I am not the first rhetorician to be puzzled by and interested in the sometimes strange relationship between situations or opportunities and the rhetoric that fills them or takes advantage of them. In fact, the concern with "kairos" and rhetorical context is as old as the art of rhetoric itself. This first chapter offers an abridged and selective history of the role of kairos and context in rhetoric, noting similarities and differences between kairos and my notion of immediacy, and sets the stage for a more detailed discussion of immediacy in chapter two. I say "abridged" and "selective" because my purpose here is to create the context and opportunity--that is, make/take advantage of "kairos"--for the rest of this dissertation, and also because my history is necessarily incomplete. Thoroughly accounting for the history of the rhetorical situation--assuming that were possible--is not my purpose here. After discussing in general terms the origins and definitions of kairos, I will examine its role for both Plato and the sophistic rhetoricians, notably Gorgias. Then I will skip quickly to an examination of the twentieth-century discussion of context and the "rhetorical situation" in order to highlight the similarities and differences between the classical and contemporary views of context.
Understanding "kairos" has never been an easy business. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon defines the term as "in season, seasonable, happening at the right or critical time," or the "right opportunity." This rather simple explanation belies the complexity embedded within the concept. Although kairos commonly implies a qualitative measurement of and within time, it also has connotations of "the right or critical place," as in "vital parts" of the body (especially in terms of a mortal wound), and also "the webbing or thrums to which the threads of the warp are fastened" (341)--that is, the threads attached to a weaving loom that are parted at the right opportunity so that the weaver can weave through another thread. Carl Glover, in his dissertation Kairos and Composition: Modern Perspectives on an Ancient Idea, recounts the frequent comparison of kairos to the balance and measure required in archery. "The archer must exercise 'due measure and proportion' in aiming the arrow and drawing the bow string; he must hit a 'vital part of the body' to fell his prey; he must release the arrow at the 'exact or critical time' to strike a moving target" (1). James Kinneavy points out still another depiction of kairos in his essay "Kairos: A Neglected Concept." Kairos (like so many other Greek ideals) was a god, represented as a "young athletic man . . . characterized by a striking hair style, a lock at the front with short hair behind," an image that suggests contrasts and, according to Kinneavy, the need to "take favorable opportunity by the forelock" (93).
Because of its complexity, "kairos" is frequently explained in relation to other key terms of time and place. Carolyn R. Miller suggests in "Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science" that kairos, as a qualitative term, needs to be understood in relation to "chronos," the quantitative term for measurable time. Thus, kairos "appears as a critical occasion for decision or action, . . . an occasion that is objectively presented or divinely ordained" (312). In Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent, Eric Charles White explores the modern applications of kairos and its implications of "spontaneity" in relation to "nomos," which implies for White "tradition." Ultimately, White is presenting here an argument for kairos, which he defines in the closing of his book as the "radical principle of occasionality establishing the living present as a point of departure for rhetorical invention" (161). As I will discuss in the next section (and indeed, throughout this dissertation), exploring the relationship between kairos and context is necessarily tied to larger ontological/epistemological questions concerning the possible origins of discourse and knowledge. It is one thing to suggest that kairos is "objectively presented" at the right time according to particular traditions or divine actions; it is another thing entirely to suggest that kairos is seized according to the spontaneous needs of the occasion and the speaker.
Plato's and Gorgias' "primary source" materials on the role and importance of kairos are probably Hesiod, Pindar, and Pythagoras, although Kinneavy suggests that the notion of kairos "was embodied in several of the maxims attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece, particularly 'Nothing in excess' and 'Seal your word with silence and your silence with the right time'". . . (80). According to Glover, Hesiod's reference to kairos in Works and Days is the first we have in writing ("Observe [due] measures. Timeliness [kairos] is best in all matters." [Works 689-694, quoted in Glover, 5]). Glover also asserts that kairos was important in the poetry and thought of Pindar, who displayed "his rhetorical savvy" in an acute sense of audience and understanding of the importance of "due measure" in verse (6). For Pindar, "due measure" also implies "balance" and "harmony." As Mario Untersteiner writes in The Sophists, due measure for Pindar is ". . .the work of God. . . A prerequisite for a sound decision is kairos, a harmony of conflicting elements. . ." When this "due measure" exists, "the decision, the act which involves a value-judgement, is possible" (72, note 18).
Kinneavy also suggests that the Pythagorean school--which influenced both Gorgias and Plato--assigned a similar role to kairos in that the Pythagoreans thought it was the "basis of all virtue, particularly justice," and that it was the "essence of philosophy" in the sense that it was "a faculty on par with the soul and the intellect" (81). According to Untersteiner, key to the Pythagoreans was a reconciliation of the opposite qualities of the universe into a unity--"[T]he wise man must know how to master the opposites . . . to overcome their barren strife" (82). Glover, quoting from W.K.C. Guthrie's A History of Greek Philosophy, says that Pythagorean thinkers refined this balance of opposites into a table of ten pairs:
limit/unlimited
odd/even
one/plurality
right/left
male/female
at rest/moving
straight/crooked
light/darkness
good/bad
square/oblong
(Guthrie, History 245, quoted in Glover, 11)
An understanding and reconciliation of these opposing forces, the "mastery" that Untersteiner speaks of, was considered by the Pythagoreans to have been the role of kairos. In other words, the philosophers of the Pythagorean school saw kairos as the key ontological component governing their concept of the balance of opposites, or, as Untersteiner puts it, "one of the laws of the universe" (110-111). Kairos was the cosmic force which brought together opposites in harmony and thus life (and meaning) to the universe. As I will discuss in the next section, Plato's implied definitions of "balance," "harmony," and "meaning" differed radically from the perspective of the sophists. However, what's important here is that while I think both the Platonic and the Gorgian versions of kairos share the Pythagorean notion that kairos is the necessary moment and opportunity from which "meaning" passes from speakers to audiences, Plato's notions of the source and importance of kairos differs radically from Gorgias'.
While I think both Plato and Gorgias saw kairos as the moment of opportunity where rhetoric is performed and while their definitions of kairos seem to derive from similar "source materials," the ontological/ epistemological differences between Plato and Gorgias dramatically effect the role of kairos in their rhetorics. Put simply, Plato believed in a transcendent "Truth" and Gorgias did not. As a result, kairos for Plato was the necessary moment and opportunity for reaching toward "Truth," the "means to the end" so to speak. For Gorgias, on the other hand, since there was no "Truth" to be attained in the first place, kairos was the "end" in and of itself, the epistemological cornerstone of his ethics, aesthetics, and rhetoric (Kinneavy 81).
One of Plato's clearest statements on the role of kairos is in the Phaedrus. This dialog--unusual for its rural setting and small cast (it is set outside the city walls of Athens and involves only two characters, Socrates and the young student Phaedrus)--has long been thought of as being about Plato's notions of "good" rhetoric versus "bad" rhetoric, although "love" is the ostensible subject of the discussion. Phaedrus, who happens upon Socrates "outside the wall," has just come from listening to a speech on love delivered by Lysias. Phaedrus reads the clearly inappropriate speech to Socrates, which prompts Socrates to make up a similarly inappropriate speech on the spot, as was the practice of the "bad" rhetoricians, the sophists. Feeling quite guilty about this indiscretion, Socrates then appeals to the "tuneful Muses" and professes the true speech on the nature of love. So in a sense, the entire Phaedrus is an example of both bad and good kairos. It begins with an entirely inappropriate, incorrect, and over-stylized speech where Phaedrus isn't actually offering his thoughts on love, but rather is reading from a speech written by Lysias designed to be delivered by an entirely different speaker (an older man, as opposed to the youthful Phaedrus) to an entirely different audience (a young man who is the subject of the older man's love, as opposed to the aged Socrates). In other words, this speech is the epitomy of "bad" kairos: it is speech delivered by the wrong speaker at the wrong time to the wrong audience. To demonstrate how easy it is for clever orators to deliver clever (and seductive) language, Socrates makes up an even more attractive speech on the spot and then instantly regrets it. Then, in order to "wash out the brine from my ears" (467), Socrates delivers the "true" speech regarding the nature of love and discourse, a speech that exists in a proper state of kairos since it is offered by Socrates at the proper moment, in a measured fashion, and at the correct opportunity.
Discovering the correct opportunity for discourse is of course not an easy task. Socrates says since "it is the function of speech to lead souls by persuasion" to the Truth of the matter, the speaker must not only know the Truth but also the best means of delivering that Truth to an audience (553). To do that, the speaker must know the forms of the soul, which persons in an audience are of what type of soul, and which type of speech will have the proper effect on the particular type of soul. This suggests that Plato believed that in order to understand and properly make use of kairos, a speaker must first understand and be in a position to convey the transcendent Truth. This recognition of Truth, combined with an awareness of the proper moment, is the only way a true rhetor can deliver a true speech:
But it is only when he has the capacity to declare to 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 [kairos]--when to speak and when to hold his tongue [eukairos and akairos], 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 will have been given to his science. (Kinneavy 86)
For Plato then, it was crucial for the rhetor to understand and recognize everything involved in discourse--not only the "Truth" of the matter, but also the type of souls that are in the audience and how they will respond--so that he could then take advantage of the right opportunity--kairos--to deliver a discourse that approached an absolute "Truth." Similar to the Pythagorean school of thought discussed previously, Platonic kairos was much more about the assumed attainability of propriety and measure in discourse because both the Pythagoreans and Plato assumed an absolute "Truth" that served as a standard for determining propriety and measure in the first place. In other words, kairos for Plato was merely the window of opportunity through which the good speaker could advance his "Truth" to an audience.
This view is in stark contrast with Gorgias and the other sophists, as Richard Enos points out in his essay "The Epistemology of Gorgias' Rhetoric." While "Plato believed that ideas had an immutable nature which, when discovered, would reveal certain knowledge," Gorgias believed that "'knowledge' was revealed by understanding the dichotomies inherent in the diverse nature of individual concepts" (44). As Michael Carter suggests, this contextually-based and "relativistic epistemology" explained the universe through a synthesis of contradictory beliefs (i.e., through a mediation of the same sort of opposites suggested by the Pythagorean school and discussed earlier), and limited "knowledge" to what could be perceived through the senses (102). In other words, Gorgias saw "knowledge" as based in probability and human sensation, and thus limited and imperfect.
Gorgias' opposition to the Platonic search for absolute truth is stated most bluntly in his work On Not-being or On Nature. As is the case with most of the writings of the sophists, we only have fragmentary knowledge of Gorgias' argument, but as it is mentioned by Sextus, Gorgias' thesis was "I say that nothing exists; then that if it exists it is unknowable; lastly, even if it exists and is knowable, nevertheless it cannot be directly communicated to anyone else" (Untersteiner 145). The first assumption, that nothing exists, seems at first to be an obvious impossibility: Gorgias is stating in "absolute" terms that absolutely nothing exists. However, Enos suggests that this frequent misinterpretation which implies that Gorgias was simplistic and nihilistic is inaccurate. Gorgias wasn't speaking of "existence vis-a-vis the physical world" (46), but rather, he is doubting the ideal "existence" of the essences assumed by Plato. As I will discuss further in a moment, Gorgias' statement on "Not-being" begins and ends with confidence in "his own empirical observations on sense-perceptions" (Enos 46).
The second assumption, that if "it" exists, we wouldn't know it, suggests again Gorgias' belief that humans have no choice but to rely on the limitations of their abilities to perceive and evaluate the physical world. In other words, even if an absolute and ideal truth does exist, humans are too limited to perceive it. This seems to me to be analogous to the sophist Protagoras' famous claim that "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are as they are, and of things that are not." The third assumption--even if someone could know "it," that individual couldn't explain "it" to anyone else--simultaneously closes the possibilities for absolute knowledge, articulates a difference between being, thinking, and communicating, and suggests the limitations of "the word," or logos. This is not to say that language is powerless (quite the contrary, as will become clear with my discussion of the Encomium of Helen), but rather it suggests that conveying any sort of absolute truth, which Gorgias assumed didn't exist in the first place, certainly isn't one of language's uses.
Untersteiner, Kinneavy, and Carter all argue that the implication of Gorgias' epistemology and ontology is that any action is necessarily based on a choice between oppositions that each have the potential to be true. "Man cannot escape the antitheses," Untersteiner tells us. "His thought discovers only the opposite poles in all propositions which try to explain reality philosophically" (159). Therefore, any action--because of a lack of appeal to an absolute--ultimately remains irrational. Carter provides a useful summary of this dilemma and its implications:
Thus, if a person demands absolute truth as a basis for action, he or she will be brought to a standstill, the veracity of each logos being diminished by its opposing logos. Action, therefore, is inevitably nonrational because it must be taken despite the knowledge of opposing positions. Sophistic rhetoric, according to Untersteiner, must be understood in these terms: "'I know the irreconcilable conflicts and yet I act'"(161). The decision to accept one of the alternatives is based on kairos, which Untersteiner describes as "endowed with the property of breaking up the cycle of the antitheses and creating something new, irrational: that epistemological process defined as 'deception,' 'persuasion,' and the power of which lies in the imposition of one of the two alternatives (161)" (105).
To not make this fundamentally irrational choice is to not take action, to (in Untersteiner's words) bring human experience to a standstill "in the face of reason, which can no longer decide anything and therefore ends by denying on a rational basis every relationship between man and man, and finally all coherence within the individual himself" (160).
The epistemology and ontology Gorgias developed in On Not-being or On Nature and the effects of this on both "logos" (speech) and kairos is exemplified most clearly in the"Encomium of Helen." Gorgias' speech ostensibly both praises and excuses Helen from blame for her abduction by Paris, an example of rhetoric as the art of liberation (Consigny, "Sophistic"). Gorgias suggests that if Helen's abduction was the will of the gods, it would be unreasonable to blame her since the strength of the gods is obviously greater than that of any person. If Helen was actually kidnapped by Paris, it would be more reasonable to pity Helen than to blame her for being the victim. But most important for my discussion here is Gorgias' consideration of the effects of persuasion on Helen:
"But if it was speech (logos) which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech (logos) is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works; it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity" (Sprague 52).
Gorgias goes on to praise the power of logos for causing "fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing" in its hearers and to suggest that "The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies" (52). In short, the persuasive boundaries of logos (according to Gorgias) know no bounds.
However, it is important to note here (as Untersteiner does) that Gorgias seems to be drawing some distinction between the "speech" of the crowd and the "speech" of the poets, which suggests to me a distinction between persons who should be listened to and those who should be ignored. "Logos according to Gorgias can be attained to by the individual, though not by the majority of mankind; if this were not so, there would be neither poets nor orators nor philosophers, nor any others able to create logos. The whole cognitive process occurs internally, but not all can set in motion the complete process leading to knowledge" (Untersteiner 117). There is a distinction then between the speech of the mob, the "mere opinion" of the "uninformed" and "unpoetic," and response to the speech of the poets that is part of Gorgias' reasoning for Helen's defense. "Whoever is ruled by opinion alone cannot act towards a definite end; this ability is granted, however, to whoever is controlled by the imperious necessity of logos. Helen, since she was governed by the latter, showed herself decided and sure" (Untersteiner 117). I think this definition of logos and the implication that precious few possess the ability to reasonably shape logos for audiences is a key distinction between what kairos meant to Gorgias and the ancient sophists and what "immediacy" means to me. I will of course discuss this in more detail in chapter two, but I would suggest that the definition of whose speech "counts" in a postmodern age is much more fluid than it was for Gorgias.
The relationship between the power of logos and the creation and use of kairos is perhaps made clearest in the eleventh paragraph of the Encomium of Helen:
All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had (both) memory of things past and (awareness) of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes.
(Gorgias 52)
Untersteiner argues that Gorgias' use of "false argument" is not meant to be synonymous with "falsehood." "Falsehood" implies "the objective aspect of the false, without regard to the diversity of the subjective process which has decided it--whether error or an intentional lie is in question," whereas "false argument" implies a "subjective process in that the intention to deceive is clear--a process which cannot well be defined since it can manifest itself in many ways" (Untersteiner 108). In other words, while Gorgias clearly is suggesting that persuasion always relies on a false argument since the speech is altered to fit the kairos--the situation and opportunity to persuade an audience which is created by the speaker--he is not suggesting that speakers routinely lie and deceive an audience. It seems to me that this distinction between "false argument" or deception and "falsehood" or lying suggests the delicate moral balance Gorgias was trying to address. As suggested earlier, logos has the deceptive power to both create and take advantage of kairos so that an audience can side with one "truth" or the other and act depending on the specifics of the situation. However, since there is no "absolute Truth" that can be approached or obtained via Gorgias' rhetoric, the action of the persuaded audience is definitionally irrational, and the distinction between "proper" and "improper" action is vague. And this represents the point of contention between Plato and Gorgias: Plato suggested Gorgias was a fool and immoral because of his denial of a transcendent Truth, and Gorgias implied Plato was a liar--not a deceiver--when he suggested that there was a transcendent Truth. In other words, while both Plato and Gorgias make use of a similar conception of kairos, the role of kairos is clearly different for each.
The doubting of the existence of absolute knowledge suggested by Gorgias in On Not-Being or On Nature and in the "Encomium of Helen" has clearly been revived in a broad sense by a wide variety of postmodern thinkers and has certainly been an appealing alternative to the Platonic tradition for a number of contemporary "neo-sophistic" rhetoricians (Enos, Lester Faigley, Sharon Crowley, Jasper Neel, etc.) I think it also has some obvious and important effects on my notions of immediacy and its relationship to and distinction from Gorgias' epistemology and ontology because immediacy also assumes the absence of any sort of absolute knowledge and the necessity of "illogical" action. However, determining and defining what is and is not "empirically and physically sensed" within a postmodern world--where distinctions between the "real" and the "simulated" or "virtual" are in flux and dramatically problematized by technology-- is much more difficult than it would have been for Gorgias and his ancient Greek contemporaries. As Enos suggests, Gorgias assumed for a "thing to be comprehended it must be understood through the human media of understanding" (47, emphasis his), or through our finite senses. If those media (human senses) are altered (as has clearly been the case with contemporary television and print media, computer technology, and network technologies such as the Internet), it seems to me that our perceptions and assumptions about what can be comprehended must also change.
As Kinneavy points out in his essay "Kairos: A Neglected Concept," while kairos in some sense merged with the notion of prepon (propriety or fitness) in the rhetorics of Latin Stoicism and had some "residual influences" throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, kairos (and, I would argue, any focused concern with rhetorical context and situation) "is almost a negligible chapter in the history of rhetoric since antiquity, partly because of the overwhelming influence of Aristotelian rhetoric in this history" (82). It has not been until quite recently that a direct concern with context and situation has once again become a topic of debate among rhetoricians. This closing section of chapter one, the previously promised "quick skip" into the twentieth century, will discuss what I see as a revision of the Platonic/Sophistic debate on kairos: the dialog about "rhetorical situation" initiated by Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz, and most notably commented on by Scott Consigny. This contemporary discussion of the rhetorical situation is both the last component of the opportunity I am taking to create a context for my definition of immediacy and is the starting point for describing the effects of the postmodern condition on rhetorical situations.
By focusing on Bitzer and Vatz, I don't mean to imply that they are the only twentieth century critics concerned with rhetorical situation or that they were without influences. For example, I think the goal of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic "pentad" was to come to some understanding of the rhetorical "space" where discourse takes place and how it functions. As he said in A Grammar of Motives, "any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)" (xv, emphasis his). In some sense, "scene" seems to most closely correspond with a notion of kairos or context, but as I think will be clear when I discuss Bitzer's and Vatz's arguments, Burke's concern with act, agent, agency, and purpose is also a part of what "counts" as a rhetorical situation. For Burke, things that have "meaning" are "persuasive," and thus are "rhetorical"; things that don't have "meaning" aren't rhetorical. For example, "Food, eaten and digested, is not rhetorical. But in the meaning of food there is much rhetoric, the meaning being persuasive enough for the idea of food to be used, like the ideas of religion, as a rhetorical device of statesmen" (Rhetoric of Motives, 172-3, italics his).
Chaim Perelman's "New Rhetoric" also seems to have been influential to both Bitzer and Vatz, especially in his discussion of the "universal audience" and "presence." As he argues in The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, the "appeal to reason" for Perelman should be understood as "an appeal to an ideal audience--which I call the universal audience--whether embodied in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite" (14). Perelman's footnotes to this passage make it clear that by "God" and "reasonable, competent, and/or elite men," he means something along the lines of the transcendent ideals proposed by Plato in the Phaedrus that I discussed earlier. However, later in the same paragraph Perelman concedes that absent a "demonstrative proof," the philosopher has only argumentation at his disposal to make something appear "reasonable" (14).
In reaching this "universal audience," the speaker seems to be aided in this pursuit by taking advantage of/creating "presence." According to Perelman, orators "select certain elements" within a given situation to focus attention by "endowing them, as it were, with a 'presence,'" a sense in which the subject being discussed by the orator seems "near to (the audience) in space and time" and thus more relevant (17). Perelman says that the orator creates presence through a variety literary and rhetorical figures and by choosing the proper categorization, selection, and description of "facts, truths, and values," which seems in some sense to once again harken back to the methods Plato describes in the Phaedrus for speakers to reach audiences (see, for example, the passage I quoted earlier where Socrates is describing to Phaedrus the different natures of the soul and the need to know how they are represented within a given audience). However, "presence" also seems to connote a powerful and/or charismatic speaker who is able to persuade an audience based on who the speaker is, as opposed to simply what figures he or she employs. Perelman's explanations of presence seem to imply as much [e.g., "well-known authors" occasionally use different language figures "at the beginning of a story in order to lend more presence to a character they introduce" (86, italics his)]. In any event, I think it is clear that Perelman's theories regarding audience and "presence" (who is listening, and how what they are listening to is made relevant) and Burke's investigation of motives can be seen as modern extensions of the ancient concept of "kairos" and strong influences on the contemporary Bitzer/Vatz debate about rhetorical situation. As was the case for the ancient Greeks and kairos, the point of conflict regarding situation for Bitzer and Vatz revolves around the perceived presence or absence of transcendent "truths" (though in the twentieth century, the "t" has been demoted to lower case.)
The premise of Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation" harkens back to Plato's premise in Phaedrus in that Bitzer is arguing that situations exist independently, and they exist as opportunities or spaces to be filled with discourse. As he claims in the opening of his article, Bitzer wants "to know the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse: How should they be described? What are their characteristics? Why and how do they result in the creation of rhetoric?"(1). Bitzer begins answering his own questions (and thus taking advantage of a "discovered" situation) by arguing that while "the presence of rhetorical discourse obviously indicates the presence of a rhetorical situation, . . . it does not follow that a situation exists only when the discourse exists" and "it is clear that situations are not always accompanied by discourse" (2). Sometimes situations aren't filled with discourse (Bitzer argues that "many rhetorical situations mature and decay without giving birth to rhetorical utterance"), but a situation must always precede discourse much in the same way that "a question must exist as a necessary condition of an answer" (6). This seems quite similar to what Socrates argues and Plato demonstrates via his arrangement of the speeches in the Phaedrus: the situation--the "window of opportunity"--must first be identified and opened before discourse can successfully commence, which means that situations exist in some "real" sense and precede rhetoric.
Vatz's essay, "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation," is as antithetical to Bitzer's argument as Gorgias' is to Plato's. He argues that what Bitzer sees as an externally existing phenomenon--situation--is simply an indication of the perspective of the perceiver. "No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it" (154), a position which is reminiscent of Gorgias': since "nothing" (in the sense of ideal essences) exists, and since humans are inherently limited by perceptions, rhetors use language to create situations. The implications of this for Vatz are two-fold: "rhetoric" and "situations" are not discreet, and situations are "rhetorical" in and of themselves (159). If nothing else, the initial premise of both Bitzer's and Vatz's arguments suggest that while it may be true that the ancient debate between Plato and the sophists was largely forgotten, the epistemological and ontological questions raised about situation remain viable and unanswered.
In describing the origins and nature of rhetorical situations, Bitzer suggests there are three "constituents" necessary for their existence. First, there must be an "exigence," which he defines as "an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be." Significantly, this exigence must be something that can be potentially modified if discourse that responds to it is to qualify as rhetoric--"death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance--are exigencies to be sure, but they are not rhetorical," (6) a position that seems to echo Burke's description of rhetoric offered previously. Further, while there can be more than one exigence within a situation, Bitzer argues that there will always be one "controlling" exigence that organizes and "specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected" (7). The second constituent of Bitzer's rhetorical situation is "audience," which he defines as those individuals affected by the exigence and as those persons--real or imagined by the speaker--"who are capable of being influenced by discourse and being mediators of change" (8). Interestingly enough, Bitzer argues that "neither scientific nor poetic discourse requires an audience in the same sense" because while the scientific audience "consists of persons capable of receiving knowledge" and the poetic audience consists of those "capable of participating in aesthetic experiences induced by the poetry," neither audience is capable of "mediating" the "change which the discourse functions produce" (8). The final constituent in Bitzer's theory of rhetorical situation is "constraints," by which he means those elements that have the power to potentially "constrain [the] decision and action needed to modify exigence. Standard sources of constraint include beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives, and the like. . ."(8).
Since situations precede and call into existence rhetorical discourse, it stands to reason (according to Bitzer) that not just any discourse is invited; rather, the rhetorical situation created by the convergence of exigence, audience, and constraints "invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation"(10). This too recalls Plato's description of the role of kairos given in the Phaedrus, where Socrates' "appropriate" speech on love comes only at the fitting opportunity, after the "inappropriate" speeches have been recognized.
Each of these necessary components for the rhetorical situation is literally "true;" that is, they are ". . . located in reality, are objective, and publicly observable historic facts" (11):
To say the situation is objective, publicly observable, and historic means that it is real or genuine--that our critical examination will certify its existence. Real situations are to be distinguished from sophistic ones in which, for example, a contrived exigence is asserted to be real; from spurious situations in which the existence or alleged existence of constituencies is the result of error or ignorance; and from fantasy in which exigence, audience, and constraints may all be imaginary objects of a mind at play (11).
In other words, while Bitzer does not adhere to the Platonic belief in the "essences" or an external "Truth," he is suggesting that rooted in observable reality the "true" can be distinguished from the "false."
In contrast to Bitzer, Vatz argues in "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation" that situations do not exist independent of discourse; rather, situations are created and identified by speakers themselves. Vatz first points out that Bitzer's emphasis on exigence as an imperfection to be corrected implies that a positive or beneficial modification is apparent and possible. "We learn for example, that the obvious positive modification of pollution of our air is 'reduction of pollution.' One wonders what the obvious 'positive modification' of the military-industrial complex is" (156). Further, Vatz asserts that with the exception of situations that we "confront (in) our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through someone's communicating them to us," meaning that audiences are necessarily reliant on subjective communicative mechanisms for learning about the exigence, which raises obvious questions about the extent to which the constituents of the rhetorical situation are indeed "objective" and "publicly observable" (156). Again, this position is an extension of Gorgias: all we ultimately have to understand reality is our own senses (what Enos described as the "human media") and language. Further, Vatz points out that the "choice of what facts or events are relevant" is purely up to the rhetor within a given situation. It is the choice of some elements over others that as Perelman and Oblrechts-Tyteca (quoted by Vatz) tell us "endows these elements (and, I would argue, the situation itself) with a presence. . . It is not enough indeed that a thing should exist for a person to feel its presence" (The New Rhetoric, quoted in Vatz, 159).
Vatz also problematizes the ability of the rhetor to distinguish particular situations or contexts that Bitzer claims gives rise to discourse in the first place. ". . . [O]ne never runs out of context," Vatz writes. "One never runs out of facts to describe a situation. What was the 'situation' during the Vietnam conflict? What was the 'situation' of the 1972 elections? What is any historical situation?" (156). In short, there is nothing about Bitzer's argument, based in a "Platonist Weltanschauung" (Vatz, 155) with which Vatz agrees. Like Gorgias before him, Vatz does not accept the assumptions of a recognizable and objective truth--or situation--which is then filled with "proper" discourse by the "good" speaker; rather, since situations are produced by rhetoric, they are themselves the mechanisms that create meaning. The implications of this for Vatz are liberatory in the sense that they expose and potentially promote the political nature of "meanings." Throughout his 1973 essay, Vatz argues that the Vietnam War was never a "discrete" situation that had an "objective" meaning, but it was actually both a situation (a war we "needed" to be involved in) and a meaning that was created by the rhetoric surrounding it. "There was no 'reality' of the situation's being in or not being in our national interest" (159). Like Gorgias, Vatz is arguing the move toward a given action is not based on observable truths or empirical evidence, but instead it is based on language that succeeds in persuading an audience to act despite the lack of a known truth. Rhetoric then is not an act of discovery but an act of creativity (161).
So, as it was with Plato and Gorgias, the philosophic schism based on the accepted or rejected "truth" is at the heart of these radically different hypotheses on the nature of the rhetorical situation. However, Scott Consigny's 1974 essay "Rhetoric and Its Situations" presents us with an apparent solution to this antinomy: both Bitzer's and Vatz's positions are but one part of a more complex and complete view of rhetorical acts (176). Consigny says that in Bitzer's formulation, the rhetor is no different than the "expert or scientist who can solve specific problems by using well-formulated methods or procedures," which is simply not the role of a rhetor; rather, "[T]he rhetor's task is . . . to be able to ask good questions and formulate or discover relevant problems in an indeterminate situation" (177). In other words, Consigny claims that Bitzer errs in his determinate views of the rhetorical situation and "fitting" responses. On the other hand, Vatz "errs in construing the rhetor as completely free to create his own exigencies at will and select his subject matter in a manner of 'pure arbitration'" (178). Consigny argues that rhetors are frequently placed in situations beyond their control or situations in which they must quickly alter their responses based on the constraints of the situation. If rhetors "fail. . . to take these constraints into account, spinning issues from (their) imagination, (they) may never get in touch with events or (their) audience, and may rightly be dismissed as ineffective and irrelevant" (179).
Consigny reconciles these positions by returning to an Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an "art." Conceived of in this fashion, the art of rhetoric has "heuristic" value in that it allows rhetors to "discover the real issues in indeterminate situations"; "managerial" values in that it provides rhetors with the "means for controlling real situations and bringing them to a successful resolution or closure"; and "universal" values in that rhetors who master the art "can function in all kinds of indeterminate and particular situations as they arise" (180). This "art" is construed by Consigny as a mastery of "topics or commonplaces" in the "tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, Vico, and others" (181), the "tools" of rhetoric that also serve as the "realm in which the rhetor thinks and acts" (italics his, 182). In other words, "the topic is both instrument and situation in that as merely a formal device the topic has no significance. . . . But the context or material situation independent of the formal topic is indeterminate and without meaning" (183). A reconsideration of the traditional rhetorical topics thus acknowledges the constraints of situations suggested by Bitzer and the abilities of rhetors to manipulate situations as suggested by Vatz.
Clearly, Vatz's position on rhetorical situation corresponds more closely than Bitzer's with my argument concerning immediacy. Rather than naming boundaries between discreet situations, a rhetoric of immediacy suggests a dissolution of borders through a lack of any appeal to a "truth" and through the difficulties in distinguishing "real" rhetoric and situations from simulations. Similar to Vatz's concerns regarding the hierarchies of exigencies, I am arguing that the act of isolating and naming the "controlling cause" of a rhetorical situation is arbitrary because of the possibilities of sudden and quick shifts of positions between speakers, audiences, and situations. Most significantly for my arguments concerning the Internet that I will take up in chapters three and four, Vatz argues that our perceptions and definitions of situations are necessarily filtered through an increasingly complex "media," a process that is inherently rhetorical. Situations--both in their origins and their possibilities--are creative.
Having said this, I think Consigny's effort at synthesizing Bitzer's and Vatz's positions is particularly relevant to my concern with immediacy. I disagree with Consigny's conception of the art of rhetoric as being both "managerial" and "universal" not only because the postmodern condition obviously problematizes such conceptions of "master narratives" (to borrow Jean-Franç ois Lyotard's term), but also because the effort to strive for the "management" of discourse is antithetical to what I see as the efforts of immediacy. However, he quite effectively points out that rhetors do not exist as autonomous, self-contained beings capable of independently creating situations. His synthesis of the presumably irreconcilable differences between Bitzer and Vatz (and between Plato and Gorgias) both exposes the necessary interactions between rhetors and situations, and creates the opportunity to examine the effects of postmodernity on the integrity of the rhetorical situation.
So in the end we have come full circle: after centuries of absence from the Western rhetorical canon, the debate about kairos (here named rhetorical situation) has been revived and the debaters are still pondering the same questions: Are situations "discovered" or "created"? Does situation necessarily precede or come about as a result of rhetoric? Can "appropriate" be objectively measured, or is "appropriate" always operationally defined according to the success or failure of the discourse? In this first chapter, I have tried to establish a "rhetorical moment" in the visions of both Plato/Bitzer and Gorgias/Vatz: that is, I have discovered and reported on my understanding of the definition and history of kairos in ancient Greek rhetoric, and I have created/argued for a connection between Plato and Gorgias, and Bitzer and Vatz in an effort to create a context for further discussion. Chapter two attempts to explain immediacy by problematizing this debate over kairos and context. What happens to a rhetorical situation when it is no longer clear who is the audience and who is the rhetor? What happens when their roles reverse, or when the lines between their roles rupture? If we postulate that the individualistic/modernistic subject no longer exists in a fragmented/postmodern context, how can we "rationally" or "irrationally" act at all? What happens if we can no longer tell the difference between the "real" and the "simulation," if the distinction between the two no longer really matters?