Without timenergy, drive is only self-destruction... The relevance of jouissance
Between Winston Churchill and G.G. Allin
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.
Chapter Nine: Without timenergy, drive is only self-destruction
Whether you “succeed” by today’s social standards has almost everything to do with what theorists call “libidinal economy.” This is not about sex in any way that we think about it, so I tend to just refer to it as drive. Freud, and later Lacan, called it “death drive,” but this has little to do with how we think of death either. So I will just use drive as defined earlier: The repetitive drive towards self-overcoming.
Your “self” is your ego, your body, your present state, its equilibrium—and drive seeks to upset this equilibrium and overcome your “self” as you have grown to understand it. What does any of this have to do with success? How we get from point A to point B, in terms of life projects, goals, or something like a career, has everything to do with your drive’s circuit of outlets being such that you can still show up to work on time and get the job done. School measures little else.
Success being defined as showing up on time to get the job done is the product of a job-centric system of production. Under these conditions, elders and authority figures use carrots or sticks to get us to become the kind of person whose life priorities center around career success, or at minimum, punching a clock. That’s what it always comes back to, unless you were born into, and groomed for, power.
For someone like Churchill or F.D.R., the purpose of education runs completely counter to the purpose of the kind of schooling put upon middle and working class people. Churchill and F.D.R. had to deal with castration still, but when their vital impulse to act on the world in ways they found interesting was thwarted, their redirected drive had significantly more outlets to latch onto. A lot of those outlets were ones that, in the social scheme of things, bring returns on their investments of time and energy, or at least they do not undermine them too much.
Most activities originating at the outlets we have at our disposal, that our partial drives have latched onto, have diminishing returns. When timenergy is fractured and stultified by a society that reduces it to labor power on call for the whims of the market or state, and all we have left is time without energy (garbage time) or energy without reliably repeatable big blocks of time to focus on our interests, then our partial drives latch onto what they can. Because no absolute master lifestyle of pure will to power is ever actually possible, our unconscious instead copes by getting jouissance from its various outlets of partial drive. One way or another, we will get our self-overcoming. Everyone does, or they lose their minds!
Jouissance defined
Jouissance is a French word that does not get translated well into English. If we translate this word as “enjoyment,” like Todd McGowan always does (or Slavoj Žižek sometimes will) there is a serious risk: We conflate enjoyment with pleasure. Mental habits having to do with word-associations are strong.
To break the habit of thinking of “jouissance” as “enjoyment,” which in turn gets confused with joy or pleasure, we must instead think of it as the opposite of both joy and pleasure. It is not a pure opposite, but thinking of it as an opposite is a good heuristic device for getting closer to the phenomenon being signified by this term.
As Michael Downs, my mentor in all things Lacanian/Žižekian, has made clear: Pleasure has to do with release of tension, equilibrium, and ease. Jouissance, on the other hand, has to do with kinds of stress, drama, or pressure that bring a sense of excitation and exhilaration.
Because societies necessarily have their own respective legal order and norms, we learn we cannot just do whatever we want. We internalize the “No!” at a young age. Our parents and adult authority figures all have their own ways (carrots and sticks!) to try to teach us to learn how to satisfy our needs, desires, and demands in ways that are less obstructive or harmful. “Don’t pull your sister’s hair!” “Don’t shit on the floor!” “If you are good, you will get candy.” Etc.
Internalizing a relation to the “No!” of our parents and society in a larger sense is a big part of how we become people. I am trying to avoid writing a whole chapter about Lacanian psychoanalysis, much less introducing and unpacking a bunch of jargon about “the big Other,” “prohibition,” “superego,” or the distinctions between desire, drive, and demand. Suffice it to say, we are standing on the threshold to an entire field that would take another book to properly introduce. For now I will say two things: First, if you want such an introduction, I have done a whole series of conversations with Downs on the topic of Lacan and Žižek 101.[1] Second, I aim to write this so that none of that is necessary to get the main point.
What is the main point of introducing “jouissance” along with “drive”? Because we rationalize what we do, our egos buy into stories that hide what is really going on at the level of drive. Downs uses the example of road rage as a way one’s drive might get jouissance from commuting to work. I have developed this into three different forms that this could take:
1. One person gets his jouissance by driving like a speed demon. He tells himself a narrative about how “others just don’t know how to drive,” or “it’s really not that unsafe and it is the law of the road itself that is wrong, tyrannical, and unfair.”
2. Another person experiences road rage when seeing the speed demon drive. This person also has a narrative about why they get so pathologically unhinged when others behave the way they do, for example, “They’re going to kill someone driving like that!”
3. The third person drives the speed limit, or even slightly under the speed limit, because they want to enforce their rationally derived belief in what is appropriate onto others, break-checking the speed demon and road-rager.
Number 2 and 3 need not be mutually exclusive, but all three of these drive formations can exist on their own in different people. All three of these archetypical people have rationalized why they drive the way they do at the level of their ego. They have even moralized it. But below the conscious level, their drive finds jouissance in driving and judging.
We tell ourselves everyone should do as we do, but because they do not, we get stressed out. But this dramatic and exhilarating kind of stress is not pure misery—there is a kernel of enjoyment that persists through the experience, and we repeat it habitually.
One person’s jouissance is the next person’s misery. So it is easy for the passenger in any of the above examples to believe the driver is stressed out in a miserable way, especially as the driver might rationally condemn the way others are driving. When we have not learned to see jouissance at work, it can be hard to tell the difference between rationality in service to truth, and rationalization in service to unconscious drive seeking a kind of jouissance.
What counts as an exhilarating build up of tension for one person results in nightmares for another. One person’s party is the next person’s loss of sleep, as the neighbors who play their music loud at 2AM make clear.
Likewise, if you get your jouissance through political debate, then most people avoid you because your jouissance is, for them, nothing but the stresses of already fragile relationship networks bending under the pressure of culture war, or because of timenergy fragility.
Timenergy fragility is simply when you do not have timenergy, so even if something is deeply interesting or you feel the need to know more about it, you see no plausible way of actually getting to the level necessary to participate in the discourse or endeavor. When someone is putting pressure on you to participate in something that will make you appear foolish, and you have nothing but garbage time or one-off days of energy but no repeatably useful blocks of time, then feeling pressured to engage in a discourse for which you do not have the timenergy to get a footing in will only piss you off or stress you out—in a way that is just miserable, not exhilarating.
Our most deeply ingrained habits come down to the shape we take as we internalize the “No!” This negation of our vital expenditure re-directs drive, which unconsciously finds its ways to latch onto specific outlets for its jouissance. Unless you are as wealthy and timenergy rich as Churchill or F.D.R., your biggest habits are probably more or less latched onto outlets that bring diminishing returns, which is what happens when almost any physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, or creative need is being “met” by a simulation of that need’s satisfaction.
A perfect example of someone who developed really messed up “outlets” for drive at an early age is G.G. Allin. Allin is known for being the most profane punk rockstar of them all—any way that he could “transgress” on stage, he did, often resulting in jail time. G.G. Allin would smear his own shit on himself, fight audience members, and even sexually assault the women in his audience. He was well-known in the 90s, making appearances on sensational shows like Jerry Springer, Phil Donahue, and Jane Whitney.
Before he became the anti-celebrity icon of pure transgression for its own sake, G.G. Allin had an insane upbringing. His father kidnapped him with his brother and mother and kept them out in the middle of nowhere, threatening to bury them in the basement sometime in the near future. When he was not being beaten and terrorized by his father, his father was doing the same with his brother or mother. Allin reports, on the mainstream television interviews, that this upbringing made him “strong” with the “soul of a warrior.”
Reading his autobiography, we learn that at a very early age he started sniffing his mother’s underwear, masturbating to the contents of toilets, and having sex with his brother. Was this his own free will, or was he determined by his environment? In a documentary interview, after G.G. Allin had already passed away, his brother reports that they chose to be bad. They had bad circumstances, yes, but they also chose to embrace badness, to become monsters. Whether you believe this is true or not probably says a lot more about your ideology than the reality of the situation, because we develop very strong feelings about free will as opposed to determinism. Regardless of where one comes down on such matters, we should have no problem admitting that it is complicated when it comes to children with a fucked up childhood.
How one’s drive unconsciously latches onto a certain outlet as opposed to another is, at a certain level, a matter of dumb luck within a given environmental context. Yet such dumb luck also has a lot to do with the people we look up to. It is not just that Churchill and F.D.R. had better environmental factors that made a much broader set of possible outlets available than were at the disposal of G.G. Allin, they also had more potential role models with which to form identifications.
Churchill and F.D.R. had to deal with internalizing the “No!” just like anyone else who is socialized, but they had significantly more outlets for their drive to latch onto, and a lot of those outlets were ones that, in the social scheme of things, bring returns on their investments of time and energy. The outlets their drive latched onto at an unconscious level would have never connected if not for the sake of seeing others desiring in similar ways.
Desire is desire of the Other
If you never saw someone score a point in your favorite sport, then you would have never run the risk of this fantasy becoming one towards which your ego desires. If you never saw someone on Broadway nail a part, you may have not imagined yourself in her shoes. If your favorite person at a formative stage was not impressed by someone doing something, then maybe you would not have been.
Whether G.G. Allin could have become someone else given different environmental conditions and a broader array of potential role models is besides the point. For now, it is simply this: It seems highly unlikely that a child’s drive develops a jouissance fixation on the contents of toilets when they are not being abused, or when they have a lot of adult role models and opportunities for trying out diverse and complex assortment of activities.
While G.G. Allin and his brother both take total responsibility, saying they chose to become bad and even celebrating their father’s abuse, it is hard to not wonder if this is a way of rationalizing what seems beyond one’s control. We might consider ourselves superior to them because we did not develop such perverted fetishes, but this is likewise a way of moralizing something that involves a lot of dumb luck outside of one’s control.
Your fantasies were not written into your essence prior to conception, nor are they in your DNA. Your fantasies are not your own, i.e. a product of your inner truth, so much as something that rubbed off on you, that you got hooked into, that you are now haunted by. The selection of potential role models, or ways of being, that you had at your disposal growing up probably came through your television set, school, church, or YouTube as opposed to what we know of Churchill, as a perfect example. Here is a quote from one of his most popular biographies:
[In terms of power and wealth] Churchill was surrounded at a young age by the most successful people in the world. The social life of the Victorian and Edwardian [British] upper classes was partly based upon staying in the country houses of friends and acquaintances for the ‘Friday-to-Monday’ extended weekend. Over the coming years, Churchill was to stay with the Lyttons at Knebworth, his cousins the Londonderrys at Mount Stewart, the Rothschilds at Tring, the Grenfells at Taplow and Panshanger, the Roseberys at Dalmeny, the Cecils at Hatfield, the Duke of Westminster at Eaton Hall and on his yacht Flying Cloud, his cousins Lord and Lady Wimborne at Canford Manor, the John Astors at Hever and the Waldorf Astors at Cliveden, as well as paying frequent visits to Blenheim and very many other such houses. Although he occasionally experienced social ostracism as a result of his politics in later life, he always had an extensive and immensely grand social network upon which he could fall back. This largely aristocratic cocoon of friendship and kinship was to sustain him in the bad times to come.[2]
Most people develop some kind of respect for, or desire for respect from, some individual. The question is, what options did you have? How did you make sense of the differences between these options and how did this develop your own sensibilities?
A single role model is never enough. A handful of teachers and a pastor is not going to cut it. At least with Catholicism there is a world of saints one might learn about, each embodying a different way of being in the world, but for most of us Americans, we were raised as protestant—so no saints. Even then, though, no amount of other people telling us about a person counts for being around a person ourselves. As a child, it is the people you are around that set the constellation of your social reference points, and these show you possible ways of being-in-the-world, possible ways to project yourself onto the horizon of possibilities that are not reducible to book knowledge.
Thanks for reading!
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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.
End notes:
[1] Lacan 101 playlist: theoryunderground.com/courses/Lacan101
and Žižek 101 video playlist: theoryunderground.com/courses/Žižek101
[2] Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts. Publisher: Allen Lane (2018)
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