Three Versions of Rhetoric

It's interesting to read the three articles assigned for this class, and look broadly at their views of rhetoric. In each one, rhetoric is articulated as something different, and each holds different social implications.

Bitzer's article seems to delineate rhetoric the way Plato and Gaonkar did--as something suited for persuasion, and nothing else. He takes it for granted that rhetoric is used when persuasive language is needed, which is limited to a specific set of situations.

Vatz acknowledges this as a primary difference between them, and tries to render Bitzer's position untenable by showing its roots in the Platonist tradition. Clearly rhetoric can't be situational, and must be constitutive of meaning, because rhetors seem so clearly able to create emergencies and other situations where rhetoric is heightened.

Edbauer seems to work more from Vatz's tradition, but to modify it with the same kind of horticultural metaphor offered by ANT, and its heterogeneity. Rhetoric, like the ANT conceptions of the individual and the world, exists in the confluence of too many influences for it to have tidy borders and guidelines.

Exigence seems to be the pivot point that facilitates these different definitions, and it also implies divergent definitions of rhetor and audience. All of the above hearken back to earlier readings; Vatz and Edbauer seem to both be working from a position that might be shared by Berlin, LeFevre, and Crowley, of rhetoric as ubiquitous and constructed in socially constructed selves.