Bitzer and Vatz on Rhetoric

Bitzer and Vatz on Rhetoric

Lloyd Bitzer's essay "The Rhetorical Situation" attempts to argue that rhetoric naturally follows from certain "rhetorical situations" due to some inherent quality of those situations which generates rhetoric. Thought intriguing at first glance, Bitzer's argument ultimately falls apart when one examines the assumptions he makes in order to construct the notion of the "rhetorical situation," and Richard Vatz performs just that kind of examination in his essay "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation." By comparing and contrasting these two articles, one will be able to see how Vatz's view of rhetoric is far more applicable to rhetorical theory today, because it does not rely on the assumptions regarding meaning that ultimately lead Bitzer to construct an entirely unuseful and logically flawed characterization of rhetoric.

Although one may see the fatal flaw of Bitzer's argument in the first paragraph (as Vatz points out), it will nonetheless be useful to investigate the entirety of Bitzer's argument before moving on to a discussion of Vatz's critique. Bitzer begins by claiming that statements may reveal certain inherent properties of specific situations, so that, for example, "if someone says, That is a dangerous situation, his words suggest the presence of events, persons, or objects which threaten him, someone else, or something of value" (Bitzer 17). Similarly, "if someone remarks, I find myself in an embarrassing situation, again the statement implies certain situational characteristics" (17). From these and a few additional examples, Bitzer concludes that "there are circumstances of this or that kind of structure which are recognized as […] dangerous or embarrassing," so that, analogously, the "rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed is discourse, introduced into the situation, can […] bring about the significant modification of the exigence" (17, 20). Bitzer suggests that situations have essential qualities which allow an observer to differentiate between them and respond accordingly, regardless of the observer's own personal experience of the situation. Thus, embarrassing situations are inherently embarrassing, and dangerous situations are inherently dangerous.

According to Bitzer, then, the rhetorical situation is that situation which, due to some inherent qualities, may be identified as "calling for" and being amenable to rhetoric, because "so controlling is situation that we should consider it the very ground of rhetorical activity, whether that activity is primitive and productive of a simple utterance or artistic and productive of the Gettysburg Address" (19). The astute reader may already be grasping the central assumption underlying all these claims, namely, that rhetoric and situations which call for it somehow exist a priori to the individual human beings that might identify these situations and respond in turn. However, before moving on the Vatz's critique of this assumption, it is necessary to demonstrate just how fully it permeates the entirety of Bitzer's essay as a means of showing how invalidating this one assumption ultimately causes all of Bitzer's claims to rapidly unravel.

For Bitzer, the power of situation is nearly absolute, even if he hedges a bit by claiming that "many rhetorical situations mature and decay without giving birth to rhetorical utterance" (Bitzer 19). The clearest example Bitzer gives of a rhetorical situation which does not actually giver birth to rhetorical utterance is when he proposes that "each reader probably can recall a specific time and place when there was an opportunity to speak on some urgent matter, and after the opportunity was gone he created in private thought the speech he should have uttered in the earlier situation" (17). However, in Bitzer's essay these abortive situations are far less common than those which, for whatever reason, so compellingly require rhetorical utterance that mere mortals are powerless to resist. For example, "the situation generated by the assassination of President Kennedy was so highly structured and compelling that one could predict with near certainty the types and themes of forthcoming discourse," and "the historic situation was so compelling and clear that the responses were created almost out of necessity" (21). Bitzer says "almost" here, but it is really nothing more than a courtesy to the skeptical reader; Bitzer's overall argument leaves no doubt that he believes certain situations necessitate rhetoric to the point that it is inevitable, because certain situations are so compelling and so inherently important that a specific, rhetorical response is the only behavioral option for any observer engaged in that situation.

One final detail must be discussed before moving on to Vatz's critique, in order to forestall any claim that this analysis of Bitzer's work misses some nuance that might render his thesis somewhat more palatable. In short, if Bitzer were to claim, for instance, that the emotional response to President Kennedy's death required the kind of rhetoric seen afterward, then one could not fault him for suggesting that the news reports and eulogies were nearly inevitable, considering the vast evidence relating to humans' and society's reaction towards death. However, Bitzer is not making this claim. Instead, he is suggesting that something inherent about the situation, independent of any individual or collective cognitive and emotional response, necessitates a rhetorical utterance. Human are very neatly excised from this dynamic, serving only as the conduit by a situation may change itself by instigating rhetoric. Of course, framing Bitzer's argument in this way may seem a bit ridiculous at first glance, considering that he lists "audience" as one constituent part of a rhetorical situation, in reality the audience is no more important than the speaker, as it exists solely as a mediator, alchemically transforming the situation via its reception of the necessitated rhetoric such that it is "constituent" only in its subservience to the rhetorical situation (Bitzer 20-21).

Vatz's essay does not waste any time in addressing the crucial flaw of Bitzer's theory, likely because Bitzer manages to reveal his central assumption in the first lines of "The Rhetorical Situation." Vatz, in "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation," begins by bluntly noting that Bitzer's examples of a dangerous or embarrassing situation "do not imply 'situational characteristics' at all," but rather "actually only inform us as to the phenomenological perspective of the speaker," because although "there can be little argument that the speakers believe they feel fear or embarrassment […] their statements do not, however, tell us about the qualities within the situation" (Vatz 154). In short, "no situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it," a reality in direct opposition to Bitzer's assumption that "there is an intrinsic nature in events from which rhetoric inexorably follows, or should follow" (154, 155). While one could cease reading Vatz here and have a decent enough understanding as to the glaring flaw in Bitzer's thesis which renders the rest of his essay irrelevant, it is worth examining how Vatz picks apart the way in which Bitzer seems to shield his assumptions by breaking down and categorizing what he sees as the constituent parts of the rhetorical situation.

For Bitzer, the first constituent part of a rhetorical situation is the exigence, which he describes as "an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be" (Bitzer 20). Like Bitzer's overall claim, this definition relies on an assumption of a priori meaning independent of any observer or interpreter, and his definition of exigence is where the heart of his thesis' assumption rests. Thus, "not only is a 'waiting to be done' now existing in the event, but we also learn that [the rhetorical situation] contains an ethical imperative supposedly independent of its interpreters" (Vatz 156). Furthermore, while Bitzer explicitly states that "the situation is rhetorical only if something can be done," his definition of exigence suggests that "it is only rhetorical also if something should be done," such that Bitzer further assumes "that the 'positive modification' needed for an exigence is clear" (156). These assumptions build upon the central assumption that meaning is inherent in events and beget further assumptions and flaws.

For example, by assuming that the most salient meaning of any given situation is readily apparent, Bitzer ignores the fact that "the world is not a plot of discrete events," but rather "a scene of inexhaustible events" such that "one never runs out of context" or "facts to describe a situation" (Vatz 156). Thus, Bitzer's idea that "the nature of the context determines the rhetoric" is problematic because the context of the situation is arbitrarily decided by the speaker and audience, with each individual member of an audience further providing their own context and organizing features of the scene to their interpretation and reception of the situation (156). Each assumption and flaw in Bitzer's essay begets another, such that the entirety of his thesis paints a relatively bleak future for rhetoric in general.