for multimodality, new factors come into play, introducing new layers of complexity. Many kairotic determinants are beyond the rhetor’s control, a reality that complicates models of rhetorical agency. Indeed, the delicate nature of rhetorical agency is one of the abiding preoccupations of this book. Accordingly, we offer a preliminary look at agency here.
Kairos and Rhetorical Agency
We sometimes talk about writing and rhetoric as if everything depends on rhetors and their compositions. Rhetors are constructed as rational autonomous subjects who craft efficacious compositions based on their mastery of the art of rhetoric. Kairos, however, reminds us of the numerous factors that rhetors do not control but that nevertheless determine what is rhetorically possible at a given moment. Kairos draws attention to rhetoric’s “bondage to the occasion and the audience” (qtd. in Sutton 415). Kinneavy explores this issue in an interview focused on kairos. Asked if kairos is “beyond the rhetor’s control” or if it can be “manufactured” by the rhetor, Kinneavy replies,
Well, I can see that a rhetor can choose the right time, and in that sense he can create it. He may realize this is not the right time to bring this up yet, but if he waits too long it’s going to be too late. So timing, or the right time, is sometimes in the hands of the rhetorician, but not always. Sometimes a situation just arises, and if a rhetorician wants to persuade, he has to use the time, and so in that case what he can do is simply to adapt himself to that time. Or, sometimes, say these times are not very good or not very favorable to this idea, then he may show you back historically how this has been a very important idea, and we should not forget that. So, there are different things a rhetorician can do with regard to time. It is not totally in his control. (“Revisited” 77–78)
Kinneavy goes on to explain that if the time is not right, the rhetor can “tell people, ‘you people nowadays don’t think very much of the importance of this particular concept, but it is important’—you can create that kind of a timing” (78). Kinneavy acknowledges that attention to kairos means candidly confronting the constraints within which the rhetor operates. But he ekes out a space, however uncertain and contingent, for rhetorical agency. The rhetor “reads” the situation to determine what opportunities are and are not available.
Moreover, in Kinneavy’s view, kairos doesn’t fully precede rhetoric. Instead, rhetoric plays a role in helping to construct the moment of kairos. In Kinneavy’s example, referring to the lack of kairos becomes a way to create kairos. An audience might be resistant; a skilled rhetor might artfully address that resistance. Some audiences, however, might be so resistant that no amount of rhetorical skill will be sufficient.
JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski are among the most optimistic about rhetoric’s ability to create its own kairos. Yates and Orlikowski, citing Carolyn R. Miller, emphasize a “constructivist” view in which “situations are created by rhetors; thus, by implication, any moment in time has a kairos, a unique potential that a rhetor can grasp and make something of” (Miller, “Kairos” 312). Yates and Orlikowski give the following example to illustrate the role of rhetoric in fashioning kairos:
An especially eloquent statement of this action-centered notion of time comes from a keynote speech made by Dr. Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse College, to a 1946 convention of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) at which delegates were debating a proposed (and, at the time, very progressive) interracial charter. In this speech, he successfully overcame inertia and motivated action, in part through his characterization of time as something to be manipulated: “I hear you say that the time is not ripe . . . but if the time is not ripe, then it should be your purpose to ripen the time.” (109)7
Yates and Orlikowski can be seen as testing the limits of rhetoric’s ability to, as Kinneavy says, “create that kind of timing.” Moreover, their example reveals the danger of citing situational constraints as an excuse for inaction.
Thus, there is a negotiation—or, as Carolyn R. Miller, drawing on Eric Charles White and Scott Consigny, calls it, a “struggle”—between the rhetor and the situation. “As an art,” Miller concludes, “rhetoric engages the phenomena of concrete experience and itself is engaged by the force of human motivation; it is thus the site of interaction between situation and rhetor” (“Kairos” 313). Reviewing Gorgias’s understanding of kairos, White echoes this more dynamic notion of the rhetor-situation relationship, stating that “[f]or Gorgias, kairos stands for a radical occasionality which implies a conception of the production of meaning in language as a process of continuous adjustment to and creation of the present occasion . . .” (15, emphasis added).
The crucial idea that rhetors might “ripen the time” is usefully illustrated in Miller’s discussion of the rhetoric of science. Miller draws on the work of John Swales, whose research focuses on how scientific articles are framed. Swales finds that one of the primary “rhetorical moves” scientists make in their introductions is to “indicate a gap in the previous work” that “is turned into the research space for the present article” (qtd. in Miller, “Kairos” 313). For Miller, Swales’s gap corresponds to the kairotic gap: the opening through which the arrow passes. “Kairos as opening,” therefore, “is actively constructed by writers and readers” (“Kairos” 313).
The kairos or opening might present itself to the archer at a particular moment in time, but exploiting it depends on all of the training and preparation the archer has received prior to that moment. Similarly, the ability of rhetors to exploit kairotic moments depends, in part, on their past experiences and training. Sharon Crowley invokes the notion of the “prepared rhetor,” a phrase we find particularly apt (84). Preparation is required to read the situation effectively, to discern what opportunities are available, and to know how to frame a rhetorical response that is appropriate. As McComiskey demonstrates in his discussion of Gorgias’s use of kairos, an approach that works in one situation may not work in another, therefore “it is necessary for the Gorgianic orator to know and be able to apply all of the different literary devices (metra) to any logos in any kairotic situation” (“Disassembling” 213). Walker alludes to the issue of preparedness in his discussion of the enthymeme. He notes that the verb form of enthymeme (enthymeomai) includes the concept of “forming plans,” hinting at rhetoric’s “strategic intentionality.” Crucial to this “strategic intentionality” is “kairotic inventiveness”: “an inventiveness responsive to . . . the ‘opportune’ at any given moment in a particular rhetorical situation” (“The Body” 49). In many ways, this is a book about how “kairotic inventiveness” changes in the context of multimodality.
Kairos, finally, refers precisely to the moment when theory becomes practice, the moment when all of the rhetor’s preparation, knowledge, and training is applied within a particular situation. This is hinted at in a passage from the Phaedrus cited by Kinneavy:
But it is only when he has the capacity to declare himself with complete perception, in the presence of another, that here is the man and here the nature that was discussed theoretically at school—here, now present to him in actuality—to which he must apply this kind of speech in this sort of manner in order to obtain persuasion for this kind of activity—it is when he can do all this and when he has, in addition, grasped the concept of propriety of time . . . —when to speak and when to hold his tongue . . ., when to use brachylogy, piteous language, hyperbole for horrific effect, and, in a word, each of the specific devices of discourse he may have studied—it is only then, and not until then, that the finishing and perfecting touches have been given to his science. (qtd. in “A Neglected” 86)
Given the role of preparedness, rhetorical education can be seen as fundamentally consistent with a kairotic approach. By rhetorical education, we mean the totality of experiences that prepare a rhetor to act effectively within any given situation. In this broad sense, rhetorical education begins early. Infants enter into social environments in which a variety of rhetorical practices and tools are modeled. As they grow older, they continue to be immersed in rhetorically rich settings
