Notes on LuMing Mao's "Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric"

Mao, LuMing. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 41–57.

This might be a good article to have students read in an undergraduate comparative rhetoric course. (Like the one I'm supposed to be planning right now!) It asks important methodological (and ethical) questions about representing the rhetoric(s) of "the other" (or "the others"). Then it introduces some concepts and practices that might be helpful in answering those methodological and ethical questions and presents an approach to "the art of recontextualization" for representing other rhetorics. And it ends with an example of Mao's own analysis of the rhetoric of the Daodejing. 

Mao begins with some questions that I thought should be highlighted in a comparative rhetoric class:

What right ... do scholars have to represent this or that particular culture and its rhetorics? From what vantage point do they position themselves, and how does their position in turn shape and influence the outcomes of their studies? Why do we often encounter, in the accounts of the other, the privileging of facts over experiences or of logic over other modes of thinking? (42)

The first question is one that I often ask myself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I've come up with any satisfying answer. Mao cites Linda Alcoff's "much cited" article "The Problem of Speaking for Others" to provide a four-step strategy for thinking about your own relation to the "others" you are speaking for or about. Fortunately, she seems to reject the idea of simply giving up on speaking for others (an option that I have been tempted to take over these long years); she suggests the need to question your reasons for speaking, to think about your own status and position in relation to who you are representing, to accept accountability for what you say, and to consider the consequences of what you have said "on the discursive and material context" (Mao 45). 

In arguing for "interdependence and interconnectivity" as important principles for representing rhetorics, Mao uses Bakhtin's concept of answerability to posit that "each act of contextualization represents a response to preceding acts of contextualization and further anticipates a response from similar future acts" (46). (I have to admit that I asked in the margin if it was necessary to contextualize the use of Bakhtin here. That is, should we take the ideas of dialogism and answerability as universally applicable? I'm not asking this to be a smart-aleck...) 

Mao argues for the importance of examining one's own context and its influence on how they're representing others; in addition, the context of the "other" needs to be examined, and it should not be assumed that the "other" is unified or speaks with one voice. He argues for "cultivating a processual mode of representation--where we continuously trouble our own modes of thinking and learn to listen to the voice and claim of the other" (47). 

Mao tries to show how this art of recontextualization would work in looking at the rhetoric of the Daodejing. He contextualizes the classic by pointing to Daoism "as a direct challenge to Confucianism and Legalism of its time, but also because the Daoist sensibilities have permeated Chinese culture and its thought patterns" and have "unexpected affinities with postmodern views" (48-9). He shows how different terms/concepts in the Daodejing interconnect with each other in a "discursive field" to create a rhetoric that can "challenge and subvert Confucian ideology" and Legalism (54). He also points out the tension between people's individual "Daos" and "the social and political pressure to codify one of them as the Dao for everyone else to follow" (54). Mao argues that this latter pressure was "driven by the rhetorical exigencies of the time [during the Han dynasty] and spurred on by political ambition" (55). (Here I wonder if we have moved from the Daodejing notion of the Dao into the Dao of the Confucians? As Lloyd and Sivin say in The Way and the Word, "in the hands of Confucius and those who followed him it [Dao] took on normative meanings" [200].)  

Mao ends by seeing how this discussion of the Dao might be applied to our current situation, focusing on the rise of "cultural nationalism" in China, in which (as he puts it), there is pressure for only one Dao ("read as the state ideology or the law of the land"), and Chinese citizens' more individual Daos are suppressed. 

One final question I have is in regards to the "processual mode of representation" that Mao raises earlier--I'm not sure I see that in this example. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place, or I'm not sure what to look for. What should this "processual mode" look like? Should we be bringing ourselves into the text and reflection on our own positions in relation to the texts or rhetorics that we are studying?