Polarization of Rhetoric

The readings for last week were beset with claims and counterclaims: Black versus Leff and Bitzer versus Vatz. These contending scholarly views tended to focus on two main questions: What are the ways of critiquing the rhetorical situations? How a situation is rhetorically defined? Both these questions have been answered and critiqued upon with qualified contradistinctions and the fallout is we get a mélange of critical convictions.
I read Black as someone who is splitting criticism into two watertight compartments albeit offering a stiff possibility of reaching a critical middle ground. For him the ‘etic’ form circumscribes the critic by defining theoretical limits whereas the ‘emic’ form teases the essence out of the artifact. Given these either-or dyad, I feel that it Black himself is dismissing the complexity of the scope of criticism. For him, though emic criticism holds greater openness, it is only potent enough to analyze but not to evaluate an artifact as he resolves, “ I don’t believe that a critic should evaluate an object emically, but an emic interpretation may be an avenue into a fair and full etic evaluation” (334) I wonder if this is actually possible when someone intends to “vibrate” (Leff 345) emic form on a situational analysis. For instance, if I were to situationally analyze 1994 genocide in Rwanda, would I not want to evaluate the massacre in terms of the loss of human values rather than to bring in a theoretical perspective (etic) to judge how morally and emotionally devastating it was. Why do I have to seek refuge in the mechanistic constructs of etic criticism for the judgment of a situation that clearly merits humane discernment? Perhaps the response to this question may reside in Leff’s conviction that “abstract theories and models provide no rules for their connection to a particular phenomenon, and the study of this connection moves us outside the realm of any formal system” (344). And thus the process of connection (to humane subjects) is not mediated by models rather it is dependent on our “hunches” to seek out the matching modes (emic or etic).

We find an interesting phenomenological shift in Bitzer from whom this hunch can never be intuitive. Actually, he contends that there is hardly a room for a hunch, so to speak, in any rhetorical situation. If there is a situation that can be defined as rhetorical then there are discourses based off the conditions of the situation. In this sense, Bitzer reflects what Perelman calls “demonstration.” Like the demonstration where “a calculation is made in accordance with the rules that have been laid down before hand” 1(Perelman 13) the rhetorical utterance owes itself to “a rhetorical situation [that] must exist as a necessary condition of a rhetorical discourse […]” (Bitzer 6). For Bitzer, the whole idea of rhetorical situation is centered on modifying or diffusing the exigences. Therefore, if there is a situation that is rhetorically responsive then a rhetor must be able to modify or control all the dominant exigences based on the controlling exigence; in other words the modifying ingredients are already available to the rhetor in terms of the audience, the controlling exigence, and the constraints. Thus, to bear this notion once again on the example of Rwandan massacre, it would seem a classic case of historical materialism that coerces a deterministic view upon a situation in order to attribute it as rhetorical. Steering clear from this philosophical warrant, Vatz presents his own notion of perspectivism. He makes some interesting claims as far as “situational” determines rhetoric. For him situations are not reflected by language but translated and hence, it is the rhetor who determines meaning of the situation and not the conditions inherent in the situation. Does not it then dilute the whole categorical imperative on the part of the rhetor? How can we then distinguish between a rhetor and a translator? In my opinion, it might help us to think of this rhetor not as translator but as a transcreator who bears upon himself the ethical responsibility of communication. On the other hand, his notion of rhetoric as “[…] a cause not an effect of meaning. It is antecedent, not subsequent” (160) makes the claim of reducing every speech act as rhetorical. He further says, “To say the president is speaking out on a pressing issue is redundant” (161). This view arrogates upon the idea that the whole notion of public speech is necessitated by rhetoric of convenience (on the part of the speaker-translator) rather than by any act of ethical, moral, and political justification.

Clash of Civilization
Schiappa celebrates the expansiveness of rhetoric of forms—“the rhetoric of X” (260). Extending this view, I see my artifact as representative of lots of inclusive forms. Inclusive because all propositions aspire toward one single condition of what Donald McKenzie would label as political determinism of the western powers. Let me illustrate this with a very overt example—the section headings. “The next Pattern of Conflict,” “The Nature of Civilizations,” “Why Civilization will Clash,” “The Fault Lines between Civilizations,” “Civilization Rallying: The kin-country syndrome,” and “The West versus the Rest” are only few of the innumerable invidious forms that one may find in the essay. These headings runs into the fallacy of begging the question in attempting to ground the claim— The Clash of Civilization? The title would seem less of a hypothesis which the author is attempting to prove intellectually and more of a rhetorical question whose responses are obtrusively clear in the section headings.