James Kinneavy’s “Modes of Discourse”

The modes of discourse refers to what discourses are *about*.

To determine the mode of a discourse, ask yourself 2 questions:

1. What is the object of the discourse? What’s being talked about?
2. What aspect of that object is given the most attention?

The 4 modes 0r “windows on reality” (ways of looking at an issue):

• Narrative – gives “prominence to changes taking place in reality”
  - Dynamic (Becoming) view of reality
  - Details change from potential/potency to act (Moves forward)
  - Attempts to show causality
  - Theorizes a procedure chronologically: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.    (prescriptive)
• Evaluative – pronounces judgment on a thing or event
  - Dynamic (Becoming) view of reality
  - Considers the act relative to its potential (Looks backward)
  - Structure is the same as classificatory mode (parts become criteria)
  - Logic is syllogistic, as classificatory mode, except a positive evaluation is attached –> All GOOD social networks have x,y,z
  Facebook has x,y,z
  Facebook is a good social network

• Descriptive – a still, stable “photograph of reality”
  - Static (Being) view of reality
  - Concerned with individual characteristics (Existence)
  - Whole to part organizational structure (need to be sure you have all the parts when you use this mode)
  - Simply describe the component parts of the main thing
  - Clustering way of thinking
  - The parts need to be parallel in importance, level of abstraction, mutual exclusivity
• Classificatory – “not concerned with the unique thing, but with things as members of groups”
  - Static (Being)
  - Concerned with group/class characteristics (Essence)
  - Part to whole organizational structure –> demonstrate how the part belongs to the whole
  - 1st must take the thing (object under study) and name it into a larger whole
  - Logic is syllogistic–>all social networks have x,y,z characteristics
  Facebook has x,y,z characteristics
  Facebook is a social network
  - Compare/contrast themes use this mode of organization (x,y,z above would be points of comparison)

Other important points:

• The modes closely parallel the 4 points of stasis, as described by Cicero.
• “Modes determine organization” and “differentiate the various kinds of scholars” in disciplines.
  - E.g. “literary history is narrative, literary criticism is evaluative, literary theory is classifictory, and literary         analysis is descriptive.”
• Isolating the modes from one another is artificial, since they are always working with one another to provide a thick picture of reality.
• Looking through the lens of one mode will always hide what could be seen when viewed through another.
• Thus, the modes both illuminate and obfuscate the same reality, depending on which lens one has on.
• “Each mode needs to be supplemented by the other modes to make any pretense to a full account” of reality.

There is a direct relationship between the modes and stasis theory. The modes, like stases, make rhetoric possible in that they offer a way of getting to what’s at issue in a text. They are both ways of constructing reality.

When can a text that exists unto itself in the descriptive mode be used as a heuristic to evaluate (an) other text(s)? What elevates a text to the level of a heuristic? How does that movement happen?