Jeff White, Ball State University
Abstract of a Paper to Be Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
Traditional accounts of the Greek term kairos identify it as "the right time" or the "proper measure." The term is sometimes called upon as a relevant descriptor for important notions in situational "contingency" and "relativism" in postmodern theory. I believe that these invocations of kairos are largely accurate in principle; however, I sense an irony in the fact that these uses of kairos unquestionably assume the "original" meaning-the classic meaning-of the concept to convey a current attitude while, at the same time, the attitudes of postmodernism strongly suggest that we cannot count on "traditional meanings" at all. Essentially, my presentation at the Burke Conference will consider what kairos would look like if it were conceived in postmodern terms
One of the key ingredients in my consideration of kairos will be Kenneth Burke's "comic" frame. I see kairos as, in one sense, the ability to resist rote practices, to challenge 11 pieties," and to avoid following schedules and rituals just for the sake of "rightness"; instead, kairos is a moment of emergence and generation within and from a multitude of situationally juxtaposed perspectives. I mean simply this, for example: when one faces a group of divided colleagues in a department meeting, one might listen, throw in an "o(a)r" or two, and, in a kairic moment, overcome the difference by stating "the right thing." It is in this ability to withhold judgment, to listen, and to consider without exercising a "tragic" dismissal of one side that I see "comedy" as essential to kairos. However, kairos is not only comic; I want to maintain that it contains elements of its own in that it is, as James Kinneavy states, ethical, aesthetic, rhetorical, epistemological, and educational in nature. In fact, in the end, I want to argue that kairos is the comic juxtaposition of all these elements.
My presentation is not the first exploration of kairos in Burke. In a 1993 College English essay, Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard discusses kairos in dramatistic terms. While I agree with much of what she says, I believe that she limits kairos by locating only in Burke's "scene" and by finding it expressible through the "scene-act" ratio alone. Instead, a "kairic" sense can be expressed in any of the ratios because of its comic root. When understood in terms of comedy rather than in terms of scene-act, kairos becomes a much more dynamic critical and generative concept. As such, it is more applicable to current postmodern theories because it offers a more fluid frame for understanding situation and contingency while still carrying its full armament of ethical, aesthetic, rhetorical, epistemological, and educational concerns.
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