Unhinged: Kairos and the Invention of the Untimely

Authors

Robert Leston, CUNY New York City College of TechnologyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

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 timeas 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.

Comments

This work was originally published in Atlantic Journal of Communication.