Jonathan Johnson-Swagel

Section I. Temporal Enclosure: Time as Colonized Medium

Time is not an innocent container around which human and nonhuman lives circulate in freedom, since the very instruments that score and divide duration also conscript bodies, territories, and relations into a grammar of governance whose authority depends on the appearance of neutrality; calendars, clocks, schedules, fiscal quarters, timestamped ledgers, machine queues, and synchronized networks do more than measure because they enclose, and this enclosure operates with the same epistemic and political force as cartographic borders or cadastral lines, which is why the argument must begin by refusing the myth that time is a pure backdrop and by demonstrating instead that the modern time regime is a colonial technology of world making shaped by extraction, denial, and standardization that recodes multiplicity as deviation and renders other tempos unintelligible until they submit to the authorized beat of an imperial metronome.

Johannes Fabian named one decisive tactic of this regime when he showed how anthropology fabricated its object by placing the people it described in another time altogether, a move he called the denial of coevalness; description becomes temporal displacement, the field site becomes an earlier now, and the interlocutor becomes an anachronism made legible only through the researcher’s narrative of development that carries the prestige of science while dissolving contemporaneity itself (Fabian). This gesture appears benign because it speaks the language of observation, yet it operates as a world ordering practice: by refusing shared time to the other, it licenses intervention and pedagogy, since those who do not occupy the same now can be remade without consent, can be governed in the name of catching up, and can be curated in museums and ethnographies as residues of what the present has already overcome. The effect is ontological rather than stylistic because it converts temporal grammar into being, and once being is so converted the subjects who resist the prescribed sequence become problems rather than neighbors.

Mark Rifkin shows the parallel structure within settler colonial contexts with arresting clarity when he argues that the settler state secures territory by imposing what he calls settler time, which is not simply a chronology but a temporal infrastructure of sovereignty that makes Indigenous governance, seasonal round, kinship, and land relations appear as survivals or as deferred modernities; temporal sovereignty thus becomes a name for the right to inhabit and organize duration otherwise, and its denial functions as a quiet annexation that often accomplishes what overt violence could not, namely the absorption of the future itself into the settler project so that Indigenous presence is tolerated only as heritage or as a demographic whose horizon remains the schedule of the dominant polity (Rifkin). Once time is reclassified as public infrastructure, the state’s calendar, census cycle, and statutory deadlines overwrite the many clocks of a place, compressing ceremonial, ecological, and caretaking tempos into administrative windows and making life livable only when it can be reconciled with the time of permits, courts, and budgets.

Walter Mignolo helps name the broader historical logic of this operation by conceptualizing coloniality as the darker side of Western modernity, which includes a temporal order that hierarchizes epochs, peoples, and knowledges along a single ladder of progress; within this matrix the West occupies the now, others are assigned to the not yet or the no longer, and the promise of development polices deviation through the hallucination of a universal timeline that both authorizes intervention and conceals its own provincial origins by renaming them as the baseline of reality (Mignolo). The temporal container therefore doubles as pedagogy: to be modern is to accept the linear itinerary that begins with rupture, advances through rationalization, and culminates in an open future governed by innovation, and to refuse this itinerary is to risk exclusion from the ranks of fully historical subjects. One sees here why contestations over monuments, syllabi, and museum taxonomies are also fights over authorized time, since the archive of modernity does not only conserve artifacts, it also conserves a tempo and a sequencing that teach the body how to move through days and generations.

If Fabian, Rifkin, and Mignolo disclose the colonial mechanics of temporal assignment, E. P. Thompson’s history of industrial capitalism shows how enclosure becomes intimate through work discipline, where the shift from task orientation to clock regulation converts labor from a relation to materials and seasons into a relation to abstract intervals that can be purchased, surveilled, and penalized; the bell, the foreman’s book, and the synchronized factory routines fabricate a worker who sells hours rather than results and whose life must be rearranged to match the new discipline, so that even leisure becomes recovery for the next turn of the wheel and attention is trained to obey the partitioning of minutes into payable units (Thompson). The point is not nostalgic lament but structural diagnosis: when the wage purchases time slices rather than goods, the body learns to live inside an artificial container that now frames domestic life, care work, and sleep, and because the same logic governs rail timetables, national broadcasts, and later digital platforms, the factory’s choreography expands until it organizes an entire society into slices that can be priced, optimized, and compared.

Barbara Adam teaches that this organization of duration is never only economic, since standardization builds a culture for which the invisible hazards of modernity arise when long temporal chains are shortened in practice and ignored in policy; nuclear waste, endocrine disruption, soil exhaustion, and the lagging harms of industrial production exceed the quarter and the election cycle, yet decision systems are trained to disregard temporal externalities because their metrics were designed for speed, comparability, and near term legibility rather than ecological fidelity or intergenerational care (Adam, Timewatch; Adam, Timescapes of Modernity). When institutions live inside short containers, they create risks that mature in slow time and distribute those risks to communities whose seasons and lifeways they have already overwritten; temporal enclosure therefore has a bioecological edge that makes the violence of time measurable in cancers, collapses, and the creeping losses that arrive too slowly to trigger alarms in systems that trust only the short and the smooth.

To say that time is colonized medium is to say that the devices of coordination are also devices of rule, since the political community is defined not only by borders but by synchronized rhythms that decide whose feast days count, which sunsets constitute the close of business, when debt matures, when innocence expires, and when a claim becomes void; the civil calendar is a doctrinal text in numbers, the public clock is a monument as coercive as any statue, and the archival timestamp naturalizes one story of what counts as an event while making other events inaudible because they do not fit the chosen granularity. Fabian’s denial of coevalness, read alongside Rifkin’s temporal sovereignty, shows why the politics of recognition so often fails, because recognition that arrives within the conqueror’s time still demands translation of lifeways into an authorized tempo and format; what looks like inclusion is frequently a demand to perform time correctly under observation, which is a demand to live as a sequence whose value can be audited and predicted rather than as a relation whose tempo is set by care, ceremony, or place (Fabian; Rifkin).

Because the modern time regime justifies itself through the rhetoric of coordination and efficiency, one inevitable objection claims that standardized time is the necessary condition for complex cooperation at scale; without synchronized clocks, railways would crash and global supply chains would crumble, without shared calendars legislatures could not convene and diseases could not be tracked, and without deadline and due date the very possibility of accountability would evaporate. The force of this objection must be granted in its practical form and refused in its metaphysical inference: coordination requires conventions, but no law of nature demands a single temporal ontology or a monopoly calendar that suppresses plural tempos into a thin uniform; Adam’s work shows that short containers produce perverse outcomes when they govern long hazards, Thompson’s history shows that labor discipline was an invention with winners and losers, and Rifkin demonstrates that settler synchronization is a conquest that presents itself as neutral public benefit while displacing other forms of order that had coordinated lives across seasons and generations without reducing them to unified clock time (Adam, Timescapes of Modernity; Thompson; Rifkin). That is, the choice is not chaos or a single time, the choice is which architectures of time are designed, for whom, and with what ethical horizon.

Once the ethical horizon is made explicit, the analogy with spatial enclosure sharpens. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the privatization of common lands through hedges, fences, and title, and the twentieth and twenty first witness the privatization of common time through regimes that allocate attention, availability, and future to capital and state through devices that feel like infrastructure rather than law; the notification schedule that keeps a worker on call and the algorithmic queue that reorders the day in pursuit of platform throughput are contemporary hedges around lived hours. Fabian helps diagnose why critique alone fails: the ethnographic present tense that refuses to name itself performs the very denial it exposes by representing others as static residues rather than coauthors of the now, which suggests that scholarship must practice temporal cohabitation in method as well as analysis if it is to undo the ontological habit of assigning people to other times (Fabian).

If temporal enclosure works by naturalizing a metric, then conceptual and institutional alternatives must be named without romance. Rifkin’s proposal of temporal sovereignty can be read as a design invitation for polities to articulate and protect their tempos, which might include ceremonial calendars that take precedence over statutory deadlines, harvest based timekeeping that shapes work cycles in relation to land rather than to uniform weeks, and kinship obligations that interrupt the smoothness of production schedules not as exceptions but as the measure of ethical order; such proposals do not abolish coordination, they reorder it around plural clocks that recognize that dependence and regeneration require durational forms that cannot be flattened into standard intervals without loss that later returns as harm (Rifkin). Adam’s attention to lag, latency, and long chains implies that environmental governance must build institutions whose reporting periods and accountability horizons match the processes they claim to steward, which means constitutions and budgets that extend beyond the short now in ways that empower communities living inside slow cycles to veto plans that would offload harm onto their futures (Adam, Timescapes of Modernity).

E. P. Thompson’s archive indicates another path for design: if the factory invented a worker who sold hours, institutions can invent roles that sell presence, knowledge, and care as relations not strictly countable in slices; this would require contracts that acknowledge seasonality, policies that refuse the expectation of constant availability, and technologies that do not reward the shortest response time as the highest value but that make space for deliberation, repair, and recovery as the very conditions of reliable action (Thompson). Mignolo’s lesson is that such redesign cannot be merely technical because the temporal hierarchy is entangled with epistemic authority; to alter the clock without altering the curriculum and the archive is to reproduce the same temporal order under a new interface, which is why the work of time reform includes the pedagogy of time literacy that teaches how modernity’s timeline was made, who paid its costs, and which other timelines continue to exist in the interstices despite efforts to erase them (Mignolo).

A final clarification is required to avoid the false choice between acceleration and idyll. To insist on thick time, on plural tempos, and on temporal sovereignty is not to valorize stasis or to fantasize about an untouched past; it is to argue that livable futures require containers that can actually hold the processes they claim to coordinate, and that this holding must be negotiated among communities rather than imposed by instruments designed for extractive smoothness. The anthropologist who shares time with interlocutors rather than placing them elsewhere, the policymaker who allows ecological cycles to pace funding and assessment, the technologist who builds systems that defer and slow rather than hurry every exchange, and the community that defends its calendrical and ceremonial time as infrastructure rather than as culture all participate in the same refusal of enclosure that once reduced vast territories of duration to a single grid. The violence of time does not end when clocks are smashed, it ends when clocks are humbled by other measures of worth and by forms of life that insist on the right to set the tempo of their own becoming, which is the deepest sense in which time must be governed as a commons and not as an imperial conduit for profit and control.

The remainder of this work will develop this claim across bodies and archives while insisting that every redesign of institutions and technologies takes time itself as a first order design variable rather than as a precondition beyond dispute; the argument remains precise enough to guide policy and capacious enough to protect multiplicity because the same insight animates each level, namely that the form of time we inhabit is a choice backed by power, and that other choices are possible when coevalness is restored, sovereignty is respected, and the measure of coordination is widened until endurance, relation, and regeneration can breathe.

Section II. Chrononormativity and Biopolitical Tempo

If the previous section demonstrated how time as container emerges through colonial, industrial, and ecological enclosures, the most pressing next step is to show how this container is made intimate—how it penetrates the body’s cycles, scripts entire biographies, and binds life itself into rhythms that seem natural but are in fact historically engineered to render existence predictable, legible, and governable. Without this turn to the body and its temporal disciplining, the critique of temporal enclosure risks remaining at the level of infrastructure and institution, missing the degree to which the violence of time operates as a biopolitical technique that shapes when one wakes, reproduces, labors, rests, and dies. Here, the gaps in the previous movement become evident: while we traced the imposition of standardized time from the vantage of sovereignty and production, we did not yet account for how life is choreographed through normative sequencing—the unspoken timeline that decides the proper order of birth, education, reproduction, productivity, and decline, and that punishes deviation as failure, deviance, or pathology.

Elizabeth Freeman’s term chrononormativity gives this choreography its analytic name: it is “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (Freeman xxii), and it operates by installing a life-course template in which progress is measured by milestones that synchronize the individual with the needs of capital, the family, and the state. Chrononormativity is both intimate and infrastructural; it is felt as the ticking of the biological clock, the seasonal progression of academic calendars, the corporate performance review cycle, and the actuarial table that plots one’s expected expiration date. In this frame, deviation is not merely unusual—it is a temporal offense that disrupts the smooth functioning of the social machine. A queer refusal of the marriage-child-mortgage-retirement sequence, or a decision to remain in a prolonged apprenticeship rather than accelerate to managerial work, becomes a disturbance to the larger tempo, and the disturbance is disciplined through material penalties, social stigma, and sometimes outright exclusion from entitlements.

This disciplinary tempo is not evenly distributed. Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics reminds us that the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die also includes the power to decide the tempo at which life unfolds: the slow death of populations through deprivation, the indefinite detention without trial, the acceleration of death through targeted violence, and the temporal suspension of those left waiting for aid or recognition (Mbembe 40–55). In contexts of migration, incarceration, and occupation, time becomes both weapon and wound: the endless queue at the border, the limbo of refugee processing, the compressed deadlines of survival economies where missing a day’s wage can trigger cascading losses. Such tempos are not side effects—they are mechanisms of control that mark whose life is worth synchronizing with the public clock and whose life is consigned to delay or erasure.

Barbara Adam’s Timescapes of Modernity sharpens this point by showing how the compression of time in late modern economies—driven by technological acceleration and competitive speed—produces differential vulnerabilities: those with resources can insulate themselves from the harms of haste (outsourcing care, buying time through services), while those without are forced into just-in-time existence, perpetually catching up, perpetually late in a system whose clock is set by someone else (Adam 118–132). Sarah Sharma’s In the Meantime adds that such temporal hierarchies are gendered and racialized; she examines how certain workers (drivers, servers, cleaners) live “in the meantime” of others, keeping them on schedule at the cost of their own temporal autonomy (Sharma 71–95). This hierarchy ensures that not all bodies experience acceleration as liberation—many live it as exhaustion, disorientation, and temporal disempowerment.

The gap in the previous section’s analysis thus becomes clear: without accounting for chrononormativity and biopolitical tempo, the critique of enclosure risks suggesting that the violence of time is solely structural or infrastructural, when in fact it is also metabolic. It enters through circadian disruption in shift work, through reproductive scheduling in employment law, through educational pacing that assumes cognitive uniformity, and through health care timelines that ration care according to statistical models rather than embodied need. These are not merely parallel problems; they are the very channels through which standardized time reproduces itself.

One foreseeable critique is that life-course sequencing and standardized tempos provide necessary stability and predictability, especially for coordinating care, education, and public health at scale. The reply here must be twofold. First, coordination does not require uniformity of tempo—historical and contemporary examples abound where plural time systems coexist and coordinate effectively without collapsing into a single metric. In the Pacific, navigational traditions coordinate travel across islands without a singular standardized hour; in agricultural communities, planting and harvest cycles align with ecological markers rather than fixed calendar dates, yet still achieve large-scale cooperation (Geertz 389–392). Second, predictability for some is often bought at the expense of others whose tempos are subordinated to meet that predictability—Sharma’s “in the meantime” workers, or migrant laborers on hyper-accelerated harvest contracts that shorten their lives to preserve the schedule of distant consumers.

The task, then, is not to abolish sequencing or shared tempo, but to unmask the specific life-course templates and bodily rhythms that have been naturalized as universal and to replace them with architectures that can sustain multiplicity without penalizing divergence. In design terms, this might mean rewriting workplace policies to allow asynchronous productivity without loss of pay, structuring education around modular pacing rather than fixed semester blocks, and building public health infrastructures that track and respond to multiple tempos of illness progression rather than privileging only those that fit the quarterly reporting cycle.

Chrononormativity and biopolitical tempo reveal that the violence of time is not an abstract oppression felt only at the level of the calendar or clock; it is lived in the pacing of the heartbeat under stress, in the exhaustion of the shift worker whose body is never allowed to resynchronize with daylight, in the foreclosure of futures that do not match the prescribed order. The point is not to retreat into an unmeasured idyll but to design an ethical tempo that allows for divergence, recovery, and the maintenance of tempos that resist reduction to the smooth flow demanded by extraction. If the previous section dismantled the enclosure’s walls, this one shows how its rhythm becomes our pulse—and why reclaiming tempo is as urgent as reclaiming territory.

Section III. Violence of the Linear Future

If the previous sections have shown how time is enclosed and choreographed to fit the needs of sovereignty, industry, and capital, there remains the most pervasive and least questioned form of temporal violence: the presumption that time advances in a single, unidirectional line toward a better state of affairs. This presumption, packaged as “progress,” saturates political rhetoric, developmental economics, technoscience, and even much of reformist activism. It is so embedded in the infrastructure of planning and governance that to question it often appears either naïve or nihilistic. Yet this linear future is neither neutral nor benign; it is an instrument of dispossession, an epistemic weapon, and a disciplinary horizon that constrains what counts as possibility before the present has even begun to unfold.

Walter Mignolo names this imposition “temporal coloniality,” the subsumption of diverse temporalities under a single globalizing schedule that orders histories into a ladder from primitive to modern (Mignolo 155–174). In this configuration, Europe and its settler extensions occupy the apex as the embodiment of the now, while all others are relegated to the not-yet—imagined as lagging behind, in need of acceleration, and unable to claim their futures except through catching up. The violence here lies not only in the epistemic insult but in the material interventions justified by it: development loans, modernization projects, and resource extractions all premised on the necessity of bringing others into the future already defined by the dominant order.

Saidiya Hartman’s historical work lays bare another dimension: the linear future depends on erasing certain pasts so thoroughly that they cannot return to trouble its trajectory. In Lose Your Mother, she writes of the Atlantic slave trade as a rupture in time, a wound that collapses the temporal continuum between those taken and those left behind (Hartman 17–24). For the descendants of the enslaved, the linear narrative of progress is uninhabitable because it pretends the break has been mended; it moves briskly from emancipation to civil rights to a supposed post-racial present, all the while leaving the afterlives of slavery—mass incarceration, economic dispossession, premature death—untouched in its celebratory timeline. The future’s linearity here is not an invitation but an eviction from the temporal present, replacing the ongoingness of harm with the comfort of closure.

Dipesh Chakrabarty offers a parallel critique in Provincializing Europe, where he distinguishes between “History 1”—the universalizing, capital-driven temporality that structures global modernity—and “History 2,” the heterogeneous, often subaltern times that persist alongside but are subordinated to it (Chakrabarty 62–70). In development discourse, History 1 appears as the only future worth reaching, relegating other trajectories to the status of cultural ornament or archaic holdover. This subordination produces what Charles W. Mills has called a “temporal contract” in which inclusion in the polity’s future requires adherence to its pace and sequence (Mills 129–136). In effect, access to the benefits of tomorrow is conditioned on surrendering the right to shape what tomorrow is.

One predictable critique of rejecting linear futurity is that without it, accountability collapses: how can there be measurable progress on poverty, disease, or ecological restoration without agreed-upon future targets? This objection takes for granted that the only alternative to linear time is chaos. Yet ecological systems, Indigenous governance, and trauma recovery all demonstrate viable models of non-linear accountability. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of the Honorable Harvest in Braiding Sweetgrass shows a cyclical ethic where taking is always followed by giving, where seasons guide action, and where sustainability is measured not by advancement toward an endpoint but by the ongoing health of relationships (Kimmerer 175–194). Such a model produces accountability as recurrence rather than projection, as repetition of care rather than acceleration toward a definitive state.

What the linear future conceals is that it functions as a debt instrument: the present is mortgaged to a promised condition that will only arrive if certain policies, investments, and sacrifices are made now. The moral force of “for the sake of the future” thus becomes a lever for present-day extraction—ask the communities displaced by “green” energy projects who are told their sacrifice is necessary for a low-carbon future they will not inhabit, or the patients in medical trials whose risk is justified by a hypothetical cure to come. The linear future is not merely a temporal figure; it is an economy of deferral in which the distribution of risk and benefit is always uneven.

Hartman’s work demands that we remain with the rupture, refusing to smooth the jagged edges into a clean arc. Mignolo and Chakrabarty insist that futures must be provincialized—made multiple, accountable to their specific cultural, ecological, and historical contexts rather than subsumed into a single trajectory. Mills warns that without challenging the temporal contract, even progressive reforms will reinscribe the same exclusionary horizon. Together, these insights reveal that the violence of the linear future is twofold: it forecloses multiplicity by defining the only valid tomorrow in advance, and it licenses present violence in the name of that tomorrow’s eventual arrival.

Designing against this violence requires more than replacing the endpoint with a different endpoint. It means reorienting governance, technology, and culture toward futures that are plural, provisional, and porous to interruption. In practice, this could mean legislative frameworks that evaluate success through recurring cycles of relational health rather than fixed-term growth metrics, technological roadmaps that accept deliberate slowing as a form of innovation, and cultural narratives that make space for endings without presuming they feed a larger arc of redemption.

The linear future’s greatest triumph has been to make itself synonymous with hope. To dismantle it is not to abandon hope but to refuse the version of hope that demands obedience to a single path. In its place, we can cultivate a hope that inhabits many tempos at once, a hope that does not require sacrificing the present for a promise that has already chosen its winners. In that sense, to reject the linear future is to open the possibility of a present that is no longer a waiting room but a dwelling place.

Section IV. Lived Time, Fractured Time: Phenomenology and Trauma

If the first three sections have established how temporal enclosure, chrononormativity, and linear futurity discipline the collective order of life, there remains the deeply embodied dimension of temporal violence: how time is lived, and how certain experiences—especially trauma—alter its structure in ways that neither metric clocks nor linear narratives can fully contain. Without reckoning with lived time, the argument risks remaining abstract, as if temporal regimes act only at the level of systems and not at the level of breath, pulse, and perception. It is in the phenomenological register that time’s violence becomes intimate, manifesting not as a distant policy or ideology but as a felt interruption, an elongation, or a collapse that seizes the very texture of the present.

Henri Bergson’s concept of durée provides one of the most precise philosophical accounts of lived time, describing it as a qualitative multiplicity, irreducible to the homogeneous, divisible units of clock time (Bergson 100–125). Durée is not a succession of instants but a continuous interpenetration of past and present, in which memory saturates perception and the future emerges not as a predetermined point but as an unfolding from the whole of lived experience. In contrast, the temporal regimes traced in the earlier sections spatialize time—they treat it as an external dimension in which events are laid out like beads on a string, severed from the consciousness that gives them thickness and continuity. The violence of standardized time is thus not merely that it imposes the same measure on everyone, but that it actively suppresses the subjective density of durée in favor of an external metric.

Edmund Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness deepens this account by analyzing how consciousness holds onto the immediate past (retention), anticipates the near future (protention), and constitutes the now as a dynamic synthesis of these horizons (Husserl 35–47). Trauma disrupts this synthesis. In cases of acute trauma, the past does not remain in retention as a receding trace—it surges back with the vividness of the present, collapsing the distance that normally allows events to be recognized as past. Protention, likewise, may be invaded by dread or suspended altogether, producing a lived sense of “no future.”

Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience describe this collapse in complementary ways. Van der Kolk emphasizes the somatic dimension: trauma imprints the nervous system so that sensory cues trigger physiological states as if the original event were recurring (van der Kolk 66–84). Caruth frames trauma as a paradoxical belatedness—the full impact of the event is not experienced at the time but returns in intrusive images, nightmares, and compulsions (Caruth 4–12). In both accounts, trauma generates a fractured time in which past and present are not sequential but entangled, creating a temporal condition that resists assimilation into either the uniform now of enclosure or the smooth arc of linear futurity.

The standardization of time not only fails to accommodate these altered temporalities but often actively pathologizes them. In clinical and institutional settings, recovery is frequently plotted along a linear timeline—symptoms should diminish in a predictable sequence, milestones should be reached by fixed dates, and deviation is interpreted as noncompliance or treatment failure. Michelle Balaev’s The Nature of Trauma in American Novels counters this by arguing that trauma narratives demonstrate adaptive temporalities, in which non-linear recollection and repetition serve as mechanisms for integrating experience (Balaev 7–14). Here, temporal divergence is not a symptom to be eliminated but a survival strategy that holds space for the work of repair.

One possible critique is that embracing fractured and non-linear temporalities risks undermining collective coordination, particularly in contexts like public health, where schedules and timelines are essential for delivering care. Yet this critique rests on the false equivalence between coordination and temporal uniformity. Systems can be designed to synchronize action without forcing all participants into the same temporal mode—consider disaster response protocols that allow for phased recovery tailored to local conditions rather than imposing a single “normalization” deadline. Indeed, trauma-sensitive design in education, healthcare, and governance increasingly recognizes the need for flexible pacing, acknowledging that temporal uniformity often retraumatizes those it seeks to help.

The phenomenological account also forces a revision of earlier conclusions: if enclosure, chrononormativity, and linear futurity are to be dismantled, their alternatives cannot merely be slower or more plural—they must be porous enough to accommodate the radically asynchronous lived times of those who have survived violence. In design terms, this might mean legal systems that extend or remove statutes of limitations for survivors of abuse, recognizing that the capacity to testify may emerge decades later; educational models that allow learners to pause and resume without penalty; and labor arrangements that accept fluctuating productivity as compatible with dignified work.

Lived time is not only disrupted by trauma; it can also be deepened through practices that refuse the abstraction of duration. Ritual, meditation, and forms of attention that saturate the present moment offer experiences of time that resemble Bergsonian durée—thick, interwoven, resistant to quantification. These practices, like the altered temporalities of trauma, point toward a temporal ethics grounded not in the smooth passage of instants but in the fullness of relation. The challenge for temporal redesign is to hold space for both: the fractured time that bears witness to harm and the deep time that sustains care.

In this sense, phenomenology and trauma theory converge on a crucial insight: the violence of time is not only in the schedule imposed from without but in the erasure of the time lived from within. To restore temporal sovereignty at the systemic level without attending to the subjective and embodied would leave untouched the most intimate site of enclosure. Any ethical reconstruction of time must therefore begin with the recognition that coordination is not worth the cost if it requires the flattening of lived temporal multiplicity, and that justice itself may depend on making room for durations that refuse to align.

Section V. Physics and the Myth of a Universal Time

To this point, the dismantling of temporal enclosure has proceeded through historical, political, phenomenological, and embodied registers. Yet one of the most persistent legitimations of standardized, singular time lies in its presumed grounding in the “objective” order of nature. The uniform tick of the clock is widely treated as a reflection of the universe’s own beat, a scientific truth preceding and justifying its social uses. To dislodge this belief, and to prevent it from covertly reasserting itself beneath political critique, the argument must pass through the domain of physics—not to appropriate its authority, but to show that its most advanced accounts of time refuse the very universality they are assumed to confirm.

The decisive breach with absolute time came with Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which established the theory of special relativity. Here, time is not an independent backdrop flowing uniformly for all observers; rather, it is bound to space into a single spacetime manifold and varies according to the relative velocity between observers (Einstein 891–921). A moving clock runs slower relative to a stationary one, a phenomenon confirmed by experiments with particle decay and precise atomic clocks in high-speed aircraft. This is not a perceptual illusion but a constitutive feature of the physical world. The “now” of one observer is not the “now” of another.

Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time pushes this insight further, drawing on developments in quantum gravity to argue that time does not flow at a universal rate even in a single reference frame; the structure of spacetime itself is granular, and at the smallest scales the distinction between before and after dissolves (Rovelli 15–28). In his relational interpretation, time is not a container in which events occur but an emergent property of the relationships between systems. There is no master clock, only local interactions from which temporal ordering arises.

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway adds a crucial philosophical dimension: measurement itself is not passive observation but an active intervention that produces the phenomena measured (Barad 315–321). When we measure time, we are not simply reading off a preexisting quantity; we are enacting a cut in the continuous unfolding of the world, defining boundaries between “then” and “now” through apparatuses whose design choices embed particular assumptions about regularity, granularity, and what counts as an event.

Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty further unsettles the classical picture by centering irreversibility. In thermodynamic processes far from equilibrium, time is directional: systems evolve toward states of greater entropy, and these transformations cannot be simply reversed (Prigogine 28–37). While the fundamental equations of mechanics are time-symmetric, the macroscopic world we inhabit is not. The “arrow of time” emerges from statistical asymmetries and boundary conditions, not from an intrinsic metronome ticking uniformly across the cosmos.

One likely critique here is that such physical pluralism is irrelevant to social time—after all, trains run and stock markets open according to Earth’s rotation, not the Planck time of quantum gravity. Yet this misses the point: the singularity of social time is not mandated by nature but is a human construction, one option among many. Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps makes this explicit in tracing how the adoption of relativistic time in technologies like GPS arose from practical needs—synchronizing navigation and communications systems—rather than from any metaphysical imperative (Galison 232–249). Even these infrastructures maintain multiple time standards (GPS time, UTC, TAI), translating between them as needed.

The political implication is clear: appeals to “natural” or “scientific” time as justification for uniform social scheduling are misplaced. Physics shows that time is contingent, relational, and locally defined. The universality of clock time is not a discovery but a decision—a standard imposed for coordination, with all the attendant risks of enclosure and exclusion detailed in earlier sections. Once the absolute falls away, the choice to enforce a single time becomes transparently political and ethical, not inevitable.

Recognizing this opens new possibilities for temporal design. If nature itself operates with plural, context-dependent times, then social systems can likewise adopt temporal architectures suited to the processes they govern. Ecological restoration projects might measure success in seasonal cycles and generational spans; trauma recovery programs might refuse fixed-duration treatment models; governance could employ asynchronous deliberation that accommodates participants’ divergent temporal conditions without presuming simultaneity as the norm.

The hard sciences do not rescue us from the problem of plural time—they deepen it. Einstein, Rovelli, Barad, and Prigogine each, in their own register, dismantle the myth that there is a singular temporal container awaiting our occupancy. In its place they reveal a multiplicity of clocks, none of them final, each emerging from relations and conditions that can shift. This recognition is not a threat to coordination; it is an invitation to design coordination without erasure. It allows us to meet the objection that multiplicity is unscientific with the precise opposite: universality is what the science refuses.

If, as Barad insists, measurement is an intra-active cut that both reveals and produces the world, then to measure time differently is to world differently. The next task is to explore those alternative cuts, especially those that emerge from lifeways already practiced outside the empire of a single time. This is where fugitive and thick temporalities enter—not as reactionary withdrawals from modernity, but as experiments in designing and defending temporal orders that match the scale, rhythm, and ethical demands of the relations they serve.

Section VI. Fugitive and Thick Temporalities

With the collapse of a universal time secured in both social critique and physics, the question shifts from dismantling to designing: if time is neither absolute nor singular, what kinds of temporal architectures can support survival, relation, and autonomy without reproducing enclosure under a different guise? The answer begins with the recognition that such architectures already exist—in fugitive practices that have persisted under regimes of synchronized control, and in “thick” temporalities that measure worth not in velocity or output but in the density of relations sustained.

Bayo Akomolafe writes of fugitive temporality as a refusal of urgency, a deliberate stepping aside from the momentum of dominant time in order to attend to the openings and solidarities that only appear when haste is abandoned (Akomolafe 88–95). Fugitive time is not a pause for rest before reentry into the main flow; it is a different current altogether, one that navigates around the structures seeking to capture and standardize life. Such practices include community healing circles that take “as long as it takes,” migrant kin networks that ignore national holidays to follow their own festive calendars, and activist strategies that avoid predictable rhythms to evade surveillance.

Michelle Bastian’s environmental philosophy offers a complementary form: slow time as ecological belonging. In “Fatally Confused,” she critiques conservation efforts that operate on project timelines divorced from the lifecycles they claim to protect (Bastian 95–113). Thick temporalities, in her sense, align human activity with the tempos of other species, seasonal cycles, and geophysical processes. This is not mere deceleration; it is an ethical recalibration in which the container of time is designed to fit the process, rather than forcing the process to conform to a pre-existing container.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera provides a political and cultural articulation of this principle through nepantla—the in-between space that is neither fully one time nor another, where multiple rhythms coexist in tension (Anzaldúa 100–112). Nepantla is lived by those who cross temporal borders daily: borderland communities whose economies and rituals must negotiate between Indigenous, colonial, and globalized clocks; queer families whose care practices defy the linear sequencing of heteronormative life; diasporas whose diasporic “now” is already braided with the time of elsewhere.

Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters adds another dimension: haunting as a temporal persistence that defies linear closure (Gordon 63–75). The dead, the disappeared, and the dispossessed linger not only in memory but in the pacing of the present, producing interruptions, hesitations, and returns that make thick time inseparable from the work of reckoning. Fugitive and thick temporalities, in this sense, are not simply self-chosen tempos—they are inhabited alongside the ghosts of histories that have not ended.

A predictable critique emerges here: that such temporal orders are inefficient, exclusionary, or impractical for complex, interconnected societies. The fear is that without a common clock, coordination collapses into fragmentation. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World offers a direct counterexample. Her ethnography of matsutake foragers shows how diverse actors—human and nonhuman—coordinate effectively without standardizing tempo (Tsing 21–42). Trade, knowledge exchange, and ecological stewardship occur in overlapping, asynchronous rhythms, producing resilience precisely because no single temporal order dominates.

From a design perspective, fugitive and thick temporalities demand tools and infrastructures that are modular and adaptive. In place of the rigid schedule, think of platforms that allow for asynchronous collaboration without penalty; legal frameworks that permit decision-making processes to vary in pace depending on context; public funding structures that allocate resources according to ecological or social indicators rather than fiscal year deadlines. In each case, the goal is not to abolish shared timekeeping but to embed plural clocks into the governance apparatus itself.

These temporalities also challenge the moral hierarchy that equates speed with progress. In fugitive practice, slowness is not a failure to keep up but an assertion that certain forms of attention, care, and repair require durations that cannot be accelerated without loss. In thick temporalities, the measure of success is not the swiftness of completion but the continuity and depth of relationship—metrics foreign to the logic of the quarterly report but essential to the logic of survival.

Fugitive and thick temporalities do not exist outside the reach of enclosure; they persist within and alongside it, often in compromised or precarious forms. The task is not to romanticize them but to recognize their design principles and extend them into formal structures without stripping them of their adaptive autonomy. This requires vigilance against co-optation, for as soon as fugitive time is fixed into a repeatable model, it risks becoming another schedule in the empire of the clock.

If, as the earlier sections have argued, the violence of time lies in the imposition of a singular, extractive tempo, then the ethic of fugitive and thick temporalities lies in defending the right to inhabit many tempos at once, and to decide when and how to shift between them. This is not inefficiency; it is the infrastructural condition for multiplicity itself. And as the next section will show, the work of designing time otherwise must directly confront the counterarguments in full—especially the claim that multiplicity is politically and technologically unworkable—by translating these principles into concrete, viable architectures of governance, labor, and collective life.

Section VII. Designing Time Otherwise

The dismantling of temporal enclosure, chrononormativity, linear futurity, and universalist time has revealed a clear ethical imperative: if time is a constructed medium, then its construction is open to redesign. The question that now demands attention is how to design temporal architectures that preserve multiplicity, autonomy, and relational density while allowing for coordination without erasure. Without this step, the work risks remaining diagnostic, offering critique without the infrastructural counterforms needed to alter lived reality.

Designing time otherwise begins with acknowledging that the current temporal order is not the inevitable product of technological or natural necessity but a series of historical decisions—about labor, sovereignty, and measurement—that can be unmade and remade. Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 warns that contemporary capitalism has weaponized time’s openness by eliminating pauses altogether, turning the twenty-four-hour cycle into an unbroken field for consumption, production, and surveillance (Crary 8–13). Any alternative design must therefore explicitly protect discontinuities—gaps, delays, and pauses—as part of its structural logic rather than treating them as inefficiencies to be optimized away.

Theological and philosophical traditions offer rich conceptual resources for this protection. In The Protestant Era, Paul Tillich’s analysis of kairos—the opportune, transformative moment—contrasts with the empty homogeneity of chronological time (Tillich 31–46). Designing for kairos means creating systems that are not merely continuous flows but are punctuated by events that disrupt, reorient, and open new possibilities. Such systems might schedule decision-making not at fixed intervals but in response to ecological signals, communal readiness, or thresholds of relational repair.

Case studies from alternative economies show practical forms of this principle. Timebanks, as articulated by Edgar Cahn in Time Dollars, replace money with hours as the unit of exchange, thereby de-centering market speed and valuing forms of labor—caregiving, mentoring, community maintenance—that are often invisible in wage economies (Cahn and Rowe 3–15). While not immune to co-optation, timebanks demonstrate that measurement can be recalibrated to affirm diverse tempos and relational work without enforcing uniform pace.

In workplace design, temporal plurality might mean adopting modular pacing frameworks. Instead of fixed schedules, projects could proceed through self-paced modules, with coordination achieved by aligning milestones across modules rather than forcing simultaneous progress. This is already practiced in certain open-source software communities, where asynchronous contributions converge into releases without requiring all contributors to operate on identical clocks. Governance could adopt similar models: municipal decision-making processes might be designed to accommodate longer deliberative tempos for certain issues (e.g., land stewardship) and shorter, responsive tempos for others (e.g., emergency relief).

Education is a critical domain for redesign. Current models assume uniform temporal progression through grade levels and semesters, penalizing learners whose cognitive or life circumstances require different pacing. Temporal redesign here could draw on Indigenous seasonal education practices, where learning is integrated with ecological cycles rather than divided into abstract semesters. Such systems would need assessment models that measure mastery or relational competence rather than time served in a given stage.

A central critique of temporal plurality is that it risks fragmentation and inefficiency. This objection presumes that coordination requires identical pacing rather than interoperability among diverse tempos. Hybrid temporal architectures offer an answer: in distributed ledger systems, for example, transactions occur asynchronously across nodes but are reconciled through consensus protocols that do not require uniform time across the network. Similar protocols could be developed for governance, labor, and ecological stewardship, ensuring that systems remain coherent while allowing local temporal sovereignty.

Sarah Sharma’s feminist interventions in temporal design remind us that the redesign process must account for how time has been differentially distributed along gendered and racialized lines (Sharma 142–158). A temporal commons that ignores this history risks replicating existing inequities under the guise of plurality. This means embedding equity audits into any new temporal architecture—examining whose tempos are being privileged, whose are being subordinated, and how infrastructural decisions redistribute temporal power.

The challenge is to institutionalize these designs without hardening them into new enclosures. This requires ongoing reflexivity and the willingness to revise temporal forms as conditions change. It also requires cultivating temporal literacy across populations, so that communities can identify when their time is being captured and can mobilize to defend or redesign it. Just as environmental literacy enables defense of land and water, temporal literacy equips people to recognize and resist the imposition of extractive pace.

Designing time otherwise is not an abstract thought experiment; it is an applied ethical task that touches every domain from climate governance to interpersonal care. The aim is not to arrive at a single perfected model, but to proliferate frameworks that can be adapted, hybridized, and revised, preserving the capacity for tempos to remain in tension without being forced into false equivalence. This multiplicity is not a liability but the foundation of resilience.

The next section will turn to Counterarguments in Full, confronting the most sophisticated objections to temporal redesign—technological infeasibility, political inertia, and fears of ungovernability—so that the ethical case for temporal plurality is not only aspirational but defensible against the strongest critiques.

Section VIII. Counterarguments in Full

The call to dismantle temporal enclosure and design for plurality invites several predictable but formidable objections. These critiques, often voiced by policy makers, technologists, and even sympathetic reformers, must be met in their strongest form, not simply dismissed. The following responses aim to demonstrate that the defense of thick and fugitive temporalities is not merely idealistic but can withstand the most rigorous tests of feasibility, governance, and ethics.

1. The Necessity of Standardized Time for Large-Scale Coordination
The most common argument insists that without a single, standardized time, complex societies would collapse into disorder: trains would crash, markets would fail, and global supply chains would dissolve. Anthony Aveni’s Empires of Time acknowledges the historical importance of standardization for empires, but this importance was never a matter of natural law; it was an infrastructural solution to specific logistical problems (Aveni 201–225). Coordinated diversity is possible. Precolonial Polynesian navigation synchronized voyages through shared celestial markers, not through uniform hours. Even today, digital distributed ledger systems and asynchronous communication protocols coordinate global transactions without enforcing identical clocks at every node. The choice is not between chaos and homogeneity but between oppressive uniformity and interoperable plurality.

2. Romanticizing the “Pre-Modern”
Another critique warns that calls for temporal sovereignty risk idealizing an imagined past, ignoring both its inequities and its incompatibility with contemporary interdependence. Vine Deloria Jr. in God Is Red cautions against treating Indigenous temporal frameworks as static relics rather than living systems capable of adaptation (Deloria 77–98). The aim of plural temporal design is not to restore some pristine, pre-contact order, but to recognize and integrate living traditions of timekeeping alongside emergent, hybrid forms. Temporal sovereignty is forward-facing; it draws on inherited wisdom without binding itself to historical replication.

3. Technological Infeasibility
Skeptics often claim that infrastructures—from air traffic control to hospital scheduling—require strict temporal uniformity to function safely. Yet as Peter Galison’s historical study of time coordination shows, even the most rigid-seeming systems operate through negotiated translations between multiple time standards (Galison 232–249). Aviation already accommodates multiple time zones, flight-level timing protocols, and local weather-dependent schedules without demanding a universal “now.” The key is to design conversion systems—temporal interoperability layers—that translate between local tempos without erasing them.

4. Political Inertia and Governance Risk
Critics argue that states and corporations have vested interests in maintaining control over time and that any attempt to redistribute temporal power will encounter structural resistance. This is accurate. Barbara Adam’s Timescapes of Modernity notes that institutional short-termism is entrenched not by accident but by design (Adam 118–132). However, this resistance is precisely why temporal reform must proceed both infrastructurally and culturally—embedding plural temporalities in local governance, community-led resource management, and educational systems, so that top-down resistance is countered by bottom-up insistence. The history of labor rights offers precedent: standardized weekends and limits on working hours were once deemed ungovernable fantasies until sustained social movement pressure made them normative.

5. Risk of Ungovernability
A subtler critique warns that allowing divergent tempos could exacerbate inequality by empowering those already able to control their time (the wealthy, the self-employed) while leaving the most vulnerable at the mercy of extractive pace. Sarah Sharma’s In the Meantime provides the necessary caution: temporal plurality without equity measures can reinforce existing hierarchies (Sharma 142–158). This is why temporal redesign must embed distributive justice at its core—ensuring that those currently most constrained gain real sovereignty over their pace, rather than creating an elite privilege of opting out. Policy safeguards could include guaranteed paid time sovereignty for workers, legally protected ceremonial calendars for Indigenous nations, and regulatory requirements that infrastructural projects align with ecological and community tempos.

6. Loss of Accountability
Finally, some insist that without linear targets, there can be no measurable progress on urgent issues like climate change. Here, the problem lies not in abandoning measurement but in abandoning the assumption that measurement must be linear. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s cyclical accountability in the Honorable Harvest, or the seasonal reporting used in traditional water governance systems, show that recurrent, process-based accountability can be more responsive than rigid milestones (Kimmerer 175–194). The measure of progress becomes the health of relationships and systems across cycles, not the march toward a fixed endpoint.

Taken together, these counterarguments reveal the stakes of the project: to design time otherwise is not to escape complexity but to inhabit it differently. The viability of plural temporalities rests on three principles: interoperability across tempos, equity in temporal sovereignty, and accountability that is cyclical rather than linear. The technologies, governance models, and cultural practices to achieve this already exist in partial form; the challenge is to weave them into coherent infrastructures capable of resisting the reassertion of singular time as the only legitimate frame.

With these objections addressed, the work can turn toward the concluding synthesis: a temporal ethic of solidarity that frames time not as a neutral backdrop but as a commons to be defended, nurtured, and shared across human and nonhuman communities.

Section IX. Toward a Temporal Ethic of Solidarity

Across these preceding movements, time has been revealed not as a neutral backdrop but as a constructed medium—engineered through colonial imposition, industrial discipline, biopolitical sequencing, linear futurity, and the false universalism of standardized clocks. Each regime works by enclosing multiplicity into a single pace and by naturalizing that pace as the condition for coordination, legitimacy, and value. Having dismantled that premise and met its strongest defenses, the work now turns toward the constructive horizon: what it would mean to inhabit and defend time as a commons, and how solidarity can be practiced across divergent tempos without dissolving them into sameness.

Solidarity in time begins by abandoning the fiction that equality requires simultaneity. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments demonstrates that waywardness—life lived outside prescribed sequences—is not disorganization but another form of coherence, one that makes space for intimacy, improvisation, and survival (Hartman 26–43). A temporal ethic grounded in solidarity refuses to demand that all communities arrive at the same “now” before recognition or aid is possible. It treats coevalness, as Johannes Fabian insists, not as a gift bestowed by the dominant but as the starting point of any relation (Fabian 30–35).

This ethic is planetary in scope because the crises it must address—climate instability, mass displacement, ecological collapse—are themselves temporal in nature. Climate change, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, collapses human history and Earth history into a shared, volatile present (Chakrabarty 1–5). To respond effectively, governance must coordinate across geological, seasonal, and generational tempos without subordinating one to another. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Honorable Harvest offers one such framework, measuring obligation not in years or quarters but in the ongoing reciprocity between human and more-than-human worlds (Kimmerer 175–194).

Karen Barad’s concept of entanglement reframes this obligation: we are never outside the temporalities of others; our measures cut into a fabric we already share (Barad 315–321). To act as if one’s clock is sovereign is to deny the constitutive dependencies that make that clock possible. A temporal ethic of solidarity therefore entails designing institutions, technologies, and rituals that are accountable to the tempos they affect, even when those tempos are incommensurable with our own.

In practice, such an ethic could take many forms:

Governance that allocates decision-making authority to those living within the longest-affected temporal horizon (for example, Indigenous nations determining the pace of resource projects on their lands).

Labor systems that guarantee time sovereignty, allowing workers to refuse acceleration without forfeiting income or security.

Technological infrastructures built to operate on multiple temporal layers, translating between them without forcing convergence.

Cultural practices that normalize asynchrony in care, education, and justice, so that no one’s worth is tethered to their ability to match the dominant pace.


The danger here is that “solidarity” becomes an abstraction—an ethical mood rather than a material practice. To prevent this, solidarity in time must be formalized through enforceable rights and responsibilities. Just as environmental protections embed ecological considerations into law, temporal protections could mandate plural calendars in public institutions, require infrastructure to accommodate asynchronous operation, and penalize the compression of processes whose integrity depends on longer durations.

Mark Rifkin’s insistence on temporal sovereignty underscores that solidarity cannot mean absorption. The goal is not to blend all tempos into a composite average but to protect the integrity of each while ensuring the capacity to act together when necessary. This requires both mutual recognition and infrastructural support—shared protocols for translation and coordination that respect temporal autonomy.

Closing without closure is essential here. A temporal ethic of solidarity is not a blueprint to be implemented once and for all; it is an ongoing negotiation that must remain responsive to changing conditions, emergent tempos, and unforeseen entanglements. Its durability depends on its flexibility, and its coherence depends on its refusal to force resolution where divergence is what sustains resilience.

If time is a commons, its defense must be collective and constant. The task is not to imagine a future free of conflict between tempos, but to build the capacity to remain in relation across those conflicts without defaulting to the violence of enclosure. In this way, the ethic of solidarity does not end the work of temporal politics—it ensures that the work will continue, in many times at once, for as long as there is a world in which to keep it.


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