Negotiated Meaning: Kairos, Audience, and Dialectic in the Contemporary Classroom

This week’s readings dealt with the concept of Kairos or kairotic moments. In class, we developed a definition of the concept, outlining it as a concept that “through examination of contexts to create a message for an audience that is appropriate to constraints of time/place/etc., a rhetor can find truth in the ethical, rhetorical, and epistemological implications of the intersection of the dichotomies surrounding discourse” (Enos, ed. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, Silva Rhetoricae). For the exploratory, we utilized John T. Gage’s “An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives” and James L Kinneavy’s “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric.” We set them up in conversation with each other, taking where there was agreement and creating a schematic that illustrates that composition, when steeped in kairos, can build up to an epistemology that is help up through understanding and successful utilization of what we illustrated as the four pillars of Kairos (as defined through the Gage and Kinneavy texts). Because Kinneavy’s work was so steeped in classroom application (and Gage’s too, although not to the same extent), we opted to create a tool that students could use to help them understand the concepts. We utilized Gage’s ideas about enthymeme, dialectic and stasis to organize the columns that were made using Kinneavy’s ideas about ethical, rhetorical, civic, and aesthetic (utilizing his notions about epistemology to serve as the capstone of these texts).

Gage situates his claims in historical traditions, particularly sophist traditions of relativism; he asserts that there was a subsequent branching off of rhetoric as epistemology that divided on the basis of whether rhetoric was more for presentation and persuasion or a means to generate and create knowledge (153). Most of his essay is steeped in audience, knowing who they are and how to interact with them; Kinneavy, too, focuses in on audience, stating that “there is no more immediate application of kairos than that of establishing a real audience apart from the classroom situation” (103). In particular, Gage sees dialectic as an exchange between audience and rhetor to create truth, a negotiation of sorts, and this requires an active audience rather than passive receptacles for knowledge to be input. This idea of negotiation, of discourse creating knowledge, is part of the definition of Kairos that we created; Gage asserts that “dialectic implies knowledge can be created in the activity of discourse…as it emerges in the interaction of conflicting ideas” (156), which echoes our definition in the idea of the “epistemological implications of the intersection of the dichotomies surrounding discourse.” In other words, Kairos plays a big role in the creation of knowledge through discourse/dialectic because rhetor and audience work together and discuss and play with ideas and illuminate differences through the activity of presenting information to one another. Based on Kinneavy’s discussion on the epistemological dimension of Kairos, he seems to be in agreement that Kairos “brings timeless ideas down to the human situations…[and] thus imposes value on the ideas and forces humans to make decisions about these values,” (88) which shows that the dialectic/discourse elements of Kairos, the way that it forces dichotomies to the forefront and make humans have to collectively decide what they mean, is a vital aspect of kairotic meaning-making.

Both Kinneavy and Gage make arguments to include Kairos more prominently in current composition work and classrooms, utilizing ancient rhetorics/rhetoricians to argue for its necessity (which, I just realized, is a way for them to literally be kairotic in their approaches…they brought up these past ideas, gave context to them for a modern audience, and argued for how they fit in today’s contexts and why they are still important ideas that should be included as part of the knowledge we teach). Gage discusses how enthymeme, dialectic, and stasis were used in classical times as ways of understanding and investigation, ways to produce knowledge, and that in contemporary times they have been either ignored or reduced to “technical formulae functioning alongside other devices as options” (159). Kinneavy argues that “a Kairos program is a liberal arts program in the historic sense of the word” (105), and that students will benefit from creating real-world situations that help them to see and practice the ideas of proper timing and measure. Kinneavy also makes arguments that Kairos is vital even outside of English/Composition contexts, asserting things like “at least some geologists, some pharmacists, [etc]… should engage in the impassioned and simple prose that affects the multitudes” because when they are trained only in disciplinary (in these cases expository) writing “is training them to ignore their political and ethical responsibilities” (102). This wholistic approach to composition education helps to create writers and learners who can engage more fully with all of the aspects of his outline (rhetorical, ethical, aesthetic, etc) and thus who are more able to engage kairotically and see a big picture and situate themselves within it.

-CH