Changing Reality, Or Stuck In It?

I've become pretty familiar with rhetoric in the past few semesters, but it's an elusive construct that I always have to redefine for myself at the start of each class.  The issues discussed in our readings were ones that I've encountered before, but a few key phrases caused me to want to play devil's advocate.

Reality can get kinda weird and produce stuff like this.  But even in the abstract, we would describe everything in this picture by using other things that already exist.

  Grant Davie says that "a rhetorical situation is a situation where a speaker or writer sees a need to change reality and sees that the change may be effected by rhetorical discourse" (265).  This is a pretty bold statement, because it assumes that all speaking or writing changes reality.  Does this mean that we are unable to talk or write 'casually' for lack of a better word?  Must each utterance be an effort to do something as drastic as changing the reality we know little by little?  I'd like to think that there are some moments of communication that occur simply because we are alive and passing time, taking a break from shifting reality.  But the more I think about this, the harder it is to deny that everything has some sort of chain reaction.  For example, I might be talking about the plot to The Scarlett Letter (not sure why) and cause my significant other to think internally, "Letter...Mail comes around noon...OH SHIT I forgot to put the check for the energy bill in the mailbox!" I changed reality without meaning to, and without "seeing" a need to change reality.  The point of all this is to say simply, yeah, we can change reality with writing and talking but at the same time, shit just happens whether rhetoric exists (or is invented) or not.

Taking another perspective on this topic, Porter seems to think that we may not be changing reality at all, because we are intertextually "within the confines of a well-regulated system" (40).  Within this system is the impossibility of originality, because anything we can think to create relies on thinking about creation, which already exists.  We cannot change reality because everything has already occurred before the point of occurrence, otherwise we could not understand what the hell was happening.  Porter goes on to say that these limitations aren't as bleak as they seem, because "Even if the writer is locked into a cultural matrix and is constrained by the intertext of the discourse community, the writer has freedom within the immediate rhetorical context" (41).  This brings to mind the image of a solitary confinement prisoner, begging for just one minute of time outside, while the guard shrugs and says, "I don't see what all the fuss is about.  You have 8X10 feet to walk around in there."

Maybe it's not that bad.  After all, Porter says that really successful writing can help to "redefine this matrix" (42).  To borrow Doug's pet peeve, how the fuck do we "describe the thing by using the thing we are trying to describe as a description?"  If all definitions exist in the matrix, simply arranging them in a different order does not redefine anything.

On an entirely different note, one more element of Grant-Davie's article stood out to me as a writer, where they explained that "Vatz argues that rhetors not only answer the question, they also ask it" (265).  This was essentially saying that a situation does not exist until a rhetor begins to think of something as a situation.  I think I can buy this, if we are talking purely about the issue of perspective.  This means that we are creating a situation by approaching the delivery of a message (be it orally or written) as a situation.  In essence, because we have a word to associate with a particular notion, that word being "situation," we create this construct ourselves.  Well, sure we do!  We construct everything we think we know!  I don't think that necessarily means that situations cannot exist without rhetors.  As writers, there will be countless situations that arise independent of us, that then cause people to turn to us to write something about their situation.  For example, I just had to write a eulogy today for a woman that I met once, 10 years ago.  The question that begs for a eulogy is death.  The answer for the creation of a eulogy is writing.  I provided the answer here, but did not ask any of the questions.  Whether I wrote the eulogy or not, the situation existed whether or not I did.