Bitzer blog

I don't find Bitzer and Vatz mutually exclusive. I think Bitzer might be arguing from his frame within Vatz's idea of rhetoric, but Vatz himself doesn't allow for rhetoric to be a specific idea, even one as vague as his. Bitzer deals with possibility while Vatz deals with potentiality. It's easy to say that Vatz's must be the correct idea because it's broader, but is it nearly as helpful as Bitzer's?

As far as the rhetorical situation Bitzer describes goes, I also don't see as many problems with it, maybe because my tenure does not depend on whether or how violently I disagree with something. Whether we like it or not, each rhetorical situation involves exigence, constraints and an audience. Vatz's rhetoric involves constraints that we invent personally, but as we move through life, our Bitzerian identification or Vatzian interpretation is going to have the exact same result. That bear is a definitive threat! vs. That bear will certainly eat me if it gets close! mean the same thing: run away.

Likewise, whether we invent the situation of pollution or not by naming it "pollution," X company will continue to dump industrial waste into X river, and frogs are actually mutating. Sure, we could interpret that positively as a sign of the return of Xenu or whatever, but they are mutating. They are changing, and the situation is a situation, different than it was before and noticeable. You are not going to get into that fishing boat and try to bring them all round to veganism. You cannot invent that much situation or get rid of that much constraint. The reality of these men, and of your persuasive ability is not stronger than their interpretation of their situation as a fishing-only one, despite the historical example of certain fishers of men who shall remain nameless.

But you also can't say that the appropriate response to a situation is one that "fits," because many, many situations could potentially "fit" -- we know when we find one that does, but we never know how many we didn't find. Sure, Winston Churchill found himself a lot of "finest hours." But it doesn't give him enough credit to say that he found them just as they were and had the mystical ability to find the appropriate response. He was an amazing rhetor, and another rhetor could have found a totally different response to the situation which may have fit just as well. The only thing this means about Bitzer is that his "rhetorical audience" is too constrictive -- sure, the people who it was possible to persuade were persuaded by Churchill. But other people had a different fitting response. I see this most clearly in the abortion debates: to pro-lifers, the appropriate response is a violent one, since it is being committed as an act of lethal violence. To pro-choicers, the appropriate response is a peaceful one, since abortion is an action which brings peace to fraught women's lives. Who's right? We'd have to figure out whether abortion is right first. Are there two situations or one? How many appropriate responses?

It's silly to pick a side. I think what would work best for most people is to build from both ends -- select situations you recognize/interpret as in need of a rhetorical solution, but select situations which you personally can affect rhetorically. Constraints are negotiable, but not infinitely negotiable for anyone. Maybe Jesus would be able to convince the fishermen to go vegan; I can't. But at the Library Fair yesterday, which my boss did not tell me would be happening until she e-mailed me to turn up for my shift at PCL plaza and to "expect to get messy," I did successfully convince a bunch of people to make silly putty by hand, most of them people who were dead set against it once they figured out what we were doing. Their constraint was that they had to work in an hour; I negotiated that constraint by suggesting they wash their hands or get a friend to spend ten minutes rolling goo between their hands for "snap factor." I couldn't unconstrain everyone, but I could obviously unconstrain some people, because the situation required me to unless I wanted to face extreme librarian wrath.

Basically what this comes down to is that, perhaps, it's both the size of the ship and the motion of the ocean.