achieved through compliance with a representational code. All of which suggested that the real crime pertained to a realm well beyond the legal proceedings initiated by Paula Jones. At the February 1999 closed-door Senate Hearings on the Articles of Impeachment (subsequently published in the Congressional Record), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) explained that he was compelled to vote to convict Clinton because “the President would seek to win at any cost. If it meant lying to the American people. If it meant lying to his Cabinet. If it meant lying to a federal grand jury.” Conviction was necessary, he added, because “the road” the president “has traveled” was not straight but “twisted, tortured”—one that “forced the American people and their government to plod along—for what seems to many of us like an eternity.”3

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) voted guilty because “our President must be trustworthy—a truth teller whose life of principled leadership and integrity we can count upon.” Clinton “betrayed that trust” that must be believed “if we are to follow him. . . . His leadership has been betrayed because most Americans have come to the cynical conclusion that they must read between the lines of his statements and try to catch a glimmer of truth amidst the spin.”4

“The spin,” of course, is a code word for the rhetorical or that which stands in opposition to the disinterested, timeless, and transcendent. “The spin” is precisely the realm of the spurious and the fraudulent, inhabited by charlatans who claim to speak truly but instead use language to seduce and manipulate audiences to take up perspectives that go against their better judgment. The spin implicates representational styles that abuse power when they act to turn heads away from “hard” facts or “reason’s harsh light.” Accordingly, we should attempt to escape the spin of seduction and seek access to reason and truth by invoking discourses of realism. We should engage in the practice of representation that endeavors to separate the spin from the truth by deploying a style that connotes a purposeful ordering and presentation of signifiers meant to reflect a prior reality. We might call this kind of engagement Mimesis 101.

From this perspective, the abstract goal of “bringing truth to presence” will be achieved when rhetors insure that the signifier acts as a substitute for the reality that is not visible or no longer literally present, such as an abstract ideal (justice) or a historical event (a prior occasion of speech). The act of re-presentation appears to be accomplished when language users reference an invisible and yet discernible structural order that presumably exists to insure that the representational form journeys to where it should—out of the spin zone and back to truth’s domain. To follow a (straight) path to the real and authentic, language users should endeavor to correlate the originary referent with the signifier that would re-present it by crafting a proper correspondence. The straightforward and honest speaker is the one who clearly charts clear correspondences and chooses words that do not impede the audience’s perception of what a signifier represents.

This version of discursive responsibility implicates not only how to use language but also how to receive it. Audiences are expected to “take a hard look” at the represented object to determine if the words being used are in alignment with the source material. Such discernment involves acts of recognition characterized as re-cognition—a cognitive act that involves taking a careful look at an object of representation to see if the essence of truth has appeared along with the signifiers that represent a given premise. Once speakers create a proper correspondence between words and referents, then the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of language use fall away, dislodged by the weight of what is indispensably valid.

Visual metaphors underwrite this conceptual model. By directing audiences to search for truth’s nugget and to decry its absence, this interpretive methodology also promotes a hierarchy of values wherein a representation’s form is regarded as subservient to content and therefore not as significant as the referent that precedes it. (See Panagia 7). Audiences are on call to look past the surface style, especially when it is deceptively seductive, so as to assess whether the rhetor has engaged the right procedures and endeavored to establish discernible resemblances between signs and referents. Credibility is ascribed to speakers who seem to follow governing procedures while those who do not may be deemed reckless and negligent. The value system encoded within this apparatus seems to neutrally authorize the dismissal of those who do not engage representational properties as they should.

Such was the logic organizing the campaign to unseat the President, whose speech acts were maligned because they gave no evidence of even attempting to conjoin words with referents. The GOP stance conveyed all of the suspicions of representation expressed by Plato as House and Senate members sounded an alarm about the dangers of figural excess that presumably will be eliminated when all emulate correct representational practices. Clinton’s apparent indifference to a governing representational order needed to be curtailed because its threat implicated more than his ways with words. The public’s apparent indifference to his crimes was read as emblematic of a national crisis involving a general disregard both for procedural fealty and for having simple faith in truth’s omnipresence.

“What has been happening, not just here in Washington, but all around the country is something far more disturbing than the trial of a President,” stated Sen. Frank Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) at that Senate closed-door session that would determine if the nation’s choice for president would be upended. “What we have been witnessing is a contest for the very moral soul of the United States of America—and that the great casualty so far of the national scandal is the notion of Truth. Truth has been shown to us as an elastic commodity.” In another context, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) expressed the same concern. “There are some who seem to be saying that truth doesn’t matter.” When voting to impeach Clinton, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) described the issue as being not about “the relation that Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky, but rather the credibility and the honor under oath that must exist within the institution of the presidency, and which has been squandered by the current occupant of this high office. There are absolute applicable standards by which we all must live. If we do not live up to those standards, we will no longer be that nation which stands as a beacon of hope for all the world.”5

It should be noted that a realist conception of representation is not party affiliated. The idea that modes of expression should deliver truth and reality in a straight way is one of those commonplaces that structure basic conceptions of language use in U.S. culture. Contemporary representations of political issues within media representations, for example, regularly draw upon the idea that there is a mode of speech that can be characterized as “straight” and because straight, effective and honorable. “Straight Talk Wins Votes in Wisconsin” ran a headline in U.S. News and World Reports three weeks before the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.6 On the other hand, it is also true that the GOP has crafted a party identity that is wedded to a preferred style of speech called “straight talk”—the kind that seems to be most invested in delivering “the hard facts” to audiences. “Sign up for Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk” declares the Congressman’s official website, which, in issuing this invitation, links Paul’s identity to his mode of delivery. Similar qualities are attributed to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who, according to CNN, was expected to deliver at the 2012 Republican Convention a “straight-talk speech that Republicans have come to expect from the straight-talking Christie.” “Laura Bush Delivers Feisty GOP Straight Talk” ran a 2008 People Magazine story favorable to the first lady at a time when her husband’s White House tenure was largely ridiculed.7

Presumably, unlike Clinton, the straight talker has nothing to hide. Emboldened by the courage of his convictions, he expresses ideas without pandering and without fearing the backlash that his perspective might generate. Clinton’s unwillingness to get his words straight not only refused to engage virtuous mimicry, many believed that he purposely twisted words in a resolute attempt to mislead citizens with statements that gave the appearance of being forthright while only pretending to do so. As put by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and panelist on ABC’s “This Week”:

Bill Clinton has acted for the past year on his deepest beliefs: that law is merely politics, that the truth is merely spin, that an oath is merely rhetoric, that justice is merely power. These doctrines are deeply corrosive of free government. They corrupt us and degrade our constitutional order in a profound way. This fundamental disdain for his presidential oath is Bill Clinton’s highest crime and misdemeanor. And the remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors is impeachment.8

According to Dallas Morning News commentator Richard Estrada, “Like Nixon, Clinton is his own worst enemy. He is an equal opportunity bully, smirking at political enemies and the victims of his personal whims. He may survive the latest threat to his political life, but his reputation will not survive his diminishment of his presidency, nor his hubris.”9

The idea that speakers should be punished for misrepresenting reality is not unique to the events of 1998. Here we can take a cue from Scott Durham who notes that historically, many cultures have devised narratives about ideal speakers and a corresponding injunction against those who claim to enact a cultural ideal but only pretend to do so. Indeed, the idea that democratic life demands a kind of vigilance that will unmask charlatans has been deemed so vital to maintaining social order that punishments have been devised within Western philosophical traditions for those who fail to demonstrate a commitment to establishing resemblances between speech and Truth. Durham’s observations about this dynamic are worth quoting at length:

In the metaphysical and theological traditions, the appeal to narrative is made by the philosopher or ‘truthful man,’ whose attempt to grasp the ‘beyond’ of the image is formulated as a problem of passing judgment on the image as a truthful or deceptive representation, which either reaffirms or subverts the founding truths of the prevailing order of things. Does the lineage of the image participate in the essence of the original or is it merely a sophistic counterfeit or a demonic usurper? Does it lead us back to our foundation in the Good and the True or does it cause us to lose ourselves in error and perversity? (19).

Media reports circulating in 1998 often expressed exactly the concerns outlined by Durham, including the following op-ed that ran in the Philadelphia Enquirer:

Doublespeak, particularly of the political and legal kind, of the Clinton kind, is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is the product of clear, calculated thought, intended from the outset to control and pervert reality. It is language that avoids or shifts responsibility and undermines honest public debate. It is an oppressive form of communication that ultimately confines our thought and suffocates our ability to express ourselves freely. It breeds suspicion, distrust, cynicism and ultimately hostility.10

The remedy to the threat of perversion: expulsion. Expel the pretender—the one who promises to speak truly but instead steers listeners away from truth’s domain (Durham 19). Expel those who fail to adopt proper purposes and banish the desire to engage in language practices that forsake the honorable and principled. “Most officers of my acquaintance would have resigned their commission had they been discovered violating their oath,” declared Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) during the Senate debate that followed the House impeachment. “The President did not choose this course of action. . . . As much as I would like to, I cannot join in his acquittal.”11

The act of expulsion attempts to make the problem of representational indeterminacy disappear by doling out punishments to those who fail to demonstrate that they have endeavored to secure the “lineage of the copy” (Durham 19) and through that process, take part in a ruling interpretive order that guarantees that distinctions between meritorious and abusive speech will be unambiguously maintained. But while GOP arguments rested upon the idea that an a priori representational order (or self-evident logic) prefigures any cultural production and should govern how language is used, in the wake of poststructuralist challenges to the metaphysics of presence, questions arise about how to distinguish the existent a priori from the cultural signifiers people invent to describe representational action. Interpretive technologies are also representations and the processes they delineate are linguistic descriptions that function like any other discourse that is historically situated and socially sanctioned. And because discourse cannot escape the social, meanings are not conveyed via a straightforward lineage but when words are positioned within rhetorical contexts and in relationship to other socially sanctioned terms. The technologies we use to enact interpretive processes are fully mired in these complex acts of positioning, unable to stage an act of independence that would separate representational forms from their meanings. This principle applies to all of those words that seem to have self-evident content—logic, reason, straight talk. The content of such terms cannot be categorically distinguished from the signifiers that would give that content expression.

With no ability to escape narrative, all methods of interpretation engage acts of translation. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard has observed, a problem of translation will be raised whenever we communicate because the attempt to delineate what a given representation has conveyed will not encounter a question about truth’s appearance but a question about how to perceive where we think a given representation aims. Is the representation attempting to re-present truth or only pretending to or perhaps aiming somewhere else entirely? Baudrillard’s attention to perpetual translation underscores a critical caveat within the narratives that engage metaphors of vision to describe interpretive labor. Even Plato maintained that language is incapable of displaying truth’s raw essence. True visions of truth are only available to the gods. Since humans cannot discern whether truth’s essence is present, when they judge, they assess whether it seems that an interlocutor’s language use has attempted to mimic a priori forms. (On this point, see Panagia and Durham.) In other words, when we assess a representational aim, we “look at” that which remains stubbornly invisible—an attempt at a kind of participation that would align with the divine realm that is unavailable for human review. We’re at least three steps removed from any straightforward vision of truth’s presentation. Hence, when gauging ethical comportment, we can only evaluate what cannot be seen: whether a rhetor harbors a goal of being true to the idea that one should attempt to convey what is genuine and authentic.

Baudrillard’s use of simulacra calls attention to this knotted but crucial caveat. Because interpretive methodologies cannot definitively locate truth’s presence, procedures overseeing judgments about whose speech aims in the right direction are based upon speculations, not facts. “Simulacra” confound orders of representation by introducing the possibility that pretense—the fake show of obedience to an order of representation—will be mistaken for a genuine act. And they introduce the further possibility that the lineage of the copy should not be automatically esteemed. The term simulacrum identifies symbolic constructs/representational modes that forego the demands of Platonic mimesis by making no claims to a domain beyond interpretive mediation. The simulating action that produces linguistic signs and visual artifacts need not ascribe value or ethics to the endeavor to mirror truth. Simulacra implicate style because the putative abandonment of any attempt to retrieve the “true referent” would seem to empty the signifier of content, leaving only a formal appearance that does not engage with the ideal but offers only an imitation of bona fide act of engagement. Simulacra could potentially mean anything.

When cultures embrace simulacra as valid linguistic signs, they reorder the value system that would determine which language practices matter. In contexts in which simulacra circulate, no premium is placed on the attempted act to re-present reality and the referent is not given priority over the signifier that would represent it. The speech that heads back to truth is not preferred to the one that spins. Rather, all representational endeavors are equally regarded no matter what direction they take. Baudrillard maintains that a problem of translation arises when people fail to see the difference between the evaluative equity implicated by the production of simulacra and the order of evaluation imposed by the conventional work of distinguishing categorical differences between the true, the false, the real, the imaginary. Further, because simulacra look like genuine signs of truth, they can fool us. They will feign the requisite work of mimicking a higher order but offer a mere appearance, a thin surface rather than a core essence.

Baudrillard advises caution: Through the power of simulacra, we risk privileging artificiality over reality. We live at a cultural moment that has been influenced by the lessons of postmodernism and that embraces hyperreality as a component part of any communicative context. He argues that we are in danger of preferring representations that are pure contrivances, relying upon them as points of reference informing conceptions of what has value and significance. Letting go of the ability to make truth claims threatens to render systems of interpretation “weightless” (Simulations 10).

The GOP’s fear about the nation’s “soul” veering away from truth could be characterized as expressing a similar concern. On the other hand, to many of us watching the impeachment spectacle, the endeavor to punish the President for an illicit speech act enacted the very problem of pretense that GOP leaders claimed to fear, leaving us once again spinning in textuality.

The Reality and the Charade

I have been arguing that GOP arguments about the need to trust in the absolute authority of the law conflated a culturally produced social practice with a transcendent order that presumably oversees and guides how human beings respond to representations of ideas and events. On one level, such arguments remain persuasive because the idea that all should abide by the law is, after all, critically significant to the functioning of democratic life. Perjury is a serious offense and should be punished. We need to be able to count upon the idea that testimony given in a legal setting should be as faithful to the truth as possible. Further, the rule of law, in general, should be sacrosanct if we care about preventing despotism.

But when the concepts of governance and obedience were incorporated into public arguments in 1998, the idea that the law’s authority should absolutely and resolutely govern both the production of speech and audience reception not only failed to persuade a majority, the dedicated support for this way of perceiving issues cost the Republican party five seats in the House during the 1998 mid-term elections. As noted by political scientist Gary Jacobson, it was “only the second [time] since the Civil War that a president’s party has increased its share of seats in a mid-term election” (21).12 Many perceived pro-impeachment arguments to be empty, overwrought, “just” rhetoric, mere pretense, and hence dismissible.

As debates circulated in 1998 about the significance of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, GOP leaders had to convince audiences that they were sincerely raising a question about whether Clinton should be impeached. To appear to conduct a genuine inquiry, lawmakers gathered to talk things over, but because views about what was at issue were sharply divided along party lines, precisely how to organize discussion in the proceedings became bogged down in controversy itself. Congressional leaders endeavored to devise terms to name interpretive procedures that presumably would keep the question of impeachment open rather than rationalize a predetermined verdict. A language was needed that could clearly describe interpretive practices that truly enacted inquiry. Presumably, during the October meetings that took up the question of how to stage an impeachment inquiry, House members would be able to skirt the problem of simulacra by proposing deliberative procedures that would establish something akin to “best practices.” (Or, to put this in the language of mimesis, any speaker’s description of how to evaluate the meaning and significance of the evidence to impeach would correspond to that speaker’s actual conception of how representational processes work to facilitate a genuine inquiry within a legal proceeding.)

Debates in 1998, however, demonstrated precisely the inverse—that languages about procedures did not neutrally transmit uncontroversial depictions of evaluative practices. Once the House Judiciary Committee voted (21–16) to pursue an inquiry into the question of impeachment (Oct. 5, 1998), the House as a whole met to address the question of whether to approve the Judiciary Committee findings. Disagreements followed as Congressional leaders found themselves not only arguing about how to regard Clinton’s speech acts, but also about how to determine a method for exploring the question of whether criminality had made an appearance.

Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) opened that judiciary committee meeting with a statement that attempted to set parameters:

We have another ideal here: to attain justice through the rule of law. . . . And so here today, having received the referral and 17 cartons of supportive material from the Independent Counsel, the question asks itself: Shall we look further or shall we look away? I respectfully suggest we must look further by voting for this resolution and thus commencing an inquiry into whether or not the president has committed impeachable acts. We don’t make any judgments. We don’t make any charges. We simply begin a search for the truth.13

On the face of it, this statement might sound reasonable, if not rudimentary. If objectivity is obtainable, then we all might agree that the October meetings were, indeed, quite directly about establishing procedures and not about determining who was engaged in this historic event just for show. Hyde’s opening statement attempted to avoid that thicket of ambiguity by clearly describing the situation at hand. Ostensibly, facts about the alleged crime had been collected and were available for review. At least sixty thousand pages of evidence had been produced by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to demonstrate that a crime had been committed. The evidence, meanwhile, was treated as a re-presentation of a “fact-finding” mission, delivered in narrative form, presumably neutral, presumably reasonable and hence devoid of any language uses that would persuade audiences to adopt a particular view of what the facts meant. When considering whether they were compelled to look at that evidence in the first place, Congressmen advocating an inquiry responded: Of course. How could a responsible inquiry move ahead but by taking a look at the evidence collected?

We might, then, expect few to disagree with the seemingly reasonable response from U.S. Rep Tom Delay (R-TX) about why legislators should always take a look at the possibility that a political leader has engaged in criminal activity: “Closing our eyes to allegations of wrongdoing by voting no or by limiting the scope or time constitutes a breach of our responsibilities as members of this house.”14

When proposing to take an objective look at the facts, both Hyde and Delay invoked what might be described as a scientific model of deliberation that envisions inquiry as objective and guided by an empiricist process in which a search for facts is made possible because “facts speak for themselves.” This version of realist discourse implicates style in that it maintains that forms of representation should facilitate the endeavor to both engage responsible deliberatory practices and signal one’s true intentions to others. The words we use to name this kind of engagement describe actions such as categorization, differentiation, logical clarification. These words tend to be read not as words but as clear descriptors of bona fide actions that correspond exactly to what is named—scrutinizing, clarifying, ordering, establishing causal links between various points of a perspective. Typically, the realist strategy is not read as a strategy but as the means for conveying and activating a rational process that makes it possible to obtain the objective overview the critical thinker is expected to take.

The practices that appear to actualize rational procedures of deliberation draw upon the same scopic paradigm (see Martin Jay) that invokes a metaphor of vision to depict political judgment as an act of critical scrutiny. Impeachment advocates were able to summon this paradigm because it is a familiar one with a long and venerable history that, according to Davide Panagia, extends from the writings of Thomas Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham to the contemporary theories of Jürgen Habermas, whose ethic of communication calls for open debate that enables interlocutors to mutually recognize and validate the most reasonable premise. The organizing logic conflates democratic practices with public scrutiny and affirms the validity of the mimetic act of “presencing” while rendering its reception as tantamount to deliberation’s very character. Once this narrative depiction is referenced as a real descriptor of deliberatory practices, then it will seem both logical and ethical to expect that language users should put forth acts of representation that facilitate a straight forward review.

But rather than prove that the language of empiricism is available to buttress deliberatory processes, the October meetings demonstrated that proclaiming a desire for representational order will not necessarily instigate it. Disagreements arose about every aspect of the inquiry in ways that implicated the role of narrative in establishing visions of what actually constitutes critical scrutiny. When Republican members effectively said, “yes, let’s look at this,” Democrats responded, “at what?” and “for how long?” As summed up by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): “The chairman said we shouldn’t look away, we should look further. I agree. What we shouldn’t do, however, is adopt a resolution that says, ‘let’s look around. Let’s see what we can find.’”15

Democrats who did not want to pursue an inquiry at all—those who felt that the calls for impeachment were a charade—raised objections to Republican methods of obtaining and processing evidence. They posed questions that, initially, seemed to be straightforwardly procedural: How much time to devote to deliberation? What evidence should be examined to insure that a look at facts took precedence over innuendo? But even these seemingly simple questions encountered the problem of translation that accompanies the endeavor to distinguish style from substance. Rather than generate an unassailable linkage between a narrative describing an ideal inquiry and an actualization of that ideal, the October debates about whether to even consider the option of impeachment revealed a fundamental inability to demonstrate that words connect to practices in ways that would enable the spectator to ascertain differences between the fake and the true. How, for example, to represent and bring to full presence the intangible and fluid experience of deliberating? What to do to insure that legislators were truly engaged in the labor of thinking and not delivering preformed stylized performances?

When, for example, Hyde opened the meeting of the House and mentioned that thousands of pages from investigating attorneys had been made available for review, he suggested that the pages themselves should be regarded as an unprejudiced object of scrutiny. But many had doubts about the impartiality of that evidence and what it represented. The objectivity of the Special Prosecutor who collected “the facts” was also rendered suspicious, and that sense implicated feelings about whether a straightforward look at the evidence would instigate an unbiased review. Further, the question about how much time to give to debate posed a secondary question of whether we can know, for sure, whose look has been critically engaged rather than cursory—the mere show that aimed to validate a foregone conclusion. How to tell the difference between the look that would truly deliberate from that which only appeared to do so?

The suspicions of Democratic congressional leaders about the legitimacy of the inquiry were articulated by U.S. Rep William Delahunt (D-MA), who, at the House debate about the impeachment inquiry, objected to the restrictions being placed upon the kind of deliberation that was to take place:

I’m aware of the fact that there is a limited time for this debate. I think that is indeed unfortunate, because I was going on to talk about how we have abdicated our constitutional duties to an unelected prosecutor; how we have released thousands of pages that none of us in good conscience can say that we’ve read; how we’ve violated the sanctity of the grand jury so that we can arrive here today to launch an inquiry without an independent adequate review of the allegations by this body, which is our constitutional mandate. . . . That’s not a process, Mr. Speaker; it’s a blank check. That’s what I was going to talk about. But out of deference to others that want to speak, I will conclude by saying that one hour to begin only the third impeachment inquiry in U.S. history is a travesty, and a disgrace for this institution.

This was followed by applause.

Hyde’s reply:

I just want the record to be clear. My good friend Mr. Delahunt talked about 60,000 pages that were released that weren’t reviewed or looked at. I want him to know and I want everyone listening to know every single page of anything that was released was reviewed and things that weren’t released were reviewed by our staff. . . . Six (Democrats) never came over to see the material. On the Republican side . . . every member came over to look at the material.16

The actions undertaken in this House inquiry had all of the hallmarks of fairness and yet, from Delahunt’s perspective, what they produced was precisely the opposite—a rush to judgment. The implication here is significant because of what we may extrapolate from it: that the very procedures that seem to demarcate and generate a responsible and ethical democratic process can instead instigate an abuse of power. Indeed, rather than prove that due deliberation should be configured with reference to a mimetic theory of correspondences, the October meetings raised ethical questions about whether to connect Congressional deliberatory practices to the languages that would describe them. Doubts about such connections implicate how to apprehend the relationship between narrative, experience and discourses of authenticity. Do the languages that would represent acts of deliberation adequately and accurately portray a just (and repeatable) political process? If connections between discursivity and event remain tangled and elusive, then an action does not necessarily indicate a “doing” that correlates with a narrative depiction. Not all acts of looking will realize the ideal of fairness or constitute proper attentiveness. And if concrete practices cannot be fully or precisely described, there are narrative gaps within any judgment of whether a practice such as deliberation has made an appearance. How to fill in those gaps is precisely the ethical question.

Hyde’s response effectively avoided any consideration of ethics and representational ambiguity and instead asserted an automatic linkage between looking and testimonials to practicing diligence. The review of the sixty thousand collected pages was presented as concrete evidence of an intangible quality that might be called “thoroughness.” In proclaiming that members of his party had taken a look at the evidence, Hyde delineated a specific technology that promised to transform what some had called a “partisan witch hunt” into a model of judicious review. In effect, he suggested that the act of looking itself inaugurates an ethical stance, and that the presence of an amorphous concept such as deliberation will be demonstrated via a testimonial about its importance. Hence the very phrase “due deliberation” would seem to designate in a straightforward way the ethical actions practiced under its name. Presumably, not only will the facts be discernible and recognizable to spectators, so will the methods deployed to engineer their unbiased review. The style used to designate fidelity to the representational processes depicting facts would seem to be of little significance.

It is important to consider how this model is referenced regularly within political debates as if it does indeed offer a neutral means for adjudicating differences in perspective and as if audiences do follow a neutral order when judging about which positions have substance. The discursive conventions associated with rational argumentation seem to make it possible to cut through stylistic excess and retrieve what is essential about core issues and to deploy truth’s harsh light to excavate what exists, no matter how disturbing or ugly. And, presumably, when language is stripped of its excesses, we should be able to notice when substance is missing. But it is also possible to read those conventions as conventional, a portal to instrumental thinking that gives the appearance of bona fide engagement while instantiating the mechanistic repetition of practices devoid of scrutiny that might be called critical.

Delahunt’s statement registers the difficulty of knowing whose use of language is, indeed, practicing due diligence. If it is possible to regard the very claims of fairness as an abuse of power, then we may question whether to automatically place a higher premium on the discursive practices that claim to aim towards truth’s revelation. In effect, discourses about the impeachment asked citizens to determine whether having faith in language’s ability to convey truth neutrally should underwrite the nation’s representational agenda.

Idiosyncratic Action

Once the President’s use of language was targeted for critique, it became paramount for the GOP to exhibit a mode of representation that did not dissemble and that instead fulfilled moral obligations to be true. One notable attempt to illustrate what “straight talk” looked like could be found in the Articles of Impeachment, the legal document that officially represented what was at issue and in so doing, promised to provide a clear demonstration of how argumentation is structured by correspondences between signs and referents. There were four articles, but I will cite only Article One:

In his conduct while President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process of the United States for his personal gain and exoneration, impeding the administration of justice, in that: On August 17, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a Federal grand jury of the United States. Contrary to that oath, William Jefferson Clinton willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning: (1) the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate government employee; (2) prior perjurious, false and misleading testimony he gave in a Federal civil rights action brought against him; (3) prior false and misleading statements he allowed his attorney to make to a Federal judge in that civil rights action; and (4) his corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence in that civil rights action. In doing this, William Jefferson Clinton has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, William Jefferson Clinton, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.17

Ostensibly, the Articles of Impeachment offered a legal representation that straightforwardly delineated the charges and their reasoned justifications. But like much of the discourse involved in this event, the very language in these documents seemed noticeable. Rather than solidify a sense that a crime had been committed, the Articles renewed doubts, at least for some citizens, about whether this issue deserved attention at all. Indeed, rather than provoke recognition of a severe crime, the legal language highlighted the difference between narrated descriptions and lived perceptions of Clinton’s behavior. Humiliating? Yes. Disgraceful? To adherents of a particular version of propriety, yes. But was a lie about a sexual liaison equal to a violation to protect The Constitution? Should a refusal to fully cooperate in an inquiry about one’s sexual dalliances be represented as an “obstruction of justice”? To some, Clinton’s responses to the grand jury in the Paula Jones case had to be measured against the dubious merit of that proceeding. If Clinton did lie (fudge?) about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, then was that a crime at all? A high crime?

Arguably, the Articles of Impeachment failed to enact a logic of substitutions. For many readers of House Resolution 611, the words did not seem to correspond with the deeds being described. Nor did they seem to retrieve and bring forth any esteemed abstract qualities such as a higher order of reason. Indeed, one could make the case that the verbs in the Articles seemed to be stylistically excessive, even hyperbolic, and hence dismissible for failing to execute a systematic and neutral method that allowed for the identification of the issues and their importance. And if legal language—that which promises objectivity and equity—can seem excessive, then what does that suggest about the prospect of formalizing abstract conceptions of how to think in other, less narrowly defined contexts?

The Articles exposed a rift between the generalized narrative that depicts democratic inquiry as an act of scrutiny and the specific material practice of scrutiny exercised in this particular case. Many citizens may have wondered about whether this was the kind of look that vigilant citizens should be expected to take when inspecting the comportment of their national leaders. When puzzling that out, they encountered the textual limits to acts of translation, where the implicit rational order arranged through narrative encounters the potentially unwieldy experience of human interpretation. In rejecting the claims of neutrality by those who wrote up the formal charges, there was a simultaneous refusal to see a straightforward connection between the legal language used to name this issue and give it visibility and the enactment of justice.

A number of polls suggested that voters instead read the drive to impeach as political theatre. Immediately following the December, 1998 vote to impeach, pollsters endeavored to register the mood of the citizenry and found expressions of discontent. As put by a headline in USA Today: “Public Likes Clinton More, GOP less in Wake of the Vote.” The article cited a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll that showed “public support for Clinton jumped to a personal high of 73 percent” and that “fewer than one in three has a favorable view of the GOP, its lowest since 1992.” Other polls concurred. A CBS-New York Times poll taken after the vote to impeach found that sixty-six percent of those polled said that Clinton should not resign; thirty-one percent said that he should. In an NBC poll, seventy-two percent of respondents approved of the job Clinton was doing, while twenty-five percent disapproved. Sixty-two percent maintained that Clinton should complete his term, a number that had risen eleven points from the previous Tuesday.18

Because the charges were not demonstrably valid, they appeared to be baseless and hence the case itself was “logically” dismissed. This, of course, was a relief to those of us who viewed this event as a journey into the land of the surreal. But that response did not contend with the problems of representation that impeachment discourses otherwise raised. Embedded within purported explorations of “the facts” of criminality was a speculative question about how discursive practices manifest intangible qualities such as guilt. Arguably, the possibility that ambiguities are embedded within speculations about how language communicates meaning was exactly the point of contention within impeachment debates. Any exploration into the guilt or innocence of a person charged with lying under oath raises a philosophically opaque conundrum about whether it is ever possible to tell the difference between “the spin” and its presumed opposite.

Given that the vote to impeach Clinton was rejected because, to those polled, the charges seemed to be excessive, then it is possible to conclude that style plays a formidable role in determining representational legitimacy. Rather than clarify why Clinton deserved to be impeached for an aberrant act of speech, arguments that called for straight talk instead illustrated that a strange doubling accompanied public discussions about crime and representation. The strange part included the sense that a principle of negativity permeated the presentation of the issues, wherein the style of pro-impeachment arguments promising to deliver straight talk seemed instead to call out its absence. Every attempt to establish an indisputable “reality” about Clinton’s criminal activity or the authenticity of the impeachment inquiry itself veered into what might be called the gestural, theatrical, and aesthetic aspects of political discourse. Warnings about the dangers of Clinton’s linguistic impropriety simultaneously registered a query about how to read the language use of those making the accusations. Indeed the very style of those claims contributed to their rejection.

After the impeachment effort failed, for example, Hyde repeated the idea that impeachment proponents were motivated by a noble desire to uphold standards, and this time referenced history when defending his actions in a Chicago Tribune editorial:

The impeachment . . . was not a political struggle . . . but a historic constitutional test. A bedrock principle of democracy, first formulated by our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition in the Magna Carta, was a stake: the principle that no person is above the law. Birth, wealth and social position do not put someone above the law. Neither does public office. . . . This was a constitutional test of whether the United States government remains a government of laws, not of men.19

This kind of pronouncement, one that aimed to seamlessly organize political life by connecting past to future, instead called attention to itself via the attempt to craft an equitable correspondence between this sorry event and that awe-inspiring document from a historical past that stands as an emblem of human progress toward shared governance and individual freedom. Indeed, this was exactly the kind of comparison that was regarded (by that apparent majority) as violating the correspondence theory that seeks resemblances between terminologies and the ideas words would represent. By formulating dissonant linkages, Hyde’s commentary became stylistically noticeable for its overreach rather than for his argument’s ability to nail a point of view and demonstrate how straight talk ought to appear. Once a representational mode becomes noticeable, then how to situate it within the organizing logic of substitutions is not immediately apparent.

But rather than mull over this conundrum, we tend to consign such stylistic dissonances to the realm of the unpersuasive and dismissible. This outcome is a byproduct of the value system that prioritizes the delivery of substantial content by characterizing style as a surface feature of language, its concerns relatively meager and insubstantial, both qualitatively different from information and knowledge and potentially an impediment to their apprehension. We are expected to uphold the idea that rhetorical styles should be invoked to guard citizens against “two kinds of corruptions—vagueness and artificiality” (McCrimmon 6) that indicate that the rhetor has “settled for a superficial view” (6). Typically, after deciding that a given style, like that of Hyde’s, is “artificial,” we draw upon such perceptions to determine what happens next, which usually means losing interest rather than deliberating about how styles affect evaluations of an utterance’s content and significance.

How to theorize style’s role within acts of persuasion is a question that rhetoricians have puzzled over since antiquity and found difficult to answer. As Edward P.J. Corbett observed, style is a “vague concept” that we think we grasp but then find impossible to encapsulate within neatly sorted descriptions. To characterize style, we often borrow familiar descriptors such as “‘lucid,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘labored,’ ‘Latinate,’ ‘turgid’ or flowing” (209). Or, as phrased within impeachment discourses, “plain” and “honest.” Our conceptions of style, Corbett concludes, include “a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). When idiosyncrasy and convention blend, then a question is raised about the purpose of stylistic standards and whether their application helps to identify what a style is and does. Styles may be identifiable when discursive protocols are followed, but the effects (or consequences) of re-presenting forms of representation are not. Styles are present. They are material embodiments of ways of seeing that can carry forceful persuasive effects by provoking our senses. But what a given style conveys is conspicuously (and perhaps tortuously) ambiguous. Meanwhile, because that curious blend between the idiosyncratic and the conventional cannot be standardized to guarantee interpretive results, it contributes to the contemporary tendency to downplay style’s role in political judgment.

But as we move from apprehension to dismissal, we are apt to lose sight of a critical moment of interpretive conversion. Style’s role in judgment is minimized when meaning and significance get ascribed to entities that appear to have substance. This apparent order of cause and effect offers another occasion for considering how interpretation engages acts of translation. Our encounters with the domain of “the substantial” would seem to require no translation at all, as substance would seem to be self-evidently present, unambiguously noticeable, forging a clear and direct relationship between the signifier of substance and its substantial quality. The judgments we make about what has substance seem to be organized by the terminology we’ve devised to designate that quality, while the possibilities for identifying what has substance seem to rely upon the procedural—a neutrally deployed process that constitutes the experience of feeling (knowing) what has weight.

Arguably, this tidy model is packaged for easy consumption, but it overlooks component parts of interpretive technologies that are significant yet impossible to substantiate. Elizabeth Grosz explores one example of the ways in which an insubstantial significance inheres within conceptions of narrative’s relationship to interpretation in an article that considers whether the discourses of philosophy and those of architecture can speak to each other in discussions that consider how to conceive of space. There are radical differences between these discourses. One aims to design material objects that will inhabit a physical landscape while the other imagines the mind as an object, a landscape that may be mapped, traveled upon, situated, and occupied. We draw connections between these two discourses as if their associations are automatic, but any correlation will be conceptual only. Any (virtual) comparison will contain unanswerable questions about whether concepts have inherent relationships to reality and whether the virtual ever gets converted into the actual. If a shared conceptual space can be forged between these disparate discourses, its status will be tentative, perpetually unsettled and not hospitable to clearly enunciated indications of what is shared.

The tentativeness of any formulation about what these divergent discourses share calls attention to a dynamic of conversion within the interpretive processes that enable a proposed possibility to be treated as an actuality. In tracing what that conversion entails, Grosz contemplates the significance of the time of translation that seems to establish its own substantial dimension occupied by mental processes that get activated as an aspect of contemplation. This time/space is ephemeral as well as multifaceted. It involves (at least) the time of “before” that encapsulates preconceived notions, the time in which thought emerges, takes note of, assesses, etc., and the time of deliberation wherein we consider whether an object of representation has merit, significance, gravitas.

I bring up Grosz’s argument because it foregrounds an aspect of interpretive action that tends to go unnoticed. In the context of political disputes, the dynamic of time also includes the time it takes for an apprehension of a particular material/stylized marker to emerge into a judgment of its quality and significance. Within that time of transition, the ephemeral potentiality of a style to mean any number of things will be converted into a narrative declaring its actual significance (whether it is classified as idiosyncratic, conventional, helpful, an obstruction, etc.). These judgments occur in the time of “retrospect”—when we appear to look back at a prior (preconceived) order of meaning to determine the significance of any signifier made anew. The endless possibilities of meanings that might be derived from style’s idiosyncratic features get domesticated within interpretive orders that look for stylistic conformity in order to put forth a narrative about standards. In that particular time of conversion, we will likely forget those other potential meanings, especially when we are encouraged to connect the act of finding meaning with that of being ethical. We will also likely forget what occurred during the interval of time between the possible and the actual, “an interval that refuses self-identity and self-presence to any thing, any existent. This interval, neither clearly space nor time but a kind of leakage between the two, the passage of one into the other” (Grosz, “Future of Space”) will be forgotten once the final judgment takes hold and becomes the point of reference in subsequent narratives about the judging event. Within that realm of leakage between space, time, and judgment, we undertake acts of translation that then inform the decisions we make about whether a given style fits the occasion of its use, decisions that are perhaps flitting and transitory, but remain radically consequential to estimations of what seems to exist.

Judgments of what exists (such as whether legal language identifies just causes for impeachment) engage an aesthetic dynamic wherein narratives appear to correspond to experiences of deliberatory processes only when we overlook what cannot be represented—the very act of converting an apprehension into a resolution. Such conversions entail drawing connections between diversified discursive elements and then neglecting to consider the stylistic strategies that get deployed to enable them to appear to connect to judgments of meaning. Arguably, we do not consider how that time of conversion influences judgments of what exists because of the tendency to conflate the act of naming an interpretive result with the act of apprehending its significance. Rather than remember that narratives have contributed to how we convert the possible to the actual, we instead align an idea of actualization with an idea of “being substantial,” and then attach that conceptual connection to specific representational forms that we have learned to regard as having substance. In the process, style’s specific contribution to how potential meanings get channeled into resolute judgments of what has merit or fails to carry weight disappears. Indeed, we mostly ignore the particular ways in which our sense of what has substance emerges partly because we are prone to look for “the substantial” and overlook all that will not settle into any recognizable form —time, the action of conversion, style’s potential and ineffable ability to affect our senses.

The thicket of debate that arose in the 1998 impeachment proceedings demonstrates that taken-for-granted conceptions of deliberative time did not work in conclusive ways to clarify what was at issue and how it should be addressed. The question of who was doing what with language created numerous messy entanglements, all of them poised for judgments about which, if any, had significance. The act of categorizing what was at issue did not automatically propel citizens toward a neutral time of deliberation in which all considered the legitimacy of terms being thrown around to name what was at issue. Instead, the potential categories conveyed attitudes about how to ascribe substance. Was perjury at issue? A linguistic evasion? A deft response to political theater? The terms established how to “look” at potential meaning, and the look (the “surface” appearance) influenced what happened in the deliberatory time that then generated judgments about the impeachment’s (lack of) significance.

Style and Significance

This is, of course, Kenneth Burke’s point. Burke attends to the constitutive role of language that delivers meaning neither transparently nor neutrally but by provoking audiences to experience an embodied sense of identification to signs that they will potentially accept (and with which they will become “consubstantial”). Any form of discourse engages a representational dynamic that facilitates not only an act of recognition but also the potential for shared participatory responses. Words constitute communities not because they reflect connections that already exist but because they offer sites for inducing shared perceptions about what matters. Unlike Plato, Burke does not banish the aesthetic from the serious work of political judgment but emphasizes its centrality to facilitating the appearance of having shared perceptions of whether something as amorphous as significance is on hand. Hence Burke positions rhetorical style at the center of the discursive give and take that comprises democratic deliberation, and he effectively revises conceptions of how styles influence judgments about which representations should earn our intellectual and emotional commitments. Not only do styles establish the textual protocols and grammatical conventions that craft cultural productions, more importantly, rhetorical style is key to the social practice of communication.

Hence, a crucial difference between positivistic views of representation and rhetorical ones can be located within attitudes about style’s significance to judgment. While impeachment advocates condemned the bad attitude Clinton conveyed when refusing to forego rhetorical flourishes and straighten out his speech acts, rhetoricians rehabilitate conceptions of style by configuring stylized speech as ethically motivated speech. The seemingly surface features of rhetorical styles provide a gateway to a most important element within judgments of who is doing what with words—our perceptions of how people participate with language. We read styles as exhibitions of that which remains invisible: one’s intentions, aims, attitude about how language should be used. Indeed, as rhetoricians have long argued, it is through style that we determine whether a rhetor seems to be communicating genuinely, is concerned about us, the nation, or even approved modes of expression. Our entrée into acts of judging begin with our readings of a speaker’s motives. If we do not trust or believe the speaker’s motives, we probably will not be convinced by what he or she says, even if the ideas might otherwise seem perfectly reasonable. Style is neither superficial nor an obstacle to truth’s delivery but endemic to communicative action. Styles convey ways of seeing what matters within a scene of representation and enable audiences to get a sense of what a speaker (writer) cares about when putting forth a premise that others might share. For Burke, style is a means for getting others to collaborate with you when determining what to esteem and/or overlook. “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, ideas, identify your ways with his” (Rhetoric of Motives 55). One learns to speak in ways that audiences will recognize to encourage their acceptance of one’s point of view.

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 be influenced by the cultural narratives that prioritize the substantial and actual over the speculative and the unrealized potential. Style straddles a spectrum as well. Styles are both textually material and merely textual—merely the representative of a prior conception about how symbolic forms inform ways of seeing what has merit. But because styles do affect our senses, they are also imbued with awesome potentiality. Styles can help instigate “new” perspectives, “shocking” us out of complacent worldviews, as Kant would suggest. Or, as Burke suggests, styles can act to console us when familiar. Or, in the case of the impeachment, styles can act to alert us that something feels “off” about the purported connections between the propositional content of a speech and the motives underwriting its expression. By overlooking how we apply a sense of substance or its lack to our evaluation of style, we overlook a subtle but critical element of an interpretive encounter that can influence how we come to believe or lose faith in the languages that would speak on our behalf.

Pragmatism and Positivism

Rhetorical study engages in speculations about how to use language strategically to achieve desired ends. It’s not that truth does not matter. But facts are not necessarily available and even when they appear to be, their presentation does not necessarily persuade. In rhetorical formulations of how to use language, the act of speculating about what makes an argument effective is treated as an act of substance, as part of one’s civic duty. Rather than denounce speculation and then consign style to the realm of the superficial, style’s importance is reframed through the lens of the pragmatic. Accordingly, style acts to serve an identifiable social purpose. Its value is located not in its aesthetic qualities but in its ability to be socially productive by acting on behalf of the formation of a majority view.

As a starting point for an interpretive framework, this insight offers both a promising and a problematic way of contending with the paradoxical positive negativity that animates style’s place in judgment. Rhetoricians often endeavor to demonstrate that rhetoric’s contribution to acts of communication matter and are about more than “mere” style. How this outlook is validated allows for a consideration of significant differences between postmodern and rhetorical delineations of ethics in relation to acts of representation. For example, James P. McDaniel and Bruce E. Gronbeck maintain that it should be possible to both allow for civic disputes and find a path toward reconciliation by advocating “the imperative of the doxastic”—those “species of communal thought and values that must fill up the abstracted self of the citizen if he or she is going to have rhetorical efficacy in localist political environments” (36). Gerard Hauser, meanwhile, clarifies what “species” might mean when he promotes a specific style—vernacular rhetoric—as a central agent within political judgment that generates “a common understanding about the reality of experience, including its intended and unintended consequences” (297). To make rhetorical inquiry relevant, Hauser proposes that rhetorical models be based on actual discursive practices. “To overcome the reification of publics found in the Rational Deliberation model, a discourse-based theory of public opinion must widen its scope to include vernacular exchanges in addition to those of institutional actors. . . . A rhetorical model locates public opinion—a civil judgment—in the manifestations of common understanding within a public sphere,” which he adds, is “fashioned through the dialogue of vernacular talk” (297—original emphasis. See also, Ivie 455).

In practice, rhetorical attention to style has promoted the idea that styles should bear recognizable forms, especially those that have come to be regarded as signifying reason or rational norms. Vanessa Beasley makes an explicit case of “a democratic style” that “must foreground reasons, recognition and imagined relationship(s) to promote the discursive environment necessary for the most fundamental democratic processes to flourish” (466). She argues that “the public articulation of reasons promotes education, legitimation, and accountability . . . Democratic style should offer recognition to audience members” and should “activate certain relational commitments to other people whom one does not know” (466). (Beasley eventually wonders if she should reject this schematized approach but does not fully do so.)

We will find echoes of this kind of thinking within countless textbooks that advise college writers about how to represent their ideas on the page by adhering to discursive protocols that have been culturally sanctioned. In his opening chapter, “Understanding Style,” Joseph M. Williams begins by noting that his book on style, clarity, and grace is “based on two principles. It’s good to write clearly, and anyone can” (1). That democratic pitch to “anyone” delineates an ethics of equity that in turn bears upon the kind of style that presumably should be valued—that which assists the act of persuasion and the enactment of community. And that assist is typically given stylistic expression when one attempts to represent with clarity forms that follow a logical order, elucidate definitions, and invoke “if, then” clauses that are sensible. The cause and effect logic that structures an argument should enable a majority to tell where one’s thinking leads. Audiences should be relieved of the burden of having to struggle to understand what one is saying and why. Once freed from an interpretive struggle, audiences will be able to decide on the merits of a position put up for review. Paul Butler offers similar advice when he encourages compositionists to use the study of style as a way of claiming expertise about language issues and through that claim, to fashion the identity of the public intellectual contributing to public conversations about language controversies that take place outside of the academy. Butler traces how composition scholars lost an interest in style because of an association between style and a much-critiqued rhetorical tradition called “current-traditional rhetoric” that, scholars have argued, was too rigidly invested in Enlightenment mythologies. Because of this historical association, rhetoric and composition scholars “have failed to see the study of style for what it actually represented . . . a set of innovative practices used to generate and express language through the deployment of rhetorical features” (143). He adds that returning to a study of canons of style as a mode of invention “could be used profitably together in current discourse” (143).

To render style’s role as pragmatic means discarding the expectation that one should chart a path back to universal truth. Rather, language use aims to activate audience consent. Accordingly, meanings evolve as audiences decide whether to adopt a particular version of truth in spite of a perpetual representational inconstancy. (See Hariman on this point as well.) Without the capacity to choose whether to believe in the validity of any given representation, the democratic part of public argument is effectively annihilated. Hence, rather than function as a reflection of meanings that are already intact, styles act as agents that generate the reasonable, democratic give and take of ideas, the kind that allows ideas to be represented, weighed, judged, and also abandoned. Styles help audiences evaluate whether representational forms facilitate actions that engage democratic practices, like aiding communication or showing concern for the nation and the citizenry.

While this reflexive approach to language studies is supple enough to allow for the possibility of dissent, it does not necessarily address the question of which specific styles will be anticipated, accepted, or dismissed, for what reasons, and to what effects. And while the acknowledgment of representational inconstancy also addresses style’s significance to democratic processes in ways that expand conceptions of political judgment beyond the simple logic of substitutions, it nonetheless retains allegiances to the scopic paradigm that it presumably challenges. It affirms a hierarchy of values that delineates what kind of styles should receive cultural preference—i.e., those that identifiably serve specific purposes, that may be “used profitably” to signify qualities that have been culturally sanctioned, such as being reasonable. If it is “profitable” to convey styles that get read as reasonable, that is because there is a preset conception of what reason will look like linguistically and how its look will facilitate judgments about whether “reasonableness” has, indeed, appeared.

The “use language profitably” premise also implies an inherent connection between the idea of accountability and the priority of representability. Any judgment about “the look” of reason will then influence a secondary judgment about what cannot be seen: whether the rhetor is motivated to use language responsibly and with a reasonable attitude. The metaphor of vision reappears to support the idea that accommodating audiences means presenting those reasonable forms that, presumably, are recognizable and that, because communally accepted, get around the problem of ambiguity by generating thought processes that all have agreed to call “reasonable.” In effect, political participation is positively measured through the evaluation of forms that signify invisible aims and motivations. Style continues to be situated as evidence of whether a speaker desires to be held accountable for his or her language practices. One’s willingness to participate with socially sanctioned modes of representation is read as evidence of having good motives, while the motives that are good presumably coincide with socially redeemable aims. So that, even though attitudes are invisible, we tend to believe that making something representable means being accountable and that accountability is communicated stylistically.

It is style, then, that we rely upon to represent a moral image of thought. Having a commitment to styles that appear to be moral seems to tell us about what the speaker/writer intends to do with his words and whether those intentions are nefarious or honorable, and we make such determinations by deciding whether formalized expressions are cogent, orderly, pointed, etc. Such stylistic features seem to tell us whether a speaker, for example, aims to communicate rather than seduce, be earnest rather than playful or ironic, inform rather than please.

But is there a difference between the aim to use language to constitute a community of agreeable listeners and the expressed aims of GOP legislators to find a shared language that would communicate noble representational purposes?

Consider, for example, the following statement from U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), delivered at Clinton’s impeachment trial in December 1998, to justify Barr’s vote to impeach:

You know as children, all of us believed certain things with all of our hearts. We knew there was a difference between good and evil. We knew it was wrong to lie, and equally important, that if we got caught, we would be punished. . . . What happened to these simple truths that we all knew in our hearts just a few short years ago? Why do so many adults now find it so hard to call a lie a lie, when as parents, teachers, and employers, we have no hesitancy?23

What to make of this expression of yearning? Arguably, it articulates a longing to find a way back “home” to truth, the same longing that has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and priests, many of whom have also longed for signs of origins, evidence of a continuance between this life and another, past and present, a connection between what we can imagine and what we can know. And yet, while it is possible that Barr’s statement conjured such reflection, it is equally possible to imagine many of us sitting there on our couches watching the impeachment hearings unfold, the second one in the nation’s history, having a less than sublime response, muttering, perhaps, something along the lines of, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Dismissing the value and significance of Barr’s locution does not necessarily translate into a rejection of the value system informing his perspective. Presumably Barr, described by one reporter as “leading the charge to impeach a popular president,” 24 offered his rendition of a common enough motif in this proceeding to repudiate interpretive ambiguity that could interfere with the goal of being a straightforward, objective, and fair adjudicator of the issue. But for anyone who was hoping to witness justice at work, what may have seemed notable was a sense of dissonance between an expectation and an experience—expecting to bear witness to the exhibition of reason’s signs; encountering instead a nostalgia-inflected homily about simplicity and innocent children as a way of justifying a draconian outcome. In a legal proceeding that purported to address presidential misconduct, this blend of convention and idiosyncrasy may have been curious if not bizarre, offering (to some of us) absurd imagery when juxtaposed against preconceived notions of what form reason should take. Nonetheless, there are plenty of cultural practices—including those from rhetoric’s traditions—that lend support to Barr’s larger claims about the need for speakers to speak clearly and get to the point. Indeed, borrowing from Hayden White, it is possible to consider how the propositional content of Barr’s statement compares to discourses of history that claim to engage models of discourse “purged of all figurative and tropological elements, and subjected to tests of logical consistency as an argument and of predicative adequacy as a body of fact” (5).

Barr advocated for the use of recognizable modes of speech to allow for determinations of who may be held accountable for language choices. As such, he made a case for representability in general, and more specifically, for representations that present a systematic order of cause and effect in which “good” reasons lead to “good conclusions.” Far from seeming like pure nonsense, Barr’s statement and the principles that he defended were both intelligible and representative of dominant discursive conventions, including those touted within rhetorical studies of style’s role in generating audience adherence. Within Barr’s call for simplicity was a presumed inclusionary motive made evident via the “plain” style that extends a democratic “welcome” to everyone and conveys a bona fide desire to reach as many in the audience as possible. The question, then, is whether and how Barr’s particular call for clarity differs from, for example, the Rawlsian or Habermasian idea that communication should be oriented towards producing understanding, or how it differs from the rhetorical concern with devising styles that signify one’s desire to communicate and to use language for the purpose of community formation comprised of mutually shared perspectives.

There are dissonances. When comparing Barr’s statement to rhetorical theorizing that positions rational and vernacular norms as signifiers of socially responsible communicative practices, we might observe that Barr’s demand for innocence expressed through the elimination of verbal excess is precisely at odds with a rhetorical framework that valorizes flexibility and representational inconstancy. Rather than advocate for particular representational forms, rhetorical approaches to language study address how context is an element within any decision about which forms are suitable to speech occasions. Hence, a rhetorical take on Barr’s justification for an impeachment would deem it unpersuasive because a majority would probably reject the allusion to a child’s perspective as being suitable in this case.

Further, while Barr conflated linguistic transparency with a kind of literacy that is elemental and denuded of strategic calculating, rhetors would note that this paean to rhetorical innocence represents its own specialized discursive practice, or what Stuart Hall would call “a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of knowledge and conduct associated with” knowledge production (see Webb 56). Hall’s account is congenial with Burkean studies in that both ask us to question how we draw relationships between “knowledge” (culturally defined) and the representational technologies that would presume to bring that knowledge to presence. None of this is artless. To understand Barr’s comment, audiences would have to know something about the value attached to the idea of innocence, and that it is common to configure the idea of innocence in the form of children at play. Barr’s presumably inclusionary “we’re all children at heart” premise also delivers a reprimand to those who practice verbal complexity, implying that they may be rightly judged as elitist, pretentious, out of touch, and worst of all, inauthentic. Audiences further will be expected to be able to sort through the interrelated premises that suggest that identifying how speakers should conduct themselves linguistically will also identify the audience’s coordinating obligations: to be on the look out to see if the “authentic” “simple” and “clear” (or vernacular) statement has made an appearance. Audiences would be expected to comprehend, if not commend, the idea that when we follow our hearts when judging, we endorse the most noble descriptor of “the American” democratic spirit—a spirit that fosters community by championing the plain style that speaks to all, does not exclude, patronize, confuse, or deviate from the goal of calling everyone an equal. The ability to understand all that Barr’s homily communicated is not achieved in any simple or direct way but by connecting in complex ways to experiential contexts that influence how we judge whose act of representation seems to be honest, presented for political purposes, or some mixture of both.

But even when rejecting the reductive trajectory informing Barr’s veneration of simplicity, its kinship with rhetorical claims about how to engineer language uses that will enact identification might give us pause. Barr’s investment in a specific version of representational normativity is oddly congenial with the rhetorical valorization of discursive normativity as being benevolent, well-intentioned, and democratic. Rhetorical positivism is not the same as the empirical positivism within Republican arguments that contended that propositional content trumps style. In rhetorical theories, both style and content matter to the endeavor to persuade. The positivism within rhetorical theorizing situates style as morality’s identifiable agent, albeit in ways that are not straightforward. Rhetoricians envision style’s role as helping to negotiate intricate interconnections between private individual interest and public concerns. Signs of eloquence, in particular, are expected to smooth over differences in perspective and craft affiliations that facilitate interpretive resolutions. The question, then, is whether a rhetorical appreciation of the eloquent representation has a different political effect than that of a Platonically-inflected positivism that valorizes stylistic transparency.

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, Clinton also failed to meet other expectations about what form linguistic participation should take. Arguably, his apparent refusal to abide by the anticipated obligation to explicate rather than muddle provoked the Prosecutor’s follow up question, conveyed with what might be called a sarcastic tone:

PROSECUTOR: I just want to make sure I understand, Mr. President. Do you mean today that because you were not engaging in sexual activity with Ms. Lewinsky during the deposition that the statement of Mr. Bennett might be literally true?

CLINTON: No, sir. I mean that at the time of the deposition, it had been . . . well beyond any point of improper contact between me and Ms. Lewinsky. So that anyone generally speaking in the present tense, saying there is not an improper relationship, would be telling the truth if that person said there was not, in the present tense; the present tense encompassing many months. That’s what I meant by that. Not that I was—I wasn’t trying to give you a cute answer, that I was obviously not involved in anything improper during a deposition.

Ridicule might seem like a natural response to perceptions of language users who fake it—who, for example, parse terms as if doing so actually answers a question. Conventionally, we would likely agree that when a person testifies, he should not be cute. But that “given” is indicative of a chain of associations that precede expectations about how one should stylize one’s speeches in order to conform to whatever contextual demands are made in a given speech situation. In Clinton’s case, that meant comparing what he said to a preestablished idea of what constitutes “responsible testimony” and then jeering at his invocation of grammar rules when addressing a question about his possible culpability. But standards are also narratives, not neutral signifiers of equitable interpretive processes. They can impose potentially unfair interpretive constraints, especially when standards seem to authoritatively steer how speech acts get situated within that spectrum of idiosyncratic and conventional language uses.

Too often, the chains of associations that inform assessments of a speaker’s aims lose their speculative status and come to be regarded as actual evaluative methods. Testimony tends to be regarded as a “concrete” and actual practice that involves a bona fide act of retrieval—as if those who testify actually take a step back to the past and find a way to deliver the content of the prior experience in terms that accurately carry the past into the present. When testifying, one is expected to deliver one’s statement by subtracting any complicating desires such as taking pleasure in the act of speaking, attempting to seduce the jury, or expressing a will to triumph over an a perceived opponent. A (clever) linguistic “dodge” that asks, well, what does “is” reference? does not appear to communicate that one aims to helpfully render an accurate version of “the truth and nothing but.” It would seem only natural to disparage a witness who not only failed to engage dominant codes but also indicated an apparent refusal to do so by manifesting a lack of enthusiasm to follow protocol.

But the putatively natural derision that followed Clinton’s act of speech exposes not its inherent problems but the ways in which audiences are encouraged to internalize the idea that when speakers do not adhere to discursive expectations, the rest of us are given permission to disengage and be dismissive. Such assessments are authorized when mimetic models are marshaled to endorse judgments about whose language choices fail to match idealized standards. And this applies to both the Platonic versions of how to participate with language as well as rhetorical ones that reference standards to authorize speculations about whether a given speech aspires to act responsibly. In effect, we are given permission to overlook and devalue those speech acts that fail to engage our judgments in ways that we expect them to, whether they act to uphold community standards or, as in Clinton’s case, use language to challenge a coercive prosecutorial strategy. The dissonance of the “is is” phrase is remarkable not because the phrase deserves either derision or praise but because it offers an illustration of the meeting point between a speech act and the expectations that inform a collective sense of what language is supposed to do to constitute legitimate purposefulness. When we don’t question the legitimacy of the idea that we should speak with purpose and make use of recognizable styles to clearly represent purposes, then the demand that we be purposeful and show that aim by adopting normative styles will stand as legitimate, inevitable, and not itself abusive. Clinton’s “is is” phrase did not easily fit into any preestablished identity category that would legitimate its articulation. It was not especially witty. Few would likely regard it as a courageous example of “speaking back to power.” As President, Clinton was not being oppressed in any conventional sense of the word; his words continue to be influential. Evaluating his “is is” phrase according to a preestablished hierarchy of values that has staked out what counts as a salient purpose gives “the community” permission to disregard and effectively render insubstantial any locution that refuses to go along with enforced institutional conventions.

When we are speculating about a speaker’s purposes, we not only make judgments as if we have, indeed, identified those purposes, we also make judgments about whether identified purposes seem to be significant (or have “substance”). But given that ways of reading and evaluating significance have been shaped by cultural imperatives—including the one that effectively counsels rhetors to show significance by obeying discursive protocols—the answer to the question of whether and what kind of significance actually appeared will carry the imposition of cultural ideologies. And while that observation may be itself familiar to readers of critical theory, what may not be as common is a more specific meditation about how rhetorical technologies of evaluation that promise access to all instantiate biases by conflating particular acts of representability with accountability and then drawing upon that conflation when converting speculation about motives into judgments of who is credible.

When engaging in rhetorical analyses of who is doing what with language, we should not lose sight of the ways in which rhetorical responses to Platonic logocentrism also counsel punishments for speakers who fail to represent viable purposes and that these punishments also include acts of expulsion, albeit in more subtle ways—expel by rendering insignificant. Much of the exchange between Clinton and the Independent Counsel involved skirmishes about the way that Clinton responded to questions and included the complaint that Clinton’s responses were too long, as if to suggest that his responses were designed to distract listeners and turn their attention away from the heart of the matter. In the following exchange, the President and the Independent Counsel interrupted each other but eventually, Clinton began to offer the short responses requested from counsel, and those responses followed legal protocol that allowed him to exercise his right to refuse to incriminate himself. On the other hand, that wrangling also included what is perhaps the most merciless exchange of the entire impeachment proceedings:

PROSECUTOR: I want to go over some questions again. I don’t think you are going to answer them, sir. And so I don’t need a lengthy response, just a yes or no. And I understand the basis upon which you are not answering them, but I need them for the record. If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area you touched her breasts, would she be lying?

CLINTON: Let me say something about this—

PROSECUTOR: All I really need for you, Mr. President—

CLINTON: I know—

PROSECUTOR: is to say—

CLINTON: But you—

PROSECUTOR: I won’t answer under previous grounds, or to answer the question, you see, because we only have four hours and your answers . . . have been lengthy. . . .

CLINTON: I know that. I’ll give you four hours and thirty seconds if you let me say something general about this. I will answer to your satisfaction that I won’t – based on my statement, I will not answer. I would like 30 seconds at the end to make a statement, and you can have 30 seconds more on your time, if you’ll let me say this to the grand jury and to you. And I don’t think it’s disrespectful at all. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. But go ahead and ask your questions.

PROSECUTOR: The question is, if Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area, you touched her breasts, would she be lying?

CLINTON: That is not my recollection. My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Miss Lewinsky, and I’m staying on my former statement about that.

PROSECUTOR: If she said—

CLINTON: My, my statement is that I did not have sexual relations as defined by that.

PROSECUTOR: If she says that you kissed her breasts, would she be lying?

CLINTON: I’m going to revert to my former statement.

PROSECUTOR: Okay. If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area, you touched her genitalia, would she be lying? And that calls for a yes, no, or reverting to your former statement.

CLINTON: I will revert to my statement on that.

Prosecutor: If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid in the Oval Office area, would she be lying? Yes, no, or won’t answer?

Clinton: I will revert to my former statement.27

The Prosecutor’s stated intent, to pose questions “for the record” in spite of his belief that Clinton would not answer, was, at the very least, strange for those of us unaccustomed to legalese. It suggested that his interrogation was a lawyerly, procedural one, meant to be reviewed in a future context in which “the record” would stand as a pristine document and allow for an objective evaluation of testimony by objective judges familiar with the conventions of courtroom proceedings. On the other hand, because Clinton’s Grand Jury appearance was eventually broadcast to citizens (the transcripts were released to the public one month later by the House Judiciary Committee), it was impossible to delimit how “regular folks” would react to the content of those questions. Given that audiences were promised evidence of perjury, some may have wondered if there were other reasons for this exchange. Perhaps the team of prosecutors organizing this inquiry thought that a verbal “probing” into details of intimate physical contact would exercise due diligence. Maybe they aimed to force Clinton to finally crack and admit what presumably everyone could already see. Or perhaps the prosecutor thought that Clinton would avoid the risk of being ridiculed for maintaining a representation of what happened that seemed to be at odds with the detailed picture that Lewinsky had apparently provided. Presumably, the repetition, the “frank” exposure of sexual terms aimed, through their explicitness, to both get to the truth and coerce an honest response from a known equivocator. Meanwhile, that same constellation of devices may have signified to audiences the designs of a too-ardent prosecutor who failed to consider that his version of how to enact a truth-seeking process might raise questions about its legitimacy. And yet, interestingly, many of us who remember the “is is” statement may not have remembered the specifics of this exchange and the ways in which it was contextualized in terms of adhering to representational formalities specifically aligned with the law.

Arguably, the Prosecutor’s brutal questioning could be called “neutrally legal” because of a play of appearances. One can appear to be responsible and ethical by adhering to discursive protocol that promises to represent reason and neutral analytical thought. One may deploy such protocol as if doing so is intrinsically responsible and ethical, and use that general regard for linguistic accountability via representational responsibility as a way of providing insidious cover for an abuse of power. Here, we might locate that abuse exactly in the space of an interpretive conversion where a spectacular act of representation in the form of prying questions got read, at least officially, as an enforcement of ruling methodologies and then officially classified as part of a “legal” inquiry. If any momentary surprise at the questions was forgotten and rendered unremarkable, then it is possible to conclude that the prosecutor’s adherence to discursive protocol superseded all other ways of reading what was significant to that exchange. (Hence, the commonplaces: “He was only doing his job.” “That’s what happens in legal proceedings. Lawyers ask tough questions that make witnesses uncomfortable.”) The particular viciousness encoded within his cross-examination was masked by the ability to read his purposes as being aligned with community standards. Meanwhile, Clinton’s “is is” response was belittled, in part, because it seemed to offer an insincere attempt to participate with community standards.