The Untimely with Bio Akomolafe

概览

This episode centers on Bayo Akomolafe’s concept of “the untimely”: not another alternative clock, but the excess, gap, residue, or opening produced inside clock time itself. He argues that attempts to escape modern time often repeat its logic, while the more interesting possibility lies in noticing where time fails, leaks, misbehaves, or becomes incomplete.

Akomolafe develops the idea through Yoruba twin cosmology, his family story, Black Atlantic histories, plantation time, quantum uncertainty, disability, autism, grace, progress, and fugitive spaces. Across these examples, he frames the untimely as something that cannot be fully planned, mastered, or converted into a program.

The discussion repeatedly returns to modernity’s need to categorize, measure, include, and make bodies legible. Against that, Akomolafe proposes attention to cracks: the places where bodies, histories, grief, ancestrality, and failed punctuality point toward forms of life not captured by the ledger.

分段落总结

[00:25] Introducing the Untimely

[事实] Rebecca Lendl introduces the Long Now Foundation as an institution that takes time seriously across the next and last 10,000 years.

[事实] She presents Bayo Akomolafe’s provocation: the clock people try to escape is producing something more interesting than time.

[事实] The “untimely” is described as something between tick and tock, not an alternative to clock time, because an alternative can reinforce the same logic.

[推测] The episode positions Long Now’s long-term thinking in productive tension with Akomolafe’s refusal of past-present-future architecture.

[02:25] Time as Backdrop, Money, and Countdown

[事实] Akomolafe begins by thanking time and questioning the assumption that time is simply a universal backdrop.

[事实] He recalls growing up in Nigeria with songs and classes organized around the idea that time is money and must be managed.

[事实] He says contemporary climate discourse often frames time as running out, with people speaking of deadlines, thresholds, and extinction.

[推测] He treats “running out of time” not only as an ecological warning, but as a symptom of a deeper temporal imagination.

[06:15] Why Alternative Clocks Are Not Enough

[事实] Akomolafe lists proliferating temporalities such as Indigenous time, spiritual time, yoga time, long time, and deep time.

[事实] He argues that long time and deep geological time do not necessarily dislodge modernity’s logic of human supremacy.

[事实] He says humans can extend time 10,000 years into the future or millions of years into the past while still keeping themselves central.

[推测] His critique is aimed less at specific time frameworks than at any framework that preserves mastery under a new name.

[09:01] A Black Studies Suspicion of Time

[事实] Akomolafe says that as a Black studies scholar he is “programmatically suspicious of time.”

[事实] He names thinkers including Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Fred Moten, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka as part of the intellectual nourishment behind that suspicion.

[事实] He says he wants to speak about time differently and gently introduce the concept of the untimely.

[推测] The talk shifts here from general critique into a philosophical and autobiographical method.

[10:24] Yoruba Twin Cosmology

[事实] Akomolafe says Nigeria has more twins than any other place on the planet, with Igbo-Ora identified as especially known for twins.

[事实] He explains that in Yoruba naming, the first twin to emerge is Taiwo and the second is Kehinde.

[事实] He says Yoruba cosmology treats Taiwo as the younger one sent out first to inspect the world, while Kehinde is older in the womb.

[推测] The twin story begins to unsettle linear birth order as a simple measure of before and after.

[14:29] Family Trauma and the Child After Twins

[事实] Akomolafe tells the story of his mother giving birth to twin boys in 1981, both of whom died the same day.

[事实] He says he learned the fuller dimensions of this family story recently and that it had existed as a kind of unlanded family secret.

[事实] He explains that the child born after twins has a special Yoruba name: Idowu, meaning “I came after the twins.”

[推测] His own position as the child after the twins becomes the personal ground for his theory of excess and aftermath.

[16:37] Idowu as Excess

[事实] Akomolafe says Yoruba cosmology treats Idowu as older than the twins because Idowu holds the twins’ feverish energy.

[事实] He describes Idowu’s work as holding or composting the binary rather than resolving it.

[事实] He says his elders tell him his brothers have been sublimated into the atmosphere, so he must meet culture as if it were his brothers.

[推测] Idowu becomes a figure for the third term that interrupts binary thinking without becoming a neat solution.

[18:30] The Untimely Is Idowu

[事实] Akomolafe directly identifies the untimely with Idowu: the excess, residue, and surplus of temporality.

[事实] He warns that creating alternatives can repeat the logic of what one is trying to escape, using anti-capitalism as an example.

[事实] He says feminist epistemologies, Indigenous cosmologies, trickster cultures, and Black studies invite attention to excess and surplus.

[推测] The untimely is framed as neither opposition nor replacement, but as what exceeds the terms of opposition.

[20:01] The Clock Produces More Than Time

[事实] Akomolafe says the clock people have been trying to escape is producing more than time.

[事实] He describes “temporal droppings,” “autistic meanderings,” and “little curls of temporality” as attempts to name what resists language.

[事实] He says Idowu is the third that is not part of the count but breaks the count.

[推测] The clock becomes important not because it is liberating, but because its failures reveal hidden openings.

[21:35] The Black Atlantic and Dancing the Slave

[事实] Akomolafe turns to the Middle Passage and describes enslaved Black bodies being brought above deck and forced to dance to keep them marketable.

[事实] He describes the whip as a downbeat that created a temporal command and a subordinated subject.

[事实] He says the forced dancing also generated movements the whip did not anticipate, linking this excess to resistance and to forms like capoeira without claiming direct causality.

[推测] The example shows how coercive rhythm can produce unintended bodily futures inside domination.

[26:35] The Plantation Bell and Musical Gaps

[事实] Akomolafe says the plantation bell commanded enslaved people when to eat, stop eating, go to the plantation, and return.

[事实] He describes time as having a history of colonizing bodies through anticipation and command.

[事实] He says that every mark also creates an unmarked gap, and from such gaps came songs and musical forms such as jazz, hip hop, reggae, and blues, without presenting a simple causal chain.

[推测] Music functions here as an example of life emerging in the intervals of violent temporal discipline.

[28:24] Quantum Time and Speculation

[事实] Akomolafe mentions two recent quantum physics papers that, as he reads them, suggest time is not settled.

[事实] He says increasingly precise measuring instruments lead toward the realization that time is speculative, superposed, and undecided.

[事实] He connects this to Black scholars’ suggestion that coloniality cannot make final claims on bodies.

[推测] He uses quantum uncertainty as a resonance with, rather than proof of, his broader claim about time’s incompleteness.

[30:11] Staying with Excess

[事实] Akomolafe says the invitation is to revisit claims to mastering time or mastering the clock.

[事实] He argues that people should stay in spaces of excess where bodies can feel and do other things.

[事实] He says the clock has never been complete and that there is an Idowu in every second.

[推测] This is one of the talk’s central practical orientations: not escape the clock, but notice its incompletion.

[31:50] Accommodation and Modern Categoricity

[事实] Akomolafe introduces “accommodation” as a field or house where bodies gain legibility.

[事实] He says the accommodation of modernity hates cracks and works through categoricity, finalizing what things are.

[事实] He links categorization to surveillance, archiving, and incarceration.

[推测] “Accommodation” names the system that makes bodies visible only by making them governable.

[33:41] Inclusion as a Tool of Power

[事实] Akomolafe says modernity includes what it does not understand by giving it a seat at the table and making it legible.

[事实] He invokes an apocryphal Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times, may you be seen by the emperor, and may you get what you want.

[事实] He argues that even speaking truth to power can help the accommodation continue when legibility becomes the mechanism of inclusion.

[推测] The critique challenges political strategies that seek recognition without questioning the terms of recognition.

[35:38] Punctuality, African Time, and Pathologized Resistance

[事实] Akomolafe says the accommodation covers the untimely by naming people late, unpunctual, or in need of time management.

[事实] He says Africans are often described as perpetually late through the phrase “African time.”

[事实] He suggests something in bodies resists the punctuality of colonization and is not available for imperialism.

[推测] Failed punctuality is reinterpreted as a possible signal of resistance rather than merely a defect.

[37:42] Parapolitics of the Untimely

[事实] Akomolafe says people are feeling grief that is not only their own and a sense that agency, solutions, and justice are not enough.

[事实] He calls this invitation the “parapolitics of the untimely,” distinguishing it from politics as being seen.

[事实] He defines the untimely as not time-counting or a known future, but a stain with uncertainty, failure, and what does not fit.

[推测] The parapolitical names forms of response that do not rely on visibility, mastery, or programmatic certainty.

[39:00] Eshu, Decolonization, and Sanctuary

[事实] Akomolafe describes Eshu as the Yoruba trickster who lives at crossroads and says Eshu is called Idowu in Yoruba stories.

[事实] He tells a story in which Eshu enters the slave ship, not to fight mastery from outside, but to undo power from within.

[事实] He says decolonization is not creating another world, but insisting that the world upsetting us is incomplete.

[事实] He says sanctuary is not a project to build on schedule, but something the world conspires to create through cracks in bodies.

[推测] Decolonization is framed as experimental inhabiting of cracks rather than a finished alternative blueprint.

[43:50] Autistic Time and His Son Kea

[事实] Akomolafe says he calls the untimely autistic time because of his eight-year-old son Kea.

[事实] He recounts Kea saying “Merry Christmas” every day in 2023, even in April, with genuine joy.

[事实] When Akomolafe told him Christmas happens only on December 25, Kea replied through tears that it was Christmas.

[事实] Orland Bishop asked Akomolafe why he was “gentrifying” the boy and suggested Kea might perceive time radically differently.

[推测] Kea’s time is presented as a challenge to neurotypical and calendar-bound assumptions, not as something to correct.

[47:42] Something to Do That We Know Nothing About

[事实] Akomolafe says Kea walks around in circles and once explained, “There are things I have to do that you know nothing about.”

[事实] He identifies this as the untimely: something to do that people know nothing about, not a blueprint, plan, project, or foundation.

[事实] He compares this to bodies taken across the Atlantic without a GPS or plan, being dragged into the mist.

[推测] The untimely requires staying with unknowability rather than demanding clear instructions.

[49:46] Grace as Awkward and Monstrous

[事实] Eden Perlstein asks Akomolafe to connect the untimely with grace, especially the monstrousness of grace in Akomolafe’s book.

[事实] Akomolafe says he thinks of grace as awkward rather than amazing.

[事实] He uses Dostoevsky’s parable of Christ returning and being imprisoned by the church as an example of grace disrupting established order.

[事实] He defines the monster in a folkloric and Indigenous sense as that which reworks time, bodies, and the middle of a binary.

[推测] Grace, in this account, is not comfort; it is disturbance that exposes incompletion.

[53:57] The Monster Reveals Desensitization

[事实] Akomolafe uses a humorous example of a bad smell in a room that people gradually become used to.

[事实] He says when someone enters and notices the smell, the group may treat that person as the monster.

[事实] He argues that the monster is not bringing chaos but introducing people to the chaos they are already in.

[事实] He defines grace as the entrance of movement and possibility into a sterile, clinical, carceral, colonial dimension.

[推测] The story makes grace a force of re-sensitization rather than rescue.

[56:14] Progress, Catch-Up, and Emptied Locality

[事实] Perlstein asks how progress relates to stories of time, origins, teleology, and social values.

[事实] Akomolafe says progress is teleological and linked to time as an arrow moving from past to present to future.

[事实] He describes a “catch-up imperative” in Africa, where people are told they must become more like California or the West to be fully themselves.

[事实] He says progress empties locality and turns place into space.

[推测] Progress is criticized as a temporal story that ranks civilizations and strips nearby worlds of value.

[58:30] Ancestrality Is Not the Past

[事实] Akomolafe says progress must get rid of ancestrality in order to travel straight.

[事实] He criticizes romanticized originalism and the idea that Indigenous cosmologies can simply be picked up and applied.

[事实] He defines ancestrality as the immediacy of other bodies in the room and the idea that the world is not empty.

[事实] He says modernity wants people to walk straight, but “we must limp,” and that limping is salvation.

[推测] Ancestrality is treated as a present, embodied density that interrupts linear progress.

[60:08] Time as Collaboration and Fugitive Space

[事实] Perlstein asks what it would mean for time to become a medium of collaboration rather than accommodation.

[事实] Akomolafe answers with the Great Dismal Swamp, where people escaping plantations found a hostile and hospitable place beyond plantation clock time.

[事实] He says life worlds are built in cracks and that some ways of showing up are not on books, ledgers, or cards.

[事实] He refuses to pin down the untimely as a definition and says it is already working with bodies, ancestries, and temporalities.

[推测] Collaboration with time means being moved by fugitive, unregistered forms of relation rather than scheduling them into legibility.

[64:11] Refusing Friendliness with Time

[事实] An audience question asks how people can become friendlier with time instead of fearful.

[事实] Akomolafe jokes that taking a time management class is one way, but says he does not want to be friendly with time.

[事实] He says his body is positioned differently from modern temporality and that he is looking for fugitive spaces.

[推测] His response rejects therapeutic adjustment to time in favor of escaping the arrangement that makes time disciplinary.

[64:58] Time as Currency and Whiteness as Practice

[事实] An audience prompt asks about time as currency in relation to money, attention, and thoughts.

[事实] Akomolafe says whiteness should not be reduced to white bodies and describes whiteness as a practice rather than an identity.

[事实] He says white modernity arranges value in ways tied to settlement, and that time circulates value through phrases like “time is money.”

[事实] He says the more interesting question is what else this currency does: where it pools, misbehaves, or fails to complete the circuit.

[推测] Time as currency matters to him mainly where its circulation breaks down and creates unexpected openings.

[68:44] The Attentional and Its Cracks

[事实] A final audience prompt invokes the untimely, grace, Walter Benjamin, the messianic, and things that arrive when one is not looking.

[事实] Akomolafe says he is developing the idea of “the attentional” and argues that no one actually pays attention.

[事实] He describes attention as a weather or geology that holds and bends bodies toward value.

[事实] He gives an example of a Brazilian woman whose idea was ignored until a white man with a PhD repeated it and received applause.

[事实] He says he is looking for cracks in the attentional, where new futures may be buried.

[推测] The attentional extends his critique from time to perception: what people notice is shaped by infrastructures of value.

播客点评/总结

[推测] The episode’s value lies in how it refuses a simple self-help or policy answer to temporal crisis. Instead of offering a new clock, it asks listeners to examine where clocks, categories, progress narratives, and attention systems fail to fully capture life.

[推测] Its strongest moments come from the movement between intimate story and large historical argument: Yoruba twin cosmology, Akomolafe’s brothers, his son Kea, the Middle Passage, plantation bells, and the Great Dismal Swamp all become ways to think about time without reducing time to abstraction.

[推测] The limitation is that the talk deliberately resists operational clarity. Listeners seeking a concrete method for “practicing” the untimely may find Akomolafe’s refusal of blueprints frustrating, though that refusal is also central to his argument.

[推测] This episode is best suited for listeners interested in philosophy, Black studies, decolonial thought, theology, ecology, disability, and critiques of progress. It is less suited for those looking for practical time management or a conventional future-planning framework.