Notes on Mary Garrett & Xiaosui Xiao, "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited"

Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 30-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3885923

Somehow they managed to spell Garrett's name wrong in the article, spelling it Garret instead, which makes it tough to see how many times the article has been cited because you have to look it up both with her name written correctly and with it misspelled. Anyway, it seems this article has been undercited, which is a shame because I think it's a very useful contribution to the discussion of rhetorical situations. I read it a long time ago, but I'm revisiting it myself because I thought it might be good for my comparative rhetoric course. 

Garrett and Xiao are using the case of the Qing Dynasty's response to the Opium Wars to add to the discussion of rhetorical situations. As I mentioned in my "Formosa Translated" paper, the rhetorical situation, as first conceptualized by Lloyd Bitzer, saw rhetorical acts as emerging from a rhetor's recognition of an exigence--an outside event or situation--that called for action in the form of speech. As Richard Vatz saw it, however, the exigence was not coming from outside but was actually created by the rhetor. In either case, however, the rhetor--the speaker--was the main focus of the rhetorical act and the actor in the rhetorical situation.

Garrett and Xiao argue that the audience and what they call the "discourse tradition" have more of a role in the rhetorical situation than the speaker does. According to them, 

The audience is ... the pivotal element which connects the rhetorical exigency (the audience's unsolved questions), the constraints (the audience's expectations), and the rhetor (as a member of the audience). With this shift the debate over the facticity of the exigency loses much of its force since the important question becomes whether the audience accepts that an exigency exists. (p. 39)

In terms of the discourse tradition, they argue that how (or if) an exigency is perceived by the audience is largely dependent on "what audiences will accept as the appropriate forms of discourses, the proper styles, and the right modes of argumentation in relation to certain topics and contexts" (p. 37). These in turn are conditioned (if not determined) by the how similar issues have been addressed in the past. In the case of the Qing response to the Opium Wars, Garrett and Xiao argue that the discourse tradition regarding foreign relations, which consisted mainly of viewing foreigners as barbarians that needed to be managed or sinicized, resulted in a delay in the Qing court's recognition that the Western incursion on China was "unprecedented." While some literati-officials did try to warn the government of the seriousness of the situation, most officials saw it in terms of previous Chinese-foreign relations. 

It wasn't until after the second Opium War that more officials started to argue that the Western powers were not content to be allowed to trade and be treated like like tribute states. Garrett and Xiao quote official Li Hongzhang, who wrote that "[t]he Westerners ... profess peace and friendship, but what they really want is to seize and possess China. If one country creates trouble with us, others will stir up conflict. This is a truly unprecedented situation [ch[u]angju] in the past several thousand years" (p. 35). This recognition led to self-strengthening movements of various types in response to the newly recognized situation.

However, it's not entirely clear from the authors' discussion what exactly changed that allowed the officials to recognize a different exigency than the one that had originally been shaped by the discourse tradition. There are a few possibilities, judging from the article. One is that the "open-minded Prince Gong ... [who] was the earliest member of the royal family to acknowledge the changing situation of China" (p. 35). He helped to create what Garrett and Xiao call a "proto-Foreign Office" (the Zongli Yamen), whose officials helped change the perception of what was going on. There were also other "[s]igns of dynastic decline" happening that suggested serious problems in Qing China. Even so, the authors point out that there was a debate between the self-strengtheners and the more traditional Neo-Confucian scholar-officials regarding how to respond to the "unprecedented situation." While the self-strengtheners called for changes in administrative practices and study of Western knowledge, the Neo-Confucians stressed moral cultivation as an answer to the problems facing China. 

One question I'm having here is similar to the "classic" question regarding discourse communities--how strong are the boundaries that contain the members of the discourse community or the discourse tradition? Do changes in the discourse tradition or the discourse community have to be occasioned by attacks from the "outside" (such as the Western incursions on China in the mid-1800s)? In the case of China, this probably also involves the debate over the "response to the West" thesis of historians like John King Fairbank. (See this essay for a summary of some of the debate.) In terms of the rhetorical situation, how does a rhetor, as a member of the audience (as Garrett and Xiao posit it) step outside of the discourse tradition to propose a new way of seeing (or creating) the exigency? 

Another question that I'm thinking about, in light of what I've been reading about decolonizing comparative rhetoric, is whether the "rhetorical situation" (however it's construed) is a universal concept that can be used to discuss rhetorical practices in non-Western cultures without fear of imposition of Western concepts on non-Western contexts. And how does the concept of discourse traditions fit into this, in the case of Garrett and Xiao's discussion? Is it also a universally applicable concept? One idea that comes to mind here is if there are variations in how strong discourse traditions are in different cultures or contexts. (This might dangerously lead to generalizations about "conservative" cultures as opposed to cultures more open to change.) Also, in the authors' discussion of discourse traditions, topoi figure in as a "key element"--is the concept of topoi universal (whereas the actual topoi themselves might vary according to context or culture)? I'm inclined to think that these three concepts (rhetorical situations, discourse traditions, and topoi) could be considered important parts of rhetorical practices in most contexts, while the forms that they take or the meaning of them might vary. 

One final thought is that I wish Jenny Edbauer's 2005 essay on rhetorical ecologies had engaged this article. In their conclusion, Garrett and Xiao point out that "viewed diachronically, the rhetorical situation is an ever-changing spiral of interactions among entities and groups which shift roles and shape each other even when in opposition" (pp. 39-40). This does not seem far from Edbauer's argument.