Intentionality

Erin,
When I read your post, it made me think of the question that we brought up in the first (or perhaps second) day of class of intentionality. You claim that performing rhetoric is inevitable, as does Fish in his article. It seems that you and Kelly claim that the difference between the rhetorical man and serious man is that the rhetorical man is using rhetoric intentionally...which I agree with.  I think one problem that is created by Fish's two categorizations of people (serious and rhetoric), with his statement in mind of the inevitability of rhetoric, is that these categorizations propose two divisions of rhetoric: intentional rhetoric and unintentional rhetoric. If Fish is correct in claiming that everything is rhetorical, then being purposeful isn't a part of the definition of rhetoric. Before this class, I saw purpose as a huge aspect of rhetoric, but it makes more sense that rhetoric is the conversation between the maker (writer, artist, etc.) and the audience. The conversation doesn't have to be intentional to be a conversation.
You had a line in here that made me think that perhaps intentionality is correlated with the quality of rhetoric, "A rhetorical man on the other hand would put much more time and thought into such an issue, and I think they would come up with a rather creative solution." It seems that if intentionality is part of the quality of rhetoric, then a definition of "good" rhetoric is rhetoric performed with purpose. Someone performing rhetoric with purposeful awareness, definitely is performing rhetoric differently than someone who isn't. You bring up a point in your second paragraph of the rhetorical and serious man approaching a topic through a different lens. I agree that intentionality creates a different lens in one's method. The rhetorical man invests more thought into how they are approaching their writing than the serious man, who, to me, is solely concerned in what they are going to say in his/her writing.
I wouldn't consider unintentional rhetoric as bad rhetoric. I think someone can persuade without meaning to be artful in their persuasion. However, I would also say that the rhetorical man has more advantages in being intentional in his/her persuasion because I would consider purpose an important tool in creating quality rhetoric. With intention as a tool, a writer invests significant meaning into different aspects of a text, that make it a text. It also gives the writer a stronger focus on his/her writer when creating a text. Being intentional as a writer, is investing purpose to engage and persuade an audience.
I'm not 100% clear on where intentionality plays into rhetoric, but I do think that it is worth thinking about. Right now, I see it as a tool but not a necessity to be rhetorical.