CCST2110

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CCST2110

• Style

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Style in 2 parts

• Style Part 1
• Style is the use of a discursive repertoire
  within a particular cultural and institutional
  frame.
• style of writing 20th century style even
  fashion

• Style Part 2
• Style is the effective use of language use
  through heuristics and conceptual schemes.
• Figures, schemes, tropes

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Part 1 Style and discursive repertoire

• What makes something a characteristic style?
• Political Rhetorical Styles
• The realist style
• The republican style
• The bureaucratic style
• The courtly style

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The Realist Style

• An old political style usually credited to
  Machiavellis The Prince.
• Holding up a Mirror
• Oldest rhetorical claim Nothing rhetorical
  going on here
• Relation to the objectivity we now come to expect
  in scientific rhetoric
• Disguise of judgment for description

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Machiavellian Realist Style

• Ethos of Self-control
• Word choice plain style
• Emphasis on description
• Denigrates others texts as texts, but raises own
  discourse to the standard of truth
• (consider when journalists call politicians
  speech rhetoricwhat is their own?)

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Example

• All the states, all the dominions, under whose
  authority men have lived in the past and live now
  have been or are republics or principalities.
  Principalities are hereditary, with their
  princes family long-established as rulersor
  they are like limbs joined to the hereditary body
  of the prince that acquires them. Dominions so
  acquired are accustomed to be under a prince, or
  used to freedom a prince wins them either with
  the arms of others or with his own , either by
  fortune or by prowess.

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Courtly Style

• Emphasis on hierarchy
• (examples from the modern court of Haile Selasse)
• Ethos built by a series of conventions that
  could change at any moment
• Courts cultivate a particular kind of
  communication
• Silence
• Speech/gesture
• Writing (page 62)

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Strategies of silence

• The Rhetoric of gesture overtakes and gives
  meaning to the spoken (examples 68, 69)
• Performative Power
• Claim If all utterance in this context comes to
  have primarily epideictic force if silent style
  manifests over rhetorical argumentif
  conversation is not listened to but watched, then
  the power relation between speaker and hearer
  becomes skewed toward the audience.

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No comment

• How do we respond to this?

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From courts to Hollywood

• Retinues
• Julio Iglesias was seen walking onto the lawn in
  front of his cabana followed by a blonde in a
  bikini and a squatty butler. Selecting the ideal
  spot for sunning himself, Julio snapped his
  fingers and two towels were placed on the ground
  for him and his companion. After fifteenminutes,
  the suns position had changed, and Julio stood
  up. His assistant bounced to attention and
  produced fresh towels, which he then placed on
  the ground a few degrees to the west of the
  first two.

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Republican Style

• Ethos of self-help
• How does one compose oneself for public life?
• Best encapsulated in the genres of the letter and
  in novels and in self-help guides as Eloquence is
  highly elaborated
• Clear distinctions between public and private

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Republic constituted in discourse

• Speech defined by excessive attention to ethos,
  and by obsessive attention to audience.
• Aesthetics of Cohesioninclusivity, consensus

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Cicero

• I have discovered that good taste is more
  important than a postgraduate degree in
  political science. It is essentially a matter of
  style knowing how long to speak, when to begin
  and when to finish, how to say something politely
  that your opposite member doesnt want to hear,
  not to speak of what is uninteresting, how to
  insist on your own position without offending,
  how to create the kind of friendly atmosphere
  that makes complex negotiations easier, how to
  keep a conversation going without prying or being
  aloof

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Cicero continued

• But more that thisit means having an instinct
  for the time. Qualities like fellow-feeling, the
  ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity
  to grasp quickly not only problems but also human
  character, the ability to make contact, a sense
  of moderation all these are styles immensely
  more important to politics.

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The Bureaucratic Style

• Kafka The Trial, Mellvilles Bartleby the
  Scrivener (the system relentlessly
  appropriating the lifeworld)
• The practice of keeping people waiting, of
  deferring decisions
• Emphasis on jurisdiction when politics is
  jurisdictional, rules become the signs of power

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The modern

• Max Weber Administrative acts, decisions, and
  rules are formulated and recorded in writing,
  even in cases where oral discussion is the rule
  or is even mandatory. This applies to
  preliminary discussions and proposals, to final
  decisions and to all sorts of orders and rules.
  The combination of written documents and
  continuous operation by officials constitutes the
  office style.

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Argument form in the Bureaucratic style

• Struggles over control of documents
• Jurisdictional arguments over which documents
  control which behaviours
• Interpretive questions become items for much
  argument.
• Individual ethos disappears and is substituted by
  the ethos of organisations and procedures

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Conclusion of 4 styles

• The efficient is no less a construct than the
  dignified the dignified no less an
  expression of power than the efficient.
• One might add that Machiavellis mirror is only
  as real as Ciceros self-made man.