Kakokairos: A Not-Altogether-Unserious Theory of Time, Language, and Autism

Abstract This article discusses autistic temporalities, asking what it means to be unstuck from neurotypical time. Remi Yergeau first coined the term kakokairos to playfully describe how autistics deploy distinct modes of rhetoric to mediate our various temporal displacements. The present paper draws from autistic testimony to flesh out the meanings of kakokairos, but its primary case studies are literary texts, to avoid reifying any particular autistic's temporality as exemplary. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life both portray a tension between simultaneous and sequential temporalities. Furthermore, each text's protagonist occupies an “amalgamated” temporality that deconstructs this binary. This article argues that these amalgamations are helpful for understanding autistic temporalities, whose multifarious nature resists any singular rubric, including that of the time loop. Indeed, if there is any defining feature of autistic temporalities, it is simply that they deviate from normative temporal mores. Yet these disjunctures occur in a world which was built around neurotypical temporalities, so autistic survivance relies on some degree of familiarity with neurotypical expectations, resulting in an amalgamated awareness. The article concludes with a not-altogether-unserious enactment of kakokairos and speculates on the nature of neurotypical temporalities.