My On Again/ Off Again Relationship with The Rhetorical Situation

The Rhetorical Situation is a tricky thing. I’ve tried to remove it from my own understanding of rhetoric quite a few times, but I haven’t been successful. It seems to be rather indispensable. I genuinely agree with Vatz’s articulation of the academic and ethical problems with The Rhetorical Situation. Still, every time I conceptualize discourse in my mind, the rhetorical situation sneaks into my design.

Like Vatz, I believe that rhetors are capable of creating exigences. Exigences don’t exist until someone points a public’s attention in a particular direction. There exists no shortage of contemporary social and political examples of groups racing to define an issue so that they can demonstrate how their solution best solves the problem or responds to the situation. When Bush tried to reform social security, you could usually predict a person’s opinion on the issue based on whether they thought his program was designed to “privatize” or “personalize” social security. To define/describe/create an exigence or a situation is to prescribe a response.

Still, while meaning certainly lies in people and not situations, I believe rhetors craft messages that rely on situations for their meaning and value. No utterance can be interpreted without context. This is so natural that when we hear a comment for which we have little or no context, we usually create ourselves so that the comment makes more sense. Socio-political context cannot be overlooked when crafting a message. There are indeed limits or constraints to what a speaker can get away with. It might be important to recognize that those constraints are also rhetorically constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential in any set of circumstances.

While I would disagree with Bitzer’s idea that the Rhetorical Situation determines discourse, I would argue that rhetor’s necessarily look to situational factors when generating discourse. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “search for the available means of persuasion” and even though artistic proofs might come from within the rhetor, she must still look to audience and context to discern which persuasive techniques are most likely to work. The entire field of rhetorical criticism was originally based on this idea. Traditional or neo-Aristotelian methods of criticism have certainly fallen out of favor, its hard to begin to understand what a speaker has done, or how she has done it without first accounting for situational elements.

If this blurb seemed to chase its own tail, then I think I have accurately reproduced the way the Rhetorical Situation dilemma spins around in my mind. I can try to summarize by saying that I take issue with the determinism expressed by Bitzer, but I still see the situation as crucial to the production and study of rhetoric. In actuality, I think my relationship with the rhetorical situation is way more complicated than that. But we'll work it out.