Rhetoric Aimed to Assert the Truth about Rhetoric

In Stanley Fish's "Rhetoric," Fish alludes to an ongoing battle between rhetorical man and serious man. Rhetorical man is said to manipulate reality rather than discover it while serious man is said to know and express the fundamental reality. In other words serious man sees himself as an agent independent of reality while rhetorical man perceives reality as subject to his interpretation. In a way, rhetorical man believes that reality is created by human agents. Between the two, there is an ongoing debate in which it seems neither side could ever be the victor. While rhetorical man accuses serious man of conforming to a fabricated reality of rhetoric, serious man marks the accusation as a rhetorical sleight of hand contrary to common sense. To rhetorical man, "common sense" is just as fabricated as the rest of reality. The debate is ongoing and seemingly never ending, but considering the fact that the argument itself is presented as a form of rhetoric (an essay disseminated to readers), rhetorical man might necessarily prevail.

The very act of me writing this is rhetorical, originating from my interpretation of the text as the reader (audience) and the other constituents--rhetor(s), constraints, and exigence--of a rhetorical situation. In writing his piece, Fish, the rhetor, was forced to adhere to the constraints Keith Grant-Davie describes in "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents," the most compelling of which I believe to be the "emerging discourse."

In any act of writing as a means of communication, the writer must temper his piece to maintain coherence for the reader. The very nature of coherent writing requires that the piece follows a sort of natural order as it emerges. A writer might have numerous points that he wishes to express all at once, but the nature of transmission and reception prevents it. He must follow the coherent order. Consequently, communication is inevitably rhetorical. Our limited mode of maintaining message fidelity between sender and receiver denies the possibility of a pure message transmission. This notion is expanded upon, not necessarily explicitly but to a greater degree, in Robert Scholes's "Toward a Semiotics of Literature."

In Scholes’s “Toward a Semiotics of Literature,” he argues that “the formal qualities of literature are the result of a process that multiplies or complicates the normal features of human communication (Scholes 119). His argument relies on 3 sets of opposing binaries—absence/presence, semiotic/phenomenal, and abstract/concrete—to determine the extent to which an utterance is literary. Something non-literary would be something that is present, phenomenal, and concrete. This is what I would determine to constitute reality in its purest form. J.L. Austin might refer to this as “constative.” By testing our reality against these binaries, it seems that any act of communication could never assume the constative form in reality. This is due to an issue over presence that is induced by our natural process of recollection.

According to Scholes, when we attempt to recover memory by reconstructing it, it necessarily becomes fictionalized. This is because we are absent from the context of the memory in its present and immediate form. With the unstinting progress of time it seems we could never grasp anything and express it in the presence. Each utterance becomes fictionalized as it is mediated through the human condition. The degree to which we struggle to present the truth is the degree to which it becomes increasingly more fictionalized. We operate within a vehicle in which rhetoric is inevitable.

I’m digressing from the readings, so I will present one final observation. Both Fish’s and Grant-Davie’s pieces mention a universal agent. The former mentions a universal rhetor and the latter a universal audience. Fish mentions the “ideal speech situation” “in which all assertions proceed not from the perspective of individual desires and strategies, but from the perspective of a general rationality upon which all parties are agreed” (137), and Grant-Davies mentions the “universal audience” which is an "audience encompassing all reasonable and competent men” (271).

I mention this because while reading the Geisler essay, I began to think that the internet and the Itext revolution would offer the only forum in which this might be possible. According to both Geisler’s and Grant-Davie’s essays, the audience and the rhetor are interdependent. The relationship is dynamic. While it might be true that “the audience determines the appropriateness and success of communication” (Geisler et al 271), the rhetor is required by the exigence to convey the message. Through the dynamic exchange between agents, they might reach a point in which they necessarily come to reaching universality on both parts. However, this could potentially only occur for an instance in a vacuum in which no historical or political constraints might alter the situation. There is also the issue of digital divide of course and I’m sure many other factors my limited mental faculty is too lazy to grasp.

The complexity of the world and limitations of the human condition might never allow for a situation in which the “truth” is realized. This has all been rhetoric, however, which is cunning and deceit at its core.