Unhinged: Kairos and the Invention of the Untimely

Abstract

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement or time as it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema, this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention, already present yet dormant within kairos.

Notes

¹ Kairos has a long and rich tradition, and I should mention at the outset the contributions of Paul Tillich (1972), Mario Untersteiner (1954), Augusto Rostagni (1922), and Doro Levi (1923). Although rhetoric has learned much concerning the origins and diversity of meanings of the concept from these and numerous other classical scholars, Kinneavy, though he is not without his critics (several with whom I am sympathetic), should be recognized for popularizing the term into other linked domains, especially the ubuiquitous 1st-year writing requirement, WAC, and the administration of graduate and undergraduate writing programs. Whether Carolyn Miller's (2002) statement that Kinneavy “did more than anyone to revive kairos as a term of rhetorical art” (p. xiii) is completely accurate, his contribution is noteworthy. In more postmodern circles, I should also mention at the outset the importance of Bernard Miller's (1987) essay “Heidegger and the Gorgian Kairos,” and I have already mentioned Eric Charles White's (1987) Kaironomia; such works effectively changed the way rhetoricians would think about the link between kairos and situation. Indeed, this influence is a major concern of mine and I take it up next.

²See Jennifer Edbauer (2004), Byron Hawk (2004), and Collin Brooke (2009) for cogent discussions of rhetorical ecologies. See Michelle Baillif (1997) for an analysis of the feminist rhetorical space of ethea advanced by Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds which anticipates discussions of ecology.

³I make this statement with one caveat. A particular version of kairos, what I call “cosmological kairos” is an exception, as I discuss next.

⁴The reader will notice that at certain occasions throughout this article I use the terms inventive and creative somewhat interchangeably. The terms historically carry a denotative distinction between discovery (invention) and to put into existence (creation); they also carry a connotative distinction between classical ways of knowing where matter is transformed through art, craft, or nature to form something new on the one hand and Biblical connotations that posit God as a source for the creation of the universe, or, on a smaller scale, Man as the source for ideas and their outcomes. These differences between the terms invent and create echo the debates in rhetoric taking place in the 1970s and 1980s involving the question of whether the rhetor discovers the material for invention or is the source of the material himself. All of these distinctions emphasize the differences in explaining how things come into being. They are concerned with causes, and from both of these points of view, whether Man discovers the material in the world or in his self, he remains the source and focal point of the inventive/creative process. For the purposes of this article, I am not interested in Man as the source of invention. It could be said, rather, that I am interested in how artifacts come into being from a nonanthropocentric point of view. Once Man is removed from the center of the equation, and one turns her attention to the objects themselves, the artifacts that are made or come into being, one can consider the network of forces surrounding the artifact itself. By placing the object, the thing created, into the center of focus, Man is thrust to the periphery and becomes one among a variety of influences. If the reader is able to entertain the decentering of Man in the question of invention, then the historical distinctions between “invention” and “creation” should become much less important.

⁵There is room here for confusion if one is thinking about a very old sense of time that Paul Tillich (1972) traced through the New Testament, the Jewish tradition, and back to Parmenides, namely, aeon. Commonly understood as a “future to come,” it certainly does exist outside a human form of time—but one that is grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the contrary, I am speaking about actual durations that are neither transcendent nor imaginary.

⁶As already mentioned, these different versions of kairos are not meant to provide a general taxonomy of kairos but rather to disclose different phases in an unfolding discussion concerning its role and our concern with kairic invention. The intention is not to provide an overview of the scholarship of kairos but to reveal a line of thought that suggests that the potential of kairic invention has been obscured by an overinvestment in the situation surrounding kairos.

⁷With the inventions of electric light and clocks, moderns do not typically organize life around cyclical, natural time. It is important to recognize a point that Smith makes concerning Greek concepts of time; that is, that the Greeks, or at least through the example of Thucydides that Smith (2002) provides, that chronos was modeled on the cyclical repetition of the seasons rather than on a linear model (p. 54).

⁸One who studies the ancients may wonder why I have omitted Isocrates who also grounded his rhetorical padiea on kairos. Because the different versions among the three share common ground concerning the concept, I omit Isocrates simply for economy's sake. For more on the relationship between Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle concerning kairos, see Philip Sipiora, 2002.

⁹These arguments have been corroborated by several contemporary rhetorical scholars including Bruce McComiskey (2002), Scott Consigny (2001), Edward Schiappa (2003), Susan Jarratt (1991), and Eric Charles White (1987).

¹⁰George Kennedy (1998) made a similar turn in his renewed conception of rhetoric in opening two chapters to Comparative Rhetoric.

¹¹Barthes referenced Camus, Robbe-Grillet, and Proust. An English speaker could just as well add Woolf, Stein, and Joyce.

¹²I never experience the other in its entirety but only an image of the other. A bird does not experience the entirety of the sky but only its encounter with it.… Because Deleuze attributes the same ontological status to images as to things themselves, he shares a strong affinity with the sophistic tradition, especially with the so-called third sophistic. Indeed, it is that recognition of the status of the simulacrum that helps to place Deleuze into a counterphilosophical traditional that often serves as a source for rhetoricians and other counterphilosophers. See Vitanza (1997, 2002) and Ballif (1998).

¹³The best way, of course, to get a sense of the time-image is to engage Deleuze's cinema books and his work on Bergson directly. Here one finds the concepts of the “Open,” the “Outside,” “pure duration,” “sheets of past and peaks of present,” and the “crystal image of time.” These are all complex concepts that deserve full explanation in themselves. I add this note because I present only a modest introduction in the short amount of space I have, and I encourage those interested in the ideas presented here to take up their study. The field of rhetoric has much to learn and benefit from investigations into Deleuze's work.

¹⁴Particularly in Lynch's film, this is not a privileged instant. As with the Hitchcock example, I choose it for ease of illustration. The anomalies of the film continually illustrate its being out-of-joint.

¹⁵Incompossible: Following Leibniz, two or more contradicting worlds that simultaneously exist. Such as a person who is dead and alive at the same time. We might think of The Sixth Sense, but Greg Harrison's (2004) film November is a more extreme example. In this film, the heroine comes to discover by the end of the film that she has always been dead. Unlike in The Sixth Sense, however, there is no liminal boundary between the living and the dead.