Accidental Rhetoric and Being Vulnerable (original) (raw)

One thing you don’t find much discussion of in rhetoric is the accidental. Without trying too hard you’ll find talk of bollocksed opportunities, logical error, calamitous missteps, and failure generally – maybe a sidebar about luck or somesuch, but nothing like a concept of ‘accidental rhetoric.’ I’d chalk this up to the peculiar history of the accident, which usually is treated as the other to essence, probability, or as just a synonym for misfortune. I’d also credit the peculiar history of rhetoric, which is intently focused on strategy and tactics, not flukes, which Burke famously summed up in the Rhetoric of Motives: “Did you ever do a friend injury by accident, in all poetic simplicity? Then conceive of this same injury done by sly design, and you are forthwith within the orbit of Rhetoric.” For me, contemporary questions about rhetoric’s ontological conditions warrant recasting the accident as one of those conditions.