Today’s Plan:
- Article #2
- Kairos
- Article #3 Experiment
- Homework
Article #2
Drafts get posted to Canvas. Articles get published to medium, and the link gets added to our Google Doc.
Kairos
So far this semester, I’ve stressed how introductions do three things. First, they introduce a problem about which “everyone” is talking (scarequotes). Second, they both clearly state a claim *and* roadmap the steps an article will take; i.e., First, this paper reviews A and B. Second it examines C. Third, it suggests D.
Today I want to discuss another element of an effective introduction, or how to affectively introduce something. That last clause is a terrible nerd joke. By the end of class, I hope you get why it is terrible. Here goes.
In his classic treaty On Rhetoric, Aristotle dedicates quite a bit of energy into the three kinds of rhetorical appeals: logos, ethos, and pathos. Let’s review.
I think most contemporary textbooks woefully mistreat pathos, which gets taught as the rhetor’s (speaker/writer) ability to generate emotion in the audience. While there are some people in rhetoric that emphasize the importance of generating emotion in order to move someone from thought to action, Aristotle isn’t one of them. Aristotle is a rationalist. His emphasis is on logos, logical argumentation. He does a terrible job with ethos (which isn’t really about “credibility” in the way Aristotle discusses). But I digress.
Aristotle’s emphasis on logos, logical argument, claims and evidence, means he is quite wary of anything that gets in the way of logical thought. Think Mr. Spock from Star Trek. That’s Aristotle’s idea citizen–someone who is able to separate emotion out of argument.
But Aristotle is also aware no one can actually do this. Maybe philosophers, like his teacher Plato can come close, but certainly not everyday (white, rich, male) citizens of Athens who are called upon to participate in democracy. They are emotional beings. They traverse the world in an always already emotional state. In fact, Aristotle’s brief comments on emotion and pathos are a driving influence behind one of the biggest philosophical movements of the 20th century–Heidegger’s phenomenology. We don’t have time for a deep dive here, but Heidegger’s response to modern philosophy was to argue that people do not simply receive the world in a neutral state, like information being loaded onto a computer, but rather exist and navigate the world from within the confines of a “mood.”
So, what does this mean for rhetors like ourselves? It means that when we come to discuss something, we have to, in Aristotle’s simple words, “prepare the judge.” We have to anticipate the emotional mood, the emotional baggage, that people will carry into that context, that situation. We have to know what else might be weighing on their mind. We have to have some sense of how others in the audience will feel. Kairos thus considers how people feel as they receive an argument. (It means more than this). To go back to my nerd joke in the introduction–in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and rhetoric, emotion is something we know we feel. We feel something consciously. Affect, however, is a feeling that resonates at a frequency below conscious recognition–it happens, in a non-sense, below or before consciousness. It contributes to the context or structure in which an “I” experiences something. Very often we will never be aware of its presence,
even though it is acting on us. Hence the terrible joke: Good writers affectively introduce us to our own affect.
Let me use an example. Friday night, during the Red Sox vs. Yankee game, color analyst Rob Darling made the following comment when Yankee’s pitcher, Japanese-born Masahiro Tanaka, struggled to throw strikes:
“A little chink in the armor for Tanaka here,” Darling said. “It’s the first inning he has lost a little of his control.”
Perhaps we need a bit more context to understand the outrage.
Let’s take a look at the introductions to a few different New York papers covering the comment and the ensuing conversations. For each of these, we can think about who the audience is and how the writer addresses, or fails to address, the complex affective network(s) underlying the conversation:
Now the three articles above are perhaps bad examples because they aren’t explicitly making an argument. They purport to report facts (although I think we can see that selecting which facts to report is itself shaping an argument). I want to compare this to a take that came across my social media, because it offers an interesting example of how to affectively establish kairos:
Some takeaways: attending to kairos is a matter of establishing ethos (identifying with the audience, forging a common identity that we can share, understanding who we are) and navigating–sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly, the emotional contexts in which arguments flow. These flows often become calcified into what rhetoricians call commonplaces–the first arguments we think of, the first impressions we have, when we hear about a topic.
Homework
There’s two homework assignments: first, go to the Google Doc and read one article on medium.com. I want you to ask the author an informed question on a specific part of her article in medium.com. I then want you to post in Canvas (Monday Oct 8th Peer Review): give me a paragraph summary of the article that focuses on three things–the authors claim, her evidence for proving the claim, and the final recommendation she makes. Then tell me what question you asked her.
The second homework assignment asks you to read and summarize one thing for our third article. Once again, I want you to focus on evidence. When you summarize something for your audience, you want to make sure you give them enough information to know why a source is credible. This often means summarizing both what the source specifically argues and then what it offers as evidence for that argument. I’m noticing a bit too much shallow reading in some people’s articles.
