Tanner Humanities Center

This lecture proposes the rhetoric of yin 因 as a specific way of power subversion. In early Chinese rhetoric, yin means “to go with local circumstances.” It specifically features a paradoxical act of reforming dominant discourses while performing a level of conformity to the discourses. To recover the rhetoric of yin, I recontextualize Guiguzi, a treatise in the Warring States period of China, and further trace ancient traveling consultants’ practice of yin in the situation of advising nobles. Consultants’ practice of yin invites rhetoricians to consider how one might break through the paradigm of speaking against power and speaking outside power, underlying which is an oppositional and ethnocentric logic that sustains the systematic production of the Other. As a shrewd and responsive rhetoric, yin reorients power subversion from antithetic resistance to interconnectivity, or a relating-yet-separating relationship where there is no center to imagine from but subjects and rhetorics of various kinds can co-exist and become interdependent.