response to "the rhetorical situation"...

What seems to be undermined, in the arguments of Bitzer and Vatz, is the frequency by which either the rhetorical situation (Bitzer) or the translation of information into meaning (Vatz) occurs. If one considers the ever-broadening definition of the term “text” to encompass any thing, event or action that signifies “something” and bears with it a lexicon of personal and culturally shared meanings, the narrowness of (particularly) Bitzer’s viewpoint, with its dominant emphases on oral and literary tradition, becomes apparent. He is correct in defining rhetoric as “a mode of altering reality” and as “(creator) of discourse.” However, Bitzer’s professed “three constituents of the rhetorical situation” (exigence: a situation which demands response or action; audience: receiver—by rhetor—of the response or action; and constraint: fact or belief that influences both rhetor and audience), lacks proper attention to the nature of a text, in its broad sense, as an unstable (that is, ever-shifting) carrier of meaning and potential site of struggle. The rhetorical situation, set off by exigency, according to Bitzer, “invites a fitting response.” The response that is “fitting,” (again Bitzer’s view) is a perception shared by the rhetor’s audience, rather than (my view) the response as a means towards further discourse, with the result, eventually (or never), arriving at an impasse. A rhetorical situation, in short, occurs in correspondence with an ideology, revealing itself in base interactions that we hardly ever think about.