Arguing Against Etiology in Chinese Rhetorics

Yameng Liu seems to me to be interested in defining the rhetorics of China as apart from cultural beginnings, and that they are not "reflections of, and functional responses to, cultural patterns and crises of ancient China" (Liu 151).

If the manifestation of a society's discourse is not based on the culture it comes from, or dependent upon certain "causal factors" and "obvious sociopolitical factors" (which he references as the Autumn and Spring breakdown of traditional social order, and the Warring States period as the culprits), then where does a society's presentation of discussion come from (Liu 151)?

Yameng Liu argues against two other claims prior to addressing the one I am interested in. But, on page 153 he jumps into the discussion of how culture does not directly mold the direction of that society's discussion. "Equally problematic, finally, is the assumption that the growth of classical Chinese rhetoric was a mere 'reflection' of or 'response' to preexisting 'cultural patterns and crises of ancient China'" (Liu 153). He argues that this approach "treats 'existing social or cultural conditions' as a given and a prior order ontologically separated from discourse (Liu 153). Essentially culture just sprouted and it is what defined ancient Chinese people, denying "discourse's role in creating social and cultural meanings that shape the perceptions, desires, feelings, and hence behaviors of individual or institutional actors" (Liu 153).

Is he then arguing that discourse, or rhetorics molded culture? I foresee similar issues with this proposal as the ones he references when discussing how "preexisting cultural patterns and crises" could not have affected Chinese rhetorics. It's sort of a chicken and egg dilemma, which came first? I posit that the two are entirely dependent upon one another, and that they do not exist apart from one another. Or, as Liu recounts: "as a special form/mode of discourse, rhetoric must necessarily have interacted with, impacted on, conditioned and in turn been conditioned by other discursive and institutional practices of ancient China" (Liu 153).

One cannot easily separate the differences between a culture's representation, and how this is represented in a culture's discourse. You see, a culture is represented through its discourse, as the discourse is represented through the culture, the two are not separate from one another; rather, they are linked as one, feeding off one another, and ceasing to exist with the other's departure.

Ultimately, Liu attempts to redefine "classical Chinese rhetoric as an 'architectonic productive art,' one that contributed vitally to the cultural and ideological production of the time by rendering possible meaningful interactions among divergent thoughts and ideologies" (Liu 161). However, this posits that speech and the presentation of this speech through writing is what molded culture. This is an impossibility, as I mentioned earlier, the two are entirely dependent upon one another only because it is impossible to discern the point of origination. Essentially culture impacts the way people speak, and the way people speak affects the culture they are speaking to.