Polytemporal Worlds — The Scales of Becoming: 4 The Politics of Tempo — Power and Acceleration

Time is never neutral. Just as rhythms can resonate, they can be enforced, compressed, or accelerated. Institutions, economies, and technologies impose temporal regimes: they dictate which rhythms are legible, which are privileged, and which are silenced. To inhabit polytemporal worlds is to inhabit the politics of tempo.

Acceleration is the most pervasive instrument of temporal power. Fast-paced markets, digital communication, and bureaucratic cycles demand conformity to a rhythm that is not shared by all. Those who cannot keep pace are excluded, marginalised, or rendered obsolete. Temporal coercion is therefore a form of relational violence: it reshapes the field of potential by privileging certain scales of becoming while suppressing others.

Resistance, by contrast, often takes the form of temporal disobedience. Local rhythms, cultural traditions, and slow practices defy the tempo of domination. They assert autonomy, sustain difference, and preserve the conditions for alternative coherence. In this sense, political struggle is also a struggle over tempo: who sets the rhythm, and whose potentials are allowed to flourish?

Temporal politics operates across scales:

• Individual — bodies, attention, and cognition resist or accommodate imposed rhythms.

• Social — communities negotiate work, ritual, and social cycles.

• Global — climate, migration, and technology expose conflicts among planetary, economic, and cultural tempos.

Recognising the politics of tempo is the first step toward ethical temporal engagement. It calls for attunement, not domination; for sensitivity to interference, not control; for the cultivation of polyphonic coexistence rather than uniform acceleration.

Polytemporality is therefore both descriptive and prescriptive: it reveals the multiplicity of rhythms in the world and challenges us to act in ways that sustain relational resonance rather than impose synchronisation. Power always flows through time — and ethical action must flow with it, not against it, if it is to preserve the openness of becoming.