Sheridan et al.: Marxists?

This exploratory schema project highlighted for me how precisely Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michael’s model of kairos is “fundamentally different” (53) from the traditional models they cite, as well as the implications for composition studies in general their model raises.

As Julianna and I began sketching out the main ideas from Sheridan et al.’s article, we originally put circulation at the heart of our diagrams, understanding it as one of the central ideas Sheridan et al grapple with, and it does in fact feature in half of the numbered conclusions they come to at the end of their article (73). Circulation, however, felt slightly off; even though circulation ties into a few of the points of articulation Sheridan et al. identify, it was still a little too specific to be the main focus of the kairotic struggle. As we searched for the idea behind circulation, we came across this line:

[K]airos is not only a function of social concerns...or symbolic concerns...but is also a function of material considerations...In other words, traditional models of rhetorical invention are fundamentally flawed because they fail to account for both the diversity and the materiality of available rhetorical practices. (55, emphasis added)

Social and symbolic concerns, then, which might also be interpreted as cultural and rhetorical (or social and rhetorical, as in our schema), underlie conventional understandings of what composers take into account and what makes up their context, however Sheridan et al. are calling attention to the material world, both physical and digital, as intrinsically affecting the composition process and kairotic moment. Mental processes of composition, then, cannot be completely separated from the material contexts in which they take place, anymore than they can from the social and rhetorical contexts.

This focus on materiality immediately calls to mind Marx and the impact of economic conditions. Sheridan et al. emphasize the ways access to material resources affect composition, such as how Ridolfo’s access to the “infrastructural resources” (73) of professional quality cameras, microphones, computers, and video editing software helped him achieve legitimacy in his documentary film. Related are the concerns Cynthia Selfe raises in “Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention” (JSTOR link), with her concerns that students without access to computers--disproportionately students of color and from low socioeconomic backgrounds--will find themselves disadvantaged in composition classrooms and in the workplace.

Marx himself asserts in “Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions” that ideas are directly linked to the materiality of people, and even consciousness itself is dependent on, as his title suggests, material realities. Sheridan et al. do not go quite so far; their understanding of kairos seems to operate less on composition as meaning-making, yet certainly both theories share an understanding of material concerns as key forces in shaping the bounds of possibility, whether in ideologies and understandings of reality or in composition and concerns of circulation.

Works Cited:
-Marx, Karl. “Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions.” The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007. 406-409. Print. 
-Selfe, Cynthia. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999) 411-436. PDF.
-Sheridan, David M., Ridolfo, Jim, and Michel, Anthony J. “Kairos and Multimodal Public Rhetoric.” The Available Means of Persuasion. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2012. 50-74. PDF.