Almost twenty years ago, James Kinneavy encouraged college professors of rhetoric to think more carefully about what he saw as a neglected idea in rhetoric: kairos. Kinneavy defined kairos as "the opportune moment" to speak or act. Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee have more recently defined kairos as a "situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity' (as in ‘the time is ripe')." Kairos is the "advantageous time" to speak or act.
Obviously, writers and speakers have to worry about stepping into a conversation at the right time in order to have the best impact. Another rhetorician of the twentieth century, Kenneth Burke, offered the metaphor of the "parlor" to explain how writers and speakers must function, and I think his metaphor has particular importance to our notion of kairos. Burke tells us to think of a party at someone's home. In the parlor, people are having different conversations that have gone on before you arrived. You walk in and listen to what is being said, you figure out the timbre and tone of the conversation, you listen for key terms and names so that you understand what people are referring to. If it's a conversation about "football," then you listen to see whether the folks are talking about the "greats of yesterday" or about the most recent Superbowl. Before you talk, most likely, you will listen for such clues so that you don't blurt out something completely off topic. Buried in this metaphor of the parlor is the idea that effective speakers who want to join the conversation (whether in the parlor or in writing communities) must listen to what's happening in order to most effectively choose the "right" time to come in.
One of the things that kairos does for us is complicate "easy" notions of audience, purpose, and logos because it foregrounds the idea that conversations are constantly changing, so what might have been the most appropriate position at one time will not work later. One example that might make this make sense: how many of you got to your first college writing course and quickly realized that the sort of topics you'd written about in high school, as well as how you'd approached those topics, were no longer the "right" way to do it. Your college professor suddenly wanted "more" or wanted to see different topics or arguments. What you were writing about worked for the audience of the teacher in high school, so you eventually learned how to write that sort of piece. You developed a kairotic stance based on your knowledge of your teacher and his/her expectations. However, when you tried to do the same thing with a different teacher/situation/time, you realized that it didn't work. The "opportune moment" to speak had changed in shape, but your writing/discourse hadn't changed with it. This disconnect produced a conflict among you, your writing, and your new rhetorical situation.
The same thing happens for professional writers who try to get their work published. Sometimes, writers are "ahead of their time" with their writing; they are saying things that the public is not ready to hear yet. As such, their ideas fall on deaf ears. When engaging in rhetorical analyses of written/published texts, it is important to think about how the writers' ideas are part of their time periods and the ways of thinking that went on during that time. As such, kairos is closely connected to ethos, pathos, and logos. When writers establish their ethos in the text, they assume that the time is right for such an ethos, that the audience will respond to it. The same goes for pathos and logos.
For example, when Bruce Bawer wrote A Place at the Table,
he argued that it was important for gay men and lesbians to "normalize," to
look like "everyone else" so that they could get equal rights. As such, he
had to get rid of drag queens, leather daddies, radical lesbians — all
those "most visible" in the gay and lesbian community. His ethos as
a "normal guy" jazzed with many gays and lesbians (as well as conservative
and moderate heterosexuals) who agreed with his position, and his book came
out at a time when stopping gay-bashing seemed more important than other things.
However, more recently, books like Urvashi Vaid's Virtual Equality
and Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal have effected a different
stance than Bawer's. They have argued that Bawer's position actually hurts
gays and lesbians who are part of "fringe" groups. These books came out at
the "right" time, so to speak, because they were saying in print what many
were already thinking. At the same time, because they were aligning themselves
with the conversations of their times, they also had the opportunity to insert
other ideas that might challenge their readers' initial positions.