Breaking the Glass; Building a Pool

During the summer before my matriculation into Florida State’s graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition, I had received a challenge from an English professor to expand an essay I had written in class into a full article. Unfazed by the sheer impossibility of the task, I set to work, reading theoretical pieces from Foucault and an introduction to the theoretical concept of Spatiality presented in Robert T. Tally’s book Spatiality. As the field of Literary and Cultural Studies has shifted to purport the significance of colonized and decolonized voices, Tally notes, there has been an accompanying shift toward better understanding the spaces that authors construct, name, and portray—through both their mimetic and diegetic devices.

Thus, the task of “Mapping Global Rhetorics” fell well within my academic interests. It is also a task that we do more than we realize in our everyday reading and writing, for, as Tally and other spatial theorists assert, writing should be seen as “a form of mapping or a cartographic activity,” wherein a “writer must establish the scale and the shape, no less of the narrative than of the places in it” (45). When we read, we take cues from authors and rhetors, constructing landscapes, cityscapes, and their inhabitants in our minds: “If writers map the real and imagined spaces of their world in various ways through literary means, then it follows that readers are also engaged in this broader mapping project” (79). Therefore, as I read the pieces for this class, pieces which introduced me to unfamiliar concepts and locations, I naturally began to form a map in my mind, well before I produced this map with my group.

The selection that most significantly informed my group’s mapping practice, though, was Arabella Lyon’s “‘Why do the Rulers Listen to the Wild Theories of Speech-Makers?” Or Wuwei, Shi, and Methods of Comparative Rhetoric.” We were most intrigued by Lyon’s mapping project she presented in her chapter, starting and ending with the frame of I.A. Richards’ “mirror of the mind” metaphor. To introduce his concept, Richards starts by asking a simple yet extremely complex question: “Can we in attempting to understand and translate a work which belongs to a very different tradition from our own do more than read our own conceptions into it?” (From Lyon 176). Our map, then, featured Richards’ mirror of the mind as its own frame, but this mirror (hopefully) did not merely reflect our Western ideas and traditions back at us. We instead created fragmentations, through a historiographical approach to understanding and mapping terms and concepts that projected a “movement beyond a New Critical translation of terms into a historical placement of ideas,” which “breaks the looking-glass into smaller pieces and forces the Western spectator to study harder in attempting to see a whole” (193).

Thus, the definitions of rhetoric that we saw emerging from each disparate location cut fissures into our looking-glass, breaking our “perfect” Western image, an image which seeks to appropriate other forms and subsume them into one, uniform discourse. Our “goal” for this map was to, through working with Richards’ metaphor, create a pool of discourse that rhetoricians can pull from to communicate in different ways in all situations. In order for our map to present an accurate representation of rhetorical traditions and concepts though, we had to recognize the Western Terministic Screen, the jagged fissure that runs vertically through the glass. While many Rhetorical traditions of the Middle and Near East seemed to correspond (and I use that word recognizing the problems associated with it) to ideas and traditions held in the West, many of the ideas from the Far East did not. Thus, ideas and traditions seemed to be able to move from the Middle and Near East to the West, but ideas from the Far East could not as easily cross the “Western Divide.”

Western theorists and historians have often dichotomized the East and the West in detrimental ways, and Smith notes the fallacious nature of this practice as “Said has argued that the ‘oriental’ was partially a creation of the West, based on a combination of images formed through scholarly and imaginative works” (27). For a time, especially within Literature and Music, the West heavily fetishized the “Oriental,” creating their own compositions that emulated “the other’s” style. These were largely misappropriations and misrepresentations, what Lyon might assert to be compositions which create merely a language of similarity. “A language of similarity,” according to Lyon, “does not access what lies beyond similitude. That is, by using a method focused on similar linguistic terms, rhetoricians are limited in what they see and remain too mired in the presence and absence of Western concepts” (177). In the placing of terms and ideas from the rhetoric of the Far East along the Western Divide, it was hard for us, then, not to approach it from a scheme of categorization based upon similitude. Ideas that could potentially cross the line did, but we did not want them to fully reach the West because we recognized that translation and correspondence alone were not substantive enough criteria to assert any stable connection between the rhetorical ideas and traditions of the East and the West. The divide, then, did represent a Terministic Screen, or a semi-permeable membrane, allowing some concepts through, but not all of them.

So, I wouldn’t say that we necessarily reached our goal of creating a pool of rhetorical discourse through our map, but I think our map showed us the limitations we face as Westerners when attempting to map and orient ourselves within other rhetorical traditions. Fracturing the mirrors in our minds is the first step to seeing the problems we face, but we have to do much more. In our own map, a problem we definitely ran into was our reductive language. We systematically reduced whole, complex traditions to one word in order to be able to plot coordinates on our map. The kind of historiographical mapping we engaged in could, then, have been deemed one framed by totalizing discourse, which Smith defines in this way: “The concept of totality assumes the possibility and the desirability of being able to include absolutely all known knowledge into a coherent whole” (31). Thus, as we continue to approach the concept of doing Global Rhetorics, we need to carefully assess each proposed method of practice to determine their benefits and detriments. As Travis notes, Lyon shows us how to potentially approach Eastern ideas as Westerners, but she never gives us clear examples that show how Eastern ideas, when placed into a healthy assemblage with those of the West, can transform or even augment our Western conception of rhetoric.