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James Kinneavy contended 20 years ago that kairos is a neglected concept in rhetoric. The same could not be said now. Partly through Kinneavy’s efforts, partly through cultural dissemination, we now find the term present in many places: in professional conferences (e.g., that held at Texas Women’s University last month), in collections of essays (e.g., Sipiora and Baumlin), and of course in the very name of the on-line journal in our field devoted to electronic rhetoric.
Kairos refers generally to the opportune time and appropriate measure for an action. (Kinneavy: “the right or opportune time to do something, or right measure in doing something” [58].) All three elements should be stressed—time, measure, and action. The term kairos means time as in the present moment or the time of live performance--not time as duration (chronos). Kairos is closely connected to rhetoric and to effective speech in a situation. Traditionally, students of rhetoric are encouraged to analyze the situation and intervene in an appropriate way and amount in order to be persuasive.
Even without the term kairos, we can find references to the opportune moment in the culture generally, in popular as well as academic discourse. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular term the tipping point reached currency for what might be called catastrophic change, as support for an action builds quietly until touched off, and then a sudden shift draws attention to the more gradual change which has been happening all along.
Among educators we find common mention of teachable moments, events (usually fortuitous) in the classroom when students are ready to get it. In this category, I thought about including Bush’s comment about the election as a “moment of accountability”; but that differs from kairotic moments because it is mentioned in retrospect rather than the proximate future. His meaning was something like “you had your chance; now I’m going to do what I think best.” Looking back at a missed opportunity is not kairos, but anti-kairos.
The term kairos is cropping up here and there in popular culture as well. Not that we can conclude anything from this fact, but Google lists 3.4 million sites referencing the term. We have Kairos Communications, in Ireland . . .
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. . . an investment firm, Kairos-inc., which proclaims its commitment to the
term through business cliches. “The Kairos: That moment in which vision,
bold action, and opportunity converge to realize extraordinary accomplishment.”
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Perhaps most contemporary uses of the term echo the religious context from the
New Testament: see http://www.mcquaid.org/faith_and_service/campus_ministry/retreats.shtml,
for example. There’s also the Cantonese missionary group which proclaims
“a golden opportune time to accomplish a special missions” (http://www.kairos-usa.org/English/index.html
)
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Correctional institutions in Texas and Mississippi pick up on the religious
motif of kairos (www.kairos-mississippi.org/,
www.hwec.org/kairos.htm).
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An ecumenical organization in Canada uses the term, but in pursuit of human rights rather than inmate reform (www.kairoscanada.org/f/qui/index.asp).
A men’s chorus in Lublin, Poland (specializing in religious music) uses the term as their name. ( http://www.kairos.lublin.pl/aktualnosci.php)
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Capstone Communications designed a logo for an ecumenical client that wanted
to stress “a moment of transformation.”
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Most of these provide visual cues for disruption of some kind. I think that
in the context of writing instruction, the incorporation of visual / electronic
media similarly involves disruption.
Amazon offers under the term kairos a romance novel by Joanne Lehman.
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Social worker Angie Halstead embarks on a spiritual journey born of despair,
decision, and desire. Mindful of the risks to her career and reputation, Angie
nonetheless crosses an ethical line and becomes involved in the personal life
of one of her clients. But when tragedy results, Angie is left to wonder where
to go next, and whether she’s finally gone too far.
Going too far is of course a violation of one part of the familiar definition of kairos, the “right measure” part. Both timing and moderation here depend on what is right, i.e., on a normative sense of kairos, and these are in turn dependent on context. Boundaries between various cultural strata are highly porous, and rather than policing them, we need to encourage our students to critique and learn from rhetorical practices in both pop culture and academic contexts.
My contention is that the context (and thus kairos) has changed with postmodernism, a concept both exemplified and put into practice by electronic media. Our professional practices and our pedagogies have already begun to adapt to these new media, a process we need to consolidate and advance.
(By electronic here I mean to refer to texts of all sorts—verbal, visual, interactive, or whatever—which are accessed or substantially created by computers or chips. Drawing boundaries is increasingly difficult, as ordinary household appliances, automobiles, thermostats, and even parts of our bodies incorporate electronics. Key to this definition is the conversion at some point of data into bits for transmission and reassembly.)
Bolter and Grusin coined the useful phrase remediation to describe the translation or adaptation from one medium to another. This of course antedates the internet, as many novels have been converted into films, many plays into films, and vice-versa. Qualities of the internet and especially the web, however, make for more radical change, because of its interactivity, its speed of response, its global reach, its more visible technology, and so on. Part of my contention here is that writing is undergoing remediation. First-year college students often has grown up with computer games, and thus are at home with their interactive environment and visual conventions. They have been doing school assignments with computers for several years (using word processing and PowerPoint, and sometimes web design software), and in some cases interact with each other more frequently and perhaps more profoundly through IM, chat, forums, websites such as Myspace, e-mail, text messaging, and cellphones than media more familiar to us such as landline telephones and f2f. We do not have to immerse ourselves in the rhetoric of these new communications to know that they mean doing writing differently.
Another change, perhaps more profound than these, involves a shift in what we mean by writing, so that it takes on aspects of design. Design pays close attention to the canon of arrangement: in spoken rhetoric arrangement pertained more to what preceded what and the relations between points (example, illustration, subordination and so on), and these have their nearly exact equivalents in written verbal texts. Computers, however, introduce the possibility, and thus the expectation, of a visual dimension. Authors can drop in digital photos or clip art, can create their own illustrations with Photoshop, and can play with text size and weight, type font, and other graphic devices formerly available only to professionals. These shifts can go further with web texts. Authors are able to modify how the text is presented, taking on functions formerly assigned to editors, text designers, publishers, and others, and the internet offers much greater possibilities for distribution (rhetorical canon of delivery). Because writing throughout the culture is undergoing remediation, our students have been using some of these new capabilities (e.g., in blogs); and in order to prepare students more successfully for the writing they will be doing, we need to address these changes through our instruction.
For the written version of this paper, this section is headed by the word writing, struck through. That is a textual trace which can only be voiced by a clumsy paraphrase, one which indicates the contention that performance is bounded by the conditions of its medium. Some things can be done in text which cannot be delivered orally, and vice versa [*hums an identifiable musical phrase, e.g., first bars of “Louie, Louie”]. There are some functions of web texts that can not be done either orally or on a printed page (e.g., animation or linking or mouseovers or pop-ups). We are just beginning to pay closer attention to aspects of electronic media which offer new capabilities to this generation of writers: easy incorporation of images (which themselves can be easily manipulated and reproduced), juxtaposition of image and word, animation, incorporation of video and/or audio, interactivity (links to other texts, branching within one’s own text), easy and quick communication with the audience, and easy incorporation or appropriation of others’ texts into one’s own.
Media grow from other media. Many of these capabilities have
been present for decades or even centuries, but available largely or exclusively
to professionals (photo-manipulation required technical skill and a darkroom;
now it requires a computer and Photoshop Elements). The wide availability of
computers has democratized text production in ways now generally acknowledged
and sometimes lamented. They should not be, at least by us: our students can
now do writing in ways we could only have fantasized about.
Many of our textbooks have begun to address a diversifying definition
of literacy in practice, by directing attention to reading the culture in one
form or another as a means of teaching students about rhetoric (print ads are
easy devices). We continue to call this reading, just as we continue
to call something done with a computer, encoded digitally, and represented with
the simulacrum of a white page on a screen writing. It’s a start.
Initially I thought of devoting this section to the impulse we all have to check our e-mail, look at our web bookmarks, and otherwise become better informed about what’s happening now. That sense of urgency, in a medium devoted to reproducibility, seems to me worth noting briefly.
Various electronic technologies make timely delivery and intervention an issue in all sorts of communications (weblogs, professional listservs, IM, texting). These and others extend presence through technology, projecting the sense that (as the 1950s CBS program had it) You Are There. The issue really isn’t technological determinism so much as designing and using devices that do things within the cultural imaginary: when we choose to do so, we really would like the capacity to Be There.
One of the concerns about the shift from spoken to written discourse expressed by classical rhetoricians was that it would diffuse presence. The rhetor’s words and arguments would continue long after she or he was no longer there to guarantee ethos. Being in the rhetor’s presence can be persuasive on its own, quite apart from the logos and pathos of the appeal—that is why we have lecture rooms set aside for presentations by our luminaries. They provide the professional version of what Walter Benjamin associates with art works—aura.
Contrary to Benjamin’s contentions, aura is not destroyed by reproduction, at least in a contemporary, non-artistic context—it’s distributed, and the result in part is a multiplying rather than a weakening of effect. Benjamin’s focus is on works of art; it may be argued that rhetorical texts function differently than these. But they do share characteristics of having a creator or speaker, having an envisioned and an empirical audience, being received in a specific context or performance space, being created in a medium with specific conventions, being bounded in space and time, and so on. Benjamin’s core argument is that artistic texts possess an aura which is bound up with the work’s unique existence in a place and time, its presence. This quasi-religious aura is weakened by reproduction in posters, photographs, art books, and parodic versions to the point that modern audiences do not really receive the full effect of the work, but only in reduced form.
In my experience, contemporary audiences do not usually agree with Benjamin’s argument, partly because not that many upper-midwestern college-age kids have been to see renowned works of art, and may not “get” art in the way early 20th-c. museum goers did, and partly because we live among so many reproduced images. Students carry Disney or Warner Bros. images on backpacks, sweatshirts, and keychains, they have supermodels or film images on their walls, and printed and digital versions of Rembrandts (never sufficiently dark) can be found in art history books or on-line museums. They don’t agree that it’s a diminishing of the work if, instead of 1,000 people seeing a painting in a year, a million see its digital replication on the web. I’m not sure I disagree with this viewpoint.
This reproducibility through electronic media, by the way, is a large part of why students and others do not consider appropriating digital texts as theft. Contrary to repeated appeals by the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content-providers, when you copy a digital text, the number of such in stock is not reduced. It’s not like shoplifting, in that nothing tangible is stolen; they see it as essentially a victimless crime, like exceeding the speed limit.
Reproduction, according to Benjamin, spoils aura, cheapening it through distribution to the masses outside the artistic context, and rendering even great works into kitsch. We should ask, however, whether the same reproductions do not in fact multiply the effect of the work by building its reputation and popularity. Aura, in this way of thinking about the concept, depends on the image’s physical embodiment in, say, oil paint on wood, and the image is altered by its transferral to acrylic on canvas, photographic print on low-acid paper, silk screening on cotton (subsequently to be run through the washing machine a few times), or digital patterns encoded on a server. But in shifting from a modern to a postmodern context, image is less dependent on its material rendering: audiences are accustomed to such transferrals, and value them to a greater or lesser extent depending on context.
Another way of putting it is that unlike Benjamin, we are comfortable in separating the image from its material instantiation. Magritte directed our attention to this in the early 20th century with his famous pipe image:
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Of course it’s not a pipe, because you can’t fill it with tobacco
and smoke it . . . it’s a banal, magazine-quality representation of a
pipe, and when we call attention to representation, we remove the image from
its material rendering, just as, when we consider Hamlet, we are looking both
at what we are pleased to call Shakespeare’s text (rendered to us by means
of centuries of editorial work, along with interpretations generated by readers
both amateur and critical), and at, say, Kenneth Branagh or Derek Jacobi. We
should also be looking at film / video / stage representation, as aspects of
the interpretive choices going into performance. In other words, the move to
separate image from material rendering is not just a visual issue.
Ours is a moment in which such attention to media becomes not
only possible but obligatory—because we have multiple media newly available
to us. When they become routine and authors / writers / creators / designers—the
terms chosen have associations—then we may take conventions of the medium
for granted again. But for now, the materiality of the medium, as Anne Wysocki
argues, becomes part of the text which should not be overlooked.
What happens to aura when image is detachable from its material moorings is
that we have, instead of art works, their simulacra. Simulacra, in Baudrillard’s
memorable coinage, are images having no original. His example (provided in the
age of film and video but not yet of the internet) is from Disney: there is
no singular drawing of Mickey Mouse of which we can say it’s the original
and the others copies. Each film short has thousands of cells with Mickeys,
and there are hundreds of films, and thousands of copies of each of these. But
unlike the case with Benjamin, I would argue, Mickey gains cultural force through
this multiplication. Up to a certain point, the more times an image is reproduced,
the more aura; that certain point, the point of overexposure, is difficult to
calculate but it undeniably exists. Aura is not just a matter of esthetic mystification.
Taken out of the high cultural realm, aura as a concept floats above celebrities
(in media culture, it is that which makes someone celebrated). The publicity
machine made Michael Jackson famous as a public entertainer and infamous as
a domestic entertainer. Timing and the proper amount are crucial.
Live performance remains important for modern media—but it is augmented rather than destroyed by reproducibility. Even in Benjamin’s time, cinema and the phonograph extended performers’ reach beyond live audiences, and in our time performances can be had practically on demand. The time of an event is distributed: while television in particular maintains the sense of live performance, most television since the 1960s has been on film or videotape, and much is accessed not during the original broadcast, but through repeated showings, syndication, VHS or DVD, or increasingly through video iPod or streaming video. It no longer matters as much whether we saw an event live, because it is likely to be repeated, in new rhetorical contexts. The opportune moment no longer has to be the live performance or first broadcast, but is extended across a spectrum of times available at the audience’s convenience.
“Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Wallace Stevens
If we can learn to pay critical attention to texts in electronic media—the low-prestige as well as high-prestige ones—we will find that their easy reproducibility offers an opportunity to presence which also creates aura. Some motifs seem to spread throughout the culture by contagion. We hear a good joke, a bit of gossip, or the latest political scandal, and we pass it on, much more quickly than through media such as letters (remember those?), telephone calls, or face-to-face conversation. This multiplies considerably the reach of opportune moments to pass through the culture in waves, facilitating the production and circulation of memes.
Richard Dawkins coined the term to refer to any bit which is culturally transmitted—graphic signs (the cross, the swastika, smiley faces, American flag kitsch), musical phrases (opening to “Louie, Louie,” the motif from “Ride of the Valkyries,” the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth), gestures (shrug, thumbs up, the finger), or words or phrases (“Whazzup?”, the migratory -gate suffix, the Force, OJ’s search for the real killer).
Memes are passed on in a kind of social contagion, and they definitely have their moment. Being in on a new trend increases one’s social prestige, marking you as having a finger on the pulse of the times. Being behind lowers your social prestige.
In a digital environment, memes circulate with greater rapidity and range. Audiences have the capacity to pass these on to friends and associates, and to transmission sites such as the massive weblogs Metafilter and Fark, much more quickly than before the internet. Television may not be as rapid or as hip as (some) blogs, but it reaches a much broader segment of the public and can therefore advance the social contagion of phrases and ideas much more rapidly and with greater saturation. The interplay between source-driven media such as television and audience-driven sites such as (much of) the internet contributes to not only the cultural reach of texts, but also to the widened distribution of what we might term the kairotic moment.
With distribution across a spectrum comes a rise and fall in intensity. A kairotic moment typically is initiated by an event (Hurricane Katrina, the State of the Union address, Vice President Cheney shooting a hunting companion), which occasions comments by public figures (“You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie,” “human-animal hybrids,” repetition of “shot a man in the face”), which then attract notice in, and in some cases are drawn from, audience-driven media such as weblogs and websites permitting comments and in satirical media such as The Daily Show, with further commentary and diminution over time as new memes displace these. But as these moments are rediscovered and given new importance by fitting into new or returning narratives (Bush or his administration as incompetent, out of touch with reality, or arrogant), they may return to intensity.
Because many of our writing classes now occur in electronic classrooms, we are once again reminded that the act of writing occurs through dispersed moments. Thinking sentences and conversing with others can be part of the process, but generally, to distinguish writing from a speech act, there has to be some sort of concrete track, a text. But what is the nature of that text? Does writing require a hand-held instrument? If we admit keyboards, does it have to produce a graphic track, or will a simulacrum on screen, to be printed later, count? Is it written as soon as one types, or does it have to be saved [examine that metaphor], or does it have to be printed? What about electronic documents? Is transmission the moment at which it becomes writing? Are web documents writing when they are uploaded? Downloaded? When they enter a reader’s consciousness? Are images ever writing? What about images which are GIFs of text? Logos?
I would contend that the act of writing was never a singular moment. Audiences are still reading for the first time words recorded by authors / rhetors who are long dead, and their words still have persuasive force. In contrast with speech, done live to a live audience, writing records and retransmits speech—as discourse--at a later time. That is, writing necessarily involves reproduction at a later time, and we have distorted its nature in overlooking this fact. We are reminded of it thanks to issues raised by digital media.
Technological changes in writing have further dispersed the act of writing, complicating its definition still further by drawing on non-verbal resources. Among the elements of composition available to current writers would be the following:
• Graphic devices such as bullets. In creating an unordered list—if there is such a thing, since even unordered lists have sequence—anyone using a word processor can make use of textual features to isolate short blocks of text and put a small solid circle to the left
• Graphs and charts. Even though these are often used badly [cf. Edward Tufte], they provide more space and air inside the text.
• Variations in type font—selection of font, type size, bold, italics, color, etc. Does anyone else remember how radical it was to be able to change the metal ball on the IBM Selectric and get a different type font?
These come under the heading of arrangement, and are aspects of design. Generally, as writers have more control over the appearance of their pages, we need to consider design as part of our instruction to writers—we already do when we specify double-spaced, 12-pt. type, Times New Roman or Verdana (etc.).
• Illustration. Many students use images dropped into their text, either in Microsoft Word and other programs, or by way of PowerPoint (which is another form of writing we should discuss below).
• Web texts. These introduce new issues: interactivity (user must click to see another aspect of the text), links (which introduce others’ texts, or other parts of the author’s text, into relation with the main text), issues of storage (memory and delivery), inclusion of sound and video, and animation. At some point audience expectations elide into video.
As with the appearance of writing in classical Greece, the present moment presents us with multiple forms of communication. In addition to public speaking, writing offered a distinct model for rhetoric, one which radically changed the rhetorical canons of delivery and memory, modifying as well the canons of arrangement, invention, and style. These changes of course didn’t happen in a moment, and the same can be said for us: there have been a series of innovations, beginning with photography and the easier integration of images / pictorial media into print publication; instantaneous long-distance communications, beginning with telegraph and telephone; bringing motion forward as a part of arrangement, with film; the development of social institutions to coordinate, systematize, and commercialize communications (telephone monopolies, radio networks, TV networks, cable TV, the internet); and the division of the mass audience into much smaller niches and communities through cable TV’s multiplied offerings, the world wide web with many genres, computer games, VHS and DVD and podcasting, along with further media still under development. Shifts in the social uses of technology, in classical times and now, mean that sources (authors, rhetors, voices—any term we choose colors the subsequent discussion) have more options, and in many cases will try them out. As primates, we like to play, and ways to communicate are part of what we play with.
In order to begin sorting out the implications of these diversifying media, we should be focusing on the different modes of rhetorical performance associated with each, initiating students into an understanding of their conventions and into critical thinking both within these, and about these.
What does it mean for us if kairos is thought of in connection with (postmodern) electronic performance, modeled on and drawing content from mediated discourse?
For writers, the opportune moment will be similarly dispersed. Writers characteristically work by moments of insight or inspiration, recorded and developed, elaborated, recontextualized, etc., as they find place in appropriate genres, media, and rhetorical situations.
Writing may not be primarily concerned with putting words on paper. It may involve other aspects of rhetoric as these blend into design (arrangement, parallelism, repetition, and other aspects of visual texts). These can be introduced through the concept of recycling, or if you like, remixing, for example by drawing images and text from on-line sources and repurposing them as part of an assignment. (In this way, students can also be reminded of expectations about intellectual property, part of performance in an academic context.)
Expanded awareness of the audience’s role in performance is part of the general democratization of communication. Conceived of as consumer choice, audience agency can be seen in expanded cable and satellite offerings, widely differentiated screen sizes and quality of display, technological capabilities and settings for computers, web browsers, and miscellaneous digital media. At its extreme, we have reality as performed: Imagine an imitation which is indistinguishable from the original has been substituted for it, and you are led into its presence. Presumably you would feel the same awe based on the fraudulent substitution. Would what you felt be any the less authentic, at least until you were enlightened? This is akin to the situation we are in in the age of electronic media, in which online experiences have no presence.
To quote Sherry Turkle, “In the culture of simulation, if it works for you, it has all the reality it needs.” This brings us to the age of manufactured news, spin, public relations--and the self-proclaimed fake news show, immune to charges of inauthenticity because electronic texts come to us pre-discredited.Having a term makes the concept available. If students can come to see kairos as a means of considering when and how much to say or write or enter the dialogue (obligatory Burke reference here), then that in itself will affect their success in rhetoric.
This for us is a kairotic moment. The increased visibility and influence of programs in rhetoric and composition, the maturation of a generation of teachers and scholars more at home with electronic media and a cultural studies environment, the popularization of not only personal computers but digital video and audio equipment, the growing attention being paid to visual media, and the continuing challenge of working with students more competent in most of these areas than their instructors, is and should be pushing us toward a broader and more critically aware conception of rhetoric. One challenge for us is how to do this without supplanting vital aspects of the field already in place. However, if we do not do so—if we do not take the moment available to us—we risk becoming (still more) irrelevant to how communication is taking place all around us.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York: Harcourt, 1968. 217-52. Accessed at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm 19 Feb. 2006.
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (January, 1968), 1-14.
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. New York: Polity Press, 2005.
Fishman, Jenn, et al. “Performing Writing, Performing Literacy.” CCC 57:2 (Dec. 2005), 224-52.
Kinneavy, James L. “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning. Ed. Jean Dietz Moss. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986. 79-105.
----------. “Kairos in Classical and Modern Rhetorical Theory.” Sipiora, Phillip and Baumlin, James S., eds. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: SUNY, 2002, 58-76.
Kairos. http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/layers/situation.html . Accessed 10 March 2006.
Kairos. http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/layers/start.html . Accessed 10 March. 2006.
Magritte, Rene. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Image downloaded from http://net.valenciacc.edu/forum/images/plicata/v01.06.plicata01.jpg Accessed 3/12/06.
Welch, Kathleen. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Wysocki, Anne. "Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications." In Wysocki et al. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004.
