대화론과 수사학: 방법론적 시론

Dialogism and Rhetoric: A Methodological Essay

&nbsp;&nbsp;This essay attempts to define and categorize dialogism as a verbal art including rhetoric and dialectic. The dialogic practice is open-ended and personal, while rhetoric is topical and decisive. When dialectic is teleological in its pursuit of ratio and truth, and henceforth hegemonic in the heuristic process of exclusion, dialogism is interactive and relative, faithfully reflecting the very nature of existence itself. As personal pronouns are positional and relative in their function and meaning, so the self is not a substance but a relation. Every speaking “I” situates itself in the space of the “in-between” in relation to the others such as “you, s/he, we, they, it.” This communicative space is the very space of dialogic practice in which we transcend the private, “idiotic” prisonhouse of the self. Dialogism provides us with the “third realm” in which every existence meets with others and transcends itself as well.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The very form of dialogism par excellence is the disputatio in utramquem partem, or dissoi logoi. This traditional formula of rhetorical debate is open-ended in its non-decidability and multiple perspectives of a situation and an issue under consideration. Dialogism is both ecological and egalitarian at once with its epistemological attention to non-speaking subalterns and natural things. However, since every verbal situation is infected with power, dialogism is vulnerable to the trapping obstacles on the way such as racism, gender difference, social status, class and cultural background. This means that the dialogic practice can be abused as a hidden and very sophisticated way of physical violence, as is often seen in the world of real politics. Nonetheless, dialogism is the only possible alternative open to us at present. It provides us with an intersubjective meeting space, making us partially forget the avatar of subjectivity.