The Rhetoric of Law

The Alchemy of Style and Law

The Alchemy of Style and Law Barbara Johnson My turn. The story of one of my madnesses. -Arthur Rimbaud, liThe Alchemy of the Word" I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, as once they burned the contents and the rafters of their homes, to feed the furnace of the Great Work. What? it's hard to say ... a book ... the Orphic explanation of the Earth ... whose rhythm would be impersonal and alive all the way down to its pagination ... the Text would speak on its own, without the voice of an author. -Stephane Mallarme, IIAutobiography" From my two epigraphs, it can be deduced that my subject is the relationship between madness and the existence of the impersonal book, between verbal alchemy and autobiography, between dream and sacrifice. I hasten to reassure you that I am about to abandon the domain of the poetic. I promise that I will not mix genres. I am here to present a paper on the rhetoric of law. The title of my paper, JlThe Alchemy of Style and Law," is meant to be heard as an echo of the title of a book by Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, subtitled Diary of a Law Professor . l What is to be understood by the word alchemy? Rather than answer that question directly, I would like to bring in a quotation 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Subsequent references are incorporated in the text. THE RHETORIC OF LAW from Walter Benjamin concerning the difference between a commentary and a critique: The history of works of art prepares their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive.2 This curious conjunction of an image of death (a funeral pyre) with a concept of life (the "enigma of being alive") will return in an unexpected way in the present essay. But for the moment, I would like simply to suggest that if "the work" in question is the entire edifice of American law, then it seems to me that Patricia Williams is undertaking its critique in exactly this sense. Is my own title meant to suggest that style is to race as law is to rights? Am I, in other words, asserting a connection between race and style? No, if it means asserting a one-to-one correspondence between a race and a style-saying, for instance, that an author's race can be identified from his or her style, as though style were a natural and continuous and un-self-different emanation of a racial identity. But yes, if it means asserting that the intractability of racial misunderstanding or inequality might have something to do with style-both because conflict might arise from not recognizing the effects of different styles, and because certain styles are privileged over others. The ideology of style is a powerful reinforcer of hierarchy . This, at least, is one of the central tenets of Patricia Williams's critique. It is not that Patricia Williams's style can be identified as black or female, but that her writing possesses a logic that makes perceptible the realities of difference subordinated behind the rhetoric of neutrality and impersonality into which students of the law are inevitably inducted. In other words, the style of Patricia Williams is not the sign of her identity but the enactment of her critique. It is not easy to give a capsule description of the style of Williams's 2. Quoted in Hannah Arendt's introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 5. THE ALCHEMY OF STYLE AND LAW book. It is not autobiography, or legal theory, or editorial, or allegory, but it partakes of all of these. It is a breakthrough book for the possibilities of a fully conscious historical subject of discourse who does not coincide with-indeed, has been subtly or overtly excluded from-the position defined as neutral, objective, impersonal. Williams analyzes the exclusions and costs of adopting...