Rhetoric by Accident (original) (raw)

Getting at the Matter of Rhetorical Production

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2022

This essay builds upon the work of George Bataille to develop an account of rhetoric's general economy that operates in terms of the relational and always entangled affective-rhetorical "turning" of all matter in the cosmos. This orientation to rhetoric's general economy affords five takeaways for rhetorical studies, especially for scholars interested in new materialist vantage points: 1) a conceptualization of rhetoric's materiality that operates in terms of an ongoing process that I call entangled entropic movement; 2) a perspective on discursive overdetermination that does not assume in advance an immaterial and unchanging extrarhetorical context that dialectically (re)produces transcendent metaphysical oppositions; 3) a view on "troping" that applies to all material bodies (organic and inorganic); 4) an agenda for rhetorical new materialisms that centers vocabularies derived from physics rather than vocabularies derived primarily from the life sciences and cognitive sciences; 5) new materialist reading strategies that are capable of critiquing the human discourses and tropes that often function in the interest of capitalism and colonialism to the detriment of local ecologies and communities. The essay is part of the RSQ forum on Rhetorical New Materialisms. To cite this article: Laurie Gries, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Nathaniel Rivers, Jodie Nicotra, John M. Ackerman, David M. Grant, Gabriela R. Ríos, Byron Hawk, Joshua S. Hanan, Kristin L. Arola, Thomas J. Rickert, Qwo-Li Driskill & Donnie Johnson Sackey (2022) Rhetorical New Materialisms (RNM), Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 52:2, 137-202.

NATURAL RHETORIC AND THE PRAXIS OF UNDERSTANDING

Heythrop Journal, 2010

Although rhetoric might be thought of as nothing more than an archaic art of manipulation, its ability to bring about action-particularly as the intellect and will engage in acts of persuasion amid the operations of the practical intellect-is a possibility that has gone largely unnoticed among philosophers of human nature. In this paper I explore the possibility that natural rhetoric, much as it serves the practical intellect in precipitating action, serves the speculative intellect as it stimulates acts of cognizing and understanding, thus leading to the acquisition of knowledge. While much attention has been given to explorations of human acts, surprisingly little attention has been directed toward acts of communication. This is unfortunate, for it is hard to imagine a life of human well being without it. Equally as unfortunate is that we have only perfunctory explanations of what it is about communication that is uniquely human. Jean Porter goes far in addressing this oversight by observing that what makes human communication different from, say, animal communication, is 'referential flexibility:' That is, the ability 'to employ symbols tethered to abstract ideas, which can be detached from an immediate referential context and expressed in the form of modal propositions.' 1 However, Porter does not elaborate on what this form of communication is, and so her account (though valuable) shares in the shortcomings of others who have been largely unable to identify the ontological importance of human communication. 2

On Rhetoric and the School of Philosophy Without Tears

Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2017

This article addresses the contentious philosophical claim that rhetoric is merely a “philosophy without tears.” Mindful of the institutional and disciplinary stakes of this claim today, it offers a genealogy of “philosophy without tears” across the past century, from the popular “no more tears” genre to midcentury debates between ordinary language philosophers and logical atomists. What emerges is an ethical argument concerning the materiality and transitivity of language, fleshed out through a rhetoric of tears and as an ontology of pain and suffering. Drawing on a rhetorical reading of Wittgenstein’s “form-of-life,” I argue that both pain and its expression should be understood as transitive rather than as epistemological or private phenomena. Transitivity helps us to better understand the perlocutionary power of pain and suffering in the politics of war and terrorism, in the “man-philosopher,” who disavows such transitivity, and, finally, in the necessary risk of responsibility toward the “other” of philosophy (and of rhetoric).

Investigating the Rhetorical Unconscious

In the 1980s, rhetoric scholars in the United States and Canada, including Raymie McKerrow, Maurice Charland, Michael C. McGee and Phillip Wander, began to challenge the Aristotelian paradigm that then dominated rhetorical scholarship. Aristotle maintained that rhetoric, as an art, consisted of finding all the available means of persuasion in a given situation, arguing that rhetoric is a function of the intentions of rhetors. Under the general title of critical rhetoric, however, a new generation of rhetorical theorists began to draw upon the insights of Continental linguists and philosophers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan to question this intentionalist paradigm, arguing that much of the rhetorical enterprise is largely unconscious. This essay, after discussing various ways that rhetoric has been conceptualized in the United States and Europe, discusses the evolution of critical rhetoric and its larger relevance for rhetorical theory and criticism, paying particular attention to more recent developments.

Accidental Rhetoric and Being Vulnerable

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.