ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a general rhetoric suitable for comparative rhetorical work. Prior attempts to produce a general rhetoric have run aground for a variety of reasons, including overly narrow or problematic definitions, conceptual inaptness, cultural chauvinism and exclusion, and so on. Building on prior work by George Kennedy, LuMing Mao, and others, I argue for an existential as opposed to definitional approach. Rhetoric springs from thrivation, which I define here as open-ended encultured flourishing. Rhetoric on this read is a worldly phenomenon, and not simply a subjective human achievement. The work of rhetoric cannot be reduced to persuasion or other commonplaces, although these remain available cultural possibilities. But every culture through its lifeways will find and hone culturally distinctive rhetorical practices. Rhetoric, then, is less a matter of persuading others than the work of worldly alteration: a transformation in ongoing or evolving situations of which other entities are a part. Such transformation in turn requires an exceedingly broad-based, transhuman sense of meaning, as seen in contemporary work in bio-semiotics, so that meaning cannot only be equated with (human) language. All semiotic work is incarnated or materialized, requiring not just an expansive sense of media, but rather the idea that rhetorical work always involves the discovery and innovation of media - media not as static frame but as ongoing media-ing. Finally, rhetoric is grounded in an existential sense of freedom, and it is, as such, a fundamental commonality to all life.
