Bitzer and LaTour as Buddies? Maybe?

Lloyd F. Bitzer published "The Rhetorical Situation" in 1968, but I swear I hear premonitions of LaTour. It is easy, I am guessing, from our post-post-modern positions (postmodern children that we are) to critique Bitzer from forty years' difference (Bitzer finds comfort in the "real," the objectively verifiable), but consider the excerpt from Bitzer's piece:

"Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency...An exigence which can not be modified is not rhetorical...thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed...are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical."

Am I the only one who hears echoes in LaTour? Simply replace "exigency" with the word "the social." Bitzer's discussion of what constitutes a rhetorical situation sounds a lot like LaTour's discussion of what constitutes the social. For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation exists when there is mediation ("an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical; thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one's own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse"). For LaTour, the social only really exists when the players involved are true mediators. Is Bitzer arguing for anything radically different? Okay, in some ways yes? But Bitzer seems to be pushing for the same LaTourian rigidity in asking that a rhetorical situation be filled with full-fledged mediators.

I'll have more to say about Bitzer (and Vatz) later, but I was pumped after noticing the LaTourian turn forty years before such a turn actually turned.