ABSTRACT
Comparative studies always run into the question of appropriate context and adequate cultural knowledge. Arguments about the responsible analysis of other cultures need to also recognize that speech-acts often have effects that exist outside of the constrained contexts of a native culture. This chapter considers contemplative rhetoric as a potent example of how cultural contexts can serve to change, redirect, or even void the professed purpose of its own speech acts. Religious practices, such the bearing of testimonies or chanting, might be essential cultural forms, but as contemplative practices the essential context is not its social function but its potential transformation: when and how do they create the effects - a significant transformation in mind (metanoia) - that they are professed to induce? What are we to make, for instance, of the highly constrained context of the Mormon Fast and Testimony Meeting or the obligatory rehearsal of memorized chants? Such speech-acts are good cases for Derrida’s observations about the limits of a context to control a speech-act, and his argument that effect rather than context is the primary principle for a speech-act. From this perspective, dominant cultural forms of such rhetorics have different effects; they then tend to be rediscovered, to new and productive ends, from outside of these constrained contexts. Comparative rhetoricians thus need to attend to the effects of context, not merely invoke them as authoritative constraints. To this end, this chapter finishes with an examination of contexts that matter for Adi Shankara’s chant, ātmaṣatkam.
