Centrality of Style, The. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ style. But rather than obscuring artifice through a mesmerizing focus on image and immediacy, sprezzatura controls perceived artifice by focusing on the acting of the casually unprepared orator. In The Book of the Courtier such performances usually begin with the courtier feigning ignorance on a topic then slowly unfold into a display of wit and wordplay on a theme the orator has secretly prepared in advance. Part of sprezzatura, therefore, involves steering the course of conversation into an area in which one can thrive. Thus, unlike sublimity, sprezzatura still retains some perceivable styling and the semblance of a creationary act but only enough to illustrate that the act was easily constructed. All hint of the artifice is filtered by the careful hand of the rhetor.

      For instance, an orator might plan a digression into his speech that at first appears to be completely detached from the course of conversation but then skillfully connects back to the topic, evoking new thoughts on the subject. Such a digression highlights the orator’s quick wit as nonchalant, natural, and kairotic, hinting that “He who does well so easily, knows much more than he does” (Castiglione, 2000, p. 38). Of course, Castiglione is only one champion13 of natural style and “flow,” but, with sophistic echoes, he seems the most honest in holding that the idea of naturalness (as well as the identity of the perfect orator) is subjective and constructed; to survive an orator needs to be deceptive in constructing the strongest “natural” ethos possible.

      Beyond casting Longinian shadows in the disguising of art, sprezzatura has a similar effect on the mind of the listener, “[W]hoever hears and sees us may from our words and gestures imagine far more than what he sees and hears, and so be moved to laughter” (Castiglione, 2000, p. 120). Where the concussion of the sublime leaves the audience thinking it was they who came up with the idea they experienced, the manipulation of sprezzatura urges the audience to look carefully into everything they hear; deeper meaning, produced communally by author and interpreter, is always just below wit and style. Thus, casual construction and stylistic devices that encourage interpretation like juxtaposition, subtle extended metaphors, and digressions perpetuate a sprezzatura style.

      Castiglione also discusses the fate of rhetors who fail to conceal their art, or worse, fail to conceal the concealing of art: “If it is discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem” (2000, p. 36). Further, he reminds readers that such failure has consequences, both for creating more wary audiences (“men who are ever fearful of being deceived by art”) as well as for compromising an author’s ethos (“If it had been detected it would have made men wary of being duped”) (2000, p. 36). Audiences are suspicious of the art of concealing because style might cloak bad ideas, intentions, and people. And in the case of the court, a constructed style might reveal that the courtier does not truly agree with the sovereign. At times, though, Castiglione seems less concerned about breaking an audience’s trust and more worried about destroying the orator’s beauty. The ultimate goal of sprezzatura is grace. An ice skater who performs a nonchalant triple lutz is more graceful than one who performs it while showing great effort.14 Or, as Castiglione explains, “Do you not see how much more grace a lady who paints (if at all) so sparingly and so little, that whoever sees her is in doubt whether she be painted or not; than another lady so plastered that she seems to have put a mask upon her face” (2000, p. 54).

      Leaked Constructedness

      A nonchalance similar to that which Castiglione instructs appears in numerous modern publications, advertisements, and websites in the form of what I dub “leaked constructedness.” To create leaked constructedness, graphic designers and artists employ bibliographic signifiers that appear to be casual and handmade but which are probably digitally created, such as seemingly hand-scripted fonts, crayon and marker drawings, collage aesthetics, photocopier mimicry, and smudged inks. Highly complex digital design programs are carefully employed to replicate the smear of a fountain pen or a hapless collage in order to cater to an audience that is nostalgic for signs of less mediated personal connections in an impersonal digital world. Thus, leaked constructedness plays to its audience through sprezzaturic styling that has the look of art that was created with ease or through accident. Such a Do-It-Yourself (rather than digitally) aesthetic plays a key role in what is often dubbed “hipster culture” with its postmodern code of radical nonchalance and can be viewed in such magazines and websites as Adbusters, Found magazine, and the websites of most “indie” music labels and “zines.” Though it seems inaccurate to claim that digitally created texts aren’t DIY or handmade, analog art often holds a more “authentic” appeal, possibly because it is less mediated and somehow represents the artist more immediately.

      But sprezzaturic nostalgia has also been harnessed since computers went personal as seen, again, in the metaphors that govern it—the desktop; the dashboard; the trashcan; the folder and file; copying, cutting, and pasting; space on a hard drive; etc. Just as the metaphor on the computer seeks to focus the reader on content rather than construction, it seeks to revive the physicality of those metaphors through familiar images like the trashcan and the folder. Such a nostalgic immediacy15 keeps the user’s attention away from the fact (and fear) that he or she has no idea how the device is actually operating and focused on the idea that it might be functioning as easily as the metaphor that represents it. Thus, the connection to sprezzatura—the technology seems to be working at a much simpler level than it really is.16

      Continuum of Apparent Mediation

      Through Castiglione’s sprezzatura and the concept of leaked constructedness we begin to explore another continuum upon which ideas of stylistic ethics are formed: apparent mediation and manipulation. Since the time of Sir Francis Bacon, Petrus Ramus, and empiricism, scientists have sought to purge rhetoric and style from language because they felt it obscured truth; it deceived; it mediated too much. Thus, plain style was born because people don’t like being, or more precisely feeling, deceived. But in examining the U.S. population’s hatred of “The Media” we can complicate this continuum as well.

      We often don’t like too much mediation in our media because we want to create our own views of the news from objective evidence. We want to get as close to pure objective data as we can—we want language to be immediate. Thus, newspapers usually seek to keep the opinion of the writer, and many times any reference to the author, out of journalism.17 As veteran journalist and pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman explains, “Being a news reporter forces you to adopt a peculiar personality: You spend every moment of your life trying to eradicate emotion. Reporters overcompensate for every nonobjective feeling they’ve ever experienced” (2003, p. 205). Reporters and editors purge opinion in order to avoid libel and media bias, but, as Klosterman further discusses, such a quest for objectivity, “really just makes them [news stories] longer and less clear. The motivation for doing this is to foster objectivity, but it actually does the complete opposite. It makes finding an objective nearly impossible, because you’re always getting facts plus requisite equalizing fiction” (2003, p. 209). Rather than producing objective facts for the reader to interpret, equalizing fiction (like transparent language) functions as sprezzatura, creating the appearance of easy objectivity and disguising another layer of mediation. Such an artificial objectivity smacks of deception and the spin that Americans hate and has a somewhat contradictory effect: “Skeptical news consumers often find themselves suspecting that deeper truth can be found on the newspaper opinion pages, or through talk radio…. The assumption is that—since these pundits openly admit their biases—you can trust their insights more” (Klosterman, 2003, p. 209). Thus, an audience trusts confession as a rhetorical style because it makes its deception and spin readily available where sprezzatura, although based on similar selectivity and styling, hides its bias.

      But at some point as we begin to trust such confession and the focus of attention switches from spin back to content, do we forget the spin? When bias is confessed, sometimes an audience no longer feels the need to criticize that bias, and when people aren’t critical of bias, it fades to the background. This is true, for instance, of both conservative and liberal news programs—at some point, to liberals The Daily Show seems less and less biased because it admits its bias; to conservatives, the O’Reilly Factor has a similar effect.18 Sometimes it seems that an audience СКАЧАТЬ