A Beat in Time

The Beat generation of writers mounted a sustained attack on postwar models of temporality—the corporate boardroom, the procreative nuclear family, the dystopic scenario of atomic futurity—through a politics and aesthetics of disengagement. Their literary works aspired to the condition of immediacy, often drawing on jazz improvisation, Zen Buddhism, and the celebration of everyday life. Writings by Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, William Burroughs, John Wieners discussed in this essay, offered a series of alternate temporalities through three frames: a poetics of dailiness and the quotidian; technologies and materialities of presence; ideals of Beat futurity and utopia. The essay draws on queer and disability theorists for whom the phenomenology of time is experienced by bodies regarded as “out of time,” either because they don’t conform to heterosexual scenarios of compulsory reproduction or because they fail to “fit” in norms of physical and cognitive health.