Virtually-Purposive Godbeasts - In Defense of "The Human"
Those who are most against the human have thought the least about what we actually "are" + 2 upcoming courses that counter the anti-humanist tendency
The question concerning what The Human actually is has tormented me now. Not like a singular obsession, but as a nagging thorn in my side that I always circle back around to. For some reason, there is this huge push against the human, yet I can never get down to what people are arguing against.
Whether we’re talking about Marxism, Heidegger, the CCRU, Nick Land, or just my own anecdotal experiences with left-accelerationist types, anti-humanism is popular in theory circles.
The Intro to Nick Land course has inspired me to think this question all the more emphatically. ((You can see lecture 1 for that course here for free:
Not being myself any expert on such matters, the consensus seems to be that Nick Land takes the side of the techno-capital AI singularity against the human (if he would respond to our emails and go for an actual interview, then I think we could clarify these matters, but for the time being, we’re stuck interpreting his main corpus).
As Srnicek and Williams said in their accelerationist manifesto:
In [Nick Land’s] visioning of capital, the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations.1
But Land is not alone. Left accelerationists go against the human too, in a sense, too. This is where it gets a little more complicated though. My anecdotal experiences with left academics who sneer or eyeroll at the word human is not exactly represented in the literature. Rather than engage with such people, I’ll go for someone who is more mature in his approach, Reza Negarestani, author of Spirit and Intelligence, ex-CCRU member. What Negarestani says in the following quote, while seemingly going beyond the human, is not incompatible with anything I am doing in my own work.
Inhumanism stands in concrete opposition to any paradigm that seeks to degrade humanity either by confronting it with its finitude, or by abasing it before the backdrop of the great outdoors. Its labor consists partly in decanting the significance of the human from any predetermined meaning or particular import established by theology thereby extricating the acknowledgement of human significance from any veneration of the human that comes about when this significance is attributed to some variety of theological jurisdiction (God, ineffable genericity, foundationalist axiom, etc.).2
This raises a lot of questions I hope to unpack later, including, Why does confronting the human with its finitude “degrade” it? What definition of theology must Negarestani be working with in order to see it as inherently something to be resisted (when, as I’ve learned might be the case in many conversations on the Theory Underground channel with prominent theorists today, “theology” never goes away, but returns with a vengeance when disavowed by a naive secularism).
It sounds to me as though Negarestani, at least at the time of this writing, cannot but associate the term “human” with the baggage of “predetermined meaning.” I love the fact that he wants to defend us from a reductive de-valuing “against the backdrop of the great outdoors,” which I take to mean the way people say our experience is “just” subjective, thus presuming that the only “true, real, good” is equal to the infinite and objective universe that is indifferent to our fate.
I think I could get onboard with “inhumanism” except that the word “inhuman” literally means, in the minds of basically all English-speakers, animal cruelty and genocide. In Negarestani’s effort to avoid some of the baggage “human” has accrued, he chooses a signifier that has even worse baggage. I don’t see why we can’t just take the word “human,” something we all take ourselves to be anyway, and then clarify our meaning.
If Negarestani once upon a time (and possibly still) thinks that the word “human” comes with some kind of species-essentialism, then I’m guessing that’s what is at stake for the smirking academics who roll their eyes at the kitsch word “human.”
In the same way that such academics must think my, and most people’s, attachment to this word “human” is cringe, I think their aversion to the word “essentialism” is embarrassing. They act like any kind of philosophical essentialism must necessarily lead “back” to the Catholic church or to Nazism. Look out everyone, you will become Leo Strauss if you think of essences! As though we cannot have more sophisticated theories of “essences,” as with existentialism, wherein the human essence is in our “nature” as being possible, i.e. our ability to become, to choose, to fashion ourselves and, in doing so, discover what we are capable of that goes beyond anything we’ve previously imagined ourselves.
I want to stop nitpicking over words, I really do. After all, I’m shadow boxing with random weirdos who care too much about such things. But if you happen to use the word “human” in a positive sense and you get the same kind of condescending bullshit I’ve seen, just ask: “Why do you insist on interpreting the term in the least charitable and easy to deconstruct way?” Put another way, Why does “the human” always go so poorly defined by its critics?
Anyway, in response to the more Landian approach, Samuel Loncar said recently on the Theory Underground YouTube channel:
“Humanity hasn't been tried and found wanting, it's been found difficult and left untried. Transhumanism is fundamentally what happens when you have an incredibly philosophically lazy culture with an enormous amount of financial and technological power and then you get essentially infantile conceptualizing with nuclear (and beyond) level power resource allocation to those same infantile concepts.”
So of course I had to ask him to tell us — what IS “the human”!?
Samuel’s provisional answer goes as follows:
“The human is the answer to the question of what you truly are. Whatever the answer to that question is, human is the name for it… that's not exactly an answer but I would say we are the animal that can become a terrible beast with the power of a god, or a god that could refashion the cosmos, or shape it into a better thing.”
So then, the human is part animal, part god. This is not what I’m saying in my book Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, but it jives well with what I’m saying when I call “the human” virtually-purposive.
Virtually-purposive, understood existentially, gets at “what you truly are” as something more than what you’ve been or have taken yourself to be; it is what stands over and above, ahead of, and before your ego, but it is not reducible to the big Other or superego (both of which colonize the place the ego exists in relation to… but this is the subject of some other work to come).
I’ll explain more about what I mean by “virtually-purposive” in a moment, but first let’s be clear that the term “human,” as well as “humanist,” both come with a ton of connotations I have no interest in hitching any of my work to… but because most people I know consider themselves “human” before, over, and above “homo sapien” or any other popular term for whatever it is we are, I think the term is worth dignifying and raising to the level of the concept. As I said on pages 20-21 of Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy:
“The humanist response can take different routes, basing its arguments on the inherent value of every human, or how we either are equal, or ought to be treated as equals. Though these all get at something important, these beliefs are based in reaction to, and lack of understanding in, what is meant by human. There is a less discussed, but more important, understanding that sees all humans as beings whose lives are irreplaceable, meant to be, and more importantly, virtually-purposive. To really understand this position, much less why it is my own, will take the rest of this book to unpack.”
Throughout that work I do unpack this in various ways, usually not explicitly though. What I hope to do here is elaborate on this idea — while bringing it into dialogue with Samuel Loncar’s statements above (from when he came on one of the Epic Marathon Streams at Theory Underground (EMSTUs) channel).
Virtually-purposive means that we are never just what we seem, i.e. the possibilities that have been actualized or imagined. We are also beyond ourselves in ways we cannot ascertain. As Michael Downs says concerning the economy, I will say about the human: We don’t even know what the human can be.
Mikey, of course, gets this turn of phrase from Spinoza, who said that we still do not know what a body can do. As Mikey explained it in a voice memo to me,
“We don’t know what virtual potentials lay inside of matter. What can matter do? Land would take that and say the techno-capital singularity, this super intelligence, machinic godlike entity, that is matter doing that. It’s like he thinks matter itself is building itself into the greatest philosopher that could ever live. It’s weird how he thinks about critique.”
I do think it’s a fascinating and even exciting, though of course also terrifying, proposition. Land’s fidelity to tarrying with this virtual-potential inherent to techno-capital is the heart of his project, and it’s something we have to think seriously about today — I mean, everyone is, seemingly, thinking about it, thanks to the recent popularity of AI. It was Land, though, who was thinking about it before anyone else in the world of theory, and where he goes with it… yeah, it' gets pretty wild.
But as much as I think it’s worth considering such things seriously, why this emphasis on not knowing what matter can do? Is this due to a deep commitment to materialism, or to speaking to materialists? What’s the matter with non-matter? What’s the matter with ideas? The human is between the two — and sure, the human may just as well be a product of both, but it is also, insofar as we can tell, the origin of the two having any significance, i.e. mattering. Matter doesn’t matter without us, and we have no idea what the human can become.
We have glimpses though. We have seen humans give their lives for projects, ideas, principles, and movements that cause the standardized and structurally stultified consumer-producers that we are to shudder and, for sobering moments, step back and take stock.
Beyond the amazing histories of humanity, there are stories, which probe the possibilities.
One of the tasks of theory, in the mass standardized and hyper-fractured world we live in today, is to think anew what we are and can be. And starting with the fact that we essentially are a can be, more than a simply positive aggregate of properties and experiences, is what existentialism contributes in its best moments.
Coming out of the Being and Time course that I taught in 2023 and the first 2 months of 2024, Heidegger gets some credit from me for being the single most profound philosopher of reconceiving the human as possibilities.
We are always already out ahead of ourselves, thrown into a world of norms and habits, projecting ourselves on the horizon of possibilities. We do not understand things first through concepts, but on the basis of their possibilities — modal being.
To think of ourselves as the modal beings who need direction and purpose is to say that we are virtually-purposive. That means that “positive traits” or observable patterns are red herrings when it comes to humans. Sure, they might be indications of something, but we cannot see what is not there — and what is not there is the most essential thing about us.
The worker is not simply underpaid and overworked. Workers are structurally stultified of timenergy, i.e. large, repeatable, energy-infused blocks of time reliably between us.
Timenergy has been reduced to labor power through the system of schooling, discipline, control, and labor. But this much alone is not enough. We have to go the extra step to emphasize the way modal negativity is essential to what we “are,” which is to say, “what we are not” is one of the most important things for us today.
I got into this on Sunday, during my podcast with Nance called M-C-M^ vs. C-M-T3 AKA Capital Mondays. We were reading section 4 of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Das Kapital, the section on fetishism.
The section in question reads:
The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determinants of value. For in the first place, how ever varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs. (Pg. 164, from Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, section 4.
Taken on its own, this is important. But what Marx is getting at goes further when you bring in the existential standpoint from Being and Time. That has been a huge factor of everything I do, thinking Marx against Heidegger, and Heidegger against Marx — not for the sake of a synthesis, but to instead open up something new as an entirely unthought alternative to the liberal-totalitarian situation we are in.
Thinking Marx with Heidegger is how I come to the human as virtually-purposive. (Ok, there’s a bit of a debt to Deleuze here as well, but it’s only relevant as an extension of Heidegger, not as a negation, so we’ll leave that for another time.) “Virtually-purposive” means that “modal negativity” becomes essential. So after reading the above quote, I said:
“Marx doesn't just call it “labor” he calls it “the expenditure of human brains, nerves, muscles, and sense organs. I think that's really important because, though we want labor to not be the measure of value, or the basis of value, it IS. And it is in THIS situation that we are in which means that everything you've ever gotten off the grocery store shelf is from the expenditure of human brains, nerves, muscles, and sense organs.”
The positivism inherent to our culture and outlooks on everything means that our default way of taking this quote will miss the true weight of what’s at stake. It’s so easy to stay positivistic, only focusing on what has gone into a product, as opposed to comprehending the negativity inherent in the process. So I said:
“And this is where I would add the other side of the expenditure, because a human being has put their brain, nerves, muscles, and sense organs into that product — not just that product, but all of the products of its kind! And not just all the products of its kind, but also the fact that it is there means someone had to get it there; all the way down the supply chain, all the way back through the whole system of production — all of the brains, nerves, muscles, and sense organs that have gone into it from each human being has foreclosed their futures, their horizon of possibilities. That's the point, they can't find their talent, their timenergy, their tutelage, because that's what they've done instead. There's been a tremendous sacrifice because there's nothing more precious than a human being's ability to find their talent, pursue their calling, and do so with timenergy under tutelage. There's nothing more precious than that, and they don't have it, and you know they don't have it because of the product that you're holding. For example, the thousands of people involved in the production of the pen that I'm holding right here, they didn't get to have T-cubed, i.e. talent, timenergy, tutelage, and when they didn't get to have that, it means that they come from a broken family, and it means that they come from a hollowed out community, which means that their culture is a simulacrum.”
This is why we don’t know what the human can be, outside of extreme cases of supposedly solitary geniuses. People like Galileo, Descartes, Libniz, Kant, DaVinci, van Gogh, Tesla, etc., these are people who were “polymaths,” but the condition of their self-actualization was always this thing we’re calling T cubed, or T3: talent, timenergy, and tutelage!
As I said in that video, I owe the succinctness of this articulation, to
— who had, just earlier that same day, given a fantastic lecture on “Timenergy before Descartes” for the Critical Doxology and Timenergy (CDT) monthly seminar Ann and I lead for our monthly membership at TU.Studebaker shows that this formulation of the conditions for the Good Life — talent, timenergy, and tutelage, is already in its germ form in Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle. It’s a wonderful lecture that I will attach down below on the other side of the paywall,3 but if you can’t afford it and want access just DM me on here or email hello.theoryunderground@gmail.com
Anyway, Studebaker’s point of combining timenergy with talent and tutelage is that without those other two Ts, our timenergy spoils in the worst ways. I appreciate the clarity of this articulation so much because I’ve been trying to say it for years now — and have, throughout both Waypoint and Timenergy, said it all kinds of less succinct ways.
Now, bringing it back to the point of the above thread: Modal negativity is essential to what we are because we are virtually-purposive, which is why it’s not just the human brains, nerves, and sense organs that go into a thing that matters, but the sacrifice of human potential itself.
When Samuel Loncar says that we, whatever we “are,” exists in a tension between beast and gods, with the potential “to become a terrible beast with the power of a god,” vs. “a god that could refashion the cosmos, or shape it into a better thing. is what he is getting at this: that we are, fundamentally, virtually-purposive godbeasts? (Or beastgods?)
Through our virtual-purposivity, rationality, and language, we are able to refashion ourselves, the world, and the cosmos. Religion, philosophy, and science, then, all have played roles in organizing us, helping us tap certain potentials, or actualize certain aspects of our virtual capacities. Understood this way, to say that we are “made in the image of God” could also be taken to mean that, as the beings who fashion an image of The Good, of gods, or of God, i.e. the divine, we are doing what Sloterdijk calls anthropotechnics.4
Through big ideas and invention, what can we become? This question was never taken seriously enough by Marxism, because it was trying so hard to be scientific and materialist — and it always had an expressly antagonistic relation to religion.
Marx + Heidegger, on the other hand, each, in his own respective way, helped me see something necessary for being receptive to where I understand Loncar to be coming from.
2024 is, in many ways, the year of something special: Theorizing the human.
The two most important courses for doing that are Introduction to Ivan Illich, which is taught by Bryan Weeks. That started last week and you can see the first lecture here for free:
Illich doesn’t take the human for granted as we’ve appeared, but wants to get to the essential core of what we are capable of becoming if we reimagine what I want to call subjectivization-tools, i.e. institutions, drawing from the rich potential of what has gone before us, as well as taking advantage of unique opportunities made available now. You can see a short trailer-essay we made for this course here:
Finally, in defense of all things human, we cannot go without phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction. No thinker stands at the intersection of all three of these disciplines, while simultaneously, in his own wild ways immanently transcending their bounds, than Emmanuel Levinas. I’ll have more posts on him, and phenomenology more broadly, soon. For now, here’s a teaser of a teaser-essay I made, which is not yet public… There are a few things I still aim to edit in this before it is officially released, but go ahead and check it out if you like:
While the Illich and Levinas courses are awesome one-off courses you can do at TU, there are also ongoing research seminars with “CMT” and “CDT” wherein Ann and I give lectures on all kinds of awesome stuff. Most of these lectures are not public, but you can check out this one here. Pay close attention to what I’m presenting… what I bring into the idea of the human subject, using Hannah Arendt, aims to go beyond where most of the theory scene is currently at when it comes to theories of the subject, i.e. a defense of the virtual-realness of a “higher self.”
To become a monthly member of Theory Underground, you can do so here. However, be advised, the whole tier model is about to change, and there are way cooler benefits currently in the works.
P.S. Thank you
for leading the Writer’s Hour that served as the midwife to completion of this post that has been sitting on the back-burner for 3 months. Your coaching is awesome and I’m so excited to be a part of Theory Writing 101.Thanks for reading.
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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