A reconsidering chronos: Chronistic criticism and the first ‘Iraqi national calendar

ABSTRACT

Chronos is a traditionally marginalized term in rhetorical studies. Historically paired with kairos, chronos is commonly taken to refer to chronology, empty, homogenous, and external time. I argue for a reconsideration and redefinition of chronos that pairs the term with a critical materialist theory of time as change, immanent temporalities. Chronos understood as an entanglement of immanent temporalities informs chronistic criticism. Chronistic criticism is a conceptual criticism investigating the rhetorical arrangement, or synchronization, of multiple processes of change. Reconsidering chronos makes room for investigating time-related texts, like ‘Iraq's first national calendar. This calendar emerged after the establishment of the ‘Iraqi state under the League of Nation's Mandate System where British authorities were charged with building a modern nation state from territories of the former Ottoman Empire. I demonstrate chronistic criticism examining Gertrude Bell's digital archive for observations about successes, failures, and competitors with the national calendar. A vitalized chronos stands to make substantive contributions to the study of numerous rhetorical concepts. Specifically, for this investigation, chronos offers new insights into political myths, calendars, nation building, and the potential influences of nonhuman immanent temporalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• temporality
• myth
• materialism
• Hashemite
• ontology

Notes

1. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1–5.

2. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 1.

3. See: Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (New York: Routledge, 2013).

4. West-Pavlov, Temporalities, 84.

5. Throughout the manuscript, I transliterate Iraq and ‘Iraq. The ‘indicates an elongated glottal stop, of which there is no letter equivalent in English. This is a small effort in foreignizing the few translations I offer in this paper in line with Lawrence Ventui's discussion of domestication and foreignization translating strategies, see: Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 24.

6. Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14.

7. Denis Feeney, Ceasar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginning of History (Berkley: University of California, 2007), 1.

8. James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, “Kairos in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Written Communication 11, no. 1 (1994): 131–42; Dale L. Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 3 (1992): 317–32.

9. Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991), 126–30.

10. Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln's Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1, no. 1 (1988): 26–31.

11. John E. Smith, “Time, Times, and the ‘Right Time’; ‘Chronos’ and ‘Kairos’,” The Monist 53, no. 1 (1969):5.

12. John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” The Review of Metaphysics 40, no. 1 (1986): 4.

13. John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, eds. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany, NY: State University New York Press, 2002), 52.

14. For a recent citation of Smith's distinction see: Allison M. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixes,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 2, no. 102.2 (2016): 172–3.

15. Adrian Bardon, A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 52. Three Laws of Motion: (1) Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. (2) Relationship between objects mass (m), acceleration (a), and the applied force (f): F = MA (3) For every action, there is an equal yet opposite reaction.”

16. Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 16–17.

17. Georgakopoulos Thanasis and Piata Anna, “The Meaning of Khronos in Ancient Greek: A Diachronic Perspective,” Selected Paper from UK-CLA Meeting, vol. 2 (2012): 345.

18. Ibid.

19. I have adapted the classification scheme from Bardon specific to rhetorical studies. Bardon argued that broadly speaking, theories of time and temporality fell into three categories: realism, idealism, and relations. Because rhetorical studies has different common usage and understanding of these terms, my classification scheme consulted rhetoric articles consciously working at the intersection of time and rhetoric to re-interpret Bardon's helpful scheme. Bardon, A Brief History, 7.

20. Bardon's categorization scheme uses the category of realism to indicate a group of theories. I have adapted this category as the foundation Time₁ to reflect realist inspired approaches to time in rhetorical studies.

21. For examples of rhetorical writings using this sense of time see: Edwin Black, “Electing Time,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 2 (1973): 125–9; Sullivan, “Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief,” 317–32; Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Timing in Public Communication,” Central States Speech Journal 25, no. 2 (1974): 84–94; Thomas L. Farrell, “Knowledge in Time: Toward an Extension of Rhetorical Form,” in Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research, eds. J. Robert Cox and Charles Arthur Willard (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 123–53.

22. See: Celeste Michelle Condit, “Nixon's ‘Fund’: Time as Ideological Resource in the ‘Checkers’ Speech,” In Text in Context: Critical Dialogue on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, eds. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 219–42.

23. Regina M. Hoffman, “Temporal Organization as Rhetorical Resource,” Southern Journal of Communication 57, no. 3 (1992): 203.

24. For examples of this in rhetorical studies, see: Raymie E McKerrow, “Space and Time in the Postmodern Polity,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 3 (1999): 271–90; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Inaugurating the Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1985): 396.

25. Lake, “Between Myth and History,” 124.

26. Campbell & Jamieson, “Inaugurating the Presidency,” 396.

27. Bardon, A Brief History, 14.

28. Ibid, 13.

29. For examples of this in rhetorical studies, see: Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2004), 4–5.

30. Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 48. Kenneth Zagacki, “Spatial and Temporal Images in the Biodiversity Dispute,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 4 (1999):417–35.

31. These dualisms are collected from rhetorical theorists and political philosophers identifying as some variety of new materialist and/or posthumanists. See: Nathan Stormer, “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 317–20 and Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 258. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press 2013), 3.

32. West-Pavlov, Temporalities, 48.

33. Ibid, 50.

34. James Jasinski, “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 256.

35. Christopher G. Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 44.

36. West-Pavlov, Temporalities, 84.

37. Burke explains the role of rhythm as literary form. See: Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 133–5.

38. Henri Lefebrve, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 15.

39. The vocabulary of Henri Lefebvre's rhythm analysis offers a profitable attunement for the chronistic critic interested in studying the constitutive potential for four reasons. First, rhythm analysis requires that space and time be thought of together. Second, working within a language of rhythms brings together two meanings of (every)day: mundane and each day. Both meanings hold special significance for the considerations of calendars and routines. Third, as a theorist, Lefebvre was concerned with time as lived and incalculable. This definition critiques theories of Newtonian universal time. Fourth, rhythm analysis makes room for non-human relationships.

40. Ibid, 67.

41. Ibid, 16.

42. Ibid, 67.

43. Eviatar Zerubavel, “Easter and Passover: On Calendars and Group Identity,” American Sociological Review 47, no. 2 (1982): 285; Eviatar Zerubavel, “The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time,” American Sociological Review 42, no. 6 (1977): 870.

44. Russel West-Pavlov, Temporalities (New York: Routledge, 2013), 98–9.

45. Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 179.

46. James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 383; Flood, Political Myth, 44; Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 177–80.

47. Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975), 247.

48. Michael Osborn, “In Defense of Broad Mythic Criticism: A Reply to Rowland,” Communication Studies 41, no. 2 (1990), 124. Osborn argues that stories presented and received as fictional, like popular films, are mythic in that they allude and evoke political myths. His explanation suggests that political myths may operate from a common narrative fidelity or rationality.

49. My pluralistic and more inclusive approach to political myths runs counter to Robert Rowland's more conservative definition, but given the plethora of literature in and outside of rhetorical studies I feel confident in these more inclusive definitions. See: Robert C. Rowland, “On Mythic Criticism,” Communication Studies, 41, no. 2 (1990), 101–16.

50. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 100–5.

51. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives, 102–8.

52. Ibid, 105.

53. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1963), 68–113.

54. See: Samuel P. Perry and Jerry Mark Long, “Why Would Anyone Sell Paradise?”: The Islamic State in Iraq and the Making of a Martyr,” Southern Communication Journal 81, no. 1 (2016), 1–17.

55. Catherine Helen Palczewski, “When Times Collide: Ward Churchill's Use of an Epideictic Moment to Ground Forensic Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 41, no. 3 (2005), 133.

56. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 138. Charland focuses on narrative throughout his analysis of the Quebecois: he briefly identifies that his constitutive understanding of narrative aligns with McGee's understanding of myth.

57. Lefebrve, Rhythmanalysis, 14.

58. Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Rhetorical History and Rhetorical Criticism: A Distinction,” The Speech Teacher 24, no. 4 (1975): 309–20. My statement contrasts with Gronebeck's argument that historical considerations are primarily extrinsic from the rhetorical artifact.

59. David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama Press, 1998), 29.

60. Visser argues the constant over-inscription of the Sunni-Shi’i conflicts in Iraq reifies ethnic and sectarian divisions. See: Reidar Visser, “The Sectarian Master Narrative in Iraqi Historiography: New Challenges Since 2003,” in Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges, eds. Jordan Tejel, Peter Sluglett, Riccardo Bocco, Hamit Bozarslan (London: World Scientific Publishing, 2012), pp. 47–59.

61. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 1–5; Jordi Tejel, “The Monarchist Era Revisited,” 87–94.

62. Toby Dodge, “International Obligation, Domestic Pressure and Colonial Nationalism: The Birth of the Iraqi State Under the British Mandate System,” in The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective, eds. Nadine Meouchy, Peter Sluglett, Gerard Khoury, Geoffrey Schad, (Boston: Brill, 2004), 146–7.

63. Ibid.

64. Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 5–6.

65. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 1–9.

66. Elie Podeh, Politics of National Celebrations in the Arab Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108.

67. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 17.

68. Peter Sluglett, “The Urban Bourgeoisie and the Colonial State: The Iraqi and Syrian Middle Classes between the Two World Wars,” in The Role of the State in West Asia, eds. Annika Rbo and Bo Utas (Sweden: Alfa Print, 2002), 83

69. Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King, 44.

70. Dodge, “International Obligation,” 150–1.

71. Rory Stuart, “The Queen of the Quagmire,” a review of Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, Gertrude Bell: The Lady of Iraq, Review of the Civil Administration in Mesopotamia, in The New York Review, October 25, 2007, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/10/25/the-queen-of-the-quagmire/.

72. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 109.

73. Riccardo Bocco and Jordi Tejel, “Introduction,” in Writing the Modern History of Iraq, xi–xvii.

74. Stoler's elaboration of the ethnographic approach emphasizes the archive-as-process where researchers look “to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed or biased sources.” See: Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxiety and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20. Throughout her writings, Stoler contends that bias is no longer a productive distinction between archives. Instead, scholars should pursue the form of knowledge production in the archive where the concern for examining bias transitions to “identify[ing] the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetitions what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could not be said,” in Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 34.

75. Amatzia Baram, “Territorial Nationalism in the Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 4 (1990): 425–48.

76. Ofra Bengio, Saddam's Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), 45.

77. N. Masalha, “Faisal's Pan-Arabism, 1921–33,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 4 (1991): 679.

78. Elie Podeh, Politics of National, 111. Gertrude Bell in her letter to her family remarks that the offices were closed due to King Faisal's birthday. Bell, Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 2 June 1926. Gertrude Bell Archive, New Castle University. Available at: http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=910. Bell makes note of a public parade given in honor of Faisal's birthday, although she gives few details. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 4 June 1924 Available at: http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=723; Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 5 June 1921. Gertrude Bell Archives, New Castle University. Available at:http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=476

79. Elie Podeh, “From Indifference to Obsession,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 184–7.

80. Mary C. Wilson, “The Hashemites, the Arab Revolt, and Arab Nationalism,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, eds. Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, Reeva S. Simon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 204.

81. Gertrude Bell to Florence Bell, 12 April 1922. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=550.

82. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 18 March 1924. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=694.

83. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 18 March 1924. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=694.

84. Podeh, Politics of National, 120.

85. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell and Florence Bell, 17 September 1921. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=506.

86. Juan E. Campo, Encyclopedia of Islam (New York City: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 124.

87. Tanya Gulevich, Understanding Islam and Muslim Traditions (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2004), 261.

88. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 13 August 1924. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=750.

89. Gertrude Bell to Florence Bell, 29 April 1925. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=822.

90. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 23 June 1926. Available at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=917.

91. Campo, Encyclopedia of, 124.

92. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 22 April 1925. Gertrude Bell Archives, New Castle University. Available http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=819.

93. Gertrude Bell to Sir Hugh Bell, 25 May 1922. Available http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=556.

94. Andrew R. Hom, “Hegemonic Metronome: The Ascendancy of Western Standard Time,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4 (2010): 1164–5.

95. Kevin K. Birth, “Calendar Time, Cultural Sensibilities, and Strategies of Persuasion,” in Time, Temporality, and Global Politics, eds. Andrew Hom, Christopher Mcintosh, Alasdair McKay, Liam Stockdale (Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, 2016), 83.

96. West-Pavlov, Temporalities, 164.

97. Liora Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 235.

98. Podeh, Politics of National, 120.

99. Ibid, 123.

100. For example of the understanding of the cessation of time, see: Catherine Palczewski, “When Times Collide,” 133.

101. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 96.

102. Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, eds. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 24.

103. Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900–1963: Capital, Power, and Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 150.

104. Keya Ganguly, “Temporality and Postcolonial Critique,” in The Cambridge Companion to: Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazaraus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162.

105. Hala Fattah, “What Did It Mean To Be an Iraqi During the Monarchy? A Preliminary Investigation Based on Oral Interviews with Iraqis in Jordan and the United Kingdom,” in Writing the Modern History of Iraq, 95–103.