Dreamweaver or Truthweaver?

While I immediately want to begin by trying to define rhetoric, I know that that is not remotely possible in the limited space I have and the many ideas that I want to write about, so instead I will discuss two main elements that are crucial to a definition of rhetoric: Truth and Exigency.

Stanley Fish’s “Rhetoric” created a new kind of truth for me, in the sense that he reveals what truth is – or can be, from different perspectives. Even that sentence rings too close to the opposite side of thinking that I want to be at, so we’ll let Fish explain it: “truth itself is a contingent affair and assumes a different shape in the light of differing local urgencies and the convictions associated with them” (126). Not only does he express that truth cannot be found in reality, because it is contingent, but he elaborates the ideas of 1) a community must be present as an audience to the given perspectives and 2) the community has created a set of convictions and laws, if you will, that ordain what knowledge or ideas become truth, the idea of a “social structure” (Fish, 127). Fish reinforces his argument with a line from Israel Scheffler: “reality itself is made…rather than discovered” (130). I agree with this idea because of the mere presence of paradox and contradictions within science and other fields – there cannot be an ultimate Truth because of how subjective and personalized our experience is with the world. Modes of inquiry and measurement are deemed accurate only by their community which believes in Truth and Certainty of their goals and methods.

The second term, rhetorical exigence, is defined by Bitzer as “the rhetor’s sense that a situation both calls for discourse and might be resolved by discourse” (Grant-Davie, 266). Exigence is the motivation for invention because a conflict, or an interest, compels the rhetor to use rhetoric in order to find resolution or “to change reality” where we can see that reality is synonymous with truth (Grant-Davie, 265). 

These two ideas are especially important to digital rhetoric and digital spaces for many reasons. The most obvious may be in the realm of truth and security – recall the commercial here where the woman believes that everything on the Internet must be true – whatever kind of information we encounter online is manipulative not only in that it may have strong rhetoric, but because we may be unable to identify it as rhetoric or even as truth, because there is no governing body of the Internet which dictates what is true reality or what is false. The idea of a governing body brings us back to the idea of communities dictating truth - that for new knowledge to be created the community must accept certain truths as foundational. As we read each other’s postings, we will discover our own ideas of truth and reality and feel exigence to either change that reality or reinforce it. I think online spheres create easier spaces for the compulsion to act on exigence, where commenting and linking is now a built in feature on any good website. It’s as easy as a few clicks to change your reality.