Myth of the Rhetorical Situation — Key Points (Vatz critique)

Core claim: a critique of Bitzer

• Bitzer: meaning resides in events; rhetoric is driven by the situation (exigence, audience, constraints).
• Vatz: meaning is not intrinsic to events; rhetoric creates meaning through selection and translation.
• The so-called 'myth' is that a situation has an independent, preexisting nature awaiting rhetorical response.

Bitzer's framework (briefly)

• Exigence: an imperfection marked by urgency; something that is (or should be) done.
• The situation dictates the observations to be made and the responses required.
• Three constituents prior to discourse: exigence, audience, and constraints.
• View rests on a realist/Platonist assumption: situations are objective, publicly observable facts that can be certified.

Meaning as construction (Vatz’s alternative)

• Two-step process in communication:
  • Selection: what events/facts are chosen to communicate is an arbitration by the rhetor.
  • Translation: the chosen information is interpreted and linguistically constructed into meaning; this is creative, not merely descriptive.
• Presence/salience: presence arises from how information is framed and presented, not from an intrinsic quality of the event.
• Language is value-laden; rhetors can recharacterize the same reality (e.g., leaders vs. bosses, education vs. propaganda).
• Edelman, Perelman, Weaver: political events are largely creations of language and symbolic action, not direct reflections of an objective world.

Implications for rhetoric and ethics

• If meaning is intrinsic, rhetoric is somewhat parasitic on other disciplines (philosophy, politics).
• If meaning is created by rhetoric, the rhetor bears primary responsibility for what is salience and how it shapes reality.
• Moral/political accountability increases: salience chosen by rhetors can influence public perception and policy more than any supposed preexisting situation.
• Examples of salience-driven focus:
  • Hunger vs. crime as topics of discourse reflect salience choices, not just objective importance.
  • Corporate vs. individual crime as framed by media and rhetoric.

Essential relationship: rhetoric creates, not merely reflects

• The inverse of Bitzer: not "rhetoric is situational" but "situations are rhetorical"; not "exigence invites utterance" but "utterance invites exigence".
• Rhetoric can determine how large a 'situation' appears (e.g., a Vietnam-era crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis) by creating salience and framing perceptions.
• George Aiken’s Viet Nam proposal and other declarative acts illustrate how rhetoric can define or extinguish perceived crises.
• Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent rotunda speeches exemplify crisis communication driven by symbolic rhetoric rather than an inevitable, objective threat.

Conclusion

• Language does not mirror reality; it organizes perception and creates meaning.
• Rhetoric is antecedent to the impact of events; it selects salience and then translates it into meaning.
• The discipline of rhetoric should emphasize its creation of salience and the corresponding moral responsibility of the rhetor.