Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings

What exactly is the difference from one century to the next? Is it the difference between a past world—for which the specter represented a coming threat—and a present world, today, where the specter would represent a threat that some would like to believe is past and whose return it would be necessary again, once again in the future, to conjure away?

Derrida, Specters of Marx

Preface

I think it entirely appropriate that the “Political Shape of Kairos” makes its way into a special double issue of Enculturation devoted to questions of disciplinarity. Writers in this issue, for instance, are asked to be aware of a now-time where both Rhetoric and Composition are marked in different ways by some sense of crisis. In a passage from the Dissoi Logoi attributed to the Sophist Hippias, Mario Untersteiner reads kairos as “unprecedented time” (306). A useful interpretation might include the idea that new imaginings are possible for momentary reconciliations between Rhetoric and Composition. Carolyn Eriksen Hill’s reading of kairos underscores the potential for transformation in such times: “What we—our students and we—today tend to experience as binary oppositions, the static, intractable polarized thinking that shows up in our lives and in our discourse, was for Pythagoras a matter of those forces expressing themselves kairotically and energetically, shaping and changing our experience of time, and themselves being transformed by it” (213). We might add Rhetoric/Composition to the list of binaries that have interacted kairotically at times, producing momentary reconciliations between the two disciplines. These interactions have been a great boon to Composition. Current Traditional Rhetoric, Process Pedagogy, and Writing Across the Curriculum, all borrow important features from classical and modern rhetorical theory.

Quite possibly this double issue of Enculturation is a self-conscious act of kairos. Eric Charles White notes in his book Kaironomia that for Gorgias, “kairos stands for a radical principle of occasionality which implies a conception of the production of meaning in language as a process of continuous adjustment to and creation of the present occasion” (14). The occasion created for this issue begins with a question: “Where’s the Rhetoric?” In the field of Rhetoric, kairos might form the core of maintaining, over and over, its very existence against those for whom the study of intention is inherently dangerous to their positions of power. Much in the way Derrida wants us to maintain the “specters of Marx,” that is, the ability of Marx’s ideas to destabilize and haunt capital, a kairos for Rhetoric asserts itself as a way of revealing design and desire. Maintaining Rhetoric as an act of criticism is important for its continued departmental viability, yet rhetoric happens, regardless of the self-conscious act. Roland Barthes may have provided a semiotics of culture, to name one example, but Rhetoric seeks to unpack the shifting desires of those sign systems designed to move people in different ways.

What the following article offers is a reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx as an example of kairos. His intention is to re-invent and even rescue Marx from both the totalizing effects of Marxist scholarship and the death sentence of global capitalism. I hope that readers might be encouraged to take from this article not so much a plan for enacting kairos as a new awareness that comes from recognizing its transformative power.

For a complete article:  

Casey, Paul. "The Political Shape of Kairos." Enculturation 5.2 (2004): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/5_2/casey.html