Kairos, literacy, and art

            In my 171 class (Humanities and Technologies) we are looking at two different views of media put forth my McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage) and Wesch (An Anthropological View of YouTube). As I comb through my students’ blogs about the impact of technology on communication, I keep coming back to the idea that writing itself was considered an invention. Where my students read McLuhan’s commentary about the isolating effect of TV as a bunch of malarkey, the claims put forth by Aristotle and the “conservative citizens” of Athens (Murphy, 26) that writing would ruin education seem equally ridiculous. Writing is an art form after all, right? As the teacher, I have to slow the students down from their either-or reasoning and have them consider McLuhan’s view. I guess I should do the same here.

            Writing, like most technology, was at first a completely utilitarian tool. Calling it an art would be a bit of a stretch. Murphy describes the basic early Greek writing system as merely an “aid to memory” (16). It was a way of record keeping. The truest art was speaking. So then some wiseguy says, “Hey, this recordkeeping system can do the same thing as speaking!” and there’s this societal gasp. This has happened relatively recently in academia as educators debate the value of online versus print publications for tenure. The technology of the computer had historically been as a word processor, a place for data storage (i.e. memory), and a place for informal correspondence. It lacked the agility and gloss of more sophisticated interfaces of the time (like newspapers and magazines—ha!).

            So what closed the gap between oral and written literacies? (And, here I am also looking primarily at what helped define written rhetoric as an art.) Off hand, I would have to say it is the immediacy and engagement afforded by the medium. Writing became relevant and artful when it became more than a recordkeeping device. Once writing became involved in the world and commented on happenings of the day—once it formed a dialogue—it became art. Here I am speaking mainly about kairos (and how fitting that the leading online rhetoric journal is called Kairos). Kairos acknowledges the affordances of the dialectic—it allows response; it gives reference to its positioning in a certain time and place; it recognizes its own temporal impact. (And at the last CCCC I heard Jennifer Rice make a convincing argument that Selena Gomez’s “I Love You Like a Love Song” is actually more mature than the Beatles/posthumous John Lennon song, “Free as a Bird” because it lives in the moment, recognizing its temporal significance.)

            Poulakos also notes the importance of to prepon to the creation of rhetoric (41)—how much the rhetor/rhetoric recognizes the formalized structures of its context. These two elements—kairos and to prepon—end up bridging rhetoric. Written texts in the classical period are made to emulate the spoken genre, hence the dialogue. In the digital age our online journals are set up to mirror the print genre while the less academic genres of YouTube and email are made to resemble TV and letter writing. It’s the tension between realizing the abstract context of the moment (a sort of reading your surroundings) in conjunction with the nuanced sense of history that makes rhetoric artful. Writing, as the Greeks come to find out, can do both. Digital technology, as the university is loathe to fully realize, can do both. There are no hard-and-fast rules for these abilities. As Poulakos notes this sense of rhetoric is “unlike scientific principles, the two are more a matter of feeling” (42). So the creation of a speech might not be creative—all the words at one point in time have been said—but rather the delivery of it makes it artful. As Jarrett and Ong say, speeches are made from “common materials arranged with some spontaneity for the occasion and purpose at hand” (16). It’s the arrangement and the idea of context that lends the rhetor to being an artist.