This is a brief exploration of the concept of style engendered by some ideas I have encountered recently in the following few readings:
- On Style (1965), an essay by Susan Sontag
- Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (1996), a book on writing in classic style by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner
- Varieties of Presence (2012), a book on perception and consciousness by Alva Noë
In synthesizing ideas from these three texts, I may mistakenly over-interpret what the authors are saying, but hopefully I can point to a few ways in which the authors’ claims overlap and — in the best case — help mold a synergistic conception of style.
Style in Art
In the essay On Style, Susan Sontag astutely notices that most metaphors of style amount to putting style on the outside of the content or matter. On the contrary, she claims that such a move is not a genuine option for an artist. An artist cannot choose to have or not have a style — just like personality, style is an essential element of ourselves. While she is largely speaking from the stance of a literary critic, her claim has plausible force in many other aspects of human life.
More broadly, her essay is a commentary on the “presumed tension between the statement and the manner in which it is stated”— between content and form, between morality and art, between the ethical and the aesthetic (Sontag 22). To illustrate the tension between content and form/style, it may be helpful to cite an analogy between morality vs. art and content vs. style.
According to Sontag, conceptual knowledge and art appear to differ in a similar manner to the way in which content and form/style do:
“[The] distinctive feature [of a work of art] is that they give rise not to conceptual knowledge (which is the distinctive feature of discursive or scientific knowledge — e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgement in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself” (21–22).
To take the morality-art/content-style analogy further, Sontag says that morality proceeds to create a “form of consciousness, aimed at action, while aesthetic experience proceeds to achieve nourishment of consciousness” (25). Nevertheless, both are essential to an “intelligent gratification of consciousness” (Sontag 24). Thus, the conventional dichotomy in art between content and style — between its conceptual interpretation and its aesthetic experience — seems to be not so sharp after all.
Another point Sontag makes is that stylistic decisions in art focus our attention on some things, but also narrow it, preventing us from seeing other things:
“But the interestingness of art over another does not rest on the greater number of things the stylistic decisions in that work allow us to attend to, but rather on the intensity and authority and wisdom of that attention, however narrow its focus” (Sontag 35–6).
The artist’s stylistic choices constrain our experience of a work of art. But it is precisely these artistic choices which provide us certain means of access to the work of art (or even to the artist’s mind), ways in which the work can engage our sensibilities and enliven our souls.
Style in Writing
In Clear and Simple as the Truth, Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner claim —although regarding classic prose, much like Sontag — that style is composed of a fundamental set of decisions from which “surface features” derive (Thomas & Turner, 22).
The “surface features” that they are referencing are often what other books on writing in America set out to define and make recommendations apropos. From where to place commas to how to order paragraphs to whether one should write “24 March 1954” rather than “March 24, 1954,” these books teach that knowing how to write is possessing such a set of verbal skills. Thomas and Turner rightfully claim, however, that such things are informed by arbitrary convention, and lack any substance at all.
While the book breaks down the elements of classic style into addressing questions about and relationships between five broad topics (Truth, Presentation, Scene, Cast, Thought & Language), I will not go into detail about those here.
Style in Experience & Thought
In Varieties of Presence, Alva Noë explores the phenomenon of presence. His basic thesis is that presence is composed and achieved through the varieties of skillful access we have with the world.
“Questions of meaning and presence are, in a basic sense, questions of style. We do things with style. That is, there are distinctive ways we achieve access to the world around us, and to these different styles or manners of carrying on there correspond different ways in which worlds (words, meanings, pictures, people, places, problems, everything) can show up for us” (Noë 3).
Representational theory of mind (i.e. the computationalist view where the mind is in the brain) consists of a traditional bifurcation of mental content into thoughts and perception. On the contrary, Noë advocates a type of externalist view of the mind that is style-based, wherein “thought and experience [or perception] are different styles of exploring and achieving, or trying to achieve, access to the world” (Noë 45).
Here is more of Noë on style:
“Style has been a low-prestige notion. When it comes to style, we think fashion, pop music or, even worse, orthography. Style is thought to be a domain where people have strong convictions but no good reasons. Style is taken to be a space where we cannot speak of right or wrong, only of how we, or they, say things are supposed to be done.
From the standpoint developed here, style emerges as a fundamental concept in terms of which to make sense of ourselves and other life forms. For what is the mind of a person or animal but, in effect, the sum total, the repertoire, of available ways of achieving the world’s presence? And what is the world but that to which the stylish being achieves access? To styles of mind, there correspond types of worlds” (Noë 45).
According to Noë, our styles are essential to us and compose our means of access to the world. Nevertheless, the presence, achieved via our styles of access, is fragile — and thus our styles require constant cultivation and exploration.
Putting it all together…
It seems that the concept of style can be thought of as something essential to us. Our styles in life provide us access to what the world offers us, à la Noë. These styles (of access) seem like two-way streets — not only giving us contact with the world, but us giving the world contact back to us. They betray how we are embedded in and connected to the world.
One cannot have a fashionable style by just wearing the latest designer clothes, much like one cannot have a writing style by mimicking the word choice or sentence structure of some great writer of the past. In the former case of fashion, it seems that style stems from elements of our personality — how well our clothes fit us or how well our clothes express our ways of being in the world. In the latter case of writing, it seems that style stems from how we ourselves entangle with and therein interpret the ideas/concepts we have encountered through introspection, conversation, books, etc.
The same seems to hold for art, music, and life generally.
In essence, conventional elements of style — from what we look like to how we say something — are superficial. Style is actually much deeper than that. Style is ultimately about the content of our character — who we are and what we care about. It’s about how we want to make, how we’ve made, or how we hope to make contact with the world in our ephemeral moments of life. It is about how it is we are aware and present to our experiences in this world. It is about communicating the nature of our experience.
Implications for Authenticity
The more I’ve lived and experienced the world, the more I’ve started to believe that to be authentic is the most valuable thing. Unfortunately, authenticity seems to be the thing which is most forsaken by others — those who say what people want to hear, who do/make what people expect, etc. It is in this spirit that I wonder what the implications of the thoughts above on the concept of style mean for the concept of authenticity.
Here is the inimitable Susan Sontag again:
“The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality” (26).
Like Sontag, I believe that great artists and writers do not advocate for anything in particular; instead, they are able to capture the entire human experience by “recording, devouring, and transfiguring” their own experience. As exemplified by Chekov in The Kiss or Dostoevsky in any of his novels, they undertake the task of “serious noticing” à la James Wood in The Nearest Thing to Life.
We should advocate for people living authentically just as these great writers wrote — processing and providing observations of their own experiences; and, over time, cultivating and invoking their own styles.
In this sense, observations as such are unjustifiable since they are usually not made via logical argumentation. They are views of the world — captured from a certain distance, expressed through some media, at a certain moment or across moments in time. Although argumentation may be a necessary component of these observations, they are decidedly not sufficient and verifiably not the point.
“Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another — not when we consider all there is” (Sontag 28).
Much like observations, art (exhibitions of observations) proclaims that the world is ultimately an aesthetic phenomenon — that it cannot be ultimately justified. Nevertheless, to live authentically may be the only justifiable thing in life.
To really live — to live it with style.
