Lloyd Bitzer defines rhetoric and explains what exactly the rhetorical situation consists of in his article, The Rhetorical Situation.
He says that rhetoric is a context of persons, events, objects, and relations with an exigence which strongly invites an utterance. Rhetoric exists to produce an action or change in the world in response to the exigence. Or in other words, the speaker’s intentions and audience expectations are functions of the situation that has “invited” the rhetor’s response.
This means to me that rhetoric is everywhere in everything because there is a situation in everything everywhere that could gather a response. For example, if you hear your stomach growling then the situation is that you are hungry. As a result, you the rhetor might try to convince you the audience to get out of bed in order to make yourself something to eat. One of the many constraints of this situation may be that you don’t have any food in the Frigidaire to cook. Thus you have a rhetorical situation within your own self.
I think that Bitzer breaks rhetoric down to a level that is easy for everyone to grasp and understand.
I’m glad you said, “This means to me that rhetoric is everywhere in everything because there is a situation in everything everywhere that could gather a response.” Rhetoric, according to Bitzer, can exist wherever an urgent imperfection exists that can be resolved through rhetoric, from the globally significant to the personally inconsequential. For instance, a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina is not a rhetorical situation, because its condition cannot be resolved via rhetoric. But the response to Hurricane Katrina is a rhetorical situation, for the way in which America responded to Katrina was determined by rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Bitzer has broken rhetoric down and made it simple for us to understand, but many people feel that Bitzer has over-simplified rhetoric too much. I personally think that Bitzer undermines the role of the rhetor and the complexity of rhetoric. Rhetoric becomes a pre-determined response for which there is a fixed recipe, while the rhetor becomes just another fixed, albeit necessary ingredient in that recipe.