A Review of a Series of Essays On Comparative Rhetoric Due for This Week

Preface from the screenplay of Being There
President "Bobby": Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives? [Long pause]
Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
President "Bobby": In the garden.
Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has its seasons. First, comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
President "Bobby": Spring and summer.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
President "Bobby": Then fall and winter.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
Benjamin Rand: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we're upset by the seasons of our economy.
Chance the Gardener: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!

The prompt for this week's assignment is as follows:

“Based on the readings for this week and the discussions on Chinglish we have had, consider some ideas/models that may help us approach translation and/or cross-cultural understanding (and knowledge sharing) more meaningfully.”

Luming Mao
Department Chair
Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies
EDUCATION
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
M.A., University of Minnesota
B.A., East China Normal University

"Thinking beyond Aristotle: The Turn to How in Comparative Rhetoric"

Professor Mao illustrates through "highlighting the need to study both 'facts of usage' and "linguistic and other symbolic behaviors and experiences that have been disqualified, forgotten, or deemed something other than rhetoric"--"facts of nonusage" (449). The author speaks of the Dao, and according to Wikipedia, Dao is "a Chinese word signifying 'way,' 'path,' 'route,' 'road,' 'choose,' 'key' or sometimes more loosely 'doctrine,' 'principle' or 'holistic science.' Within the context of traditional Chinese philosophy and religion, the Tao is the intuitive knowing of ‘life’ that cannot be grasped full-heartedly as just a concept but is known nonetheless through an actual living experience of one's everyday being."

I partially understand Mao’s argument but what I liked most is his comment that the "Facts of nonusage, in fact, conceal or embody conditions that led to their exile and led to the sanctioning of facts of usage. Parasitic on each other, the two become the yin and yang of rhetorical reality" And, according to note seven, facts in one culture may not be within the context of another.

I did not understand the example given nor the author's use of Zhuangzi’s quotes about "You’re not a fish--how do you know what fish enjoy?," or "Zhuangzi's reasoning about it," but I sensed it. I read Huizi's question as rhetorical "you're not a fish--so you do not know what fish enjoy." Zhuangzi's takes it as a question: "so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question." The dialogue became stuck in a recursive loop echoing rhetoric positions.

I seem to disagree with solutions ex-post facto to re-envision the future and I prefer to promote a synthesis of the present into something not conceivable--something dynamic that arises because of the trajectory of the past.

I’ll attempt to bring the Being There preface together with Mao and professor Lu below to arrive at a response to the prompt. In doing so, I risk misjudgment due to an improper framing of Professor Lu’s paper.

Professor Min-Zhan Lu, University Louisville, Kentucky  "Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone" Professing Multiculturalism (1993), or, rephrased another way as many are reading the word multiculturalism today: based on the disfunction that surrounds multicultural societies and the perception that multiculturalism is racism against white people: “Racism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone.” By rephrasing the title, I present one of the problems that must be addressed when considering cross-cultural understanding and that is the effect of the institutional policy.

The title words multiculturalism, contact, and zone imply an assumption that multiculturalism is something positive and associated with politics and style in a multicultural contact zone; the words assert that multiculturalism is to be taken as something worth bringing into political discussion through style. And, since this has been the case in American culture for centuries most would agree. My question, of course, is so what? And, why bring it up as something new? The article is 24 years old and around the time of modems and bulletin board internet usage. I find the content of the article within the context of limited global information sharing interesting because when I read the article, it seemed to apply as well to today. Lu quotes a lot of her words as if to pronounce them loudly; as if she is not being heard. Looking back from this time, it seems as though she sensed that a global transformation was underway and there were many back then that were not listening. I admire her paper and her intent.
Some of the words that she uses in her academic rhetoric follow. Notably missing is the word privilege:
1. Diversity
2. Contact Zone
3. import
4. articulate
5. discourse
6. ghettoization
7. aligned
8. negotiate
9. informed
10.profound 'heteroglossia'

Lu takes the route of pathos to persuade her audience through words that provoke the reader's sympathies. I believe it is enlightening to denote a few instances.

1. students at the fringe
2. anxiety
3. feel
4. worry
5. guilty
6. self-conscious
7. blundering
8. having problems
9. error
10. Mr. Roger's Neighborhood

Lu’s paper does not address a student's maturation into adulthood. It does not stress that students must develop a sense of morality by learning to deal with reality while living in a multicultural world, and it seems to presume that multiculturalism will somehow magically solve divisiveness. The obstacles to Stein and Dreiser are what made them who they were, to write what they did. I think we papers that address the importance of what it means to be human in a multicultural and diverse society rather than papers that address what it means to be a part of collectivist ideologies enacted through policy.

This where I think we can take Mao's words above and apply them to Lu’s paper. The "rhetorical reality" of political multiculturalism, political diversity, and identity politics accentuates separation and discord and breeds racism and acts of violence equal to an increase in meaningful translation and cross-cultural understanding.

In an interview on my blog by Chris Martenson of Melissa Zimdars, I give an example collective acts of violence. In particular "Suspected Berkeley [professor] Antifa Bike Lock Attacker Eric Clanton Arrested For Assault." So, what I believe Lu’s paper represents is the cultural conditioning of individuals that suffer from the listed sensitivities, beginning in 1993 and continuing to this day, into the alt-left extremist domestic terrorist group Antifa. And, I'm quite sure that Professor Lu did not foresee the potential adverse side effects of multiculturalism and diversity. I merely wish to point out that through the indoctrination of multiculturalism and diversity there are those that become twisted to the point of radical racism against people that they feel are different. That is what collectivism does. Through group identification, the other is projected from one's dark, repressed side onto a perceived enemy. The way that people become moral is that they learn to deal with their feeling side by integrating it into their total personality, and they do this by facing life without government intervention; not by institutions that protect them from individual integration.

I posted the quote from Being There because its humorous and astonishing portrayal of being in the right place at the right time. But, synchronicity functions independently of whether sequences of events lead to positive or negative outcomes. Therefore our prompt this week requires both an exigency and a productive solution rather than a policy solution (which may be worse than no answer). If a solution implemented adequately at this time, the it may lead to meaningful cross-cultural understandings simply by being there.

From my life's experience, co-operation in a multicultural workplace or academic environment is the best solution. I lived in Los Angeles for 45 years or so, and from being in a multicultural living environment, I've learned a lot. Two of my favorite literature classes were Latin American Literature which had both English and Spanish side by side on both of the books that we studied, and French in Translation with all of the French artistic authors. And, in group projects both at UCLA and CSUN my partners were from cultures other than mine. I also had a Chinese co-researcher as a partner for a two month long research project at UCLA.

Beyond the interpersonal relationships, I would immediately petition the large Internet monopolies Google and Facebook to come up with a way that let's say independent Hindi and Chinese media productions be made available to Western world users in their feeds. In other words, open up the Internet in such a way as to show what is essential in one part of the world as being important in another part of the world. News feeds should automatically be translated and trending no matter which physical part of the world people live. The commodified ghettoization of global cultures should be freed from servitude to the monopoly powers.

I believe academic solutions should focus less on historical culture. Instead, more productive solutions of multiculturalism are ones that rely on what is synergistic within the current global information system of the Internet, uncensored and non-commodified. The way people naturally interact may lead to a less multi-polar world so that multiculturalism arises not out of policy, but from the readily learned morality of the individual to unite with what I imagine Zhuangzi naming "being there." Or, said another way, knowing through the experience of not knowing; by being there immersed in the information, perceptions of whatever it may be, at the level of the simulacrum, uncontaminated and open for discussion.