Notes on Arabella Lyon, "Tricky Words"

Lyon, Arabella. “Tricky Words: Rhetoric and Comparative,” Manifesting a Future for Comparative Rhetoric, symposium of Rhetoric Review, vol. 34, no. 3, 2015, pp. 243-246. 

This article is getting at the point that I mentioned in my earlier notes. Lyon argues that "Comparison and rhetoric are so troublesome that, in rhetorical research, we might not want to start with those terms as they might lead us in a circle, turning attempts to understand new [to us] cultures into only an extension of what we already know" (243). 

Looking at the term rhetoric, she suggests that despite its instability, at its heart rhetoric is about "persuasion, argumentation, reason, and truth-seeking. Inherent is the idea, even ideal, of an individual strategizing to move an audience toward singular truth or action, but this ideal is not shared by all cultures" (244). Her objection to the use of rhetoric seems to be that although it's an unstable term, perhaps it's not unstable enough. In the end, though, she accepts the term as "an acceptable placeholder" in part due to its instability (244).

Moving on to the term "comparative," she raises some of the issues brought up in Friedman's article, such as the "appropriative" and colonial nature of comparative work (245). As she argues, "Comparison is not recognizing the other, but constructing the Other because the comparer names what is compared and the theory of comparison" (246). She suggests that while it's necessary to be explicit about what we're doing, in the end that doesn't seem to be enough "unless the trajectory of constructing ontologies and epistemologies is aligned with challenge, critique, and thick description" (246). 

A few questions/comments: 

• In her discussion of the term rhetoric, she mentions the need to "focus on the particular concepts indigenous to each text's culture" (244, emphasis on "text's" my own).  Does this mean that our studies of rhetoric (or whatever term we use) are invariably about texts? What is a text? (Do we need to have culturally sensitive understandings of textuality? Does the word "text" have as much baggage as "rhetoric"?) 
• In the next paragraph, Lyons mentions her commitment to "comparative work on theories of political communication"--is this just her own focus in terms of rhetoric, or is she offering this as an alternative to the term rhetoric? What does the term "political communication" mean for different cultures? Do we need to look for analogous terms for "politics" in other languages? (Does the word "politics" carry as much baggage as the word "rhetoric"?)
• She criticizes the title of the book, Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks because it appears to her to center Greek rhetoric. But couldn't the argument of the title be also said to be de-centering Greek rhetoric by implicitly saying that while Westerners typically look at rhetoric as beginning with the Greeks (or even "belonging" to the Greco-Roman tradition), there were theories and practices of rhetoric before the Greeks and beyond the Greco-Roman tradition? I think titles also signal their moment in history (I'd say something about their "moment of enunciation" if I knew what that meant). Perhaps the title can be seen as a call for the field of rhetoric to move beyond the Greco-Roman tradition. (I'm not just bringing this up because Carol Lipson was my dissertation advisor, by the way!)