Kairos in the Classroom: Dwelling in Time, Space, and Environment

Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s “Kairos and the Rhetorical Situation: Seizing the Moment” is a wonderful reminder of a concept that has significantly shaped the way I view rhetoric and its prevalence in the world.  As Crowley and Hawhee suggest, the Greek concept of kairos – “opportunity”—or, most simply, the right thing at the right time, describes the situatedness of rhetoric. The authors explain that kairos is a “multidimensional and flexible term” that “suggests a notion of space and/or time” (37). The emphasis on spatial time is a way to understand the rhetorical situation as something which cannot be objectively viewed but is rather lived in (around and through). We cannot just invent kairos, this “certain kind of time,” but rather must recognize the opportunity that exists in any given moment, in any given space.  This ultimate immersion provides a very different view of invention from what I, and probably a lot of (at least undergraduate) students typically imagine when teachers tell us to “go find an interesting topic and write about it.” Because absolutes are so much easier to comprehend and hold on to than the notion of invention, enmeshment (a term Thomas Rickert and other rhetoricians use to describe the radically dispersed nature of subjectivity in the rhetorical situation), and the complex relationality of the rhetorical situation, my meager attempts to explain kairos (not that I used that word) to my students have so far failed. This is perhaps because students seem to be primarily interested in The Facts. If we just have The Facts, then a paper will be logically supported and people will somehow magically be persuaded. As Crowley and Hawhee again emphasize in Chapter 2, however, a rhetorician’s job is not to find the quickest way from Point A problem to Point B solution but rather to allow the meshwork of our rhetorical situations to lead us to the right questions at the right moment (or so it seems to me). They write, “A rhetor attuned to kairos should consider a particular issue as a set of different political pressures, personal investments, and values all of which produce different arguments about an issue. These diverging values and different levels of investment connect to other issues as well, producing a weblike relationship with links to other, different, new but definitely related rhetorical situations” (51).

After teaching for a few weeks now, I realize that it is this “weblike relationship” that is the hardest part of rhetoric to communicate to students. Weblike relationships are fragile and cannot be quickly untangled into a straight string of communication between the writer and the audience or the writer and the problem. Weblike relationships (including the ones being established in the classroom) have to be dwelled among. I bring in the world “dwelling” to this discussion because Crowley and Hawhee’s chapter on kairos reminded me of my favorite anthropologist, Tim Ingold. In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Ingold understands the world through dynamic interactions rather than discrete phenomena, people groups, or skills that can be studied scientifically from an objective perspective. Talking about the concepts of temporality and historicity (which he maintains merge in something he calls a “taskscape”), Ingold writes, “The notion that we can stand aside and observe the passage of time is founded upon an illusion of disembodiment. This passage is, indeed, none other than our own journey through the taskscape in the business of dwelling” (196). I think Ingold’s notion of dwelling in the taskscape gets very much to the heart of what an exploratory essay project  does. Exploratory essays force you to go trod through the steps and the questions of an issue in a kind of rhetorical landscape rather than skip from one point to the next.

This is why I feel that Crowley and Hawhee’s pairing of kairos to stasis theory in chapter 3 is perfect way to help students systematically experience and thereby better understand a concept that is somewhat difficult for our analytical, Western culture to grasp. As they state, “Students who want a systematic way of asking questions about rhetorical situations can use stasis theory. This means of invention provides rhetors with a set of questions that, when asked systematically, can help them to determine just where it is that the disagreement between themselves and their audience begins” (53). The heuristic that they outline provides a wonderfully concrete and practical way of understanding a key component of what academians (and politicians and lawyers and etc.) mean when we talk about “entering the conversation.” How do you enter the conversation? First, you have to understand what is actually being said and what type of question actually needs to be asked (in any given situation in any given time).

 Personally, I have never tried to systematically bring an issue to stasis and then proceed to run it through the four questions that Crowley and Hawhee outline: 1. Conjecture 2. Definition 3. Quality and 4.Policy. Yet, once I read their examples, I felt like categorizing questions in this way really did illuminate the dimensions of an issue or problem and the motivations for presenting such issues in a particular way at a particular time.  I would love to introduce this kind of strategy to students in order to encourage them to develop a deeper understanding of rhetorical situation and kairos (and ultimately to understand how to get to the heart of statements, questions, and issues), but I have two primary concerns. The first is that since I am relatively unfamiliar with the specifics of stasis theory myself, it would be difficult for me to teach these strategies to students in an effective way. The second is that, as Crowley and Hawhee point out, students might be tempted rush to use stasis theory for every issue they encounter and attempt to “mechanically” apply these questions in ways that do not appreciate the “situatedness of rhetoric.” The authors state, “The issues or problems it [stasis theory] turns up will differ from situation to situation, so any rhetor who uses it must be alert to all the possibilities it raises in any case” (75). Do others have more experience in teaching formal elements of ancient rhetoric to students? Are there strategies or texts that seem to work better than others? Is this the type of conversation that has to start on the first day of class and continue to the end? And finally, how would students respond to reading Crowley and Hawhee’s text (or something similar) as opposed to staying with the more basic Allyn & Bacon chapter on “Writing a Classical Argument” (Chapter 13)?