The Untimely

Posthumanist thinker, poet and teacher Bayo Akomolafe presents The Untimely, which challenges our assumptions about continuity and time.

The Long Now Foundation welcomes

Bayo Akomolafe

The Untimely

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This talk is co-presented by Ayin Press, publisher of Akomolafe's next book, Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader. Akomolafe will be hosted by Eden Pearlstein, cofounder of Ayin Press.

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.

Learn More

• WATCH “A New Theory of the Self” with fellow Long Now Council member Indy Johar on entanglement, selfhood, and the crisis of the individual.
• LISTEN The Edges in the Middle series on For The Wild podcast — ongoing conversations with Naomi Klein, john a. powell, and others.

Book cover image courtesy of Ayin press, designed by Melissa Weiss, illustrated by Krista Dragomer

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye), Bayo Akomolafe is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’ and curator of Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation. […]

The Long Now Foundation is a globally-recognized champion of long-term thinking and responsibility, operating within the context of the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now. Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience on stage in San Francisco and with millions more around the globe through our podcast and videos.