To trace the impact of the destabilization caused by Bhaktapurıs lived world on my writing, I propose the method of dialexis: a dialogue not just at the level of conceptual content, but a discussion at the level of style (lexis). In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines lexis as correctness, clarity, propriety, and ornamentation (cf. chs. 2­12). In a Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock describes lexis as the "verbal medium" or "technique of verbal communication" that "covers the entire verbal apparatus, rhythmic and imagistic, at the poetıs disposal" (1963, 20). Lexis is not the content (logoi) but "the Œmediumı by which the content is communicated" (1963, 202) . In "Rhetoric of the Image," Roland Barthes describes different cultural texts as "lexia" (1972). One "lexia," for example, the Panzani pasta advertisement that Barthes interprets, can mobilize a number of different "lexicons," a portion of the symbolic plane that corresponds to a body of practices and techniques. According to Barthes, each image (or lexia) can therefore correspond to a body of attitudes‹tourism, housekeeping, knowledge of art, irony. I am using the term lexis to stand not just for the content of discourse, but for its style of semiosis. Accordingly, dialexis is a dialogue not just of "meaning," but of the structures, models, and conventions by which social reality is produced.