Democratic Style and Ideological Containment

In the introduction to Political Style, Robert Hariman draws an analogy between political style and musical style: “It is easy to think of the world of music according to basic, collective styles of composition,” including baroque, romantic, and modern classical music, and country, rock, and jazz popular music. Political style, like musical style, “draws on universal elements of the human condition and symbolic repertoire but organizes them into a limited, customary set of communicative designs.”¹

Since Hariman’s book was designed to start rather than conclude a conversation, I want to modify and extend his view of style in three ways. First, because of Hariman’s interest in constructing a provisional set of ideal types in the Weberian sense, he pays little attention to the sociological basis of political style, thus missing the opportunity to connect the analysis of political style to the critique of ideology. Second, it may be useful to pursue a deeper analysis of style in music and the other fine arts as a way of making sense of political style. Third, because classical rhetoric separated invention, disposition, delivery, and style, a more thoroughly modern or postmodern understanding of style would require redefining it as form—thus incorporating elements of argument, organization, linguistic structure, trope, and performance. In this essay, I argue that the role of rhetorical form in a political style is to arouse physical and emotional responses in an audience and then exploit those responses to maintain or change the current distribution of power. Because the democratic style exhibits the physical and emotional aspects of rhetoric in its most intense way, democratic style functions within political style generally as a perennial enemy to elite power that must be resisted or contained.

In Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke famously defined “form” as the creation of an appetite in the mind of an audience.² This appetite may be filled with a number of different types of form: the syllogistic form of the detective novel, the incidental form of a stylistic device such as antithesis, the conventional form of the Christian Eucharist, or the qualitative form of the well-crafted novel, as in Tolstoy’s use of railroad references to foreshadow Anna’s tragic end in Anna Karenina. Burke’s notion of form thus integrates the traditional concerns of the canons of invention, disposition, and style.³

Burke’s discussion of incidental form illustrates the rhythmic, bodily basis of rhetoric and aesthetics: when one hears the first clause of an antithesis, one feels compelled to complete the figure with the second clause. Although this pattern of arousal and fulfillment is common to all the arts, it appears in its most abstract, yet clear, form in music. If we examine musical form or style, we can identify different period styles—baroque, romantic, or modern—in terms of their management of this basic sensory experience of tension and release, mainly through the way the styles manage development of a theme or handle dissonance. Dissonance is handled very differently in baroque, classical-romantic, and modernist music. Beethoven’s use of dissonance, for example, might have shocked the ear of a Baroque musician, just as Schoenberg’s dissonant atonality continues to grate on the ears of most concert goers. Beethoven’s development of a musical theme by sending it into the most distant and unexpected keys before its resolution embodies the problem of identity (the theme), fragmentation, and unity.⁴

Musical styles, although they may outlast the social context of their genesis, are marked by that context. We may never, as Fredric Jameson writes, be able to hear a major or minor triad with quite the intensity it evoked at the end of the period of polyphonic music and the rise of tonal harmony.⁵ Similarly, the Wagnerian diminished seventh may have been heard in its time as a shocking expression of unsatisfied sexual longing, but it now has grown familiar enough to appear as a mere period sign of feeling.⁶

If musical style has its roots in the bodily experience of tension and release, all artistic forms, including political style, have their origins in the heightening and...