Collapsing The Divide Between What And The Where In Part

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 366
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Collapsing the divide between what and the where in part is meant to call on us to interrogate our ingrained patterns of thinking as we study other forms of rhetoric and tradition. Not that I have no interest in seeking discrete answers to the "what" and the "where" questions I do, but I am just as interested in exploring the discursive interfaces between the what and the where: spaces where new meanings take shape and where different ideological positions stake their claims. In other words, as we develop our narrative of Chinese rhetoric to represent its dialogic, heterogeneous characteristic and to capture its process sensibility, we must be prepared to acknowledge and indeed validate those voices that call for Merrell Shoe and are in search of other paradigms or other modes of thought as can be seen once again in all four essays.

Caution, however, must be exercised. That is, as we embrace and celebrate these voices, we should not hasten to elevate them to the status of the importantly present without first carefully examining their own ideology and their own rhetoric. Hastily ...
... promoting them may result in either having these voices co-opted or setting up another binary for what would otherwise be a dynamic, interdependent relationship. Third, part of this ongoing interest in studying Chinese rhetoric is fueled by our growing need to move beyond the paradigm of Western rhetoric and to write a different kind of history of rhetoric so that we can open up space for other ways of knowing and other modes of reasoning both of which have often been ruled in the past as anything but rhetoric. To write this kind of history, we must look past the terministic screen of Western epistemology, and we must look for ways that can help broaden our definition of rhetoric and reshape our knowledge of tradition.

At the same time, we must resist the temptation to codify the result of these efforts and turn the work into some sort of Holy Grail. Therefore, what should ensue from a question like "Where is the Way" is not a scramble for some abstract, metaphysical response, but participation in an ongoing process of Self-Other actualization. There, we will learn to find ways to validate and further interact with the other while keeping in check our own impulse to make any wholesale claims or generalizations; and we will learn to experience and advance interdependence-in-difference within and across the boundaries of the nation-state. This special issue,Merrell Boot I hope, contributes to this process in some meaningful ways.