Decorum and the Legacy of Michael Leff

In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate.

—Cicero¹

I was introduced to this passage by Michael Leff, a man who loved oratory, who loved life, and who seemed both to embrace and to resist the virtue of decorum with equal vigor. In the brief essay that follows, I compare Mike's public persona with the more personal role that he played in the lives of his advisees and students. My memories of him are not more or less authentic than the memories of others, nor do I have any secret knowledge to share here. To the contrary, the public and the private Mikes were remarkably similar, although reactions to both varied. In conversations over dinner he was precisely as he appeared in class or at conferences: he was a brilliantly inventive scholar whose manner could exceed the bounds of propriety. In fact, it is his manner that interests me now. The Michael Leff that I remember embodied a productive tension between the belief that decorum was a determinative aspect of being human and a consistent willingness to challenge propriety for the sake of intellectual growth or personal pleasure. No person's existence can be summarized in a single sentence; nevertheless, Cicero's admonition regarding the difficulties of propriety both for oratory and for life speaks to the legacy of my mentor who was also a friend.

Leff is best known within the communication studies discipline for advocating a program of close reading. In his publications and in graduate seminars at several institutions, he advanced a mode of criticism that he initially viewed as a-theoretical, but that he later understood to be the exploration of situated or "case based" theories.² Leff argued that speeches or, more accurately, exemplars of the oratorical art, constituted a "field of action unified into a functional and locally stable product."³ He suggested that rhetorical critics interpret texts from a "formal/functional" perspective to appreciate how these exemplars synthesized linguistic artistry with an immediate attempt to influence audiences.⁴ Because the text was a dynamic mode of aesthetic and political action unique to its moment of articulation, the use of modern or postmodern theories was both unnecessary and problematic for the hermeneutic enterprise.

In his graduate courses at Northwestern, Leff argued that theory and method, at least as they were practiced within the field of speech communication, sustained their intellectual authority through general, abstract principles. These theories and methods had helped establish communication as an academic discipline, but they were inadequate for "generating grounded interpretations of rhetorical texts."⁵ Leff taught and wrote that

since oratory was not regulated by abstract rules but by the changing demands of practice, only one principle could apply to the art universally, and that was decorum or appropriateness—the flexible standard that measured the quality of a discourse against the context of the situation.⁶

With the exception of this "flexible standard," Leff told generations of practicing critics that theory was a distraction. Abstract theories, regardless of their origin, interposed external demands and interests into a text that was already ripe with complexity. All the critic need do was engage the text on its own terms.

Leaving aside the difficult problem of how a critic might follow this advice—his students speculated that only Mike could do so successfully—there is little doubt that he took his admonition seriously. For example, in my third year at Northwestern we sat down to discuss my dissertation. In the course of the meeting I asked, "Should I include a section in the prospectus that discusses my methods?" He looked puzzled and then replied, "Why? You are not using a method but a perspective, close reading, and you have no theory that stands apart from the texts you will read." At the time his answer was a mild relief, because it absolved me from writing yet another literature review. Still, I had my doubts.

Leff's advice contradicted what other professors and graduate students had told me was appropriate for the content of a prospectus. The...