I've taken two runs at Biesecker's "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Differance," and am still scratching my head. I feel like there's a disconnect between where I am on the knowledge scale about this topic, and where I would need to be to have this make any kind of sense at all.
First of all, there are the terms. "Deconstruction" is a biggie in this paper, but Biesecker is not clear on what is meant by the term. So I went to Wikipedia for (hopefully) an English-language translation but instead found a 19-page site that, in my opinion, is just more of the same. (It's interesting to note that there's a box at the top of the site that claims that "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear." Yeah, no kidding! This site refers to some more of the terms used in Biesecker's paper, such as "phenomenology." So I Googled that too, and found a 13-page Wikipedia site. Hmmmm...I seem to see a pattern developing here.
So if we set aside for now my confusion about the terms, the next thing I notice is that Biesecker seems to be trying to find out how many big words she can string together and call it a sentence. I'm sure her statements are clear and meaningful to her -- and probably to other rhetoricians thinking up there at the top of the mount -- but we poor slobs who are just trying to get through a grad school class end up wanting to commit hari kari. ESPECIALLY since I and one of my fellow students have been charged with explaining this 12-page academic enigma to the class tonight!!
Now, don't get me wrong. I've been a reader and writer all my life, and I like to think I have adequately functioning gray matter up there (at least, Mensa thinks I do). But when I try to make sense out of passages like the following I feel like a non-native speaker:
"Symbolic action (what has historically been a linguistic text) is almost always understood as an expression that, wittingly or unwittingly, shapes or is shaped by the constitutent elements of the situation out of which and for which it is produced. This long-held conception of the rhetorical situation as an exchange of influence defines the text as an object that mediates between subjects (speaker and audience) whose identity is constituted in a terrain different from and external to the particular rhetorical situation."
You might object to my argument that this passage is nearly unintelligible to normal humans because I've quoted it out of context. If you don't know this particular paper, you may think this passage is buried somewhere deep within it, and that the potential for understanding has been established by previous explanation. But, my friend, you would be incorrect. This passage is out of the paper's introductory paragraph! Believe me, it gets worse. Several pages in we are presented with:
"The transitory character of one's choice of foundational terms is precisely that which any text cannot admit if it is going to make anything like 'truth' appear; however, the text's own provisionality is also that which the language of the text repeatedly performs, despite all efforts to conceal it. We are continually reminded that although our own desire for unity and order compels us to 'balance the equation that is the text's system,' the textuality of the text itself 'exposes the grammatological structure of the text,' and reveals 'that its 'origin' and its 'end' are given over to language in general.'"
Huh?
Reading (or, more accurately, trying to read) this paper has been a truly humbling experience.
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By way of self-introduction, I might include myself among the constituency of rhetoricians - or hope at some point to include myself in that number - that you describe. I don't typically think of myself as 'on a mount' (although the image is humoring) Writing as a fellow graduate student, I feel obliged to present an alternative argument - on behalf of the specialized use of language Biesecker uses in her article.
I should also note: your argument is significant in part because it isn't unique to your position as a graduate student reading outside of your circumscribed discipline. The demand for transparency from communication scholars is an unfair standard: there is a 'language' used by literary critics, physicists, doctors, historians, and political scientists (to name a few) which remains to some degree exclusive to the discipline from which these professionals belong; even if there is some, or considerable overlap between the kinds of terms or analyses these disciplines use. It is not a contradiction for an academic belonging to the discipline of 'communication studies' to use language or terms or a framework that isn't accessible. This kind of (in)accessibility can be read as a disciplinary marker; not to say that the categories of discipline do or should remain fixed. Communication studies is no different in this way. Not all of it is accessible, even if 'communication studies' seems to imply a certain necessary or fundamental transparence. Like physics, 'Communication' is, after all, something we all 'do', right?
With all of that, here's my point: yes, there's a language that rhetoricians speak, and to understand that language there's a certain amount of reading that has to be done, or should be done, that can't come from Wikipedia. Granted, that source has its merits. However, jumping headfirst into deconstruction, the rhetorical situation, or (rhetoric as) symbolic action is naturally going to be difficult without understanding the kind of conversation into which you are entering.
For one thing, Barbara Biesecker's article is important to rhetorical scholars because it responds to an important debate between Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz, both of which point to different and contradicting originary moments for rhetorical production. If you don't know Bitzer or Vatz, you're already at a disadvantage.
It's true that Biesecker doesn't say a whole lot about deconstruction, but even in the quotations you cite, she carefully defines the terms that she uses. In searching for an originary 'starting point' for symbolic action, for instance (the historical equivalent of a linguistic text) a kind of primacy is lent to 'situation' as the the 'primal' moment of rhetorical production - an importance conferred by what Biesecker calls "exchange of influence" which also relegates the 'text' of the rhetorical production to a lesser position, that of the situation's 'object'. In this article her argument is to 'dethrone' situation, but not to antagonize Bitzer or Vatz.
This might all be old hat by this point, but there are, for me, two different strategies for dealing with such an article. As I intended to do above, close reading can yield some insight, even if the referent for such terms as 'rhetorical situation' and 'deconstruction' remain unclear. The better suggestion would be to turn to Derrida for deconstruction, and to understand the conversation into which Biesecker (or whoever) is attempting to interject.
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