ecstatic ruptures: dancing in the wreckage of linear time
by Ivan March

Imagine it’s new year’s eve, New York City, 1977, Patti Smith wears a t-shirt that reads 'Fuck the Clock' and play a concert at CBGB, a legendary club frequented by Blondie, Madonna & Talking Heads. About 17 minutes into the gig, with the impassioned frenzy of a stark-raving doomsdayer or prophet Patti slams these words:

“Everything comes down so pasteurized,
everything comes down 16 degrees,
they say your amplifier is too loud,
turn your amplifier down,
are we high, all alone on our knees?
memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes..
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!”

This is then followed up by an anarchic rendition of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Time is on My Side’ with the crowd bursting into an a cappella accompaniment. Collective frenzy, improvisation, peak immersion into the moment. Rock music was in its renegade reign, resisting the prisons of militarism and geopolitical power games, in the wake of colonial collapse and the early waves of neocolonialism.

Every time you tune into the news today it feels very much like it’s fuckthisshito’clock once again. Did we ever step out of the trauma-merry-go-round? Are we suffering from golden age syndrome, when we look back onto a past we have only second-tier tethers to, with idealistic projections, and a pessimistic outlook on our ever-escaping-present and future.

Patti’s plea was an invitation to break free of the time that is disciplined under capitalist conditioning. School bells, 9-5 work, overtime, deadlines, even pretentious, consumerist New Year’s eve parties & expectations of success or forced, performative joy. It was a ‘screw you’ to capital-time but also a invitation to fuck, to make love to time, to mess around with it and find out. It jives with Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of Chrononormativity: 'the organization of individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’.

Chrononormativity is the child of standardisation, scaling and efficiency culture, it is “the expectation that we all follow the same timeline, that there's the same right thing at the right time for everybody.” Which is why, time-warping rituals like raving, sex, or grief act as temporal resistance: creating queer, circular, or nonlinear experiences of time.

Raving is a glitch in the productivity machine. It also asks us, ‘what do you dedicate life time to?’ Are you being a cog or being cognizant?

David Eagleman in his speculative short story ‘Sum’, writes of an afterlife where “you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.” Imagine after dying, having to relive your life in aggregate chunks, you spend two months looking for parking in front of your house, seven months having sex, you sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes, then for five months straight you scroll on social media while sitting on a toilet.

“You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.”

Eagleman continues, some of it will be fun, some of it dull, and some of it devastating. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line (a much higher tally for the average club kid). One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One full minute realizing your body is falling. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Six months watching commercials. Three years of swallowing food.

Four minutes you spend wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on burning sand.”

How much time did you spend dancing? How much will you wish you had spent dancing and kissing and painting and playing? When was the last time you were hopping like a kid.. on hot sand?

Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant write of ‘Affective Temporalities’, that emotions (and the language that tries to capture them) have time: waiting, lingering, dreading, hoping. Ecstasy creates suspended time, a 'pause' in affect where the future is unformed, the past is irrelevant, and only intensity exists. Meanwhile the neuro-nerds are corroborating, they find that during ecstatic states (e.g., sex, drugs, meditation, or flow), the prefrontal cortex changes its activity, leading to time dilation or compression. It can go in either way, maybe it doesn’t quite fuck the clock, but it sure fucks with it.

James Baldwin captures what every raver knows, that some time of night, before the dawn, there is a witching hour, an hour of the wolf, a moment when things get a little screwy. He writes,

“Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was, is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”

In this darkest-before-the-dawn moment we witness the face of impermanence, we are confronted by ‘the unforgiving minutes’ and the inevitable and unfathomable transience of all things.

“It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.”

Baldwin, a romantic and pragmatic humanist concludes, “I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

Here locks in Walter Benjamin’s 'Jetztzeit' (Now-Time), a notion that revolutionary time is not gradual or linear but i.n.t.e.r.r.u.p.t.i.v.e - a rupture in historical continuity. We are one step away from rave ecstasy: a break from normal life where a collective, heightened now takes over.

“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.” — Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

The 'specious present' is a term for the brief window of time (~2 to 5 seconds) that we can consciously experience—outside of it, all things get fuzzy.

Speaking of hot fuzz, “I refuse to acknowledge time”, with these outlandish words, Mariah Carey begins her memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey (2020). “It is a waste of time to be fixated on time,” she muses, “life has made me find my own way to be in this world. Why ruin the journey by watching the clock and the ticking away of years?” Instead of counting the minutes and years, Mariah chooses to live life 'moment to moment'. She inspired artist Adam Farah-Saad (aka free.yard) to make autobiographical short films titled Peak Momentations, the term 'momentation', they explain, refers to “a pronounced dwelling on the ephemeral - influenced by Mariah Carey’s queer disidentificatory theorisations of THE MOMENT.”

Aside from shifting the units of measuring time from clinical seconds to something opaque, meaning-rich, and blurry around the edges - such as a momentation - Mariah also refuses to acknowledge her age, which in part is a refusal to acknowledge the reality of aging. Here she takes a page from Frida Kahlo’s playbook, since the Mexican artist “changed her date of birth from 1907 to 1910, she made herself three years younger, but at the same time, she also made her origin coincide with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, in a deliberate rewiring of time that affirmed her commitment to anti-imperialist and anti-colonial politics.”

Van Saarloos writes in Against Ageism “our grammar on age teaches us that children are a symbol of potential, while the elderly are perceived as the antithesis of progress. The elderly hold tradition and memory, not innovation and future.” How coercive is age as a category, pushing you indiscriminately into boxes? This collective pretense that according to your age you should behave in a certain way, and normalize certain limitations? “And perhaps also let’s stop considering parenting/teaching/loving as a coercive ‘let-me-show-you-the-way’ practice? Once this structure has fallen, a whole new web of relationships can be built.”

If Mariah Carey’s momentations are the glittering refusal of linear time, then Black Quantum Futurism is its radical reclamation. As explored by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa (of the electronic duo Moor Mother), Black quantum time bends, loops, and entangles - refusing the colonial insistence on forward motion. Time isn’t a line; it’s a snail spiral, a chorus, a call-and-response between past and future. The ancestors aren’t behind us; they’re beside us, whispering in the static between sets, in the hum of a warehouse sound system at Baldwin’s 4:00 AM.

Byung-Chul Han, in his meditation on ongoingness, argues that modernity’s obsession with acceleration has severed us from the natural rhythms of continuity. Aging, decay, rebirth - these are not failures of progress but the pulse of existence itself. Rituals, he suggests, are the antidote to the neoliberal cult of the new - they reintroduce cyclicality, the kind found in rave’s sacred repetitions: the drop, the build, the drop again.

Which brings us to K-time - rave’s temporal distortion field. In the glow of a strobe, between the thud of a kick drum and the sigh of a breakdown, time doesn’t pass; it pools. You don’t spend hours on the dancefloor; you dissolve into them. This is the alchemy of collective euphoria: a suspension so potent it rewires memory. Ask anyone who’s ever lost themselves in an electronic music set; what remains isn’t a sequence of events but a constellation of moments that mattered: a stranger’s hands in yours during the peak, the bassline that cracked your ribs open, the sunrise that arrived too soon.

Michael Cunningham, in The Hours, delivers a searing internalization of time’s passage: “We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep... There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined..

..though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”

It reads like a soliloquy that plays in one’s head during a killer comedown, in the deepest depletions of serotonin. But here’s the twist: ravers know those hours aren’t accidents - they’re chosen. You don’t stumble into ecstasy; you conspire with it.

Benjy Russell & T Clutch Fleischmann’s 'Clutch's Hormones and Benjy's HIV Meds on a Mirror' (2015) is a photograph of two timelines colliding - pills as tiny monuments to survival, to the body’s stubborn negotiation with time. Chronic illness, like queerness, like raving, demands its own temporality. You learn to measure life not in years but in doses, in highs, in the space between one breath and the next.

So fuck the clock. Fuck the shoulds, the by whens, the too lates. Time isn’t a currency; it’s a collaboration. A momentation is a revolt. A rave is a temporal insurrection. And if the afterlife is just a reshuffling of our aggregated joys and agonies, then let the record show: we spent every second we could stealing back the now.

“Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.” — Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

There is a certain horror in realizing that time, which once felt infinite, is actually finite as fuck. The modern world runs on a scarcity model of minutes - productivity hacks, hustle porn, the gnawing sense that you’re always behind, always late, always missing out. But what if we recalibrated our clocks to something slower, something older, something indifferent to human panic?

Miriam Simun, in a cephalopod training session, once invoked evolutionary time, the vast, liquid stretch from primordial soup to the first flicker of neural awareness in a jellyfish. Imagine the patience of an octopus, its consciousness unfolding in pulses, its intelligence distributed across limbs that taste the world as they move through it. Or consider the tardigrade, the moss piglet, those microscopic extremophiles who laugh in the face of apocalypses constantly. They don’t do productivity. They do persistence. Jenny Odell writes of moss time, a timescale where growth is imperceptible, where survival is measured in centuries, not quarters. A tardigrade’s mantra: Wait. Endure. Outlast.

And then there’s rock time, the granite slowness of mountains, the glacial creep of tectonic plates. Rocks don’t schedule. They accumulate. They don’t achieve. They exist. To touch a stone is to press your palm against a calendar older than language.

Annie Dillard, that patron saint of attention, once wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” A schedule, she argues, is a net for catching days, a fragile, human attempt to impose order on chaos. But what if the chaos is the point? What if the blurred and powerful pattern of sameness is the very thing that numbs us?

Borges, ever the mystic, saw through the illusion: “The vociferous catastrophes of a general order, fires, wars, epidemics.. are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.” We think we’re living through unprecedented times, but history is just a record of collective amnesia. The apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s always here, in slow motion.

So how do we live inside it?

There’s a difference between a good day and a good life. A good day might be a binge of sensation - a rave, a feast, a fuck. But a good life? That’s something else entirely. “The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.”

Pasteur’s days were repetitive, lab-bound, obsessive. Mann’s were cloistered in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and sentences revised to perfection. The magic isn’t always in the peak moments but in the accumulation, the way small, stubborn acts compound into something vast.

Emily Dickinson knew this. “Forever – is composed of Nows –”, she wrote. Eternity isn’t some far-off destination. It’s the sum of every present you’ve ever slipped through. Remove the Dates, she instructs. Let months dissolve. Let years exhale.

The Tardigrade’s Rebellion: here’s the radical proposition: Be more moss. Be more rock. Be the clockroach, surviving in the cracks of capitalism’s ticking.

The world is ending. It always is. But deep time doesn’t care and it quietly suggests that neither should you.

“Everything should be an evening event.” — Mariah Carey

Midnight is a threshold. Not a beginning, not an end, but what Nathaniel Hawthorne called 'an intermediate space' - where yesterday has already dissolved into shadow and tomorrow hasn’t yet breached the horizon. Here, in the velvet dark, time unspools differently. The club becomes a temple of Aion - eternal time, unshackled from sequence, where the ego’s petty ticketty tocking gives way to something older, wilder. Carl Jung knew this. The ravers know it too.

Psychedelic visions, Dreamtime, the flicker of a strobe - these are all portals to the same truth: time isn’t linear. It’s a felt thing, a texture. Australian Aboriginal cosmology speaks of Dreamtime not as myth but as ongoing reality, where past, present, and future fold into each other like lovers in a sweat-drenched afterhours. Sound familiar? It should. The dancefloor does this too. When the bass hits just right, chronesthesia, the mind’s time travel aka short-circuits. You’re 16 again, you’re 90, you’re not even sure you’re human anymore. Trauma, nostalgia, ecstasy: all collapse into the wow of the now.

“The future is an immanent rupture in the colonial present.” Black Quantum Time rewires the colonial clock, it is the DJ rewinding the breakbeat until it becomes an ouroboros. It’s the way grief stretches a second into a lifetime, the way joy compresses decades into a single drop. It’s Afrofuturist, crip, queer: time as a “collapsed event horizon.” Time as molasses. Time as wildfire.

Capitalist time is a railroad, laid by stolen labor, policed by productivity. But Black Quantum Time derails it. It’s Sun Ra’s ‘Space Is the Place’, a fugitive physics where ancestors hum in the sub-bass, where the future isn’t ahead but already here, vibrating in the walls of a South London basement party. Rave time is Kairos, the ancient Greek 'right moment', the crack in chronology where ecstasy floods in. It’s 6AM and your wristwatch has melted. It’s the way a stranger’s hands on your waist rewrite your biography. It’s the DJ splicing 1992 jungle with 303 acid lines from a future that hasn’t happened yet.

Paul Virilio warned us: modernity is dromology, the cult of speed. Time isn’t money; it’s a missile. But what if the real rebellion isn’t acceleration, but slowness? Not the lethargy of defeat, but the deliberate, ecstatic deceleration of ritual. The pause before the drop. The breath between kisses. “Cute teaches you what it means to traverse and be traversed”, write Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic. “We softened. We became rubberised and plushy, springloaded and squishable.” Cute time is rave time - a 'joyful abandon' that melts thresholds instead of enforcing them.

So here, in the nocturne’s key, we arrive at the final paradox: How we spend our raves is, of course, how we spend our lives. Not in the grind, but in the gaps. Not in the measured ticks, but in the stolen, shimmering moments between them. Time isn’t running out. It’s pooling… at your feet, in your lungs, in the spaces where the music hasn’t stopped yet.

Turn off the clock. The evening’s just beginning.

Time’s up.

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References

There’s No Beginning & There Is No End: Mariah Carey and the Refusal of Time, Amelia Groom (2023)

The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1998)

Sum, David Eagleman (2009)

Raving, McKenzie Wark (2023)

The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung Chul Han (2019)

Against Ageism - A Queer Manifesto, Simone van Saarloos (2024)

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell (2023)

Cute Accelerationism, Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic (2024)

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman (2010)

Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time, Marc Wittmann (2016)

Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio (1977)