drawing pictures to writing essays to giving oral presentations. At the college level, rhetorical education is potentially distributed across the entire curriculum. We can, of course, point to certain locations that function as key sites, including first-year composition, upper-level writing, and other writing-intensive courses. In many ways, the idea of the “prepared rhetor” is the motivation for our book. This book is primarily addressed to those who play a role in rhetorical education: writing teachers, writing program administrators, writing center consultants and administrators, WAC coordinators—those who are charged with fostering in rhetors the subjectivities and practices necessary for “kairotic inventiveness” (Walker, “The Body” 49) and “improvisational readiness” (E. C. White 14).
Our understanding of kairos and agency, then, references the “struggle” of the prepared rhetor within complex and multifaceted contexts that are simultaneously material, discursive, social, cultural, and historical. This struggle calls for the prepared rhetor to be kairotically inventive. We ourselves are somewhat skeptical about rhetoric’s ability to “ripen the time,” particularly in light of a number of complexities that are elided in most accounts of kairos. In the three chapters that immediately follow this one, we attempt to demonstrate that rhetorical success is contingent upon networks of human and nonhuman actors, including multiple semiotic modes and multiple media of production, reproduction, and distribution. These networks can be complex, unpredictable, and chaotic. After exploring this networked understanding of rhetorical practice through a close reading of a number of specific cases, we revisit the concept of agency in chapter 5. We begin with the way agency, as Carl G. Herndl and Adela C. Licona (following Paul Smith) put it, “exceeds the subject” (142). Drawing on Herndl and Licona, we explore the ways postmodern understandings of ideology, subjectivity, and discourse force us to posit “constrained agency” (134). We then turn to actor-network theorists like Latour and Law, who help us understand the way agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actors. We find this understanding particularly useful in our discussion the way of multimodal public rhetoric is linked to the material concerns of technology and space.
Finally, we should note that if kairos refers to the opportune moment, it is not about simple opportunism. As already hinted at in the definitions provided above, kairos is inextricably linked to ethics. Kairos is not just about what is effective, but what is fitting. Kinneavy, for instance, traces the relationship between kairos and justice from sophistic through Ciceronian rhetorics. He claims that for the sophists, justice was situational, coming close at times to “complete relativism” (“A Neglected” 87). While Plato worried about this relativism, his own system of ethics was grounded in “proper measure and right time—the two fundamental components of the concept of kairos” (88). This “aspect” of kairos “continued in the Latin concept of propriety, especially in Cicero” (88). A kairotic understanding of ethics is consistent with postmodern models that emphasize the situational nature of ethics. As Porter puts it in Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing
By ethics I do not mean a particular moral core (as in the articulation “Christian ethics”). I am referring, rather, to rhetorical ethics—a set of implicit understandings between writer and audience about their relationship. Ethics in this sense is not an answer but is more a critical inquiry into how the writer determines what is good and desirable. Such inquiry necessarily leads toward a standpoint about what is good or desirable for a given situation. (68)
An understanding of ethics as situated becomes important to us in chapters 6 and 7, when we connect multimodal public rhetoric with models of the public sphere. We examine a multimodal composition used by the prosecution in the Michael Skakel trial to explore the ways multimodality potentially undermines the ethical goals of making reasoning transparent to an audience. We do not offer these goals as universal and transcendent, but rather as particular goals rhetors might want to embrace in certain situations. In chapter 7, we examine a different tradition of the public sphere that is not based on rational deliberation and that privileges goals aside from transparency of reasoning.
Publics, Publicity, and Public Spheres
If kairos allows us to characterize the inventiveness of the prepared rhetor, public sphere allows us to frame the broader social contexts within which rhetors operate. A highly contested and thoroughly vexed term, the public sphere is commonly defined as the space in which “the citizens of a pluralistic polity speak from and across their differences productively” (Ivie, “Rhetorical” 278). The term owes its popularity, in no small degree, to the work of Habermas, especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in English in 1989. We agree with Kevin Michael DeLuca that something akin to the “concept of the public sphere is indispensible for theoretical and practical reasons” (21; see also Fraser 57). In the remainder of this chapter, we review contemporary conversations about the nature of publics and publicity in order to establish what we have in mind when we use the concept of the public sphere. We begin with a brief outline of the defining features of Habermas’s original model and then trace five broad areas of critique that public-sphere scholars have offered in response.
Habermas and the Liberal Bourgeois Public Sphere
In Habermas’s original model, the liberal bourgeois public sphere is a social space in which private citizens (as distinct from state actors) come together to address issues of “common concern.” Public-sphere activity could be witnessed in the salons of France, the coffee houses of Great Britain, and the “table societies” and “literary societies” of Germany (31–34). These institutions “organized discussion among private people” in such a way that social status was “disregarded altogether” (36). Not social status, but “the authority of the better argument” ruled the day (36). The “rational-critical debate” (160) that took place in coffeehouses and salons resulted in “public opinion” which in turn exerted political force on the state (52–55). The public sphere, in this conception, mediates between the private lives of ordinary citizens and the state.
Critical Responses to the Liberal Bourgeois Public Sphere
The model of the public sphere offered by Habermas in Structural Transformation has been critiqued along many lines. For the purposes of our exploration of multimodal public rhetoric, five broad areas of critique are particularly relevant.
Critique #1: The ontology of publics. The first set of critiques concerns the fundamental nature of the public sphere: What is the manner of its existence? Is it a sphere? Network? Rhizome? (Brouwer and Asen 1–23). The question is so vexing that some theorists recommend giving up the search for a definitive answer. Borrowing a term from Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean recommends treating the public sphere as a “zero institution”: “an empty signifier that itself has no determinate meaning but that signifies the presence of meaning” (105). We find the approach of Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen more productive. Brouwer and Asen begin the introduction to their recent collection, Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life by observing that
The public organizes through metaphor. Both its practitioners and theorists employ a rich range of metaphors when enacting and analyzing public activity. Spheres, lines, networks, screens—these terms render distinctly intelligible the qualities, realms, collectivities, or processes signified by multiple meanings of public. (1)
Brouwer and Asen resist the temptation to assert a single metaphor as superior. Instead, they consider multiple metaphors, reviewing the possibilities that each one opens up and forecloses.
As Brouwer and Asen note, the metaphor of the “sphere” has been criticized by a number of scholars. Hariman and Lucaites complain that spheres are “abstract, formally elegant, inherently rational, self-completing and self-regulating entities imagined to be freestanding in abstract space and seen from a macroscopic perspective” (qtd. in Brouwer and Asen 4). Moreover, the insistence on spatiality that is implied by a sphere (as a geometrical shape) can be both productive and counterproductive (Brouwer and Asen 3–5). If we’re not careful, we begin to speak of “entering”
