Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking

 

In this book, Goodman joins the longstanding philosophical conversations about truth and reality, ultimately advocating that rather buying into the notion of Truth about a world already formed, we need to realize that we remake the world with various right and even conflicting versions of the worlds already on hand.  Goodman reminds us that the arts make and remake the world and thus must be taken just as seriously as the sciences as “modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of understanding” (102). 

 

Goodman identifies various ways in which we remake the world: 

 

a.)   composition and decomposition

b.)   Weighting or emphasis or framing

c.)   Ordering

d.)   Deletion and supplementation—weed out the old and sow in the new

e.)   Deformation—think Picasso.

 

Vision is a matter of habit.  We are conditioned to give certain conditions more weight than others. 

 

Quotable Quotes:

 

This world indeed is the one most often taken for real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit (20).

 

A broad mind is no substitute for hard work (21).

 

Growth in knowledge is not by formation or fixation on belief but by the advancement of understanding (22).

 

A salient feature of symbolization, I have urged, is tht it may come and go.  An object may symbolize different things at different times, and nothing at other times….How an object or event functions as a work explains how, through certain modes of reference, what so functions may contribute to a vision of –and to the making of—a world (70).

 

The perceptual is no more a rather distorted version of the physical facts than the physical is a highly artificial version of the perceptual facts (93). 

 

We make the world by making versions but not random ones…(94). 

 

Worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another (97). 

 

Fiction operates in actual worlds in much the same way as nonfiction…[They] unmake and remake and retake familiar worlds, recasting them in remarkable and sometimes recondite but eventually recoginizable—re-cognizable—ways (105). 

 

Rendering the world in new ways is a way to remake the world and framing is once such way to render the world (119). 

 

We need to explore how two right versions fit together to remake the world…Through categorization, we can create coherence—the most useful test for rightness (135). 

 

 

Appadurai, Arjun “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,”

In “Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,” Arjun Appadurai argues that intellectuals in the academy need to begin thinking postnationally about contemporary national crises–a claim that ultimately stimulates questions about the future of patriotism.  Appadurai’s thesis rests on the claim that study of discourse in the Western academy is divorced from other institutional forms while the study of literary discourses is divorced from the discourse of other social organizations such as armies, corporations, bureaucracies, etc. (159).  Appadurai calls for a journey to the space of postcolony, which in America is “marked by whiteness but marked too by its uneasy engagement with diasporic people, mobile technologies, and queer nationalities” (159).

 

Appurudai suggest that we need to study the organizations, movements, ideologies, and networks which comprise postnational social formations.  We need to begin studying the permanent frameworks such as refugee camps that emerge in the postnational order of the world. We need to study the local but with the awareness that the local is the global.  We can’t view local as static, homogeneous; it is always changing, interacting, creating new global realities.  Nation is unstable entity.  where it was once formed by identity, ethnicity, race; today, nation is an interaction of flows of values, cultures, movements, facilitated by different medias and technologies.  Nation is hence unstable.

 

Cultures and nations today is always an interaction of local and global; a collective of cross-cultural relations.  Comparative rhetoric is impossible because there is no static entities to compare.   

 

Appadurai, Arjun “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,”

In “Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,” Arjun Appadurai argues that intellectuals in the academy need to begin thinking postnationally about contemporary national crises–a claim that ultimately stimulates questions about the future of patriotism.  Appadurai’s thesis rests on the claim that study of discourse in the Western academy is divorced from other institutional forms while the study of literary discourses is divorced from the discourse of other social organizations such as armies, corporations, bureaucracies, etc. (159).  Appadurai calls for a journey to the space of postcolony, which in America is “marked by whiteness but marked too by its uneasy engagement with diasporic people, mobile technologies, and queer nationalities” (159).

 

Appurudai suggest that we need to study the organizations, movements, ideologies, and networks which comprise postnational social formations.  We need to begin studying the permanent frameworks such as refugee camps that emerge in the postnational order of the world. We need to study the local but with the awareness that the local is the global.  We can’t view local as static, homogeneous; it is always changing, interacting, creating new global realities.  Nation is unstable entity.  where it was once formed by identity, ethnicity, race; today, nation is an interaction of flows of values, cultures, movements, facilitated by different medias and technologies.  Nation is hence unstable.

 

Cultures and nations today is always an interaction of local and global; a collective of cross-cultural relations.  Comparative rhetoric is impossible because there is no static entities to compare.   

Dirlik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Capitalism

In the introduction, Dirlik positions globalization as an ongoing discourse and process that produces a state of global modernity, which in essence is nothing short of modernity gone global and modern day colonialism that reeks of the colonial, economically, politically, socially, and culturally.  Dirlik claims our main challenge is to “achieve a globality beyond the colonial” and thus devotes his book to identifying the visible contradictions in contemporary global modernity” so that we may reinvision a new future (7 and 8).  For a while decolonization of the material and culture world was thought to have ended colonialism, but in effect, nation states of free states, centralize their power and minorities, women, indigenous within nations begin to feel excluded from nation state.  Nationstates were becoming weaker is some minds because  of globalization and multinational companies became in power but also nationstates became oppressive to own people.

 

Chakrabarty and Derrida

Dipesh Chakrabarty—“The Idea of Provincializing Europe” (2000)

 

1^st approach—look at theory/practice divide.  Do we really practice the theories we profess to practice? 

 

2^nd approach—look at history from new-historicist perspective—old historicism sees texts as reflecting the time, culture, and period; new historicism looks at texts reflect ideologies and values of time but they preserve them and shape them

 

3^rd approach—interrogate diachronic, chronological versions of history, which causes anachronism; use historicist which is synchronic and takes rhetorical perspective to looking at historiography. 

 

He is concerned with discourses that created Europe.  Subaltern studies—initiative taken up Bengali scholars (Spivak and Gua)  to rewrite history by excavating facts that have been left out of history.  Not totally successful because always reinscribe as they try to dismantle…

 

Gua—“dominance without hegemony”—Gua says that much of history did not proceed by hegemonic rule.  In fact, people did not give consent in the colonization of India.  The colonized only give consent until they can uprise and gain power to liberate themselves.  Natives only accept power until they can overcome, so even though colonization seems to be hegemonic, the colonized only act as if they are hegemonized until they can revolt.

 

Imperialism occurs through interpolation of hegemonic discourse.  Colonialism can happen and does happen without hegemony.  The myth of hegemony perpetuates hegemony.  In this grand narrative, the peasants are passive, weak, without consciousness, but they weren’t.

 

Critique of classical Marxist narrative. 

 

Jacques Derrida—The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin

 

Written in later life.

 

We only ever speak one language.  We never speak only one language.

 

Moment we try to translate our self, we create gap, lack, amnesia. 

We are not unified I and we cannot say the truth.

 

With structuralists, language is not just a medium, it structures meaning.  Meaning is possible from differential quality of language and that a deep structure in language and once we internalize this structure, we can understand how meaning is made.

 

Post-structuralists, what is subject, how is meaning made, deep structure is not center that gives meaning.  Gap between I who speaks (Subject of Enunciating) that pronounces and the I in language (Subject of Enunciation).  There is gap.  Therefore, we can’t possess, inhabit language.  Language creates us.  We are used by language just as much as we use language.  Heidegger and Nietzsche influences Derrida.  Descarte—I think; therefore I am. 

 

Derrida says we don’t internalize language, we internalize concepts, ideologies.

 

Hybridity, subjectivity, postionality are postcolonial terms that apply to this essay. 

 

Hybridity–How do marginalized subjects appropriate power and create third space, alternative space, discourse, etc.

 

Positionality—aware of our own positionality;

 

Subjectivity—

 

Derrida takes on all this issues with autobiographical tone/approach.

 

Citizenship/nationhood—language determines this. 

 

Derrida, along with Foucault and Freud, are metaauthors. 

 

Form of this essay is performative contradiction, so unlike Plato’s dialectics which attempts to find answer, Derrida diverges from this Western traditional form.

 

Dialect of two selves.

 

Langauge and citizenship are predicated on removal and threat.

 

We are always haunted by pure past and origin of knowledge (hauntology).  We create pure past to solve our own curiousity.  The spectral function of past leads to violent and less violent forms of domination….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Combs, Steven C. The Dao of Rhetoric

In the introduction to The Dao of Rhetoric, Combs advocates for a study of ancient Chinese rhetorics in their own cultural texts and contexts as a means to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about communication, culture, and rhetoric (2).  Daoism, Combs claims, is especially worthy of study because of its antithetical rhetorical nature compared to ancient Greek rhetoric.  For instance, Daoism devalues persuasion and argumentation and is founded on an entirely different view of reality, which manifests in different conceptions of language and uses of rhetoric.  In classical Greece, a “two-world” notion of reality posits that through knowledge and reason, the underlying stable reality of life can be perceived and represented in language.  In Daoism, however, which is based in a “one-world” view of reality, an underlying stable reality does not exist; reality is always changing, thus cannot be ascertained by reason or language.  As Combs writes, Daoism “espoused views that are compatible with postmodern critiques that deny objective foundations for knowledge, essential meanings and identities, universal truths, and deprivilege reason and rationality” (4).  Combs also explains that rhetoric is rooted in philosophy of Daoism and used to make Daoism accessible and appealing (4).  Combs also aims to demonstrate how Daoist rhetoric can function as a method of rhetorical criticism, which has the potential to both “provide a lens for viewing limitations of current Western rhetorical theorizing” and vehicle for creating “exciting avenues for theory, criticism, and social action” (7). 

 

In Chapter 1 “Culture, Text, and Context,” Combs explains how the philosophical underpinnings of Daoist rhetoric are different from philosophical suppositions inherent in classical Western rhetoric (9).  Again, Combs explains how Western reason is a faculty believe to be able to get to true essence of things, to find cause, rational explanation, etc., for a hidden, fixed reality.  Daoism, on the other hand, believes universe is constantly changing and developing and is thus unknowable.  “Knowing [instead] rests on the ability to perceived the connections and interactions, the comprehensiveness, which constitutes the world”…. [And r]ational explanation lies ‘in mapping out the local conditions that collaborate to sponsor any particular event or phenomenon’” (10).   Combs explains that  foregrounding is a useful strategy in Daoism that can help us write rhetorically….Foregrounding context in daoist rhetoric is not done to make a claim about reality, but rather to describe influence of historical and cultural events, rhetors, and audience which are important to know about because at the time in which artifact was produced, these interactions were at work.  What is important to realize is that according to Daoism, “context does not imply causation.  Daoists reject linear explanations of events.  Texts are not caused by situations but are part of them (13).  Combs also differentiates between Confucianism and Daoism, explaining that while Confucianist rhetoric aims to determine a “strict conduct code, observance of rituals, and a resurrection of practices of sage monarchs,” Daoism, whose main goal is harmony, aims to align people with “eternal, universal force by living consistently with the natural world, recognizing the unity of things rather than their distinctions, and transcending the material world” (20).

 

With Confucianism participate relations between manmade things/people, Daoism align with nature of life.  Nature is outside of self and self is in nature.  No outside/inside binary.  Daoist—self is part of nature…..Unity between nature and self; rhythm is harmony; no distinctions….

 

In Chapter 2, Combs analyses Laozis rhetoric and identifies the philosophical underpinnings and commonly used rhetorical strategies and methods that were directed at rulers to urge a return to the natural way of life.  Laozi dissuaded argumentation because there was no universality to reality and language and perception are always limited (34).  He utilized negation (describing Dao by what it is not), paradox (contradicting to dissimilar things to show the “Dao is neither one things nor its opposite, but both simultaneously”, and analogy—all which are consistent with his philosophy, acknowledge limitation of language, and adhere to his natural way of communication (35-36).  Still, Daoists acknowledge purpose of language; is multi-modality might be move in direction of Daoism, certain things can be communicated better in certain modes.  Doaism interested in modality of communication; spontaneous, effortless, communication.  Daoists realize every assertion is local…

 

These rhetorical strategies are not unique but the philosophical view of argument in and of itself is unique….argument is made differently

 

Dao is “way” or “path;” but “de jing” is the design of all things…

 

In Chapter 3, Combs analyses Zhuangzi’s main us of the rhetorical strategy evocativeness—“the use of rhetoric designed to induce others to join in a communication interaction and engage in self-persuasion” …and “find Dao in their own lives” (38 and 40).  Thus, unlike Laozi who addressed rulers, Zhuangzi “offers common peasant a manual for practical living during an incredibly dangerous period in Chinese history…[and] suggests principles for appropriate ways to communicate” (43).  These strategies include going with flow, being a “natural” man, avoid contrived effort to persuade, use simple language,  and don’t communicate in ways that drawn attention to the self…So opposite from conquest and win that are goals of rhetoric…Similar to cooperation.  Egolessness…

 

Sunzi’s Art of War  main rhetorical strategy is parsimony:  use of extreme economy in the expidenture of resources.  Use minimal level of resources…Knowledge is necessary

 What do we mean when we say that we use Daoism as a method of rhetorical criticism? 

 

 Is Daoism effective for comparative rhetoric  vs.  performative contradiction?

 

 Comparative work can be strategic essentialism….

 

 

 

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture—Chapter 1 “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern”

General:

Bhaba combines interdisciplinary theories into one dense package.  Modernity=order, progress, central meaning, linearity.  Postmodernism=art and lit. movement, no central meaning; everything is text with no single interpretation; everything is text; neo-Marxism drives postmodern theory=agency less important because individual is always constituted with institutional indoctrination and culture always speak through us and ideology is interpolated in us; death of the author; we are discourse; Deconstruction= no center, no meaning, no hierarchy; in different versions of postmodernity, agency is marginalized and thus marginalize agencies were oppressed.  Some modernists recognize dominant and marginal cultures but talk about marginal cultures in discourse of victimhood; dichotomy and binary results and no agency is given to marginal agent.   Talk in power relations and deny subaltern agents productive role. 

 

How does marginal culture survive???????

 

Bhaba says agency is important and asks whose voice is talking.  He proposes that we reconfigure discourse of cultural difference because discourse of victimhood is unuseful.  Remember Mignolo’s notion of coevalness.  Enlightenment first denied coevalness.  Now technology denies the denial of coevalness.   Technology allows simultaneous study.  Bhaba says coevalness is not enough.  We must reconceive history, as well as time, and cultural signs.  He reminds us that “culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational” (247).  Transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in histories of cultural displacement; translational because spatial histories of displacement complicate our understanding of how culture signifies and what is signified by culture (247).  Cultural translation becomes a “complex form of signification,” which a postcolonial perspective can help decipher because it resists binary structures of opposition, holistic forms of social explanation, and “forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres” –the hybrid location of culture (248). 

 

In this chapter, Bhabha explores the role of the postcolonial perspective in postmodern discourse, critical theory, and historiography and calls for “a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the rearticulation of the ‘sign’ in which cultural identities may be inscribed” (246).   Bhabha challenges us to consider hybrid locations of cultural value embedded in historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy, which give agency to the subaltern subject, which if understood would “transform our understanding of the narrative of modernity and the ‘values of progress’” (249).  No longer can we take a unified sense of culture community for granted, a people from various cultures “produce incompatible systems of signification and engage distinct forms of social subjectivity” (252).  Bhabi calls for us to step outside the “sentence” or discourse of victimhood when we discuss marginal communities.  He calls for a epistemological focus of culture to a focus of culture as enunciation, which is a “more dialogical process that attempts to track displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations—subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation”—his ultimate objective being a “process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience” (255).   According to Bhabha, what is created in the enunciative present is ambivalence, which opens up “new forms of identification that may confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound the ordering of cultural symbols, traumatize tradition” (257).  We must move “beyond theory,” claims Bhabha, to “create space for the contingent, indeterminate articulation of social ‘experience’ that is particularly important for envisaging emergent cultural identities” (257).  After all, it is “a representation of social experience as the contingency of history—the indeterminacy that makes subversion and revision possible” (257).

            Moving “beyond theory” of binaries, victimhood, centrality, etc. will help us understand how this location of culture is a means of historical agency that sits among another subversive strategies such as mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, to produce subaltern agency that “negotiates its own authority” (265).  Although it may come across as social contradiction or antagonism, the “problematic of contingency strategically” in fact “ allows for a spatial contiguity…to be (re)articulated in the moment of indeterminacy,” which allows agent to “emerge into the social realm of discourse” (268 and 271).  As Hannah Arendt reminds us, this indeterminacy is created in part because the subaltern agent is always a site of tension between the who of the individual self and the what of the subjective realm (271).  Yet, this tension is productive; “it is the contingency that constitutes individuation—in the return of the subject as agent—that protects the interest of the intersubjective realm” (272).  As Bhabha explains, this site produces “a process of reinscription and negotiation—the insertion or intervention of something that takes on new meaning—[which] happens in the temporal break in-between the sign, deprived of subjectivity, in the realm of the intersubjective realm” (274).  What ultimately emerges is the “process of agency both as a historical development and as the narrative agency of historical discourse” (275).  This process can be articulated as a moment of revision in which the subaltern agent enacts (re)orders symbols in order to appropriate signs originally deprived of the subject in order to create subjectivity aiming at rediscovering truth—an this process is a theoretical form of political agency (275 and 278).   This form of political agency, what Das calls a historiography of the subaltern, is made possible by the strategic use of ambivalence and the historical use of historical contingency and makes possible the interrogation of modernity (27 .

Lipson, Carol “Recovering the Multimedia History of Writing in the Public Texts of Ancient Egypt”

In ancient Egypt, all writing and art was composed by the elite and commissioned and created by members of the state bureaucracy.  Public monuments were epideictic in that they convey cultural and ideological values.  Here, Lipson applies an analytical framework developed by Robert Horn to analyze Eyptian Narmer Palettes, whose utilitarian purpose of serving as a cosmetic palette is often overshadowed by its monumental and ceremonial functions.  According to Horn, spatial relations are “telling points of syntactic and semantic meaning,” which he employs to develop a visual language syntax.  Proximity, similarity, common region, connectedness, directional continuity, and closure are principles that reveal meaning in symbolic, visual structures.  By employing Horn’s analytical framework to the stone Narmer Palette’s, Lipson illustrates that the palletes not only reflect Egyptian systems of belief concerning kingship but also reflect Egyptian theories about the relationship between kingship, order, and ritual.  Simultaneously, Lipson claims the palettes design “a model spectator, who too is devoted to ritual and to order” (95). 

 

Lipson also analyzes funerary stelae, which are stone monuments set in niches of memorial temples where the public would come to perform an offering ritual.  Analyzing the King Scorpian Stela, Lipson reveals how the stela also is epideictic, “conveying the primacy of the eternal realm of the gods and of the king as its representative and embodiment” (101).  More so, the stela conveys guidelines for how to live one’s life, how to understand one’s status and role in the kingdom, and also emphasizes a social/political order needed to keep order in society.  Analyzing the Iykernofret’s Stela, Lipson illustrates how this stela suggests a “careerist ideology:  Serve your king well, and you will do well” (103).  Moreso, similar to the King Scorpian Stela, this stela emphasizes what role the king plays in keeping order on earth.  After all, as with most other ancient cultures, for ancient Egyptians, keeping order was of primary concern.  “The propensity to use repeated lines or patterns, even to divide a surface into an ordered arrangement of rectangular units, reinforces and reflects the value placed on order” (106). 

 

Lipson also demonstrates how although most image-texts of ancient Egypt conveyed cultural values belonging to the elite, some image-texts exist which tell a different story, which demonstrates that different forms of communication were created for different audiences.  Nonetheless, Lipson claims “Egyptian multimodal rhetoric is a rhetoric of accommodation to the ideal,” even if it does contain contradictions (110).  Overall, “the image-text involve a weaving of authoritative voices and ideal cultural topoi; they name and interpret reality in culturally sanctioned ways” (110).   More so, “both graphic and written texts are ideologically based, presenting and reinforcing the ideals and values of the elite cultures” (111).

Mignolo, Walter “Globalization, Civilization Processes, and the Relocation of Languages and Cultures”

In this article, Mignolo explores the complicities of languages, literatures, and the culture of scholarship in the civilizing process, modernity, and globalization, all of which have contributed to the expansion of the “Western world-system” in part by denying the denial of coevalness.  Mignolo reminds us that dominant languages and scholarship came from the same countries that produced and perpetuated the civilizing mission of “third world” countries and thus English is the colonial language in which the “domain of knowledge, intellectual production, and cultures of scholarship” arose.  In the current stage of globalization, however, “the ‘natural’ link between languages and nations, languages and national memories, languages and national literature…is creating the condition for and enacting the relocation of languages and the fracture of cultures” (43).  In addition, cultures of scholarship are being relocated and a “border gnoseology is emerging at the intersection of Western epistemology and non-Western knowledge, characterized as ‘wisdom’ by the former” (43).  In Latin American, for instance, the politics of language and education is being heavily influenced by a growing indigenous culture of scholarship made possible in part by both technological globalization and transnational alliances but mostly by a growing body of organic intellectuals who sparked a rise of Amerindian social movements by appropriating “theoretical practices and elaborated projects, engulfing and superseding the discourse of the civilizing mission and its theoretical foundations (44-5).   What has emerged in these borderlands, Mignolo points out, is a new consciousness, a” border gnosis,” that denies the denial of barbarism and coevalness. As he explains:

the forces of ’barbarian’ theorizing and rationality” integrat[es] and supersed[es] the restrictive logic behind the idea of ‘civilization’ by giving rise to what the civilizing mission suppressed:  the self-appropriation of all the good qualities that were denied the barbarians.  ‘Border gnoseology’ (rather than epistemology) in all its complexity (geocultural, sexual, racial, national, diasporic, exilic, etc.) is a new way of thinking that emerges from the sensibilities and conditions of everyday life created by colonial legacies and economic globalization” (46). 

In this sense, “barbarian theorizing” as it “redress[es] and implement[s] long-lasting forces, sensibilities, and rationalities repressed by the one-sided ideology of the civilizing mission/process” does not so much “oppose ’civilian’ (in the double meaning of civilization and citizenship) ‘theorizing’” but displace it and depart from it (49).

 

At the end of his article, Mignolo points out that theorizing from the border is made possible by being both trained in “civilizing theorizing” and living and experiencing in subaltern communities.  In addition, he emphasizes that “barbarian theorizing” ‘from/of the “third world” is for and benefits the whole world, not just the “third world” (51).

Mao, LuMing “Reflective Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric”

Mao’s Reflective Encounter’s begins with three challenges that comparative rhetoric as defined by Kennedy faces:  temptation of resorting to the defiency mode, identifying “rhetorical universals” across cultures and imposing principles from Western classical rhetoric onto other cultural rhetorical practices.  Mao offers a brief history of comparative rhetoric as subdiscipline in our field and fleshes out the advances that have thus far been made as well as the Orientalist perspectives that have often resulted.  Mao suggests taking an emic-etic approach to produce “reflective encounters,” which puts rhetorical traditions/practices into conversation to see how they can learn from each other. Mao explains that contrastive rhetorics by and large studies ESL and EFL rather than individual rhetorical tradition and practices on their own terms.  He asks:  how should we understand, study, and compare various rhetorical traditions and practices without resorting to the defiency model or forcing Western principles to unique rhetorical traditions so they fit within Western conceptions of rhetoric. Mao begins by analyzing whether or not Robert Olivers succeeds in studying Indian and Chinese rhetorics on their own terms as he proclaimed we must do and set out do in his seminal work in comparative rhetoric. Mao claims that Oliver does and does not succeed.  Problematic are the ways in which Oliver relies on unreliable sources, makes unwarranted general or stereotypical conclusions, makes misinterpretations because of his reliance on translated materials, as well as his failure to look at Chinese and Indian rhetoric on their own terms.

 

Mao also discusses the work Carolyn Matalene, who in conducting an early study of Chinese rhetoric, resorts to binary characterizations and the deficiency model, which result in part from not considering other social, cultural, and linguistic forces that shaped Chinese rhetorical practices she was studying. Mao also faults the scholarship of John Morrison, which claims Japanese lack a rhetorical tradition, for implying there is only one rhetorical tradition, the western one, and for a lack of primary research. Carl Becker’s work is also problematic in Mao’s eyes because in using negative correlation as a methodology, Becker focuses on what is absent  rather then what is present in Chinese rhetorical traditions, which Mao claims reflects not only a bias but also an Orientalist logic at work in Becker’s scholarship. Mao defines Orientalist logic as using “Western systems of thought or norms to adjudicate or to make value-laden judgments about rhetorical traditions in the East, without making any effort to reflect upon their own systems or norms or to search for interpretive norms or categories that inform these Eastern traditions” (409). Mao also claims that Kennedy’s work operates by an Orientalist logic that sparks rhetorical Darwinism in Kennedy’s work as well as the consistent use of Western rhetorical concepts to make sense of so called non-Western rhetorical practices.

 

Drawing on the work of J. Vernon Jenson, Mao demonstrates how comparative rhetoric can operate outside an Orientalist logic if scholars do not use Western rhetorical concepts as only “points of reference or origin and that insists on reflective encounters” (412). Reflective Encounters demand “critical interrogation and informed contextualization” (412).  Mao cites Mary Garrett’s work as example that does this important work on ancient Chinese rhetorics to prove that argumentation played a role in the Chinese rhetorical tradition and accomplished various rhetorical and political objectives. Mao reminds readers that motivating forces behind comparative work is to not only better understand Western rhetoric but also to redefine and enrich it through comparison with other rhetorical traditions operating in different contexts (413). Perhaps one of the strongest points made by Mao is that in comparative rhetoric, “the point of origin can be non-Western…and…tools for crosscultural comparisons can be based on non-Western terms or concepts” (414). Using Lu as an example, Mao also reminds us that we need to study original texts rather than rely on translations to identify rhetorical practices that have often been overlooked. Mao claims Lu effectively models how to conduct contextual analysis; describe non-Western rhetorical practices by using their own terms and concepts which do not already exist; identify how non-Western cultures conceputalized rhetoric and put it to practice; and investigate multicultural rhetorics, which are simultaneously both local and global (415). Mao does not simply praise Lu, however.  Mao claims that any move toward identifying universal rhetorics is risky, unappealing, and idealistic because that move demands extensive knoweldge across rhetoridal traditions, which there is far to less work on to be able to do it well. Mao discourages the temptation to characterize different rhetorical traditions in dichotomous terms, which in turn causes various concerns.  

 

Instead, he suggests to take an etic/emic approach, and more specifically an emic approach if we want to study rhetorical traditions on their own terms.  An emic approach describes elements that are already components of a rhetorical tradition and focuses our attention on materials and conditions that are embedded in these traditions. Mao acknowledges, however, that we are always located outside our object of study in time and place so that there is always pressure to use concepts from the here and now to describe an Other rhetorical tradition.  As long as we avoid Orientalist logic, attempt emic accounts, and practice self-interrogation, we can practice comparative rhetoric ethically. Mao concludes that an etic/emic approach produces reflective encounters, which results when we both study a non-Western rhetorical tradition on its own terms and develop on ongoing dialogue between these rhetorical traditions and Western ones.  We must again interrogate  our own dominant traditions, dominant positions, and well meaning representations of the other.  Interestingly, Mao notes that those scholars native to a non-western rhetorical tradition do not necessarily offer more authentic accounts of their own rhetorical traditions because “studying (one’s own0 rhetorical and cultural experiences is always a process of recontextualization, no matter how intimate they are with these experiences” (418).  In order to avoid resorting to Occidentalism, they too need to employ reflective encounters, which “renounce domination, adjudication, and assimilation, and…nurture tolerance, vagueness, and heteroglossia” (418).