A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back by Judith Butler)

Henry C.K. Liu hliu at mindspring.com
Wed Mar 24 08:54:54 PST 1999


Butler's article on rhetoric: A `Bad Writer' Bites Back, has a parallel in Chinese culture.

The Chinese concept of civilization is centered on ideas, and the most important ideas are those concerning the affairs of man, namely politics. Power and glory are ephemeral, while ideas are perpetual. The Selected Biographies (Lie zhuan) section of the Old Book on Tang (Jiu Tang Shu), compiled in 945, over 10 centuries before Mao, would contain two

chapters entitled: Literary Garden (Wenyuan), listing one hundred and five biographical entries of celebrated literati. Ideas are prisoners of language. That which cannot be spoken, or written as recorded speech, does not assume an external form of existence outside the mind. Language, rooted in the word: tongue, is the medium of communication, while ideas are the content. Yet some may even argue that man thinks only through speech and that without speech, there can be no intelligent thought. Even the visual and audio arts are not exempt from dependence on languages of their own for expressing visual images and musical ideas. Not

being able to hear oneself think due to excessive noise is indeed a very profound epistemological statement. That there can be no thinking without speech is analogous to the axiom that

there can be no music without sound. No musical expression can take place in a vacuum because the air necessary to conduct sound waves is missing. Learning to think without speech is like learning to swim without water. Furthermore, writing music requires the adoption of musical scales of pitch

and rhythm, just as the visual arts require principles of spatial organization, color and light. Similarly, language is the prisoner of rhetoric which constitutes the rules and principles of speech, a convention

through which thoughts are communicated among humans. The problem of rhetoric is that it tends to degenerate into expressions of coded messages that obscure true meaning and stifle creative expression. He whose thinking is trapped by rhetoric is also condemned to conventional wisdom. Such a person would deprive himself of creativity, unable to entertain original thoughts because the medium for original expression is, by definition, wanting in rhetoric. Confucian classics are all written in the most rigid form of rhetoric. Being well versed in Confucian classics is to run the danger of emphasizing

form over substance or emphasizing style over essence. It is not much different from trying to learn creative writing from the excessively flowery language of the school-book Latin of Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the great Roman orator whose famous First Oration Against Catiline skillfully condemned Catiline as a conspirator based on hearsay testimony obtained from Catiline's mistress. Cicero, despite his rhetorical eloquence, remained unable to substantiate his legal authority to execute Catiline's five associates, thus subjecting himself to exile subsequently for having put to

death Roman citizens without due process of law. Escape from verbal imprisonment by rhetoric is possible only through poetry, the grammar of which begins beyond the bounds of the established rules of rhetoric. Poetry invents new grammar and syntax for expressing new ideas indescribable by rhetoric. Notwithstanding the claim of romantics, poetry creates truth of which beauty is but a function. Poetic ideas and their prerequisite unconventional expressions are generally the rhetoric of the future, when the once innovative syntax and original concepts would have become unthinkingly commonplace through excessive use.
>From ancient emperors to Mao Zedong, all Chinese political leaders who
fashion themselves as original thinkers, write poetry. If one examines Mao's writings, the style is purposely colloquial and the logic anti-academic. Yet his poetry is highly literary. Although some would succeed better than others, all self-styled thinkers in

Chinese politics would attempt heroic poem writing. Even Marshal Chu De, the burly founder of the Chinese Red Army, whom few would list being cultured as one of his many virtues, would publish two poems in his twilight years to express his disenchantment with the protracted and relentless post-revolution ideological struggle promoted by Mao Zedong. Poetry is the

medium for speaking the unspeakable and for thinking the unthinkable. Emphasizing poetry and creative literary composition in place of Confucian classics has been the foundation of revolutionary thought in China.

Henry C.K. Liu

Carl Remick wrote:


> Reactions to Butler's op-ed that were published in today's NY Times can
> be found at this URL:
> http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/lkurtz.html
>
> Carl Remick



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