TIMENERGY: Why so triggered?
Exhaustion, impatience, and stress lead to frustration... of what?
Exhaustion, impatience, and stress lead to frustration. This includes frustration as a mood or affect, but more importantly, to the literal frustration of your life’s purpose. It is not just individuals or groups who are frustrated, but rather purposes and aims that get thwarted.
We are under the assumption that in this “free society” your life is what you make it. To some degree this is true. But there is only so much one can do when working a regular week. Only certain kinds of activities are made room for, while higher pursuits that require more time and energy? Those suffer.
Every New Year’s Eve is a sobering reminder. Some of us feel a lot of motivation to get it right this time: To hit the gym, practice a musical instrument, read some books, learn another language, get more involved with our community, and develop stronger relationships with loved ones. But we have work to do.
Work takes our time, but it also takes our energy. If one third of our lives is spent working, another third of our lives is spent recouping the energy sucked out of us by work. The overwhelming majority of our large energy-infused blocks of time are sold on the auction block of the labor market. Eating and sleeping are really just re-charging our work batteries, what also gets called “labor power.” Labor power is not the same as labor. Labor is effort expended, but labor power is potential labor made available to, or put at the disposal of, someone else’s interests.[1]
[1] This is a distinction that owes its roots to the Old Left, specifically Marx and Engels. Engels said that one of Marx’s greatest discoveries was that labor power is not equal to labor, that labor power is the commodity exchanged for wages. Timenergy theory builds on this insight, though it alters it. For Marx and Engels, all bodily processes are a form of labor, and all time and energy is labor power, even before its commodification under capitalism. Though Marx was sometimes careful to distinguish the specific form labor takes in capitalism (i.e. wage labor) he also sometimes transhistoricizes labor. This means he sometimes sees all bodily efforts, as well as time and energy, in terms of labor and labor power. “Timenergy” is not labor power, but is the pre-economic condition of what capitalism converts into labor power. In other societies timenergy is not a commodity. To keep this distinction alive, we will maintain the difference between timenergy and labor power.
This post was 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, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Defining timenergy as the pre-economic condition of labor power, is useful, because it opens up a relationship of fuel conversion between timenergy and labor power. If labor power is an abstract metric required to fuel input/output apparatuses, then timenergy is the pre-input, the surplus agency that must be processed out.
However these apparatuses are also expressions of agency, just agency that subalternates others agency. Any solution for universal timenergy then, would have to be one that mediates the balance of power between empowered and non empowered agents
It is still likely that some agents would submit themselves in hierarchy to one another as that hierarchy reflected/facilitated their aims and potentials. But they would have more bargaining power, and therefore more agency to choose. Which is really the loss in the 'timenergy' => 'labor power' conversion.
In terms of conceptualizing theory of balances of power, you and I are dealing with fundamentally the same relationships, just slightly different problems. Mine is the energy conversions required to communicate through a mediatized environment. Beneath I'll copy paste a short piece that gets to the heart of this, had to scrap it from the big project, cause its too heavy handed, but its cute; and at least it'll see the light of day here:
One is likely familiar with the image of the burning monk laminated on the front of Rage Against The Machines debut album.
It depicts the self immolation of Thích Quảng Đức -a Buddhist monk- in protest of the persecution of his spiritual practice, by the self
styled catholic authoritarian regime, at that point in ascendency in south Vietnam. The
photographer Malcom Browne quite naturally and quite grotesquely has won career defining
accolades and prominence for capturing the image.
How strange a relationship between the two men, both enact violence on the body of the
monk. Effacing and reducing the subject to nothing but a communication, the monk releases the
potential energy of the body for Debordian spectacle. The photographer retrospectively steals the
spectacle of its heat, of its particular, of its aura; and thereby feeds capital something it can digest, an
image that is really an absence, powerful in that it points to precisely what was lost in its gothic
creation.
It is only at this zenith does the relationship between the body of the person and the media
break from merely subtext. It is a relationship of inefficient energy conversion. The body is fuel for
the medium, but only the medium remains. The photo is simultaneously an artifact of defiance and
acquiescence. Defiance in the sense that the monk claims his body finally and without contestation
as beyond the reaches of the persecuting regime. Acquiescent in the sense that he has made a deal
with the devils Canadian stand in, Mcluhan. The medium is the message, and here the monk has
transmuted himself into a photograph, with the aid of the alchemist Browne. He does not scream,
we could not hear him even if he did. The subject only becomes such via self persecution of the
human
This self persecution is the Deleuzian logic of control. It is the logic of decentralized Capital.
To only see, hear, share or reprint the communicative aims of people who have effaced their
personhood.
This is a tragedy surely but not straigh-forewardly. This is “just the way it is”. Brutality so
naturalized that it reads silent, like the internal screaming of trees in a forest, as they squeeze each
other to extinction for the last rays of precious sunlight. Capitalist realism is Fishers name for this
condition where no alternative seems possible. But is this true? Can we only rage against the
machine? Is no other machine possible?
Does there exist the possibility of another mass media logic that does not convert its energy
through the spectacle? Does there exist another viable alchemic compound that communication can
flow through?
Could there be a way of mediated communication that burns the human a little less? Or at
the very least allows them to says more on their way out?
The positive contribution of this work is to propose such an alternative. A novel thrust, an
new machine, A Truth Machine! An experiment in bending Capital to the human. Lest we all die in
fatal spectacle.