Style (n.) is, in the final analysis, art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
Style (n.) is the particular idiom in which one deploys the form of one's art. It is an epistemological decision, which is to say, an interpretation of how and what we perceive.
Style (n.) is always historical; our perception of the style of a given work of art is always charged with an awareness of the work’s historicity, its place in a chronology.
Style (n.) is another way of speaking (misleadingly) about the totality of a work of art.
A Style (n.) is made visible as a product of historical consciousness. Were it not for departures from, or experimentation with, previous artistic norms which are known to us, we could never recognize the profile of a new style.
Style (n.) is not quantitative, any more than it is superadded. A work does not have ‘more’ style than others.
Style (n.) is perhaps a ‘manner of our appearing’ but it is not an opposition between ‘appearing’ and “true” being. The mask is the face.
Style (n.) is problematic because most metaphors used to grasp it amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside.
Style (n.) is haunted by the putative opposition between form and content; by the notion of form subverting content