The Unavoidably Social Nature of Kairos

    Travis and I created our schema of Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel's Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric with a special focus on the intertexts, hierarchy of concerns, and philosophical contours stated and implied. Prominent rhetorical theoreticians such as Lloyd Bitzer, Kenneth Burke, and Gunther Kress were invoked explicitly within the text. Some of their own schemas or models were invoked in the grand kairotic schema because of elements they share with those in Figure 3 and Figure 5 of Sheridan, et al. Bitzer's model of the rhetorical situation, for instance, emphasizes both exigency and audience as antecedents to the kairotic struggle (i.e., ongoing response to "the fitting situation") of the author (or rhetor) in producing a composition. Of course, intertextual relationships must begin with the development of kairos as a concept by classical philosophers and rhetors, which Sheridan, et al acknowledge in their six-point model of kairos. Sheridan, et al did, however, clearly intend their development of kairos as a pivoting or turning away from the traditional notion of kairos. Our schema explicitly incorporates the major kairotic expansions proposed by Sheridan, et al, which extend the "struggle" denoted by the term to include moments well before and after composition. Sheridan, et al argued that the value of their expansion was to draw attention to materiality as "an aspect of rhetorical practice that had often been overlooked" (54). Materiality, as they demonstrate, is a concept that is articulated by the mode of rhetorical content and the media used to produce that content, but it also includes infrastructural resources which hardly resemble the traditional media involved in composition.
    Travis and I used Prezi to create our schema. I think that Prezi was an appropriate tool for this task for several reasons. Primarily, it allowed Travis and I to collaborate simultaneously within the same digital space. Added benefits include the freeness of the tool, Travis' expertise using the tool, which he kindly shared with me, and the ability of the tool to incorporate multimedia objects into the schema. I will linger on the last element longer because it was especially harmonious with the arguments of Sheridan, et al. The ability to incorporate multimodal (i.e., text, images) media elements into our schema provided us with an opportunity to apply the kairotic struggle within our kairotic schema. This meta- aspect of the assignment was particularly salient for me on the axis or path between audience and rhetor. The primary audience for our schema was our classmates, but as Travis and I collaborated to build it, we each acted as an audience of one for the other in real-time, in that we actively interpreted the work of one another as we built the schema from our original design. Like compositions created within a textual mode, or multimodal video compositions, our collaborative composition went through multiple iterations.
    Sheridan, et al used the term collaborator to capture the diverse roles of those who contribute to the primary rhetor of a particular composition. Collaborators need not be an active co-creator in a particular composition, but when that is the case, as it was in this assignment, the collaborators find themselves playing both the role of rhetor and audience. In essence this doubles the circles representing audience and rhetor in the kairotic models of Sheridan, et al. Social and dialectical processes are at play in the positioning between collaborators as they work together on a composition. This process also appears in their discussion of multimodal rhetoric in the public sphere, a concept introduced by Habermas. Public spheres are physical-rhetorical spaces where multiple individuals engage in those dialectical processes. Rhetorical theorists including Sheridan, et al complicated the public sphere concept by drawing attention to its status as "an ecological web of factors" (71). I think that our collection of schemas of kairos as a class may serve to instantiate the complexity of this ecological view of the public sphere. Our schemas will be contingent given the social dynamics of the teams that produced them, including their own schemas of rhetoric and composition (which are changing as we spend more time with the texts in this course).