The Kairotic Struggle

                At the center of our schema is the “kairotic struggle” – an articulation of kairos that is unique to these three authors. Based on the reading, we understand and convey the kairotic struggle as a force or pull that draws on three primary pressures (social, material, and symbolic) to create the context which rhetors must negotiate in order to effect their intended result. In the cloud-like structure, we’ve coded in large black text the more conventional pressures of the kairotic struggle that we have perceived within the scholarship thus far (the social and the symbolic). Juxtaposing these factors in red text is the chief “pressure” of the kairotic struggle: the material. By placing these functions side by side, we mean to emphasize their interdependence without suggesting that they are in any way conflated. In many cases, multiple or all pressures will simultaneously come together to create the context from which a rhetor’s message emanate. We’ve coded in smaller black wording the elements traditionally thought to comprise the rhetorical situation (rhetor, audience, and exigency). In smaller red font, likewise, we’ve coded the “complications” or “nuances” that Sheridan et al bring forth as additional components of the rhetorical situation (genres, other compositions, collaborators, modes, media of reproduction and distribution, media of delivery). The lines connecting the cloud structure to the lower structure are meant to represent how the kairotic struggle actively exerts pressures (social, symbolic, and most importantly to these theorists, material) on our traditional understanding of composition. The lower structure, at first glance, represents the traditional continuum –the “before-after framework” – that Sheridan et al argue must be eliminated from our understanding of how kairos functions within public rhetoric (51). The three subcategories gridded within the structure denote, respectively, the beginning stage of composition, the nebulous “process” stage of composition, and finally the post-composition activity of circulation and distribution. We acknowledge this “rigid, linear structure” (51) only to problematize it, however. The squiggly lines connecting the beginning of the structure to the ending are meant to acknowledge the theorists’ charge that, within any given context, we must “include questions that arise before the rhetor commits to writing as a mode, as well as questions that arise after a rhetor is finished with the composition” (51). In this way, our understanding of the kairotic struggle poses the process as ongoing and active in the dialectical sense, highlighting the notion that “the real struggle only begins once the work is complete” (60). The lines, then, describe the rhetorical situation as unstable, uncertain, and contingent. Viewed together, both structures are meant to represent the “radical simultaneity” of all the listed factors (70). That is, although we separate all the components both of the rhetorical situation and the kairotic struggle for the sake of analysis, we also acknowledge that they “form a web of interdependent relationships that exist all-at-once” (70).  

While the Kinneavy article provided a solid grounding for us in terms of the historical conceptions and uses of kairos as a term, Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel brought the theory into practice by focusing on kairos, not as a term, but as an active force or “struggle” acting upon the rhetorical situation. This is not to say that Kinneavy doesn’t attempt to offer an application of the term. His proffered application, however, is clearly not in accord with current pedagogical practices within a social epistemic framework. He writes, “If we are to take a cue from the Greeks to foster a sense of kairos, then we might do well to train to kairos by a study of literature” (104). In light of the ideas offered by Sheridan et al, Kinneavy’s suggested application seems fairly stagnant and page-bound, as it lacks the emphasis on materiality and circulation that we find in “Kairos and Multimodal Public Rhetoric.” By extending the term beyond its traditional definition as “the right or opportune time to so something, or right measure in doing something,” (80), these authors nuanced Kinneavy’s interpretation of Kairos as a force situated principally within the cultural and symbolic functions of rhetoric. They write, for instance, “As we conceive of it, then, kairos is not only a function of social concerns (such as the beliefs and attitudes of the audience) or symbolic concerns (such as the linguistic devices that can best articulate with certain beliefs and attitudes), but is also a function of material considerations, such as the availability of high-definition camcorder and computers with enough processing power to digitize video” (55). In fact, Kinneavy asserts that because of the influence of Aristotelian rhetoric throughout history, kairos has been absent from our rhetorical terminology. It is interesting, then, that Sheridan et al invoke the Aristotelian triangle in figure 3 (54) in order to expand on this structure with the inclusion of materiality as a rhetorical practice that is often not considered within discussions of the term. Although the authors contend that “traditional composition-and-rhetoric frameworks are of limited use in explaining the kairotic struggles of Winter and Wong” (57) excerpted within the article, we saw this less as a negation of the Aristotelian triangle and more as an updated expansion to reflect the growing nature of rhetoric as a practice and discipline.

            An aspect of the theorists’ rendering of Kairos as “struggle” that we had our own struggle capturing within the schema was the nature of its ongoing and simultaneous process. In some sense, we can see two process (compositional and rhetorical) operating alongside one another at the same time. The authors write, “The rhetorical process exceeds the composing process; the rhetor’s work is not done when the composition is done” (60). This dialectical interchange between the beginning and ending of each process reminded us of the theories of invention we touched upon in our previous class discussions. In defining dialectic within the scope of this argument, I want to draw on Gage’s “Adequate Epistemology”: “Dialectic implies that knowledge can be created in the activity of discourse, because it is potentially changed by that activity, either as discourse gets closer to it or as it emerges in the interaction of conflicting ideas” (156). Gage’s definition of dialectic helps us unpack what Sheridan et al envision as a de-stabilizing of the traditional compositional process, which begins with a writer’s choice of mode, media, and genre, and ends in the collective acts of circulation, reproduction, and distribution. The simultaneity of these functions suggests what could also be regarded as a dialectic interaction between both the compositional process and the rhetorical process, manifesting finally in the kairotic struggle as the proposed moment of inertia. In the end, we found that the theorists’ ideas extended and applied Kinneavy’s theoretical underpinning in a practical and useful manner that could easily be implemented within the classroom.