Traditionally associated with literary studies, style has become an indispensable reference for discussing contemporary communication practices. Marielle Macé suggests calling certain forms of life experience “style”. At the expense of stylistics?
The word style continues its irresistible conquest of discourses devoted to the various fields of communication. Omnipresent in the mainstream media, from the fashion pages of magazines to sports reports and analyses of a politician’s image choices, it enters the French intellectual world of the essay thanks to Marielle Macé, a few years after the cursive Style as experience by Pierre Bergounioux (Paris, L’Olivier, 2013).
The advent of a stylistics of existence
Like any essay, Styles. Criticism of our forms of life opens with a first chapter that sets out the thesis, the strong idea to be defended, which the following four chapters will support with examples and demonstrations: “Questions of style are offered as tools to qualify life” and, due to a very convenient adjectival derivation, it is said that we are living “a stylistic moment of culture” (p. 25). On page 12, Marielle Macé had already explained that what she was aiming for was to apply the program of Michel Foucault from the 1970s-1980s, who called for a true “stylistics of existence”, an approach that should allow us, according to her, to “judge” our “forms of life” considered as experiences of engagement. We understand it immediately: more than a thesis, what is a proposition of language chooses to rely on one of these words with an uncertain referent and resistant to any theorization to characterize and describe (that is what it is about: naming, identifying) practices of life. The idea drives the entire essay, taken up clearly in the conclusion as a goal to be achieved: “increasing our collective mastery of the qualification of forms of living” (p. 316). Style is thus the name given, for those who want to talk about life, to the “deployment of a ‘kind of existence'” (Marielle Macé quoting Jean-Christophe Bailly, p. 102).
Marielle Macé therefore does not propose, and does not seek to propose in any way, there definition of style: she uses this label to describe life experiences, taking up from G. Agamben his hypothesis of an “ontology of style” (p. 216). We can see to what extent the word, reinforced by its Foucauldian derivative, is suggestive for her. This “style” is thus the name given to essentializing properties: modality, distinction and individuation – and Marielle Macé devotes a chapter to each of its properties: this is the plan of her book which concludes with a chapter summarizing a few examples (style and anger, documentary as style, etc.). The references are as numerous as they are syncretic and the analyses are carried by an explicit and self-assumed empathy. Concerning the modalities of living, we remember the pages devoted to Barthes’ mourning (pp. 97-99) and to his illness, which he would have experienced as a true “form of life”. The analysis of distinction as a social activity is entirely carried by the authority of Bourdieu whose concept ofhabitus is perfect for the author’s purpose; but we are also grateful to Marielle Macé in this chapter for paying homage to the brilliant intuitions of Balzac of Treatise on Elegant Lifewho was in fact probably the first to “observe the new stylistic regime that constitutes the distinctive conception of social life” (p. 124). And among other practices of individuation, we find the example of the dandies. It is with regard to these practices of individuation as forms of life that Marielle Macé presents one of her most seductive ideas, but which also marks the limit of her approach to abstraction with the rhythm which, “configuring and reactive” is “an exemplary dimension” of what individuation is: not a given “but a task, a demanding practice of singularities, all together demanding and dislocating” (p. 258).
Style outside the language
For Marielle Macé, style is everywhere in life, except in language, or at least this aspect does not hold her back. This is surprising, but that is how it is. Marielle Macé does not have a word in her entire essay for the linguistic and language or discursive dimension of style. Even the recurring analyses on Michaux or Ponge are not analyses of language, but of mental representations and conceptualizations. Marielle Macé’s approach resolutely and absolutely excludes the linguistic tradition of analysis and description of style in language and as discourse theorized by Bally – this discipline that the University calls “stylistics” – to make style and its adjectival derivative a term of aesthetic or sociological analysis. This is surprising and will not please everyone, but it must be admitted that “stylistics”, by agreeing to do without a style that has never been defined in order to be satisfied with a vague and all-purpose “discourse analysis”, or to affirm by tautology the “literary” nature of great authors, has had it coming.
Because, precisely, what the affirmation of style as a form of life to be evaluated, to be judged, allows Marielle Macé is to place at the forefront of any analytical approach the question of value, this taboo of stylisticians, and we must be grateful to her for it. Indeed, “the vocabulary of style is a vocabulary of value” (p. 34): “style does not only look at the appearance; it supposes the identification of dominant, adjectivizable schemes, which attract attention, bring out details and open up a life of differences”; in short, “it creates a form-forcereliefs in appearance, dynamics of separation, punctuations, “values” (p. 21, my emphasis). To Meschonnic’s form-meaning, which has been misread, misunderstood and caricatured into an amateur detective hermeneutic (the sign as an index to be understood), Marielle Macé opposes the form-force of what can only be understood as efficiency, failure, yield, performance – while remaining in the communicational regime, of course.
Marielle Macé claims not to want to “ensure the triumph of the word ‘style’ over other terms” – she adds: “I do not believe that truths reside in words, but in sentences”. “This word,” she writes, however, “constitutes my entry point into a question that, from the outset, surpasses and overflows it, that of a concern for the forms of living, which imposes itself today with great breadth but supports very divergent values and struggles” (p. 36). Marielle Macé is perfectly in agreement with herself and we approve of her: with her unthought-of view on the (linguistic) notion of expression, she has not written a book on style, which was not her purpose, but a beautiful book of witness on contemporary practices of experience, considered as forms to live.