Considering Rhetoric From the Standpoint of Primitive Accumulation

Abstract

This essay develops a materialist account of rhetoric from the perspective of primitive accumulation. Drawing on biopolitical theory and Marxian discussions of capital's dispossessive practices, we demonstrate how—within the regional context of the Euro-Western tradition—the partition of political space (polis) from the space of the economic household (oikos) operates as a material-discursive apparatus that sorts bodies in relation to a figure of "full" humanity, rationalizing violent accumulation and designating some bodies as a-rhetorical and therefore not fully human. We explore the function of this apparatus in ancient Athenian texts on oikonomia and rhetoric before turning to its rearticulation under contemporary capitalism. We argue that the articulation of oikos, polis, and rhetoric demonstrates the violence underwriting so-called "immaterial" labor as well as contemporary humanist fantasies of political agency.