http://enculturation.net/6.2/sheridan-michel-ridolfo

Kairos and New Media: Toward a Theory and Practice of Visual Activism

David Sheridan, Michigan State University Tony Michel, Avila University Jim Ridolfo, Michigan State University

Enculturation 6.2 (2009): http://enculturation.net/6.2/sheridan-michel-ridolfo

On February 24, 2005, over 30 students (including Jim Ridolfo, co-author of this chapter) at Michigan State University (MSU) “occupied” the first floor of the central administration building, setting up a portable CD player and then dancing for a half hour to salsa music. As part of a five-year local campaign directly affiliated with a national campaign spearheaded by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), as well as the international anti-sweatshop movement, these local student activists staged this particular image event to pressure MSU into joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). The WRC is a labor oversight body that works to ensure that the licensing of collegiate apparel contracts are not granted to companies whose labor management practices produce sweatshop working conditions. Partly because of strategic media prep work done beforehand, this image event was covered in three local newspapers, including the Lansing State Journal, the widest circulating mid-Michigan paper. Following this image event, on April 5, 2005, the student groups involved in the protest were notified at an MSU Board of Trustee’s meeting that the university intended to join the WRC (Davis).

Kevin DeLuca has argued that image events such as the MSU dance-in can function as important rhetorical strategies for effecting social change. Such image events “contest social norms and deconstruct the established naming of the world” (59). The "unorthodox rhetoric" of the image event "reconstitutes the identity of the dominant culture by challenging and transforming mainstream society's key discourses and ideographs" (16).

How does rhetorical education need to be transformed, given that it has historically been linked—as DeLuca rightly observes—to models in which rhetoric is defined narrowly as “civil, reasoned, verbal discourse” (14)? What would rhetorical education look like if it were reconfigured to prepare citizens to deploy image events as legitimate forms of public sphere participation? What if, alongside more traditional essays and themes, first-year college students (for instance) were asked not only to analyze but to produce image events?

This chapter uses the image event to explore a pedagogy of visual activism. We begin with the admittedly vexed concept of the public sphere, focusing on the importance of access and the role that education plays in ensuring access. We then offer an outline of what a pedagogy of visual activism might look like, finding in the ancient rhetorical concept of kairos a useful starting point. Although kairos has traditionally been applied to strategies of persuasion and to the verbal, we expand the concept to include decisions about mode, media, and technology that, we argue, are critical considerations for successful rhetorical interventions. We show how kairotic considerations informed the surprisingly complex set of rhetorical practices associated with the MSU worker rights image event. Finally, we sketch some fundamental classroom practices that foreground kairotic assessments of modes, media, and material resources.

Access and the Public Sphere

As DeLuca observes, although it is contested, "the concept of the public sphere is indispensable for theoretical and practical reasons" (21). One of the reasons the concept of public sphere has been vexed from the beginning is the simultaneous necessity and difficulty of making claims about access. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, is routinely critiqued for his initial focus on a public sphere limited to male bourgeois participation. Yet, in the Habermasian public sphere, as Jacobson and Storey put it, a "symmetrical distribution of opportunities to contribute to discussion must exist" (103). Achieving this symmetry, however, is not a simple matter. Access demands at least three preconditions: (1) access to the forum (e.g., coffee house, TV studio, Internet chatroom); (2) access to material resources (e.g., printing presses, paper, ink, computers, networks); and (3) access to knowledge and skills (e.g., the ability to employ certain kinds of rhetorical strategies, the ability to use certain technologies) (Garnham 361, 365; Tagg 18).

In many ways, the image event itself can be seen as an attempt to address the problem of access to forum. Because airtime is so expensive, many organizations have to create a media product that a network can sell to its viewership. The image event needs to be "newsworthy" in the capitalistic sense of the word: something that will cause prospective viewers to foreswear competing pursuits in favor of "tuning in." In a digital age, however, activists increasingly have access to a diverse array of venues and material resources. New technologies of rhetorical production (such as inexpensive video editing applications) coupled with new channels of distribution technologies (such as the Internet) are enabling new forms of visual activism. Although access to venue and material resources continue to be key barriers to reaching the ideal of equal participation in the public sphere, access to the kinds of knowledge necessary to take advantage of new venues and resources is even more difficult to achieve. Providing activist rhetors with computers and Internet access does not increase participation in the public sphere unless citizens also have access to the complex skill sets necessary to use these tools effectively. Such skill sets range from a rehabilitated model of functional computer literacy (Selber) to an understanding of visual rhetoric and the ways that it can serve the activist rhetor. Rhetorical education, then, potentially has a role to play in fostering a new public sphere characterized by a citizenry prepared to engage in visual activism, including rhetorical practices associated with image events. By "rhetorical education" we mean to invoke a diverse set of processes, only some of which occur within official educational structures. The classroom is one important site of rhetorical education, and we focus here on how it can be used effectively.

By theorizing the role of classroom learning in preparing visual activists, we do not mean that we envision a world in which everyone is constantly staging spectacles for mass media coverage. Instead, we hope to work toward a broader understanding of the image event that includes more localized instances of visual activism. To characterize the image event, DeLuca usefully focuses on the practices of a few groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First! that have been highly successful in gaining national media exposure. We would like to extend the application of the image event by suggesting that the project of "deconstruct[ing] the established naming of the world" cannot be left to a small number of organizations. At a time when access to new media technologies provides more people and organizations the opportunity to create image events, we want to encourage our students to use the image for social change at the local and neighborhood level. Such micro image events include a woman who posts on her blog a picture of herself that challenges the visual codes employed by Hollywood films or a neighborhood group that publishes on its website video clips whose sequenced images compellingly counter news media representations of urban space. Such reconfiguring of the ideographs that enforce the status quo needs to be integrated into the daily practices of common citizens. Everyone has a stake in "writing back" to the dominant culture.

Situating Visual Activism: Kairos and Context

One of the reasons "image event" is such a fitting concept is that it calls attention to the situated moment. "Image event" rejects the myth of a stable rhetorical object with a transcendent power that is effective in any situation (the speech that is effective everywhere and for all time because of its formal features and its compelling logic) and embraces a more time-sensitive model in which always-fluxuating contextual factors converge into a happening. When we confront an event, we are prompted to ask "where and when did it occur"—questions we sometimes forget to ask of rhetorical objects. Indeed, our forgetting is encouraged by the fact that rhetorical objects often come to us decontextualized (e.g., a presidential speech comes in the form of a transcript, packaged in an anthology of other speeches, the original location of delivery having been erased). An emphasis on the eventfulness of rhetoric invokes a tradition that is perhaps most visible in discussions of the ancient concept of kairos and the rhetorical situation. As Carolyn Miller observes, "as the principle of timing or opportunity in rhetoric, kairos calls attention to the nature of discourse as event rather than object" (310).

Kairos is a complicated word that resists simple definitions. Eric Charles White usefully unpacks the various metaphors that merge in the concept:

Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means "the right moment'" or "the opportune." The two meanings of the word apparently come from two different sources. In archery, it refers to an opening, or "opportunity" or, more precisely, a long tunnel-like aperture through which the archer's arrow has to pass. Successful passage of a kairos requires, therefore, that the archer's arrow be fired not only accurately but with enough power for it to penetrate. The second meaning of kairos traces to the art of weaving. There it is "the critical time" when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven. Putting the two meanings together, one might understand kairos to refer to a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved. (13)

A particular moment is opportune because there is a convergence of contextual factors. Thus, as James Kinneavy observers "kairos has much in common with the situational context" (104). Lloyd Bitzer, claiming to be the first to address the subject thoroughly, defines a rhetorical situation "as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance" (5). In Bitzer's model, rhetorical situations have three necessary components: exigence, audience, and constraints. An exigence is "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" (6). Therefore, Bitzer's model emphasizes rhetoric as a tool for effecting change: "a work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world; it performs some task. In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality" (3-4). In a perfect world, rhetoric would be unnecessary, because there would be nothing to change. But "[i]n our real world . . . rhetorical exigences abound; the world really invites change—change conceived and effected by human agents who quite properly address a mediating audience" (13). This emphasis on social agents deploying rhetoric to effect change makes Bitzer's model a fitting starting point for thinking about activist rhetoric.

Bitzer has been criticized for being too linear and objectivist. In his emphasis on the situation, which "controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer" (6), and on "objective and publicly observable historic facts in the world we experience" (11), Bitzer seems to shortchange both the agency of the rhetor and the way rhetoric itself functions to create, rather than merely react to, reality. Richard E. Vatz, in a provocative response, attempts to invert Bitzer's model, claiming that the situation does not lead to a rhetorical intervention, but, instead, a rhetorical intervention creates the situation. Although Vatz offers an important corrective to what might be called Bitzer's modernist sensitivities, Vatz actually goes too far in the opposite direction, denying altogether the existence of a context outside the rhetor's rhetorical response. As Vatz acknowledges, this leads to a kind of arbitrariness: "We have 'leaders' or 'bosses,' 'organizations' or 'machines,' and 'education' or 'propaganda' not according to the situation's reality, but according to the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). For activists, however, meaning is not arbitrary, but negotiated. Terms like "leader" or "boss" need to be understood within the social and material situations that shape rhetorical practices and within rhetorical practices that shape those situations.

Drawing on Eric Charles White and Scott Consigny, Miller describes a "struggle" between the rhetorical intervention of an individual and the given realities of a situation: "As an art, 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" (313). We would also add, in response to Bitzer's emphasis on constraints, that the moment of rhetorical intervention also contains within it possibilities and affordances, not just limitations.