On Biesecker's "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance"

In this piece, Barbara Biesecker seeks to highlight a contradiction within the debate between Bitzer and Vatz over what constitutes the rhetorical situation (or, perhaps, whether there even is a rhetorical situation). She notes that "Vatz's ostensive purpose is to propose an alternative to Bitzer's definition of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation...Nevertheless...even as it questions the validity of Bitzer's central proposition, Vatz's essay simultaneously confirms it" (Biesecker 114). In other words, Biesecker is drawing attention to the fact that Vatz's reply, which attacks Bitzer's main claim that the rhetorical situation takes pride of place over the rhetor, seems to play right into this main claim itself. Vatz, the rhetor, is responding to the exigence created by Bitzer's essay, and this is precisely the way that Bitzer characterizes rhetorical situation. At the same time, however, Vatz's claim that the rhetor's position is originary, since it is the rhetor who frames the situation through his or her choice and arrangement of the facts outlining the rhetorical situation, also appears to be confirmed, and Biesecker's target is resolving this apparent conundrum: "After all, Vatz's statement is a response to Bitzer's essay...itself a situation with an exigence that invites a response. And yet, is not Vatz's own article an effect of arbitration on the part of a choosing individual? So, then, is Bitzer right or is Vatz right? Is a situation or speaker the origin of the rhetorical discourse?" (ibid). Biesecker's solution is to destabilize the hierarchical structuring of the question itself, and she attempts to do this via Derridean deconstruction and his notion of differance. Eventually, this approach arrives at the claim that the source of the problem, of the hierarchical structuring of the issue of primacy in rhetorical situation, somehow turns on our ideas about the human subject. Specifically, Biesecker appears to be asserting that it is our belief that individual subjects are stable in a way that the meaning of language (perhaps) is not. This would seem to be what she has in mind when she writes: "Derrida recommends that we think the subject not as a stable presence constituted and operating outside the play of differance, but instead as a production or effect-structure of differance" (Biesecker 125). In other words, the fundamental ambiguity we may acknowledge in language does not exist only there but actually produces, or structures through its effects, our subjectivity. But, isn't this setting up the kind of hierarchical structure Biesecker was ostensibly trying to dissolve? That is, Biesecker wants to switch the ordering from (Apparently) Stable Subject >>Produces>> Ambiguous Symbolic Systems (Differance?) to Differance (Ambiguous Symbolic Systems?) >>Produces>> Subject (With an Illusory Sense of Stability).