Stasis and Kairos and Home Building?

What’s with the title of this blog? Those who already know me know that I’m a rhetoric and composition scholar. This means I have all kinds of knowledge about language and how it works. When Carl and I started talking about titles, though, he was the one who said “stasis” to me. I hadn’t thought about applying my rhetorical knowledge to a blog about building a house. And then I thought about it…. 

Stasis is about framing an issue so as to find the point of productive disagreement, the place where discussion and negotiation and changing of minds can happen. Where there is work to be done. Where minds can meet.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For those readers who don’t work in the academic world of words, I hope the following explanation helps. A writer who works in stasis thinks actively about four areas:

• Conjecture: The stasis of facts, origins, and causality. What exists? Where did it come from? What caused it?
• Definition: The stasis of meaning. What is it? What do we call it? What is the significance of that naming?
• Value: The stasis of quality. How positive/negative is it? There are two kinds: simple and comparative. How good/bad is the thing in and of itself? How good/bad is it compared to other things?
• Policy: The stasis of change and action. What should we do? How should we do it? Again, two kinds: deliberative and forensic. Should we change? And how should we change?
  

In rhetoric, these four stases are used heuristically to generate ideas and lines of argument. In house building?

Well, yes. As we have been thinking about the house we want, the location we want, the features we want, these questions apply frequently. We aren’t making an argument (and we aren’t arguing with each other – at least not yet). But we are staking a claim when we build a house. And in doing so, stasis theory helps us figure it out.

So when we post here, expect to see us referring to these concepts and tagging our blog entries with these terms along with more predicable terms, such as “land” and “roof” and “kitchen.”

Carl contributed “stasis,” but I decided to add kairos. Kairos is a quality of time that is all about the opportune moment for making an argument. It’s a kind of time we don’t really talk about in American culture, though the notion exists in saying like “strike while the iron is hot.” More frequently, though, we think about time in terms of chronos (chronological time; time on the clock) or krisis (immediate time; time for action).

violscraper via flickr

Kairos carries with it a contemplative attitude. It is a thoughtful time, not time merely passing or time demanding our attention. It’s time that is not necessarily slower, just more focused on a purpose with an air of patience and preparation.

I’m bringing kairos into the mix because our building a house here and now is really the culmination of a lot of thought and waiting, of listening and learning, of paying attention and paying rent on places we liked and didn’t like. Between us, Carl and I have lived in 24 different homes as adults, and we bring that preparation to the planning of this one. Moreover, there’s a lot that goes into house building that is attached to time. I’m not really talking about the time it will take the house to be built, but more about when is the right time to do each of the things that need doing along the way. And why are those times right?

Stasis and kairos. A house framed thoughtfully and in the right time. That’s what we’re aiming for here. Welcome to our journey.