Interrogating the Where: Process, Performance and Rhetorical Specificity
To further engage the what, we must turn to the other question, “Where is Chinese rhetoric” Doing so leads us not only to engage a different set of assumptions, but also to open up those interstices that can bring together the where and the what and begin to nurture and practice what I have elsewhere referred to as “interdependence-in-difference”. Unlike the “what” question that eggs us on to search for that objective, identifiable truth or essence about Chinese rhetoric, the “where” question leads us to focus on how Chinese rhetoric is being realized in the world or in “the ten thousand things”. Doing so is not so much about responding to or comparing with what’s of the Western rhetorical tradition. Rather, it is about Shoes Online communicating with what linguistic and other symbolic means the Chinese have actually deployed in the communities and in dealings with the world, and with how they have used them to reflect on, respond to, and reshape the political, social, and cultural orders of the day.
What kind of ideology, then, does the “where” question introduce and promote what corresponding method does it call for the “where” question reflects and reinforces “a worldview that accepts the processional and hence provisional character of natural, social, and cultural order” (Ames 95). It views knowledge making not as about discovering the essence of things, but as about producing effective performance and participation in the world, about how self and other interact in dialectical, interdependent engagements. This ideology resonates with a characterization of culture as “the semantic space, the field of signs and practices, in which human beings construct and represent themselves and others, and hence their societies and histories.” To best capture those “polyvalent, potentially contestable messages, images, and actions” that our culture always contains, we must turn to the where’s, not the what’s, because only the where’s can take us to how signs and practices align with Discount Shoes one another to engineer meaning, and to how their subject positions assume different discursive roles, frequently amid highly asymmetrical relations of power.
To put this ideology into practice, a different kind of method must be initiated one that seeks to discover and develop terms, concepts, and paradigms that are internal to Chinese rhetoric and that are situated within the (larger) Chinese cultural context. Such a method further relies on them, rather than on some externally developed paradigms or logic, to make sense of how Chinese rhetoric functions and how it intersects with other systems of thought within Chinese culture, as part of what Arabella Lyon in this special issue refers to as “thick cultural description”. Our failure to deploy this method may amount to denying Chinese rhetoric an opportunity to speak for itself using its own distinctive narrative structure.
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