Counter-Clock Worlds: Decolonizing Time

Modernity loves a schedule: progress bars, quarterly targets, “on time” development. But whose clock is that? Decolonizing time begins with a simple provocation: not all communities inhabit the same temporal order, and insisting they do has been one of empire’s quietest weapons.

Anthropologist Johannes Fabian called it the “denial of coevalness”: the colonial habit of placing others in a different time—primitive, belated—so domination looks like help. Mark Rifkin names its administrative form settler time: calendars, property regimes, and infrastructure that synchronize land to colonial economies while desynchronizing Indigenous life. Elizabeth Povinelli widens the frame with geontopower, where governance distinguishes the lively from the inert to justify extraction—treating certain worlds as resources outside history. Against this, Indigenous thinkers and artists—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kodwo Eshun, among many—stage counter-chronologies: survivals and futurities that refuse the metronome of “catching up.”

Decolonization and Temporalities

Three propositions anchor a decolonial approach to time:

1. Time is governed. Calendars, workweeks, school terms, planting seasons: these are not neutral containers. They encode authority—who waits, who rushes, who gets deadlines, who gets delays. The colonizer doesn’t just take land; they reschedule it.

2. Plural temporalities are practical, not poetic. Cyclical, seasonal, and ancestral times organize duties—reciprocity to rivers, obligations to kin across generations, ceremonies that pace stewardship. They are governance architectures, not folklore.

3. Futurity is contested terrain. “Progress” often means assimilation to someone else’s clock. Decolonial futures are not late versions of the West; they’re worlds timed by other rhythms.

Case in Point

Seed time vs. market time. Consider Indigenous seed keepers who plant on lunar phases and soil memory. Their calendars sync with pollinators and local weather, not commodity futures. Agricultural aid programs that demand yield “this season” misread success, penalizing long-horizon fertility as inefficiency.

Diasporic Sabbath. In migrant neighborhoods, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays overlap—Muslim prayers, Jewish Shabbat, Christian services—producing a braided weekend that confounds the monoclock of a national workweek. Shops open late, markets bloom at odd hours; care and cash move on transoceanic time, tethered to remittance cycles and WhatsApp midnights.

Afrofuturist offsets. Following Eshun, Afrofuturism isn’t sci-fi décor; it is time travel as counter-history. By projecting Black survival forward, it refunds what was stolen by Middle Passage time—those centuries the archive miscounts. The beat itself is a clock: polyrhythms that keep several times at once.

Climate emergency vs. seasonal sovereignty. Emergency politics shouts “now!”—often at communities long held in bureaucratic later. Firefighting funds arrive instantly; water rights cases take decades. Decolonizing time insists that adaptation requires seasonal sovereignty: letting local calendars, not electoral ones, determine when to burn, sow, harvest, or rest.

Tactics: Designing for Temporal Pluralism

If time is governed, it can be governed otherwise. A few practical handles:

• Temporal Impact Assessments: Just as projects face environmental reviews, require audits of waiting, rushing, and seasonal disruption—who bears the delay, who captures the speed.

• Layered Calendars in Policy: Build legal carve-outs that recognize ceremonial seasons, subsistence cycles, and non-Gregorian observances as scheduling constraints, not “accommodations.”

• Archive Repair: Fund community-controlled timelines that map dispossession and resurgence across generations; let public institutions cite them as official chronologies in land and water claims.

• Rhythmic Infrastructure: Transit and clinic hours tuned to community peaks (harvests, pay cycles, prayer times); utility pricing that respects heat seasons rather than flat months.

Plural time is not a romance of slowness. Some communities demand faster clocks—emergency housing now, trials before memory fades. Others need protection from acceleration—mines pushed through “on schedule.” The ethic is not speed or slowness but tempo justice: aligning pace with place, obligation, and consent.

Why It Matters

When a single chronology rules, it naturalizes inequality: late for whom, early for whom, forever waiting for whom. Decolonizing time expands the political imagination. It turns policy into pacing, development into coordination, and culture into the art of keeping several tempos without collapse.

We can’t rewind history, but we can retune it. To live in counter-clock worlds is to replace the empire of deadlines with negotiated rhythms: some cyclical, some recursive, some defiantly offbeat. The future worth building won’t arrive “on time.” It will arrive on times—plural, argued over, shared.

Learn more: An Introduction to Chronopolitics

multiple times and temporalities

The Present Is Crowded: Living Among Multiple Temporalities

Overview of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Between 1929 and 1935, Antonio Gramsci wrote approximately 3,000 pages in notebooks while imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime. Arrested in 1926 as a leader of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci faced a prosecutor who declared, "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." Instead, imprisonment became the occasion for his most profound theoretical work. Writing under harsh conditions, constant surveillance, and deteriorating health, Gramsci developed concepts that would reshape revolutionary theory.

Themes and Structure

The Prison Notebooks comprise 33 notebooks covering diverse topics: philosophy, history, politics, culture, and linguistics. Rather than systematic treatises, they consist of fragmentary notes, observations, and extended reflections. This form reflected both prison constraints and Gramsci's dialectical method—he preferred open-ended investigation to dogmatic conclusions. Major themes include hegemony, intellectuals, the state, civil society, and Italian history, particularly the failure of revolutionary movements to achieve lasting change.

Methodological Innovation

Gramsci developed what he called the "philosophy of praxis"—a sophisticated Marxism that avoided economic reductionism while maintaining materialism's insights. He insisted on analyzing concrete historical situations rather than applying abstract formulas. His approach integrated cultural and political analysis, recognizing that economic structures alone don't determine social outcomes. This methodology proved particularly valuable for understanding why revolutionary movements succeed or fail.

Legacy and Interpretation

The Notebooks weren't published until after World War II and reached international audiences even later. Their fragmentary nature and Aesopian language (necessitated by prison censorship) created interpretive challenges. Different political traditions have claimed Gramsci's legacy, from Eurocommunists seeking democratic socialism to postcolonial theorists analyzing cultural imperialism. The work's richness continues generating new readings, making it indispensable for critical social theory and political practice.

Learn about Gramsci:

Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony

Gramsci on Intellectuals, society and education

Gramsci on The Subaltern Classes

The Politics of Looking: Stuart Hall on Race and the Image

“Race is the modality in which class is ‘lived’, the medium through which class relations are experienced.” — Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980)

The Racial Image Is Never Innocent

In a world where images circulate faster than thought—viral videos, police footage, protest photography, fashion campaigns—the politics of representation can feel both obvious and impossible to pin down. We know race is constructed, that images stereotype or “other.” But how?

Stuart Hall spent much of his career answering this question—not with slogans, but with slow, careful theory. Hall didn’t just point out that media reproduces racial stereotypes. He analyzed how it happens, why it sticks, and what it makes possible.

His work remains essential for understanding how race is made visible in culture—not simply as a set of traits or identities, but as a dynamic system of meanings. And crucially, Hall showed that the image is never just an image. It’s a scene of power.

Stereotypes Aren’t Just False—They’re Functional

In his influential essay “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” (1997), Hall explores how difference is visually constructed in mass media. Drawing on semiotics and psychoanalysis, he argues that racial stereotypes operate not by misrepresenting reality, but by fixing meaning—compressing complex human lives into simple, often contradictory signs.

Think of the familiar tropes: the hypersexual Black man, the submissive Asian woman, the violent Arab, the comedic South Asian sidekick. These are not random distortions. They are part of what Hall, citing Frantz Fanon and Lacan, describes as the “fantasies” of the dominant gaze: projections designed to stabilize white, Western identity by othering everyone else.

Stereotypes work by naturalizing these fantasies—making social constructions look like biological facts. They close off interpretation. They freeze difference.

Representation Is a Site of Struggle

For Hall, the point isn’t simply to demand better representation—though he believed that mattered—but to understand representation as a contested field. Who gets to represent whom? In what terms? And for what audience?

In his earlier work, particularly “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980), Hall developed the concept of articulation to describe how racialized identities are not simply reflections of economic or political positions but are formed through cultural and ideological linkages. Race isn’t just “added on” to class—it organizes how class is lived and understood.

This helps explain why racial stereotypes persist even when disproven. They are embedded in structures of feeling and institutional power. They are rehearsed in everyday media—through humor, fear, desire. But they can also be disarticulated, reworked, and refused.

Visual Culture After Hall

Consider today’s media environment: bodycam footage of police killings, marketing campaigns with curated “diversity,” TikToks that go viral for racial caricature, or influencers monetizing cultural aesthetics they don’t belong to. Hall gives us a way to parse the layers.

When a racialized image circulates, what meanings are encoded within it? What histories are being evoked—or erased? Who is the imagined viewer? What reaction is being solicited: sympathy, fear, envy, shame?

But Hall also believed in the counter-hegemonic potential of media. He was interested in how racialized groups respond to and reclaim representation. Black British youth, for example, developing new styles, music, and speech as modes of resistance. Or diasporic filmmakers creating alternative archives of visibility.

Representation is never just domination. It’s also improvisation, refusal, subversion.

Why It Still Matters

In our algorithmically saturated culture, where images are curated to match the viewer’s profile and prejudice, Hall’s theories remain sharp tools. He reminds us that race is not just seen—it’s made visible. Through repetition, framing, contrast. Through the everyday spectacle of the “other.”

To engage critically with race and media isn’t just to ask for better stories. It’s to demand a different way of seeing.

The Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson: From Negative Dialectics to the Cultural Logic of Capitalism

Few twentieth-century thinkers absorbed and transformed the legacy of the Frankfurt School as profoundly as Fredric Jameson. While his name is most closely associated with postmodernism and cultural theory, Jameson’s intellectual foundations were laid in the critical philosophy of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Marcuse. From them, he inherited not only a Marxist suspicion of culture’s complicity with capitalism, but also a profound faith in its redemptive, utopian potential. The Frankfurt School gave Jameson the grammar of negative dialectics — a way to think through contradiction without collapsing it into resolution. Yet Jameson would expand that grammar into a full cartography of the late capitalist world.

Negative Dialectics and the Refusal of Closure

At the center of both Adorno’s and Jameson’s thought lies a commitment to the dialectic as non-identity—the refusal to simplify or reconcile contradiction. For Adorno, the dialectic is not a method for arriving at synthesis but a way to keep thought open to what eludes it. “The whole is the false,” he declared, insisting that any claim to total knowledge reproduces domination. Jameson inherits this sensibility, but rather than rejecting totality, he seeks to reclaim it critically. In The Political Unconscious (1981), he argues that totality is not a completed system but a horizon — something that can be approached only through interpretation, never possessed. In this move, Jameson transforms Adorno’s negation into a historical project: not the renunciation of totality, but the attempt to map its contradictions.

The Culture Industry and Postmodernism

Jameson’s critique of postmodern culture is unthinkable without Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. They saw mass entertainment as a machinery of standardization, producing pleasure that reinforces conformity. Jameson extends this diagnosis into the age of global media, where commodification has reached every corner of aesthetic life. In his phrase, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism: the moment when art no longer resists the market but becomes its most refined expression. Yet Jameson resists the Frankfurt School’s tragic tone. Where Adorno saw art’s autonomy as the last refuge of negation, Jameson finds traces of utopian desire even within mass culture’s glossy surfaces.

Benjamin’s Aura and the Political Unconscious

From Walter Benjamin, Jameson inherits the idea that every cultural artifact contains a hidden history — what he will later call the political unconscious. Like Benjamin’s dialectical image, which flashes up a lost past in a moment of recognition, Jameson’s reading of narrative and form seeks to reveal the repressed conflicts of class and ideology embedded within them. Yet his historical horizon is broader: Benjamin’s messianic temporality becomes in Jameson a Marxist historicism that refuses transcendence but still longs for redemption through collective understanding.

Marcuse and the Utopian Impulse

Herbert Marcuse’s influence is most visible in Jameson’s insistence that desire itself can be revolutionary. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization imagined the aesthetic dimension as a space where new forms of life might be prefigured. Jameson echoes this in his notion of the utopian impulse—the idea that even the most commodified art expresses a longing for wholeness that capitalism cannot fulfill. Utopia, for both thinkers, is not a plan but a method: the critical imagination of what does not yet exist.

From Frankfurt to the Global

Where the Frankfurt School diagnosed the psychic and cultural pathologies of industrial capitalism, Jameson globalized their insights. He brought critical theory into dialogue with structuralism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism, producing a form of world-scale dialectics that sought to read everything—architecture, film, theory itself—as historical symptom. If Adorno’s despair at culture’s commodification was the melancholia of modernism, Jameson’s vast synthesis is its postmodern afterlife: an effort to rescue the dialectic from fragmentation and to restore hope within a world seemingly without alternatives.

In this sense, Jameson is the Frankfurt School’s great continuation and its transformation. He kept faith with its conviction that critique must remain both rigorous and redemptive—but he translated its European melancholy into a new global key. From Adorno’s negativity, Benjamin’s memory, and Marcuse’s utopia, Jameson built a philosophy for the world system—one that still insists, against all appearances, that history can be mapped, and that within culture’s contradictions, the dream of freedom has not yet been extinguished.

Power, Subjection, and the Paradox of Agency in Butler's Work

One of the most challenging aspects of Judith Butler's philosophy concerns the relationship between power, subjection, and agency. If we are formed as subjects through power relations and social norms we didn't choose, how can we resist or transform those very structures? Doesn't this theory trap us in a deterministic framework where agency becomes impossible?

The Paradox of Subjection

Butler engages this problem most directly in The Psychic Life of Power, where she develops a theory of subjection drawing on Foucault, Althusser, Freud, and Hegel. The central insight is that subjection is paradoxical: the very processes that subordinate us are also the processes that form us as subjects capable of acting at all. We can't simply reject the power that subjugates us without rejecting the conditions of our own existence as subjects.

Consider Althusser's famous scene of interpellation: a police officer calls out "Hey, you!" and an individual turns around, recognizing themselves as the addressee. In that moment of recognition and response, the person becomes a subject—but a subject already positioned within a power structure, already subordinated to authority. We don't become subjects first and then encounter power; we become subjects through our subjection to power.

This creates what Butler calls the "paradox of subjection": we depend for our existence on structures that fundamentally constrain us. The norms that make us intelligible as subjects are the same norms that limit what we can be and do. Yet this very dependence creates a peculiar vulnerability for power itself.

Finding Agency Within Constraint

Butler finds resources for agency within this paradox. First, the power that forms us never fully determines us. There's always a gap between the norms that hail us into being and our actual living of those norms. We never perfectly embody the ideals we're supposed to conform to; there's always some remainder, some excess, some dimension of our being that escapes full capture by power.

Second, subjection creates what Butler calls a "passionate attachment" to the norms that subordinate us. We become invested in our own subordination because it's the basis of our existence as subjects. This attachment is psychically complex—we need recognition from the very norms and authorities that constrain us. But this need also means we can work to transform the terms of recognition, to make those norms more livable, to expand what counts as a viable subject.

Third, norms require repeated performance to maintain their authority, and every repetition contains the possibility of variation. When we cite norms, we might cite them imperfectly or with a difference. These small failures and variations can accumulate, gradually shifting the meaning and operation of the norms themselves. Agency emerges not from standing outside power but from working within and against it, using the instability inherent in all repetition.

Butler's account of agency is thus neither heroic nor defeatist. We're not autonomous individuals who freely choose our identities and actions, but neither are we cultural dopes mechanically reproducing our programming. Instead, we're subjects who come into being through norms we didn't choose, yet who possess the capacity to repeat those norms differently, to expose their contingency, and to open space for alternative ways of living. This agency is constrained, provisional, and never guaranteed success—but it's real, and it's the only agency we have.

See also:

Bodies That Matter: Materiality, Discourse, and the Limits of Construction

Judith Butler on Desire, Recognition, and the Subjects of Desire

Subversive Repetition: Drag, Parody, and the Possibility of Change

Why Your Body in the Street Is Already a Vote – Butler and The Politics of Presence

Homi Bhabha's Third Space: Where Culture Gets Weird and Wobbly

What “God Is Dead” Really Means: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Truth, Morality, and Meaning

When Nietzsche says “God is dead,” he is not trying to win an argument about whether a divine being exists. In fact, the most Nietzschean way to misread him is to treat the phrase as a simple endorsement of atheism. Nietzsche’s target is larger and stranger: the entire structure of transcendence that made certain values feel unquestionable. “God,” in this sense, names a cultural guarantee—an ultimate “because” behind truth, morality, and meaning. The death of God is the moment when that guarantee loses credibility, and a civilization is forced to discover how much of its inner life depended on it.

God as the hidden foundation of “truth”

Nietzsche’s first move is to show that “truth” is not just a neutral mirror of reality. It is also a moral commitment. Western culture, especially in its Christian-inflected forms, treated truthfulness as a virtue: you owe it to God not to lie, not to deceive yourself, not to live in illusion. But then a paradox emerges. The same passion for truth—historical criticism, scientific rigor, intellectual honesty—begins to corrode the theological picture that originally sanctified it.

This is one of Nietzsche’s sharpest ironies: the death of God is partly an internal consequence of a morality that worshiped truth. Once we demand reasons all the way down, the old “final reason” begins to look like an inherited story rather than an indubitable ground. So what dies is not merely belief; what dies is the idea that truth has a sacred anchor. After God, truth may still exist as accuracy, coherence, or predictive power—but it no longer arrives with a halo.

Morality without heaven: an unstable inheritance

Nietzsche’s second move is genealogical. Instead of asking “Is this moral law true?” he asks, “Who needed this moral law, and why?” Morality, for him, is not primarily a set of eternal commandments. It is a historical and psychological formation—developed by human beings under pressures of power, fear, resentment, solidarity, and self-preservation.

This is where “God is dead” becomes explosive. If morality was authorized by a divine legislator, then morality felt objective and binding. But if God is no longer credible as the author of value, morality cannot remain the same kind of thing. It becomes—at least potentially—human-made, revisable, contested. And Nietzsche suspects that much of modern morality is still “Christian morality” living on after its metaphysical engine has been removed: compassion as absolute, guilt as a spiritual technology, equality as a sacred demand. He isn’t saying these values are simply wrong; he is saying they are not innocent. They have a history. They served needs. They shaped types of people.

In short: the death of God exposes morality as something with fingerprints on it.

Meaning after the collapse: why nihilism appears

Once truth and morality lose their transcendental guarantee, the question of meaning becomes unavoidable. If there is no cosmic author, no final purpose, no ultimate judge, then what is life “for”? Nietzsche’s name for the cultural mood that follows is nihilism—not as teenage cynicism, but as the slow recognition that our highest values have lost their authority.

Here Nietzsche draws a crucial distinction:

1. Passive nihilism: fatigue, resignation, the search for comfort, the desire to reduce life’s demands. This is the spirit that says, “Nothing matters, so just don’t suffer.”

2. Active nihilism: a clearing force, a willingness to dismantle decaying values to make room for new ones. This is the spirit that says, “If the old gods are dead, let’s stop pretending they’re alive.”

The danger is that passive nihilism can be politically and psychologically seductive. A culture can become addicted to numbness, distraction, and moral outsourcing. It can also panic and re-install absolutes—new “gods” wearing secular masks.

“God is dead” as a turning point, not a conclusion

So what does the phrase really mean? It means that the West has lost the metaphysical scaffolding that made its highest values feel guaranteed. It means that we can no longer honestly treat truth, morality, and meaning as handed down from a beyond. And it means we are entering a period where values will either be consciously created—or unconsciously replaced by whatever shouts the loudest.

Nietzsche’s point is not that everything is permitted. His point is that everything is now at stake. The death of God is not liberation by default; it is responsibility without alibi. The question becomes: can we live without borrowing our deepest “ought” from a source we no longer believe in—and without surrendering to the emptiness that follows?

That is the real meaning of Nietzsche’s announcement: not the end of faith, but the beginning of a terrifying and exhilarating task—building a human world after the collapse of heaven.

The Madman in the Marketplace: Reading Nietzsche’s Most Misquoted Parable

Nietzsche’s most famous line - “God is dead” - does not appear as a philosophical theorem. It arrives as a scene. A little drama. A parable with a strange protagonist: a “madman” who runs into a marketplace in broad daylight carrying a lantern, crying that he is looking for God. The crowd laughs. They are already modern, already secular enough to mock the old faith. And that is precisely Nietzsche’s point. The madman isn’t addressing believers. He’s addressing people who think the religious question is settled - because they have stopped believing without noticing what belief was holding up.

Why a madman?

Calling the speaker “mad” is not a cheap insult; it is a diagnostic device. In a culture where God has lost prestige, the one person who still takes God seriously—even as a missing foundation—will sound insane. The madman is “mad” the way a person is mad who screams “fire” while everyone else enjoys the party. His madness is a kind of lucidity that cannot be comfortably integrated into everyday life.

Nietzsche is also playing with the unsettling ambiguity of prophecy. The madman resembles a biblical figure, but he prophesies the collapse of the biblical world. He is a religious voice announcing the end of religion’s authority. That tension is the nerve of the passage.

Why the marketplace?

Nietzsche doesn’t stage this in a church. He stages it in the marketplace: the place of exchange, distraction, public opinion, and practical life. Modernity’s “cathedral” is no longer built of stone and stained glass; it is built of noise, commerce, and the constant circulation of attitudes. The marketplace crowd is busy, confident, ironically detached—exactly the kind of audience that can live after God while refusing to think about what “after God” truly means.

The setting also signals Nietzsche’s suspicion that modern “unbelief” is often shallow. The crowd can laugh at God, but they have not wrestled with the consequences. They are atheists in mood, not in responsibility.

“We have killed him”: the most dangerous line

When the madman cries, “We have killed him—you and I,” Nietzsche is not describing a literal act. He is diagnosing a historical process: modern values have undermined the conditions that made God credible. Scientific explanation, moral critique, historical scholarship, and the very Christian commitment to truthfulness have, paradoxically, eroded the theological architecture that supported them.

That’s why the madman’s tone is not triumphant. It is stunned. He asks: How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? The metaphors are physical because Nietzsche wants you to feel this as an event in the body of culture: orientation lost, a dizzying vertigo, a sense that the world is suddenly unmoored.

If God was the name for an ultimate “north,” then God’s death is not the discovery that we can walk without north. It is the discovery that we have been navigating by a compass whose needle has been snapped—and we still haven’t looked down.

The lantern in daylight

The lantern is one of Nietzsche’s most precise images. Why carry a light in daylight? Because the crowd thinks everything is already illuminated: science has explained the world, progress has replaced prayer, and rationality has closed the case. The madman’s lantern suggests the opposite: the deepest darkness can arrive precisely when we believe we no longer need light. The “daylight” of modern confidence can hide a more radical obscurity—the loss of meaning’s source.

He is not searching for God as a being somewhere in the sky. He is searching for what “God” functioned as: the guarantor of value, the anchor of truth, the author of a moral order. In daylight, that function has become invisible—so he must light a lantern to show what has disappeared.

Why the crowd doesn’t understand

The cruel irony is that the crowd is already beyond belief, yet still pre-nihilistic. They have not caught up with their own act. That is why the madman says he has come “too early.” The event has happened, but its implications have not yet arrived in the bloodstream of culture. The death of God is not a moment; it is a delay. A lag between demolition and collapse.

This lag matters because it explains a familiar modern contradiction: people reject religion but keep religious-shaped moral expectations—absolute certainty, pure innocence, final judgment—now redirected toward politics, identity, nation, or ideology. Nietzsche’s passage is a warning that the vacancy left by God will not remain empty. Something will rush in to play the role.

A requiem, not a slogan

The madman ends by saying he must go into churches to sing a requiem for God. That final image is the key: Nietzsche is not writing an atheist victory chant. He is writing a funeral song. The death is real, but so is the grief—and the danger.

The parable asks one hard question: if we have removed the highest authority, can we live without replacing it with a new idol? Nietzsche’s madman is not preaching disbelief. He is demanding that modernity finally take responsibility for what it already is.