Introduction: Situations and Their Borders
The history of argumentation theory is a history of metaphorsâjourneys, conflicts, fields, and divisions. In this chapter, I want to add to this series the metaphor of the âborder.â This itself is a rich metaphorical space, ripe for exploitation and recovery. The ideas captured in âthe frontiers of thought,â for example, where perspectives collide, and assumptions are challenged are ideas common to the aims of argumentation, of opposition, modification, and advocacy. And this raises the question of what marks such frontiers, identifying limits and terms of engagement. Where difference raises its head and establishes perimeters, there the tools of argumentation are brought into play. Where those differences are real and deep, the tools are stretched to their limits and sometimes fail to find a shared ground on which to build.1 And borders have their margins to which ideas, perspectives, and entire value systems can be relegated, creating occlusions that stem communication and provoke duress (Stoler 2016).
Argumentation succeeds most within the social confines of communities that share ideas and values; it is most challenged when required to cross borders, when taken into cross-cultural environments where the stock of what is shared can be limited and cloaked in unfamiliar terms. In such circumstances, argumentation needs the complementary support of rhetoric, with its repertoire of strategies and skills and insights into the ways meaning is concealed and revealed.
Rhetoric takes us inside human experience, suffusing, disrupting, and modifying. Rhetorical argumentation draws on rhetoricâs opportunities to provide a more complete understanding of the argumentative experience, adding depth and thickness to what I will call the âargumentative situation.â Lloyd Bitzer (1968) brought rhetoric back to its contextual roots, insisting on its situational nature. Even logical threads of argumentation2 have processed this insight, observing the shift between informal logic and its formal cousins, recognizing in context the conditions for ânormalâ argument that separate resolvable disagreements from those that are deep (Fogelin 1985). For Bitzer, rhetoric does something: it brings into existence a discourse that alters reality, called forth by a situation to which it responds, an exigence (4â5).
Certain discourses, like those expressing extreme positions, throw this into disarray, marking boundaries of consensual response across which it is difficult to traverse. While not all such discourse is negative and much of it reflects the healthy diversity of opinions on which societies thrive, its presence still invites a fundamental rethinking of how rhetorical argumentation operates in circumstances characterized by dissensus (Kock 2007). Understood as positions of a radical nature that resist the status quo, extremist positions underlie many of our social and political debates and characterize the boundary lines that emerge between cultures. How are we to argue constructively with people who hold radical views in uncompromising ways?
Many of the problems entangled in this question, problems of incommensurability and deep disagreement, are anticipated in the encounters that have occurred between peoples, societies, and cultures meeting for the first time. I adopt the concept âencounter rhetoricsâ3 to describe the rhetorical and argumentative experiences characterizing these first-contacts. This chapter introduces the concept in a provisional way by distinguishing it from some recent innovations to which it has affinity and by describing some of its features. Assuming that humans are rhetorical by nature and that peoples develop rhetorically on their own terms, these early encounters are between rhetorics or rhetorical systems or codes (Angenot 2006).
If they represent rhetorical situations, they do so on a deeper level than Bitzerâs analysis anticipated. But they offer the promise of showing us how rhetorical beings have overcome problems of communication in fostering mutual cognitive environments in which constructive argumentation can flourish as argumentation cultures blend.
For Bitzer, rhetoric impacts communication in a fundamental way. In a perfect world, he muses, there would be communication but no rhetoric, since the exigencies that provoke rhetorical responses would not arise (Bitzer 1968, 13). First encounters might seem to involve exigencies as Bitzer employs the term (6) in the shape of modifiable obstacles of an urgent nature. But events (I choose this term carefully to avoid âsituation,â and I will elaborate on this further in Chapter 4) in which peoples meet for the first time inaugurate a rhetorical encounter of a specific kind, a juxtaposing of rhetorics, beyond what Bitzer envisages. Consider his delimitation of âaudience,â for example: âa rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of changeâ (8).4 If we try to extend this idea to events of the first encounter, then we need to stretch the sense of âcapableâ that is involved. Because, clearly, at the moment of encounter any capability the participants possess is potential rather than actual.5
As seminal as the idea of the rhetorical situation has become, its limitations and presuppositions have also been well catalogued (Garrett and Xiao 1993; Vatz 1973; Biesecker 1989). Among the concerns, those of principal relevance to my deliberations involve the question of whether the kinds of events Bitzer describes with the term âexigenciesâ do in fact inaugurate rhetoric rather than actually respond to it. Tying rhetoric to its relationship with meaning (a move with which I am in fundamental agreement), Richard Vatz (1973, 160) argues that rhetoric is a cause of meaning, rather than an effect, thus reversing the relationship in Bitzer. On these different terms, what rhetoric does is more fundamental than Bitzer believes. Once this displacement is accepted, the question of the origin of rhetorical discourse becomes important. Is it the situation, or the speaker, or even the audience that is the source? Criticisms of the Bitzer account push us in the direction of the third of these choices. Barbara Biesecker approaches the problem through the perspective of Derridaâs theory of deconstruction and his concept of diffĂ©rance. Suggestive in interesting ways, she worries that Bitzer âlimits what we can say about discourse which seeks to persuadeâ (110, my emphasis), and focuses much of her energy on the text as a constituent element of the rhetorical situation. It is when her attention turns to the role of audience that she provides conclusions that still resonate as important. I have discussed elsewhere the concept of diffĂ©rance with its valuable notion of the trace, interconnecting meanings in complex ways (Tindale 1999). Biesecker observes of diffĂ©rance that it allows us to read rhetoric as productive of audiences and rhetorical events âas sites that make visible the historically articulated emergence of the category âaudienceââ (126). Setting aside the question of whose history is in play here, this rethinking of what is entailed by the rhetorical situation invites an expansion of the concept that encounter rhetorics would welcome, while also shifting the focus from exigency to audience.
If any vestigial belief that Bitzerâs account describes a concept that is universal and cross-cultural should linger, Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiaoâs study of the rhetoric around Chinaâs two opium wars puts that belief to rest. They also bring into question the role that exigency plays in prompting rhetorical discourse (by detailing some serious failures on this front). While Bitzerâs understanding of exigency remains a focus of their critique, they make the crucial assertion (almost as an aside!) that we âperhaps ⊠need to distinguish differing types of rhetorical situationsâ (39), and they register the importance of audience in the ways in which any discourse tradition can participate in a rhetorical situation.
Indeed, in this spirit, one central type of rhetorical situation in which a more evolved notion of audience is prominent is the âargumentative situation,â as I will unpack this idea in the chapters ahead. In fact, the idea that should be developed is that prompted by a suggestion of philosopher J.L. Austin, namely the total argumentative situation.
In his seminal work, How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin drew attention to what he termed the âspeech situation,â and in particular âthe total speech situation.â As he insisted: âThe total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidatingâ (Austin 1962, 147). This builds on his earlier observation that we cannot just concentrate on the propositions involved. Rather, âWe must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issuedâthe total speech actâ (1962
, 52).
The parallels with this project on argumentation are striking. A long tradition of associating arguments with propositions has influenced ways in which both âargumentâ and âargumentationâ are understood (and taught) in the modern academy. But this tradition, while important in numerous ways, is insufficient for the tasks at hand. As Austin insists for speech acts, so we can echo for arguments: to be fully understood and appreciated, they need to be approached in situ, as it were. We need to uncover the total argumentative situation with all the contextual elements involved. Now, Austin is frustratingly vague on what elements constitute the total speech situation. One assumes that for the speech act, it will involve more than just the locution and will bring into play the illocution and the perlocution. But Austinâs lack of detail is a lesson from which we might learn. In unpacking the details of the total argumentative situation, we understand it first as a type of rhetorical situation, in the tradition Bitzer inaugurated but with the necessary emendations that commentators have suggested. And therein we identify the audience as a central component. Other obvious elements are the source of the argument (the arguer) and the argument itself, which may involve propositions, but also may not (see Chapter 6). Beyond this, we will learn to pay careful attention to other features of the situation that might easily be overlooked, contextual features like the timing of an event and also the place of its occurrence (Chapter 4), and also the mode by which it is expressed (Chapter 5). It is by highlighting the concept of the total argumentative situation in the context of this last elementâthe modeâthat I will contribute to the development of multi-modal argumentation, as this idea is discussed in the next chapter.
Before moving on to explore these matters, more needs first to be said about the idea introduced earlier: encounter rhetoric. Other treatments of rhetoric in the context of differences might be seen to be adequate to the concerns that have stimulated this inquiry, thus limiting its value or even its necessity. Accordingly, I will consider two of theseâcomparative rhetoric, as developed by George Kennedy and others, and Wayne C. Boothâs rhetorologyâbefore addressing a thirdâMary Louise Prattâs (1991, 1987) contact zone. I focus on these because I take them to be the strongest candidates for comparison with encounter rhetorics and because of their influence in the field.6 My intention is not to suggest that encounter rhetoric is in any way an alternative to these and the insights they disclose. My claim, rather, is that for all that they contribute to our understandings of how rhetoric operates on a deep level, they are not sufficient conceptual tools to explore the questions that interest me, and that the concept of encounter rhetorics involves things that they were never designed to manage.