What follows is an excerpt from David McKerracher’s book Timenergy. Timenergy is defined as “large, energy-infused, repeatable blocks of time reliably available within a society and between its members.” It is the opposite of time-without-energy (garbage time). It is the opposite of random bursts of energy that cannot be directed towards large and reliably repeatable blocks of time (restless energy). Timenergy is what we all lack. Timenergy theory is what McKerracher has been theorizing since before his M.A. thesis on the topic, and it is for the development of this work that Theory Underground ultimately exists. To find out more about its author, or how to get get a physical or audio version of the book Timenergy, there is more information at the end of this post.
Imagination stomachs and frustration
Robin DiAngelo is correct that she is hitting a nerve, that people are responding in a fragile way, and that there is something beneath the surface revealing itself. As already argued, what is manifesting itself is not racism, but a reaction based in a different subconscious state: timenergy fragility.
People who are not self-actualized fully in their career, who have priorities more important than their career, treat their career as a means towards a higher end. One of the most common examples of this would be good parents.
Parents have always had a difficult task, but how much more so in the information age of the attention economy? Our whole lives we are told, by every authority figure, what we should be focusing on, or what we are not supposed to be interested in. Any positive direction directs us away from a million alternatives, meaning a world of neglected interests and possibilities.
Timenergy fragility manifests in different ways, but beneath and before all such manifestations is a subconscious factor that I will, for simplicity’s sake, call the “imagination stomach.”
“Imagination stomach” is a technical metaphor that plays off of the common saying for when your appetite exceeds what can be stomached. Imagination factors in subconsciously even with food, because, in a sense, you imagined you could eat more than was possible.
Imagination is too often thought of as a conscious visualization of mere possibility or outlandishly speculative fantasy. However, imagination is inseparable from observation, practical goals, and rationality.
These are not mutually exclusive, but are necessary components of projection. “Projection” is usually used in its psychological or psychoanalytic sense, which means to see in others aspects of oneself that one is in denial of, which is important but is not how I am using this term.
Existentially, projection has to do with projecting oneself onto a horizon of possibilities. Any and all deliberate navigation into the future must necessarily observe what is possible, weigh possibilities against one another, and develop strategies. Most of the time this is done in less than a fully conscious manner, playing out in day dreams or actual dreams, the sum total of which forms the background conditions of what we consciously prioritize as plausible or impossible. Those strategies, which take into account and respond to problems and opportunities, are not just vague working theories, but are also practical projects.
Projection, then, in its existential sense, means both projecting oneself upon the horizon of possibilities, while likewise building a project for oneself through trial and error. Individuals form compacts, accords, organizations, and all kinds of groupings that are really just projects on a larger scale. Organizations institutionalize processes and decisions, as well as systems of interrelated ideas that aim to aid in the reproduction of specific strategies, priorities, and approaches to organizing the horizon of possibilities for the humans involved.
Anyone involved with anything or anyone anywhere always already has everything on that horizon collapsed into a specific set of options that, in their prioritization, excludes others. The “good career,” and everything that is supposed to help us on that path, becomes the master priority that all other priorities are servants to.
Every New Year there is a tremendous social pressure to start anew, to re-prioritize, essentialize, organize, and take on a new year of goals. This is where we are most intimately acquainted with the experience of over-estimating our timenergy stomachs.
Without a strong sense for the distinction between timenergy and “time and energy,” we look at the calendar as some abstract grid of time and think that all time is equal, that energy is a product of willpower, and that we therefore just have to try harder. When assessing the calendar, we forget energy. Similarly, when looking at a restaurant menu when hungry, we overestimate how much we can eat. With our souls starved for fulfillment, we commit to working out regularly, meditation, practicing a musical instrument, cooking special meals, spending quality time with loved ones, reading important works of philosophy, and a thousand other competing (quite worthy) goals.
Inevitably we realize that what appeared on the calendar as “free time” is garbage time. This registers at the gut level before it ever dawns on us consciously, where we usually rationalize falling off our New Year regimen in terms of personal responsibility or bad strategy.
This is where self-help gurus and life coach influencers step in to sell you a book to help rationalize why your goals are frustrated. They will blame you, your failure to adequately “attract” the right things with positive thoughts, or propose that you just need their new theory of time management.
We get so tired of the endless list of tasks and “tricks” we are supposed to be implementing, we become disillusioned with the hope of ever getting a sturdy basis in any of the relevant literature or habits, and then Robin DiAngelo shows up to tell us that our basic sense of “treat others with respect regardless of their skin color” is insufficient. She says we need to read up on, and become hyper conscious of, racial difference, in every situation, or else we’re racist.
If “good career” is only a means towards a higher end, like one’s children or a quality life, yet this career has come to demand all of your time, energy, and attention, then you know, at the level of your gut, that there is a supreme futility in all these consciousness raising rituals and the endless goal-post moving of what we’re supposed to do in order to be deserving of a dignified life.
So you either nod your head along and repeat the words you’re supposed to say, or risk social ostracization and undermining everything for which you have worked so hard. Some people are better able to adapt to the ever expanding demands of a control society, whereas others feel that it is undermining their very intellectual integrity.
You’ve not been shown the relevant literature firsthand, you have not done the primary readings, you don’t know what the major debates are within the field—and you’re not supposed to, because your job is to trust and obey.
How to be anti-racist, in this example, becomes a matter of job security—and you lack the timenergy to sacrifice the effort to gain a foothold and orientation in the field. So of course “fragility” manifests, in all sorts of ways.
Robin DiAngelo has only been a useful example to this point because of her recent popular success. She is a stand-in for a general tendency represented by worldview-salesmen and idealogues of all stripes. Diet, exercise, and book reading groups, as well as hobbies, all become competing servants of the Good Career Priority. Without the good career, we are subliminally threatened with poverty. Sometimes it is more than subliminal, when a teacher says, “Get your act together or you will spend the rest of your life working at a gas station.” Almost every “low-skilled” or “entry-level” job can be used as a threat—”you don’t want to be a janitor, do you?”
How well you succeed is supposed to depend on how hard you apply yourself to your schooling, where school no longer means leisure, but rather its very opposite: incessant preoccupation with instrumentalized necessity.
The difference between those who are supposed to lead (or “influence”) and those who are supposed to follow gets decided in school. Your willingness to sacrifice your soul, freedom, and intellectual integrity, are not the only factors in play between those who get sorted into the roles of influence and prestige vs. those who are punished with poverty.
The real deciding factor is your drive itself, that is, your repetitive self-overcoming capacity. Can your self-overcoming capacity become addicted to focusing on the arbitrary interests and deadlines established by authority figures, or does it hook you instead into other forms of self-destruction? Self-overcoming can, in the case of the “successful,” get hooked to the necessary habits of success in this society based in slavery. Though the rich slave is no doubt luckier than the poor slave, they are nonetheless slaves.
Thanks for reading!
This post is an excerpt from TIMENERGY: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Enjoy it serially here for free. If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Or just follow this Substack and read it serially over time! Also, the Audible version of this is now available!
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Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
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