The Untimely

Temporal droppings.

Autistic meanderings that stray from linearity.

Little sedimentations, little curls of temporality.

Dense knots clogging the otherwise smooth materiality of time in its totalizing productions.

Mischievous bebops lurking between the tick and the tock, upsetting the steady count.

The clock's disability.

These are some of the many ways Bayo Akomolafe wrestles to articulate what he calls the “untimely.” But perhaps his most pressing meaning can be discerned from the scandalous question he asks: “What if time misbehaves?” What if time - far from being a simple line that carries on into steady futures through mediating nows and exhausted pasts - careens off the highway, swirls into circuitous paths, and produces monstrous bodies that the imperial tick-tock cannot metabolize?

Why This Talk Matters Now

In an Anthropocenic moment when the Doomsday Clock inches closer than ever to midnight; when climate scientists tell us we have less time than we think to get our act together; and, when the pillars of global coordination are being dismantled by the rise of authoritarianism, the bitter urge is to argue with the gods for more time, or to imagine ourselves returning to a safer place on the timeline. But Akomolafe argues our “fixes” often reproduce the problem, and offers alternatives to progress narratives as the default response.

The Long View

Akomolafe urges us to deepen the practice of long-term thinking by exploring other temporal dimensions. He asks us who gets to move through time seamlessly in the first place, and what gets buried or forgotten when a single framework is universalized.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, writer, activist, professor of psychology, and executive director of The Emergence Network.