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 in which they experience and practice a wide range of rhetorical activities. School settings encourage various kinds of rhetorical practices, from 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