Kairos

I must admit that I struggle with holding on to the meanings of some words.  Some become instant friends, their meanings resonant with the music in my head.  Some stick to me like lint—forgotten, mostly, until I look down and start picking away.  There are others that, regardless of how hard I try to remember—contextualize, use—elude me.  Yes, I can fit them in, hide my confusion amongst old friends and relatives, but the haze of not-quite-understanding never really leaves.  To some extent, this is the joy of language for me.  It is the noble beast as pet.  It’s the chimp that one day might just rip my face off.

This is my way of introducing a term that has popped up in my recent readings in rhetoric: kairos.  It appears in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s introduction to classical rhetoric in Rhetorical Traditions: “This is the Sophistic doctrine of kairos, that is, the idea that the elements of a situation, its cultural and political contexts, rather than transcendent unchanging laws, will produce both the best solutions to problems and the best verbal means of presenting them persuasively” (24).  I underlined this sentence and wrote ‘kairos’ in the margins with double lines under it.  I thought it was an interesting word, an interesting concept worth trying to hold on to.

Jane Donawerth brings up kairos in her article, “Conversations and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory By Renaissance Women”: “The sophistic conception of timeliness or kairos, as adapted to conversation, thus becomes essential to de Scudery’s theory” (187). A few pages later, Donawerth adds a bit more in a footnote: “Compare Cavendish’s use of sophistic rhetorical theory, especially the social purpose of speech and the emphasis on kairos or timeliness of speech, to Susan Jarratt’s present-day adaptation of sophistry to feminist composition theory” (191).

Now, I initially confused myself—I read ‘timelessness’ instead of ‘timeliness’ in Donawerth’s writing.  Clearly, this switcheroo completely confounds the notion of kairos.  A simple little twitch changes everything.

I bring all of this up because I like the idea of kairos.  I confess, I’ve been enjoying the intersections I’ve noticed in my rhetoric readings between sophistry and postmodernism, and kairos seems a fitting concept to troubling and rethinking rhetorics.  As I sift back through my past writings, my past blogging, I hope to rethink and rewrite them to fit the evolution of my own thinking and reading—thus keeping them in place, in Kairos.