#robert hariman

[erkjhnsn]

Allegory is at once a figure of excess and deficiency. The excess is marked by the explicit overcoding of the presentation: image and text, past and present, dominion and dissent, these and other modalities are present. More to the point, they are present as signs, for the intermixing of the disparate forms makes their semiotic character explicit. This multiplicity of signs is formally reinforced by the explicit artificiality of the work, which in turn points not to a prior reality but rather the gap between sign and object. Allegories register a condition of semiotic excess that cannot be encompassed by a master narrative; the result of overproduction is fragmentation. Thus, allegories also mark the fact that reality always exceeds the means of representation, and that interpretation is necessary to complete any representation. The relatively static modality of the allegorical composition evokes an active interpreter who must not only read multiple codes but make choices regarding their relative value and application elsewhere.

Robert Hariman, "Future Imperfect: Imagining Rhetorical Culture Theory," in Culture & Rhetoric, ed. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 226.

[erkjhnsn]

In other words, at some point a political style can be understood as the artistic expression of a political theory (and some political theories might be considered rationalizations of specific styles of interaction).      . . . The throne in the desert is absurd because there is no political power in a state of nature. Politics begins with the creation of meaning, which is always shared, reciprocal, a process of display and response. There is nothing to be appropriated that cannot also be withdrawn, and nothing so useless as a prop without a play.      . . . [Frank] Lentricchia [in his reading of Kenneth Burke] has grasped the radical implication latent within any recognition of political style: To the extent that power is a product of performance, it is spontaneous, actualized, and unstable. … In this conception, power is available potentially to anyone because it is entirely crafted, and sufficient to command the entire human being, but dependent on the thousand contingencies of audience response. This is why critical awareness of decorum is disturbing to those accustomed to the routinization of charisma. In place of rational governance, organizational structure, and political accountability, the analysis of political style suggests that often political decisions turn on transitory aesthetic perceptions, that a political system is continually reinvented through performances both scheduled and spontaneous, and that political power is very difficult to grasp. In other words, power can be a relation created through performance, or a residual property of previous or repeated performances, but it is not likely to be the same thing as the application of force or the rational operation of administrative practices.

Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 71, 72, 73.