Austin City Limits

One thing that I thought about last week with Latour and that has come back to mind again as I read Bitzer, Vatz, and Edbauer is what role--if any--the work of J. L. Austin could play in an understanding of how utterances themselves function, either in a network (as with Latour and, seemingly, Edbauer) or a rhetorical situation (Bitzer and Vatz). In How To Do Things With Words, Austin presents a speech act theory in which not all utterances are simply truth-evaluable--some actually perform the function described, an action of binding power. Obvious examples include legal sentencing, marriage ceremonies, the reading of wills, the christening of ships (and perhaps naming, in general). (Judith Butler appropriated Austin's work in describing how gender is produced as an effect of a regulatory discourse--one that requires ritualized repetition of behavior, including performative utterances).

I thought about this last week in terms of Latour because it occured to me that utterances are themselves included as actors in networks and that, following Austin, they very well should. My thoughts returned to Austin this week when Bitzer talks about rhetoric as "a mode for altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). This sounded very much like Austin to me. Bitzer then qualifies his formulation, of course, by going on to say that the rhetor "alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change" (4); and Bitzer grounds the power of rhetoric in a situation that calls it forth--the situation is "the very ground of rhetoric" (5). If anything, reality determines the meaning of an utterance for Bitzer, rather than the utterance performing and giving meaning--"rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation..." (5). But Bitzer also gives both rhetorical discourse and the rhetor their due places in what might be dubbed a kind of network. On page 8 he concludes his remarks on the constituents of the rhetorical situation by saying that, "These three constituents--exigence, audience, constraints--comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by the situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents."

Vatz's argument does a 180 and goes the other way, of course: he argues against Bitzer's claims in such a way that he passes Austin and moves close to what Latour bemoans as social constructivism in the passages I discussed last week. Vatz asserts that "meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors" in a "translation" that conveys not a "situation's reality, but... the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). Meaning, thus, is not "intrinsic to situations" as Bitzer contends, but rather meaning is "a consequence of rhetorical creation" (158), "Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning" (160).

My impulse is to say that while I found Bitzer's contentions intellectually unsatisfying at best, Vatz's critique bottoms out towards the end. His statement on page 160 that "one cannot maintain that reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself" adequately summarizes what I object to--and an example he gives that "the killing of a president of this country at this time is not a real threat to the people in any measurable way" spells out on its face my objection (whatever you exaggerate you weaken). I think both formulations are simple-minded--rhetoric does not create reality, a slope that I feel Vatz slips towards, any more than reality calls forth rhetorical statements. Edbauer seems to split the difference, much in the same that I'd say Latour does in his own way. I'll expand on that in my next post.