Context/Exigency, Part 2

So my presentation responds to the call to consider "discord," "conflict"--and rhetoric's role in that. I'm looking at the Buddha's practice of avoiding quarreling, of viewing quarrels as a form of unwise speech, speech that does not contribute to the ultimate goal of Nibbana, or liberation--unbinding.

In the Ball of Honey Sutta, the Buddha announces his doctrine to be just that--the kind of doctrine in which one does not go on quarreling. Quarreling, for the Buddha, is the result of papanca, which is sometimes loosely translated as "mental proliferation," a specific habit of the mind that inevitably leads to a sense of a separate, consistent self (Burke's identity?). This sense of self is a conceit bases on comparison--"I" am the same as, not as good as, or better than, the other.

This ability to recognize papanca, to trace its arising and its path to conflict, is to uncover a non-signifying rhetoric, a rhetoric that is prior to division. It is this kind of rhetoric that rhetoric scholar Diane Davis has been calling for in recent years. In her recent RSQ article, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are," Davis makes this call:

It seems to me that Freud presents rhetorical studies with another, equally important task: to think the limits of reason by tracking the implications—for society, for politics, for ethics—of a radically generalized rhetoricity that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention. It seems necessary today, at the very least, to begin exploring the sorts of rhetorical analyses that become possible only when identification is no longer presumed to be compensatory to division. (144-145)

So her call is the second part of what I see as the professional context for my presentation. Understanding papanca becomes a way to observe or to "know" in a non-rational way the "rhetoricity that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention."