Rhetoric And Violence: The Lessons From A Face-slapping Incident

In an era of globalization and internet, exploiting various rhetorical resources in discursive exchanges or rhetorical communications, skillfully applying discourse or rhetoric and being able to discern sorts of rhetorical techniques or strategies exerted on oneself or one's own part would be the most effective way to promote a reconciliation, reach an agreement or achieve a more even distribution of discourse or rhetorical resources. And this is the reason why we carry out our current study.The paper attempts to examine the face-slapping incident from the perspective of western rhetoric. For, as we see it, this is a telling representation of conflicts due to unequal discursive power enjoyed by scholarly authority and ordinary audience members respectively, and it bears also on the deeper issue of the relationship between rhetoric and violence and especially this topic of how rhetorical practices may play an important role in lessening or even avoiding physical violence. Rhetoric, after all, is charged with the essential function of "handling conflicts by none-violent means, coordinating actions, renewing concepts and developing human civilizations," and the failure of rhetorical communication would surely bring about violence. Modern society is rife with discourse of power. And since academic studies tend to be influenced by ideology, the paper then digs up the hidden ideological factors in order for the root cause of the incident to be exposed. Finally we point out the lessons the public could learn from the incident.The paper assumes a perspective of western rhetoric and adopts as its methodology a combination of the descriptive and the inductive/deductive approaches. It makes a preliminary exploration and analysis of western rhetoric's function, the relationship between rhetoric and discursive power, and rhetoric and violence, etc..In a word, with its findings, we hope that this paper would direct attention to rhetoric and make people realize the need to reinforce rhetorical awareness and improve their rhetorical skills in order to become critical in confrontation with the flooding information and discourse they are receiving daily.