Machine Time: Unifying Chronos and Kairos in an Era of Ubiquitous Technologies

ABSTRACT

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Collin Bjork for his encouragement to pursue this project. I would also like to thank Andrew Pilsch for checking my description of the computer code to make it palatable. Thank you to Rebecca Tarsa for reading and commenting on early drafts of this article. Thank you to the two RR reviewers, Chris Mays and Kyle Vealey, as well as Rachael Lussos, for their editorial feedback.

2. There are of course exclusionary problems of gender, race, ability, and class in ancient Greece, which are very serious concerns.

3. See Sneed (150–54) for a discussion of ramps in ancient Greece.

4. I would like to thank Andrew Pilsch for bringing the clepsydra to my attention.

5. For an extended description of water-clocks, see Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (trans. Fritz and Kapp 144–45).

6. See Suzanne Young’s “An Athenian Clepsydra” for the functionality of these water clocks.

7. While I see digital rhetorics and computational rhetorics as related, the latter appears to focus on computers explicitly while digital rhetorics is a more general term. Floriana Grasso has employed the term “computational rhetoric” to focus on “rhetorical argumentative discourse” rather than on “argumentative reasoning” with the expressed aim of examining artificial intelligence (196). Crosswhite discuss, by way of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, the proposition of using a (computer) model to formalize rhetorical theories and concepts. Bill Hart-Davidson and Ryan Omizo have turned to computational rhetoric in order to calculate the claims of past rhetorical theory with respect to genre theories and recurrence.

8. Chronos is not absolute time, in the Newtonian sense, because this is an anachronistic perspective toward the term.

9. See Kinneavy’s well-received “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric” for an extended description of kairos’s richness, including its spatial component (due measure) as well as esthetic, ethical, and political elements.

10. Hans Rämö, a business researcher, has picked up kairos in the context of project management. Interestingly, Rämö advocates for precisely the opposite of traditional rhetorical theory: that project managers have neglected kairos, instead focusing on clock-time (571–72).

11. We need only to look at the definitions of chronos to see its thin treatment. Chronos is useful to rhetorical studies because it largely undergirds more common rhetorical approaches to time, i.e., kairos. As a kind of “quantitative time” that focuses on “how much or how long,” chronos measures and tracks time (Rivers and Derksen 639). It is a “necessary precondition” to kairos (Sipiora 15). In this sense, chronos frames and circumscribes kairos.

12. Kelly et al. have also observed this feature as motion when they write, “That other sense of motion is through time. Time, argues Aristotle, is not without movement; that is, we notice how time has passed when we notice movement. Thus, he posits, time is a property of movement—a quantity of it, even. Thus time is a number of movements that we recognize in knowing what was before and what came after” (232).

13. The spatial component of chronos can also be found in ancient Greek conceptions of the term. Chelsea Harry’s turn to Aristotle’s Physics (the primary text that addresses chronos in the Aristotelian corpus) provides evidence of the spatial elements of chronos. Harry notes that time is part of kinêsis, which is motion (42).

14. As Jordynn Jack observes, “Temporal and spatial arrangements reflect an accretion of previous rhetorics, including ideas of architecture, design, gender, work, and privacy” (“Leviathan” 215).

15. Transduction as a term occurs in numerous fields, including that of machine learning. Transduction, in machine learning, implies an approach that lacks a general model given a set of data. I tend to find this approach helpful for rhetorical approaches to time: rather than one or two given approaches to time (for instance, kairos and/or chronos), we could develop a variety of approaches to rhetorical timing given particular situations, genres, audiences, and so forth.

16. For recent rhetorical explorations into code, see Kevin Brock’s Rhetorical Code Studies (2019). Brock provides an excellent overview of the relationship between code and everyday rhetorical engagements.

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John R. Gallagher

John R. Gallagher ([email protected]) is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He studies interfaces, digital rhetoric, participatory audiences, and technical communication. He has been published in Computers and Composition, enculturation, Rhetoric Review, Transformations, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Written Communication. His book, Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing, is available from Utah State University Press.