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Introduction

People in the United States are expected to cherish the idea of free speech, but not all speech acts are welcome within public venues. The responsible citizen is expected to guard against the false claims and manufactured “talking points” of politicians whose rhetorical flourishes give cover to an unsavory lust for power. Political candidates tend to be commended when they speak with a blunt candor that seems to get to the facts and avoid verbal complexities. John McCain made an explicit promise when campaigning for president in 2008 to board the “straight talk express” in an effort to present himself as the people’s humble servant committed to a forthright style, as if making this pledge was unquestionably commendable and distinctive. The idea that honesty in speech means advancing past any distractions contrived by rhetoric has a long history in U.S. political discourse, its potency retained in part because of the undertheorized yet durable metaphor that crafts a conceptual linkage between linearity and discursive integrity.

This metaphorical cluster encodes a seemingly basic premise: methods exist for ascertaining how and what words mean. A promise to “speak straight” seems obtainable if language is imbued with a power to convey who signifies with probity and if citizens believe in their own integrity (i.e., honest citizens will know an honest representation when they see one and may justifiably castigate any speaker who puts forth anything but). Such beliefs create expectations about how language should be stylized, namely, that styles should be transparent so that rhetors may convey ideas that exist independently of the languages used to represent them. By channeling ideas and logic through figurative forms that do not obstruct the clarity of meaning, the plain style seems to fulfill this expectation.

One can hear echoes of the same idea in books such as the impatiently titled On Bullshit that found a publisher in 2005 as well as a receptive audience. Or in a 2008 advertisement for a local Chicago news station: “No bull. Truth in politics with Mike Flannery.”1 It underwrites the endeavors of cable news hosts such as Anderson Cooper who devotes a portion of his nightly program on CNN to “keeping them honest” by comparing a given politician’s statements to “the facts.” And it is an element in every media commentary that praises frankness and clarity in political speech when speculating on how a given statement has been interpreted by “America.” Such commentaries call upon audiences to trust those representations that deploy a positivistic logic that seems to bypass the arts of rhetoric by actively refusing the politicized, the false, the desirous and the mercenary. Audiences, meanwhile, are expected to appreciate representations that are factual, reasonable, and compelling to a majority, and to feel like virtuous citizens for ferreting out any attempted manipulation.

This book takes a closer look at how discourses of nationalism are encoded within the appeal of an “innocent rhetoric” that implicates public expectations about how language should be used and credibility judged. We are encouraged to find words that grab onto a quality of “apolitical authenticity” and turn it into a representational real. But the persistent need to proclaim that one is using language honestly and sincerely also expresses anxiety about the possibility of doing so. Contemporary language theories have fed that anxiety by challenging commonplace assumptions about how persuasive power works to achieve effects. They alert us to the ways in which attempts to clarify how to judge the genuine also obscure by concealing irresolvable ambiguities that inhere within the interpretive technologies used to evaluate who and what is credible. Indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of discursive practices that seem to disseminate representations that are straight, honest, and logical are tied neither to logic nor to a structural grammar but to narrative. We tell stories about a nation committed to discursive integrity, peopled by citizens who speak freely and invoke innate wisdom when distinguishing the reliable speaker from the political hack. A closer look at the storytelling elements of our conceptual frameworks raises an analytical problem about how to validate the interpretive apparatus that would steer evaluations of which language uses should make us wary.

That problem is made even more complicated by the question of how to regard style’s role within judgments of who to believe. Rhetorical style presents a particularly vexed topic because its status as an object of inquiry is paradoxically and simultaneously material and insubstantial. Style, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric, is most commonly described as the artful expression of ideas. But in contemporary life, the word style signifies multiple meanings that range from the demonstration of basic grammatical competence to a repertoire of protocols to aid communication to thoughtfully arranged word choices that convey a quality that is noticeable, idiosyncratic (Edward Corbett’s word), potentially provocative, and also indescribable. While rhetorical style is considered to be basic and elemental, exactly how style acts to influence the exchange of ideas remains undertheorized. Literary traditions have belittled rhetorical style, depicting it as a bureaucratic tool, its purview merely practical and detached from the honorable sublimity of the poetic. In political venues, style is treated with overt suspicion, envisioned as an impediment to the authentic presentation of heartfelt political points of view. Both of these stances call for further review.

It is my contention that rhetorical style plays a crucial role in establishing a democratic aesthetic, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Docherty, who portrays aesthetics as a “founding condition” for “establishing social and political democracy” (back cover). Aesthetics, like rhetorical style, is a term that conveys multiple meanings that range from the sensual appreciation of signs of beauty to formalized conceptions of representational action that have become too rigid. Acknowledging an aesthetic dimension to political discourse reminds us that illusory elements inhere within endeavors to certify methods of political adjudication. Docherty takes note of a formalizing impulse commandeering theoretical frameworks that repeat precepts about how we make meaning, an impulse able to render the stories told about how to judge the good man speaking well into ritualized performances rather than authentic experiences of critical inquiry. He then proposes a democratic aesthetic that countermands the formalizing dynamic by highlighting the narrative origins of routine conceptions of what we do with words. This approach incorporates a Lyotardian framework that aims to keep open the question of judgment and avoid the trap of conflating textual depictions of interpretive action with interpretive mastery. We may be reminded of their differences whenever we take recourse in explanations of how persuasive processes work to instigate audience adherence. When we acknowledge that we tell stories about who we are as citizens who judge, we interrupt the automatic reproduction of taken-for-granted commonplaces that describe how discourses organize a majority view of what has meaning and significance. Plain speech offers a case in point. It denotes a ritualized mode of expression that promises truth’s unadorned delivery. What audiences procure through its invocation may be something else entirely.

This book applies Docherty’s conception of a democratic aesthetic to commonplace conceptions of rhetorical style. Most studies of style offer advice about how to correlate language with civics when conceiving of the formation of, for example, “the national community.” I instead am concerned with the means by which people are kicked out—symbolically disqualified for failing to adhere to the stylistic protocols that appear to demarcate a representational integrity read as emblematic of a national character. Indeed, I am especially interested in those utterances that seem to provoke strong negative responses of consternation, resentment, and even anger.

Often, such responses are treated as if self-explanatory, especially within media narratives that report on public responses to stylized deliveries. I am less interested in examining the style of news reports themselves (although this does come up throughout my analysis) but in considering how such reports rely upon conventional conceptions of style’s role in political judgment. I argue that rather than act to aid or obstruct the delivery of meaning, signifiers of style can be examined to excavate the multiple points of tension within conceptions of language use and democratic access. Styles are provocations and integral to the judgments audiences make about who to believe and who to ostracize. Within the stories that we tell about what styles should do, we may locate cultural narratives that have staked out conceptions of how persuasive power works to achieve its effects. A study of style draws attention to the ways in which narrative constructions of persuasive action get treated as factual and evidentiary and then referenced as if automatically legitimate resources aiding public evaluations about who to believe, who to dismiss, and who to revere for speaking in ways that benefit the nation.

Expel the Pretender: Rhetoric Renounced and the Politics of Style addresses examples of discredited political speech and the cultural logics that endorse their dismissal. Specifically, this book analyzes well-known public speeches that not only failed to enact community but also triggered collective public ridicule, including arguments in 1998 proposing a presidential impeachment, President Bill Clinton’s responses to those arguments, his national apology after admitting that he had an affair with a White House intern, Linda Tripp’s first public statement in defense of her actions that launched the impeachment drive, and the 2008 press appearances of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Barack Obama’s former pastor who was subsequently ostracized by the Obama campaign. In each representative example, I demonstrate how rhetorical style was at the center of public concerns about whose speech could be trusted. Not only was style central to assessments of each speaker’s credibility, its significance was only noticeable when speakers failed to meet cultural expectations about what kind of speech is permissible on the occasion of its delivery.

Judgments of dismissal were fortified by the simplistic binary that depicts political truth-telling as opposite to the practice of deception. Style’s study challenges the validity of that binary and its rendering of an interpretive process that oversees how to discern differences between words that are trustworthy and those that lead citizens astray.

Style and Expulsion

Expel the Pretender gets its title from Scott Durham’s Phantom Communities, which questions whether the theoretical concept of simulation (simulacra) should be deemed an impediment to social justice. Conventionally, simulation is aligned with representational deception—when, for example, the act of voting for a reality television show is depicted as an authentic experience of political struggle or when consumer choice masquerades as democratic access. Simulacra empty representational signs of their reality and reduce them to mere appearances, a shell of what they promise to be. Durham points to a history of thought that has expressed anxiety about the inability to tell the difference between the real and the fake, and he explores those interpretive methodologies that promise to enable citizens to discern disparities and justify the practice of expelling anyone who “fakes it” by trying to pass off the inauthentic expression as truth’s representative. I will have more to say about Durham’s argument in the first chapter. (Ultimately, Durham rehabilitates simulacra with reference to postmodern theories that muddy the conceptual frameworks that enable distinctions between “the real” and “the simulated” to be made.) At the moment, however, it is possible to note that both the anxiety about the inauthentic expression and the proposed method of relief remain pertinent to U.S. political culture where, arguably, the dynamic of expulsion endures as a viable option when publics discern discursive threats.

When the political “gaffe,” for example, is invoked as a newsworthy event, it functions as way of shaming and then silencing whoever delivered a statement that raised eyebrows. Countless websites are devoted to tracking this phenomenon: “The Top Ten Campaign-Ending Political Gaffes in Modern U.S. History.” “They Said WHAT?! Politicians Most Notorious Science Flubs.” “The Nine Worst Political Gaffes of 2012.”2 At first glance, this kind of exposure seems to be useful and necessary. It draws upon the idea that speakers bear social responsibilities and that it is incumbent upon audiences to make sure that all people, especially politicians, are held accountable for what they say. But a closer look at what the act of shaming is supposed to accomplish helps to illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing simulacra from genuine democratic actions. Presumably, pointing out instances of bad speech performs important political work, revealing, for example, something true about the person whose language use prompted ridicule, especially those objectionable flaws that, as put by one ardent truth-seeking blogger, “cannot be washed aside by the world’s greatest spin masters.”3 The exposure of misleading attempts to escape accountability is presented as an ethical act itself, undertaken, presumably to enable citizens to determine who does not deserve their support. Confidence in this methodology may begin to waver, however, once we begin to question what, exactly, is revealed and then accomplished through the kind of self-righteous scrutiny that converts a gaffe into a spectacle. My point is not to discount the act of calling out the ridiculous things that politicians say. But it is important to note that the act of publicizing gaffes carries an implicit and vague demand for linguistic correctness—as if being correct should confirm a speaker’s credibility and as if the point of analysis is to take note of the gaffe itself. Meanwhile, giving exposure to “the gaffe” implicitly treats all gaffes as equal, leaving open the question of how audiences are expected to weigh the significance of whatever flawed statement makes its way to the headlines.

When undertaking a study of style’s significance to judgment, we will quickly discover the inadequacies of those cultural narratives that treat acts of revelation as expressions of an authenticating interpretive methodology necessary to the functioning of the democratic state. Too often the methodologies that we rely upon provoke habitualized judgments of what has validity. This is all the more significant given that rhetorical style itself is generally read as the agent of pretense and fakery and hence an obstacle to the endeavor to speak straight and insure that one’s audience can distinguish the hollow political platitude from the sincere utterance of conviction. Culturally sanctioned stylistic protocols are presented as positive markers that signify not only ethical representational action but also the desirable qualities of the people who use them. Indeed, when speakers and writers use styles that have earned cultural regard, we are expected to classify them as the kind of people who think and speak reasonably, who aim to communicate ethically, and who then are deserving of whatever accolades their speeches (texts) might generate. In political venues, candidates who highlight a commitment to straight talk imply that such talk may be positioned as the personification of the candidate’s moral character—a premise that conflates the qualities of seeming and being by suggesting that one’s regard for discursive protocol offers a demonstration of one’s commitment to being moral.

The question is whether the absence of culturally preferred stylistic markers necessarily indicates an absence of those qualities that have earned cultural regard (reason, common sense, good will, etc.) We might quickly downplay such a conclusion and maintain that when we judge, we weigh propositional content—the reasonableness of whatever political perspective is put up for review. Yet as my examples show, it is often the case that when valorized stylistic markers are absent, permission is given to audiences to deliver seemingly justifiable derisive judgments of whoever failed to follow the mandated methodology. When political speakers fail to follow discursive conventions, or worse, when they seem to purposely defy them, the styles associated with their noncompliance tend to be read as marking an absence of qualities that should be put on display. In effect, socially constituted, aestheticized discursive practices get conflated with real linguistic obligations.

My analysis of the politics of expulsion demonstrates that questions about style function as directives about how to participate with language. I use the word participate in the sense offered by Bill Readings, one that extends conceptions of language beyond that of communication. To communicate is to consider purpose and message, and to be concerned with protocols that assist the conveyance of one’s message. Participation broadens those concerns by attending to the intertextual dynamics that play out when cultural conceptions of what language is and does influences conceptions of what language should do within specific occasions of its use. It is my contention that commonplace narratives about rhetorical style put constraints upon judgments of how and which language uses enact virtuous political participation. Indeed, this book encourages scholars in rhetoric and composition to discard the idea that style’s main purpose is to further effective communication. As part of a democratic aesthetic, narratives about style can instead be refashioned to highlight the storytelling elements of political life that influence perceptions of how ethics and language meet. Indeed, when we restrict our understanding of style’s purposes, we also restrict conceptions of rhetoric’s significance to political life.

The idea that style should aid communication helps to sustain the convention that valorizes plain speech as a sign of a speaker’s integrity and suppresses consideration of how rhetorical indeterminacy is featured within political judgment. Discourses about style are always about more than mere style, marking instead a complex space at which embodiment, text, and ideology converge. Styles are public expressions that provoke private responses to representational power. In this sense, style signifies the felt experience of interpretation—an experience that cannot necessarily be translated into a narrative chronicling what happens as we contend with words. Style, then, marks a happening that is itself not fully representable but nonetheless noteworthy. To consider style’s significance to political judgment is to mull over commonplace visions of discursive participation, variously expressed in terms of how form relates to content, how narrative connects to lived experiences, how we endeavor to incorporate cognition, affect, and somatic responses into conceptions of deliberation that we would like to call democratic.

Rhetorical Interventions

Narratives about rhetorical style can be characterized as meditations about political access. Teach rhetors how to speak well and you give them tools for successful participation in social life. Such instruction need not be mercenary. Following Aristotle, style in rhetoric may be depicted as poetic’s pragmatic counterpart—a socially productive facilitator of civic-minded goals such as fostering mutual understanding and building consensus. The idea that people should be taught to use language to compel assent and then build community is taken for granted within rhetorical traditions, which helps to explain why, for example, eloquence, at least since the writings of Cicero, has been championed as a primary instigator of audience identification and approval. Rather than regard style as a discursive “extra,” as a superficial site of ornamentation inferior to poetic aesthetics and less significant than propositional content, rhetoricians historically have treated style as intrinsic to any concern with public welfare. For classical rhetoricians, style was central to the endeavor to persuade.

The recent return to style within composition studies pursues this trajectory by encouraging writing teachers to become more cognizant of style’s relationship to pragmatic approaches to language study. Hence, for example, Elizabeth Rankin’s important contribution from the 1980’s that reintroduced the idea that style involves more than attention to the surface features of language; style is a component within processes of invention wherein writers make choices about how to represent themselves on the page to audiences who will have their own preferences about which styles are suited to a rhetorical occasion. Learning about style gives writers and speakers the chance to harness persuasive power by incorporating models of effective communication into their own texts. More recently, Paul Butler calls upon compositionists to reinvigorate studies in style so that they may join public conversations about why the study of composing processes should be of general public concern. Like other compositionists, Butler endeavors to invalidate an epistemological tradition that has vilified rhetoric by characterizing persuasion as a force that manipulates audiences into assenting to ideas that serve nefarious interests. Butler argues for style’s importance to the work of interpretive collaboration, maintaining that it is through style that partnerships between rhetors and audiences get established. The thoughtful rhetor chooses styles that will produce favorable audience reactions, and in making such choices, he or she will be participating with language in socially redeemable ways: settling controversies, easing perceptual dissonances, establishing a means of identification. Styles execute a critical social function when put in the service of crafting shared perspectives about what matters and why.

There is a democratizing impulse within these formulations that clarifies how rhetorical conceptions of style differ from the aesthetic tradition that venerates authorial geniuses who devise representations with no concern for audience reception. In a rhetorical framework, it is precisely the care one has for one’s audience that indicates a rhetor’s integrity. Indeed, style is regarded as a kind of equipment in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term—a technology that offers a way to both acknowledge interpretive complexities and understand that one can purposefully attempt to use language to further sociability. One studies style not for the sake of art (or truth) but to be pragmatic—to determine how to use language to nurture a political sphere in which all agree that argument should replace war as a means of settling disagreements. A non-violent means of settling disputes will only work if all agree that the power of words should surpass that of physical violence. This perspective is bound by consent. It is, then, infused with rhetorical inconstancy. We might call its status fragile, if not precarious. Words are effective when all agree to the idea that a call to good argument is more authoritative than a call to arms. It is all too possible for citizens to change their minds and embrace war over argument as the right solution to a perceived threat. Consequently, when we talk about style in relationship to political legitimacy, the stakes are huge.

The conundrum imposed by narrative appears to be resolved via rhetoric’s pragmatic interest in getting things done—i.e., furthering robust debate, learning writing strategies that are stylistically effective. When style’s significance in rhetorical and composition studies is construed to be pragmatic it is, by implication, knowable, and what we think we know is that when rhetors think about how to style statements, they will become better communicators and, presumably, that knowledge will benefit the collective. This suggests that the validity of the civic-oriented study of style is itself demonstrable by looking at actual linguistic practices to see whether they accomplish the stated goal of furthering everyone’s chance to speak up and be heard. Democratic principles would seem to be actualized when all are invited to take part in life’s grand conversational give-and-take and when everyone has the same chances to invoke and respond to whatever is publicly displayed and subject to judgment. When all participate, many ideas will compete for public attention. Studies in rhetoric can effectively teach rhetors how to navigate an inclusionary discursive terrain to insure that one’s ideas will get noticed. Because debate is intrinsic to democratic culture, it is perfectly reasonable to teach people how to use styles effectively and avoid being cast out of the community to which one seeks to belong.

These premises will make sense if language is structured to allow everyone to access its force and knowingly channel it in civic-minded directions. If democratic equity infuses language’s very structure, then presumably, it may be tapped to oversee judgments of which language uses act sociably and which are uncommunicative. We should be able to understand the contours of deliberatory judgment and to put into practice ways of seeing and interpreting that are progressive, fair, subtle enough to contend with variance, general enough to be representative of a collective.

At this point, however, the authentic/pretense problem returns. We must still grapple with the enigmatic question of whether descriptions of interpretive processes tell us more than stories about how representations should be evaluated. Staking out competence means devising narratives that identify sanctioned repertoires of style. Narratives that place a premium upon rhetorical competency reinstall a binary logic to determine when competency makes an appearance. When it is absent, persuasive failure presumably follows. Stylistic markers of competency get treated as actualizations of the qualities that they would re-present, and, once so regarded, they appear to be necessary to accomplish the social purpose of constituting a democratic representational order that all can share and use at will. While rhetoricians acknowledge that cultural ideologies will influence judgments of issues, there has been less attention paid in rhetoric’s history to the ways in which intertextual histories of preferred styles will influence evaluations of which stylistic forms should be deemed legitimate agents for enacting community formation. Indeed, regard for the power of debate to flesh out “the best” claim does not necessarily address the particular ways in which issues come to be identified and then commonly recognized through discursive practices that may or may not be equitable. Rhetoric’s idealistic story of access, inclusion, and judicious evaluation does not address how to determine which forms of style constitute the kind of participation deemed to be properly “civic.” Nor does that story consider the ways in which prioritizing coded models of “sayability” affirms an exclusionary logic that dispenses punishments and rewards and ways of naturalizing those outcomes.

Postmodern Materialism

Rhetorical theories that attempt to reinvigorate studies in style to advance democratic inquiry effectively promote a singular goal for linguistic participation (i.e., the interpretive resolution). This is accomplished by installing standards of evaluation that effectively “correspond to a control over the processes of legitimation” (Panagia 9). Indeed, many language theorists habitually rely upon a restricted set of discursive norms to assess and validate the unstructured work of interpretive negotiation. Feminist theorists, on the other hand, have challenged the habit of invoking dominant narratives of legitimation when exploring how audiences are conditioned to accept their persuasive power. Susan Miller, for example, considers the ways in which audiences learn to trust discursive practices that correspond to already formulated “prescriptive networks” (2). Lynn Worsham explores how dominant ideologies are reproduced when audiences learn to identify emotionally and feel the validity of ideological perspectives. Kristie Fleckenstein outlines the contours of a materialist rhetoric that would explore “the complex processes of perception and articulation that persuade a community that a certain material reality, including the reality of the body, exists” (7). Each of these perspectives indicates how sociopolitical criteria for evaluating whether speech acts are powerful are construed in ways that entangle emotional receptivity with representational action.

This book builds upon these theories to consider how citizens are instructed emotionally to internalize preferences for those styles that have already earned cultural approval as they render judgments about whose words matter. Accordingly, a concern with style can be regarded as a paradoxical point of contact between culture and embodied experience, where the narratives that would describe preferred styles also shape audience preferences. Styles are acts of signification that have been positioned within a nexus of narratives that would explain, define, and establish what style means in relation to an epistemic conception of how language communicates meaning. Hence our grasp of any particular “failed” speech act is also produced by a “host of technologies” (Greene 52) that teach how to imagine and then recognize what constitutes a legitimate rhetorical formation. Judgments about who to expel make explicit the narratives that citizens are expected to internalize and reference to demonstrate that they are in accord with the social rules overseeing acts of linguistic comportment.

If style is a historical condition (see Huyssen 9-12) rather than an essential quality that conveys a self-sufficient force, then style demarcates a locus for mulling over the effects of cultural training on our assessments of whose language uses seem to be authoritative because powerful and compelling. When we acknowledge the significance of the intertextual on how we respond to language’s constitutive power, we may question which discourses have been granted the authority to condition our responses to the emotional power of style. At the same time, because styles do affect our sensibilities, their status is more than conceptual. While style is a locus for narratives that naturalize the embodied experience of political judgment, its analysis can also testify to the human capacity to refuse the lessons imposed by culture, particularly since our responses to rhetorical styles will also be partly spontaneous and experienced during our acts of reception. This lived part of our interpretive experience cannot be encapsulated within narrative and need not be explainable with reference to pre-established frameworks. In this regard, style functions as a site for theorizing the possibility of democratic dissent. For many contemporary theorists of rhetoric, style serves a critical role in enabling disagreements about whether a given version of an idea or event has validity. We may reject those premises that do not conform to our own “image” of what is at issue, the terms invoked failing to re-present what we think should be put forth for review. More generally, we can note that all representations are finally just that—narrative constructs and hence precisely not the same as facts. (On this point, see both Hariman and O’Gorman.)

A materialist rhetorical approach expands upon these ideas by envisioning language as a site of convergence between the agency of consent to symbolic artifacts, the influence of ideologies that have enculturated ways of seeing what is significant about any artifact put up for review, and the possibility of somatic responses that are not necessarily explainable with reference to cultural scripts. Materialist rhetorics dovetail with postmodern aesthetics in that both draw attention to the ways in which truth claims are perpetually disrupted once questions are raised about how, precisely, narratives about form influence perceptions of content. There are, indeed, consequences to language uses. But whatever reasons we devise to explain those consequences situates us right back in narrative and the aesthetic. Politics hovers within this paradoxical space of postmodern materialism. And so does style’s ephemeral-yet-substantial significance. Even as styles may assist in the endeavor to enact persuasive power, our interactions with styles will be subjected to representational ambiguities. We cannot predict when a style will incite affiliations or inspire action or prompt us to dismiss an utterance as a hackneyed cliché. Meanwhile, the fall out of those judgments will affect political life.

It might be helpful, then, to consider how narratives about style are caught within an oscillating dynamic that fluctuates between the power of cultural conditioning and the power to refuse ideology’s influence. Style is an especially fruitful topic to consider when exploring the parameters of that oscillating action because style’s effects are simultaneously tied to narrative and individually (spontaneously, somatically) experienced. On the one hand, then, we may study style to consider how techne can promote the reproduction of cultural hegemony. On the other hand, it is equally important to note that visceral responses to acts of representation cannot be ascribed solely to ideological influences. The dynamic of flux opens a conceptual space in which to revise conceptions of linguistic labor.

Style demarcates a quality, perhaps unnamable, that emerges where artistry meets craft and the legacies of cultural conditioning. Its significance to political judgment is finally elusive. Acknowledging that part of our interpretive experience eludes understanding provides an occasion for reconsidering what we mean when we turn to rhetoric and rhetorical interventions as a way of engaging a democratic ethics. When exploring the discursive networks through which meaning is made and assigned significance, we might describe style an “ambivalent rupture” (J. Kelleher 78), a mode of representation that demarcates a space between the categorical divisions that would separate language and experience, signs and referents, poetics and rhetoric, practices and metadiscourses that seem to gauge whether language uses work. Style is not an object or type of representation but a way of talking about how we think form crosses borders to connect private predilections with public codes to constitute communal ways of seeing and believing.

The complex and contingent cultural forces that produce dominant conceptions of style can be examined to consider how chains of affect come to be embedded within interpretive frameworks that generate the emotions they would describe, and in the process, install a particular kind of political literacy that seems to adequately address the question of how to negotiate representational indeterminacy when we are called upon to judge another’s credibility. This is not the same as saying that we just make things up as we judge. But it is to say that any attempt to delineate “responsible judgment” about who to embrace and who to castigate will not escape the problem of narrative and the training we’ve received to regard some styles as harboring more signifying power than others.

Chapter Summaries

In the chapters that follow, I identify how a rhetoric of value-neutrality and cultural impartiality was disseminated within media narratives that simultaneously broadcast stories about speech failures that presumably engendered emotional outrage. Each chapter explores how media narratives naturalized the idea that speech acts may be discredited when they stray from normative standards of legitimation expressed stylistically. Failure to abide by norms of stylistic protocol engendered public responses of ridicule, indicating how a dynamic of expulsion has itself become normalized. Not only do dominant conceptions of what rhetorical style is help to reproduce this norm, attitudes about style help to ratify the idea that the practice of publicly shaming those who fail to obey conventions of style is a natural byproduct of audience responses to signs of failure.

Chapter 1 analyzes the arguments used by Congressional leaders that claimed that President Clinton’s “silver tongue” posed a national threat. Officially Clinton was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, but public debate about his speech acts involved larger questions about how to signify truth. Impeachment debates offer an occasion for considering whether to continue to trust positivistic analytical models when assessing who is doing what with words. The call to linguistic clarity advanced in pro-impeachment arguments failed to persuade a majority to remove the President from office but the logic of those arguments was never challenged. Indeed, rather than generate a national debate about what kind of arguments should be available to support political outcomes, this historical event has been effectively trivialized. This response, I suggest, was made possible by cultural attitudes that underestimate rhetorical style’s importance to judgment.

Chapter 2 examines two failed speeches: Clinton’s notorious four minute national apology, delivered to TV viewing audiences once evidence emerged that proved he had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky; and the first public statement from Linda Tripp, who asked citizens to regard her act of taping private phone conversations as a performance of her civic duty. Both speeches were reviled and Clinton and Tripp were each accused of being inauthentic when looking for public sympathy. I examine how those failures can be understood with reference to rhetorical theories of propriety that envision style not as a conduit for truth but a means through which speakers locate words that fit the occasion of speech. But I also argue that even though propriety’s transactional model of judgment usefully challenges some aspects of positivistic logic, it nonetheless carries vestiges of that logic by implying that “fittingness” is a quality that may be discerned and then confidently referenced when evaluating the legitimacy of a speech/text put forth for public review. The rhetoric of propriety sanctions a technology that would gather diverse elements together to craft a working theory of ethics and criteria for judgment, as if such criteria are inherently ethical. Drawing upon the work of feminist theorists such as Lynn Worsham and Wendy Hesford, I propose a feminist materialist rhetoric that would instead argue that any attempt to identify whether language fits the occasion will have emerged from the encounter between complex, historically marked narratives and habituated embodied responses.

Chapter 3 explores the ways in which protocols of style are embedded within rhetorical theories of ethos. I locate versions of ethos-as-style within the celebratory discourses formulated in response to the 2008 primary campaign of Barack Obama, whose ethos was esteemed by many in the mainstream press, especially after he delivered his famous speech on race in March of that year. The speech was offered in response to the negative media portraits of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, who was ridiculed for making controversial statements about national politics when delivering religious sermons. I explore how public responses to Wright’s sermons referenced his style of delivery, and how a binary logic was crafted that created a discriminatory comparison between Obama’s style and Wright’s that influenced ways of reading their respective characters. This chapter also considers how theorizing ethos will benefit from both feminist materialist rhetorical theories as well as studies in rhetoric from scholars of African American communicative practices.

Chapter 4 explores the limits of rhetorical theories of genre that call for the replication of normative styles to facilitate audience recognition of categorical types of speech able to engender audience identification. I return to Obama’s race speech to consider it from the perspective of genre studies, and then look at the 2008 public appearances of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as he attempted to rehabilitate his public image. Those public appearances were condemned and Wright was officially and publicly expelled from Obama’s campaign. Drawing upon studies from African American Rhetoric and Communication scholars, this chapter demonstrates how the apparent logic valorizing the replication of norms within genre studies was invoked in 2008 to affirm the chain of reasoning that seemed to justify and naturalize the act of denouncing Wright and the representational ethics that he promoted.