Kairos and Katrina

Five years ago, on this date and at this time, I was on the I-10 between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, along with several hundred thousand others, evacuating - fleeing - before Hurricane Katrina. Five years later, today, New Orleans is awash (intentional pun) with politicians and pundits, memorials and tributes, retrospectives, reports and stories. Katrina is being remembered and analyzed. Every media has an angle - Film, TV, Music, Poetry, Fiction, Memoir, History, Graphic Novels. Etc. You can find everything from the too-personal to the too critical.

All of this demonstrates the rhetorical power of Kairos, as well as the importance of demonstrative rhetoric.

Kairos is a Greek word that roughly means the circumstances of a situation. Kairos is relevant time, as opposed to Chronos which is linear time. "In Roman rhetoric, the Latin word opportunitas was used in a similar manner; its root port- means an opening, and from it we get English verbs such as import and export. ... Kairos is thus a "window" of time during which action is most advantageous" (Ancient Rhetorics for Classical Students, p. 37). It's not a quantity of time (Chronos) - a day, a month, a year - though it has a quantity of time; rather, Kairos is a quality of time.

Aside from "a window of opportunity" we also use the commonplace "seize the moment" to describe Kairos. Another word we use to describe the concept of Kairos is "occasion" - as in, it's the right occasion.

(For a succinct, useful definition, see http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ and search under Kairos.)

These concepts - opportunity, occasion, moment - Kairos - imply place as well as time. The occasion or opportunity is as much a matter of where as when. Coming back to Katrina, for example, there's a reason why Brian Williams of NBC News or President Obama came to New Orleans itself to commemorate the five year "anniversary" of the hurricane. Timing is about place - what works in one location (a stand-up comic's routine in a comedy club) fails in another (a memorial service or even a sporting event). In this example, the comic is still funny (hopefully), but his timing is off - not the timing of his jokes, but his Kairos-time.

Space and time, as Einstein pointed out, are inter-related. Kairos works along the time-space continuum. In this sense, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address can be seen as a 268 word exercise is Kairos. Or just the most famous exemplum of it.

So it's not nostalgia, overkill, or anything else but good timing - Kairos - that so much Katrina is happening in New Orleans on August 29th.

You might ask, though, why is this Kairos different than all other Kairos? Certainly, the one year "anniversary" of Katrina was a big deal. (I put "anniversary" in quotes because while the word literally means "the date on which an event took place in a previous year," we tend to associate it with something happy or positive. So the quotation marks call attention to the word, and give us a different rhetorical perspective. I hope.)

But the fifth year is certainly a bigger deal than the fourth year. No doubt the sixth year will not be as big a deal as the fifth, but the tenth will.

That's because Kairos-time, like Chronos-time, is tied to cycles, and these cycles are tied to rhythms or structures of human perception. (Five - five fingers, five senses.) For this reason, Kairos is not just "seizing the moment," the present moment, it's also seizing the moment, again - making the past present. Through Kairos, we recognize a renewed relevance.

In our case, Katrina was relevant, lost its relevance, then regained it, but in a different form. Even when the text is the same - the levees, for example - the context has changed - the Kairos of the levees now (relevant again, at least for the moment) is very different than the Kairos of the levees five, four, three or two years ago. Or one.

One final point: Kairos is closely associated with demonstrative rhetoric, arguments of the present, of values, of identity. If you look carefully, that is, rhetorically, at the narratives, speeches and orations, at the outlines and framing of issues (economic opportunity (!), infrastructure, wetlands, etc.) presented today in New Orleans, and in the week(s) before as prelude and the week(s) after as epilogue, you'll see that all (almost all) emerge from an underlying stasis (place of discussion). And that underlying stasis is an assertion of the value and values of New Orleans, of its identity. (In this sense, Kairos gives us key words, but that's a topic for another discussion.)

And now, I will indulge in some Kairos, and consider and commemorate, reflect and remember, the Chronos of Katrina.