Rhetoric A–Z / The situation / The rhetorical situation

The Rhetorical Situation

The rhetorical situation is the context that a speech or a text responds to. According to Lloyd Bitzer, who coined the concept in 1968, it has three parts: an exigence that can be resolved through communication, an audience that can affect it, and the constraints that limit what can be said and done.

Rhetoric as action

Human beings change the world with tools, but also with words. Some problems are not rhetorical: if we are snowed in, we need a shovel, not a speech. But if we first have to persuade the neighbours that everyone should go out and dig together, the problem has become rhetorical. It can only be solved by someone speaking and others allowing themselves to be persuaded.

At around the same time as Bitzer, the philosopher J. L. Austin showed that some utterances do not describe the world but do something in it. When the priest says “I now pronounce you husband and wife”, the question is not whether it is true, but whether it succeeds, and that depends on the situation. Rhetoric is not primarily a way of describing the world, but a way of acting in it. For more on Austin’s ideas in relation to central banks’ interest rate decisions, see How to Do Things with Interest Rates.

The exigence, the audience and the constraints

Does the speech respond to the situation, or create it?

Bitzer’s theory has one clear strength: it makes it possible to ask how well a speaker has understood and handled a situation. What did the situation demand, and how did the speaker respond? A newly elected president, for example, is expected to unite the country after the campaign, thank the opponent and promise to be everyone’s president.

But in 1973 the rhetorician Richard Vatz objected that situations do not exist ready-made out there. It is the speaker who chooses what is to be seen as a problem and how it is to be described. From Vatz’s perspective the question changes: how has the speaker portrayed the problem, and what do they gain by describing it in just that way? Someone who describes a pandemic as an attack from outside has created a different situation from someone who describes it as a public health issue.

In practice, both perspectives are needed. Some constraints cannot be talked away, but every speech also selects, names and orders its situation.

The situation and kairos

The rhetorical situation also has a temporal side. A speech that would have been right yesterday can be wrong today. The Greeks called the opportune moment kairos, and what is fitting in form to prepon.

The situation in analysis

The rhetorical situation is often the first question in a rhetorical analysis. Before we can judge how a speech tries to persuade, we need to understand what it responds to, who it is addressed to and what constrains it. Read more in What are rhetorical analysis and rhetorical criticism?

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