Style: Markers and Measurements of Deferral

Style is a fundamentally mimetic concept. At the origin of any style is the performance of a role. Roles are ultimately ritual performances: certain gestures and utterances are commanded by the center in exchange for the center’s continued solicitousness. And those gestures and utterances are traceable to the oscillatory equilibrium established on the originary scene, as each indicates to the others his aborted appropriation of the object whose compellingness must also be indicated so as to make the gesture intelligible. Even in pre-Big Man orders (are they still called “hunter/gatherer communities”?) there is enough differentiation, along sexual lines and in delegation of authority over ritual to priest and shaman figures, so that performances take place outside of a strictly ritual scene, but I would assume with the same saturation of meaning as the tension of the community is communicated through each member and even more so those situated more centrally. With the emergence of imperial orders divisions of labor increase and therefore performances governed by criteria other than ritual rectitude, without necessarily being any less rigorous. “Style” is when the imitable features of a particular performance, either typical to a role or specific to an exemplary performer, are transported beyond that performer or that role. This means that we can thread of all of history through the mutations, articulations and transmissions of styles and stylistic features, and, since style allows us to zero in of the most minimal gestures and infra-gestures, it is a privileged field of data gathering. All styles and stylistic features carry in their trail ritual and sovereign commemorations that have been marked and incorporated into new ritual performances and enactments of sovereignly certified practices. Styles carry scenes with them, and with the refinement of styles we can see the creation of abstract scenes implanted in other scenes and we could call this a way of perfecting the imperative.

Style is stance, and some linguistic theorists of style reduce stance to the relation to some object or topic, the relation to an assumed set of readers, and the relation to an entire norm-governed field of expectations taken for granted by those readers. I would think of this tripartite structure in terms of deferral, deference and deferrality. A style implies some restraint—there are things you don’t say because saying them is too close to doing something that would implode the scene. Deference is offered to reader, listeners and potential interlocutors—a style encodes and enables certain typical responses and includes others in a space of conversation. Deferrality refers to the broader juridical and nomic conditions within which any style operates and which is inscribed in any style. So, speaking in terms of style, which may be very close to speaking in terms of inscription and ledgering, while being closer to a more publicly legible style, brings us closer to a vocabulary derived directly from deferral, which also means greater compression. Credit is the creation of terms under which immediate demands can be deferred; the nomos institutes a system of deferral around centered ordinality; sovereignty is deferral of claims to occupy the center; the juridical entails deferring the vendetta; and so we might get closer to being able to speak directly about layers of deferred appropriation mediated grammatically, now with the help of the very flexible concept of imperative exchange. Working through a new concept, as here with style, is a kind of perfecting of the imperative and solicitation of nomos or requesting further imperatives from the imperative and prolonged deferral from the center. (The “center” might be the undecidable hinge that must be accepted as true without being provable within the system.) And the need for new imperatives could be described in terms of the discovery of inappropriate imperatives issuing in declarative pinpointing of potential ostensives inappropriate enough from the start to be prolonged into imperatives while the request for prolonged deferred appropriation from the center can indicate possible ostensives around which might be designed scenes providing for ritually structured appropriations making further prolongations inscribable on the imperatives from the center. And so on, as we approximate a perfected originary grammar as the scene of center study; while, at the same time as this constrained, increasingly self-referential scene is constructed, more and more of the common language is poached so as to produce interfaces across expectant scenes. Maybe the poaching is needed to turn the common language into a kind of store of value. Hence: style, reducible to deferral while expanding deferral into the worlds of taking on and mutating “roles” or performances.

I’ve referred quite a few times to Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s study of “classic” style in their As Clear and Simple as the Truth, invariably in the context of working through the implications of David Olson’s metalanguage of literacy. Like Olson’s, Thomas and Turner’s account is scenic, in their case classic style is understood on the model of writer and reader sharing a scene evoked by the writer as if both are present on the scene and are looking at the same thing. Classic style, then, does not argue or purport to instruct—it simply points to a reality and the truth of that reality which the reader, as co-present on the scene, is equally capable of judging. Thomas and Turner do not study the prevalence of classic style in specific times and places, but it seems to me it was probably the civilized norm for writing from the late 17th to mid-20th century, co-existing at all times, of course, with various other styles (the question of the Baroque looms here). Thomas and Turner locate its modern origins with Descartes, whom they also treat as an exemplary practitioner, and, in fact, their account is heavily Franco-centric. But I would tie the emergence of classic style as a dominant civilizational style with the “break” in English I’ve also discussed before, noted by T.S. Eliot as having occurred around the time of the English Civil War, corresponding also to the founding of the Royal Society, with its stylistic preference for referential over metaphorical language. Classic style is, I think, a de-ritualized form of language, negating hierarchies or obligatory references to a priori doctrine, formulas or Names-of-God. All of this should be studied with the research tools made available through AI but, to follow Eliot, just a look at a poem of John Donne next to one of John Dryden will give you a clue. We can identify some specific features of classic style which might aid in archive searches, like categorical statements constructed through generalities balancing each other to the point of paradox: classic style is not “uncritical,” to use a non-classic idiom but, rather, in showing the reader a self-evident truth also creates a space of deferral whereby prior assumptions are displaced and the truth that the reader would not have considered strikes him immediately as obvious. Any educated person writing for a public would have taken classic style as default, and most of “realistic” fiction as well as political classics like The Federalist Papers would, I think, be judged to be in classic style. A very interesting history can be written (and maybe already has) from the standpoint of this very imposing and imperative style and other, “resentful” styles challenging it until it is finally overthrown which, I think, it largely has been—the struggle between classic style and the “jargony” style of bureaucratic and disciplinary styles might provide material for the tale of an epic struggle (with Romantic and other exotic styles waging guerilla operations). Classic style represents a kind of secular faith that is egalitarian and elitist at the same time: anyone can learn to think for himself and once he has can communicate freely with others who have also done so. Meanwhile, language, we can be assured, is, when properly used, in alignment with the truth. Marxists might call it a kind of “high bourgeois style.” If we trace it down to a particular scene on which it is modeled, that scene might be the conversations emergent civil society found conducted in coffee houses and publishing in the late 17th into the 18th century idealized by the recently deceased Jurgen Habermas and probably by classic style itself.

As part of my day job I have been studying other styles, such as the academic style predicated on the assumption of an open-ended conversation and inquiry in which no one will have the final word and any generality is suspect because it presupposes a consensus that has yet to have been queried—a style characterized by hedges predominating over boosters, concede/counter moves and compressed (especially) noun phrases that might delay the verb until halfway through the sentence or more with that verb, furthermore, likely to be “is” or something close. This is a style that serves as a kind of archive itself, compressing histories of conversations in those phrases, and one in which every claim must be “accredited”—someone must have said it, or said something the claim is responding to. All this contrasts sharply with classic style which represents the thought as that of the writer himself and one that the reader himself could also had arrived at—the insistence on enchaining all statements within references is a kind of ritualistic dimension of academic discourse as all conversations must be “licensed,” and I am not being critical of academic style here anymore than I am of any of the styles I’m examining. We can also speak of a kind of cousin of classic style, what Thomas and Turner call “practical” style, which is pragmatic, function and task oriented but also (in accounts less condescending than Thomas and Turner’s) “honest” and “sincere.” Practical style is what Orwell is arguing for in his often anthologized “Politics and the English Language,” even if quite a few commentators have had some fun with Orwell’s systematic violations of his own edicts in that essay. But here too we can look for specific features or markers: simple subjects and simple verbs (Joseph Williams, a major theorist of this style, calls for characters as subjects and actions as verbs), with limited abstractions and long noun or adjectival phrases. Thomas and Turner formulate the “last third test” to distinguish classic from practical style: with sentences written in the practical style you can often skim or skip the last third of the sentence because it will contain less important or predictable information whereas the sentence written in classic style requires a full read through because the reversal in expectations of paradoxical balancing is often saved for the end. Academic style is modeled on a kind of disciplinary scene, of course, while practical style draws heavily, I think, on a kind of “veteran” to “apprentice” scene, where one who knows something or has seen or experienced something the other hasn’t is putting it in “layman’s” terms for the reader.

I have also argued for a kind of originary, or maybe I want to call it “centropic” style, involving a compression and telescoping into the present tense. I would say this is modeled on the originary scene itself, or, rather, its iterations, as drawing all of the past and projecting all of the future within the scene of writing and reading itself. The most obvious marker here is the constraint of having everything in one of the present tenses, on the assumption that the past tense is mythical and the future tense prophetic and both of those styles are to be deferred in the name of curating ourselves as data for the center. This centropic style would share with and even exceed academic style in prolonged phrases tracking and tracing various instances of deferral conceivably issuing in the enactment of the present one and with classic style the compression into maxim-like paradoxical and transportable idioms—while for classic style such maxim-like phrases are to be presented as the product of thinking and observation going on behind the scene, for centropic style they are to be seen to emerge through a continual effort at executing the equivalent of the “optimized” instance of deferral. (All my work in exposing and rerouting the the metalanguage of literacy is in the interest of this style.) And on occasion centropic style will want to explain in simple terms how to do some specific thing. And, of course, we could classify a wide range of styles deriving from prayers, Chaim Perelman’s “epideictic” speech, oratory, everyday conversation and so on—along with all the satires and parodies of those styles as they become styles and are transported across scenes, far from their origins (to new origins). Each style could be dissolved into originary grammar and then be derived from it again in some trans-form, in this way serving as a kind of ongoing measure of deferral. Once style is marked, it also become self-referential as one always knows one has entered classic, practical or some other style from another style and can therefore narrate one’s movements, creating new styles as self-marking and measuring discourses. And it’s this possibility of marking features as precisely as need be—a word, a prefix, a punctuation mark can be a marker of a particular style on which we might train our search engines, and so might be sentences, paragraphs or patterns across texts. Generating a style of inquiry into style will enable us to transition in and out of originary grammar, now organized around the imperative exchange and get us closer to a kind of holy grail of anthropomorphics, which is to saying what we are saying as we are saying it with no debilitation of the saying (indeed, with an enhancement of the saying) which is also to say the articulation of the scene from within the scene itself.

I am fairly certain that it is possible to identify a set of linguistic features common to all styles that would exhaustively account for the writer’s stance toward the topic, toward the reader and toward the broader field of conversation archived in the text or, more centropically, the deferrality and deferentiality of the utterance or sample. Each style simply articulates those features in a different way. This would provide us with a technics of style determined, ultimately, by where your readers are positioned scenically in relation to you: are you imagining co-presence on a scene immediately visible and available, or a stack and succession of scenes implying a sequence or hierarchy of collection, verification, authentication, curation, ordering, etc., of what would ultimately be ostensives. To be more precise, your utterance or sample transports others from one scene to another: from a scene upon which whatever your ostensive now points to was invisible to one upon which is brought into view (or within hearing, or touch—we need not privilege any sense over the others here). So, style is the virtualization of some stack of scenes at the end of which we might expect to be able to say, “this is the same.” But “virtualization” itself means the expectation of others expecting others to have been manning posts across those scenes. Style, then is the perfection of the imperative to enact deferrality and deferentiality at ever expanded scales.