A Rhetoric of Style.

• Author: Crick, Nathan

A Rhetoric of Style. By Barry Brummett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008; pp. 190. $35.00 Paperback.

From the perspective of an Enlightenment rationalist, Barry Brummett's A Rhetoric of Style is written as a tragedy. This is because Brummett's book is grounded in a historical narrative in which substance collapses into style, in which a pre-industrial world concerned with determining an object's use value in response to situated material needs gives way to a post-capitalist world preoccupied with aesthetic texts whose exchange value is symbolically constructed to stimulate and satisfy desire. This changed environment thus brings about a changed rhetoric--from a rhetoric based in "argument" to one based on "aesthetics, style, feeling" (p. 128). In a conclusion that would make Bishop Whately weep, Brummett concludes that "the ascendancy of style as a political language means the gradual reduction of a long tradition of verbal, expositional, argumentative discourse as the hallmark of political and democratic discourse" (p. 95). However, Brummett denies rationalists their tragic ending. Instead of pity and fear, Brummett offers hope and courage. He writes:

[I]t is impossible to turn back a wave of global cultural change fueled by commerce and technology. If people around the world are obsessed with style because we are being driven to hyperconsume so as to support late capitalism, if technology is coming to make style and its sister, entertainment, more and more engrossing, if ways of thinking are shifting from the verbal, expositional, and demonstrative toward a more aesthetic mix--well, get over it. That's the way it is going to be. Our task is more to understand than to bemoan. I am convinced that once a brave new world of stylistic discourse, rhetoric, and politics becomes the usual thing for people, it will start to seem like the right thing. What is key is to know how this globally spreading system of signification

works and to understand our place in it (p. 172).

The fact that few rationalists will be motivated by this claim clearly does not bother Brummett. For him, a rationalist committed to preserving a rhetoric of "substance" over a rhetoric of "style" is akin to a biologist who "speaks of dodo birds in the Caribbean" (p. 11). In Brummett's historical narrative, the postmodern condition of late capitalism has effectively made such rhetoric extinct. Consequently, A Rhetoric of Style concentrates its energies on...