Stakes for Timenergy Theory

McKerracher Against Dogmatic Worldviews, Universal Slavery, School over Scholē, Racialisation, the PMC... and anything obfuscating the future of Timenergy theory

This Monday April 1st The Portal will be hosting its first Book Club focused on David McKerracher of

Theory Underground

book Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. To find out more, or to join us, see: The Portal.

Philosophy Portal’s next course focuses on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, find out more, or get involved here: Philosophy of Right.

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David McKerracher ends Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy in an Afterword which emphasises that “timenergy” is a concept that presents to us a fundamental issue, that is, without it (timenergy):¹

“we cannot truly appreciate those finer arts, or explore and cultivate our talents for their own sake, much less for the sake of others or any kind of higher community or culture.”

At the beginning of the book, he clearly defined the concept in the following way:²

“Timenergy is energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly sacrifice towards building sustained symbolic and material value for oneself and communities of recognition or care. In other words, timenergy is reliable, reusable, and routinely available large blocks of energy-infused-time throughout the week.”

In this way, McKerracher clearly outlines both the ground and the telos of his work, or what I am going to call the “stakes” of his theory (since he states explicitly that all of Theory Underground is built around this concept).³ Here I want to highlight two aspects that seem integral for this future:

1. Throughout the book McKerracher outlines what he is against in what poses a risk to a future in which timenergy is centred as a fundamental concept in our political ecology (e.g. dogmatic worldviews, political movements, universalised slavery, school over scholē, racialisation of class issues, the professional managerial class, etc.)

2. The book ends with the identification that this book just represents the beginning of the theory, and that a future book, requiring more research and rigour, needs to further develop the concept philosophically (with reference to different theories of time, e.g. Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, Lacan; and the problem of energy in time, with reference to will, motivation, drive, determination, etc.⁴

Here I read Timenergy as a book that functions as the necessary groundwork for the philosophical mediation which centres and legitimises the existence of Theory Underground into the future. In this groundwork, I think we get a picture of the contemporary social, cultural, and political landscape from the point of view of Timenergy theory. This picture is not totalising, highly practical, and may help us make better life choices, and unfold different life processes, in our quest to guard that which seems most precious for future creativity and community: timenergy. While we may have to wait for a more researched and rigorous concept of timenergy, we can in the meantime re-orient whatever perspectives may be in the way of securing a deeper relationship to it, while avoiding many of the social, cultural, and political obstacles that obfuscate our way.

We will start our analysis of these obstacles in our way with a dimension that was unexpected for me: giftedness. McKerracher suggests that being labelled gifted today is a “curse” (a clever play on words).⁵ This starting point resonates deeply in my history. Throughout my doctorate, my supervisor, who is recognised as a world expert on the phenomenon of “giftedness”,⁶ would not only always label me gifted, but also seemed to operate under the reified presupposition of a division in the world between gifted and non-gifted people. I thought this was, at best, too simplistic, and at worst, sociopolitical lunacy. McKerracher seems to be thinking in a similar direction, in the sense that he suggests being labelled as “gifted” in our contemporary society organised around “hustle and grind culture”, preconditions you towards becoming an “achievement junkie” prone to “burnout” and “chronic exhaustion”.⁷

What I take this analysis to be suggesting, is that if we divide the world up between “gifted” and “non-gifted” or what is apparently not quite the same thing, but similar, “high IQ” and “low IQ” populations (due to giftedness seemingly seeking a more emotionally expansive concept of intelligence), we are obfuscating the sociopolitical conditions within which “instrumentalised intelligence” is (in the negative) exploited and manipulated, and (in the positive) valued and goal-oriented. As a result, McKerracher argues that gifted achievement junkies tend to sacrifice genuine leisure time (which will become important throughout the development of the book), for a pathological productivity in order to hoard power, privilege, wealth to reinvest in their gifts.

What seems to be at stake here, is recognising that, underneath this “gifted productivity drive” is a type of “distraction from disappointment”.⁸ This disappointment could be, or likely is, some sort of existential disappointment related to love and connection in society, as well as the difficulty of sustaining love and connection in a society so hard-wired for external markers of achievement or success. If we do not play along with the culture, we become “stigmatised, otherised, abandoned, punished, or cast out.”⁹ McKerracher suggests that in a culture that promotes an intense hustle and grind culture, no matter how gifted we are, and no matter how much we achieve, we all become subject to a type of universalised slavery.¹⁰

We might ask ourselves what the term “giftedness” may mean in the context of a truly free society? That is, we may ask ourselves what the term giftedness may mean in the context of a society that was built around Timenergy?

Another way I am trying to think giftedness is something like the following: rather than reifying the gifted/non-gifted distinction, can we think about the sociopolitical contexts in which our gifts are expressed, as well as the multiplicity of different values and goals that we may judge as expressions of gifts?

Without going into too much detail, I can say that my “gifts” did lead me to the problems that McKerracher suggests are actually cursed. When I first started what would become Philosophy Portal, I started making online courses while also trying to complete my doctorate and apply for post-doc positions. I totally burned out. I had to learn the basics of online business, while also developing philosophical courses that were true to my drive, while also writing a doctorate, defending a doctorate, and applying for post-doc positions. After burning out, in the striving for external achievements, I totally recoiled from the hustle and grind culture. I started to shift my approach, and tried to re-contextualise my gifts in a different orientation. While I still do, perhaps, struggle with the curses that comes with gifts in a hustle and grind culture, I make much much more room for leisure, and try my best not to measure myself against people who I perceive to be higher achievers or being more productive and disciplined than myself.

Perhaps this is all connected to the next major obstacle in the way of a Timenergy theory, that is the distinction between school and scholē. While McKerracher sees school as something which fits into and ultimately serves hustle and grind culture, where we are trained to feel, as well as actually experience the physical reality, that we can never really “get ahead”. Our school models are built up around notions of purely utilitarian values, i.e. where we are trained to connect our values and our purposes to being useful. If we are unable to become useful, then we might as well “get out of the way”. Or as McKerracher frames it:¹¹

“Those who buy into the narrative of “sucks to suck, find a way to make yourself useful or get out of the way for those who do””.

I have to emphasise that this distinction was one that I always felt ruined so many lives. While I was in university, I was passionately dedicated to fields of study that seemed, to many, absolutely useless. I was interested in human, life, and cosmic history;¹² I was interested in great ape behaviour, culture, and technology;¹³ I was interested in obscure works of continental philosophy.¹⁴ What was the utilitarian market value of these interests? What was the practical job to which these interests clearly served a function? The simple answer: they didn’t and still really don't.

And yet I ask myself: what is the value and goal of my life without these useless interests? What the mystery of my life that causes me to be so passionately interested in forms of knowledge that seem absolutely useless?

Perhaps it can give me some consolation, that McKerracher reminds us that scholē, as opposed to school, is really about cultivating a form of leisure in which we can find our inherent virtual purposiveness in the mystery of what we can become;¹⁵ as well as towards living a life of Bildung, which can be translated to mean something like life-long personal/self-cultivation in culture.¹⁶ When I think about my aforementioned interests in school — which were so disconnected from anything that serves a clear external utilitarian function — I can easily think about the disposition or mode of engagement that I inhabited (and still inhabit) when exploring these fields, as a type of leisure where my timenergy is disconnected from pure utilitarian reduction. I can also think about the value of these interests as providing me with a type of personal self-insight in the cultivation of my spirit, that will last a lifetime, and cannot be calculated via my income or tax bracket, or how easily my skills are synergised with immediate market value.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that, at Philosophy Portal, we have focused so much on Hegel’s philosophy, as McKerracher notes that it is Hegel’s notion of universal education for the self-cultivation of spiritual freedom, which most clearly connects modern philosophical schooling to the spirit of scholē.¹⁷

Next we can set our sights on a contemporary political problem which McKerracher has dedicated a lot of Timenergy, since it seems to represent a large-scale political obstacle to Timenergy theory: that of Leftist politics over-racialisation of class issues, as well as the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as representing a weird class requiring a new type of class analysis. These twin problems come together most forcefully in McKerracher’s critical reading of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility,¹⁸ who McKerracher labels as “the new racial cop in town”.¹⁹ To be specific, McKerracher suggests that DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” is actually pointing towards something far more general: “Timenergy Fragility”.²⁰ In other words, the real social problems in America are not white people being scared to talk about race because it threatens their positive self-image, it is that people in general (black, white, etc.) are not self-actualised in their career, increasingly stressed and burned out, rich or poor alike becoming slaves to capitalist self-reproduction.

McKerracher furthermore claims that DiAngelo and her analysis, while pointing out things that should be spoken about more openly, is in her active performativity, exhibiting all of the entitled characteristics of the PMC (which certainly has nothing to do with issues of race, but of class). What are these PMC characteristics? McKerracher outlines a list of five crucial points:²¹

1. Leftist who are over-represented by people who don’t have any real contact with physical or manual labour, or working class life in general

2. Intellectuals and bureaucrats who are out-of-touch, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory

3. Class of people who get attached to “floating signifiers” without any concrete connection and “virtue hoarding” of their self-defined goodness

4. People who exhibit a meritocratic entitlement due to their university education, and are insulted by the concept of physical labour

5. A general morality that tells in words rather than shows in action, as well as manipulates others rather than reasons in open discussion

However, McKerracher also suggests that this problem of PMC culture versus working class culture, is not only or exclusively a Leftist issue, but is also expressed by the Right. While Leftist PMC’s tend to relate to the working class via the logic of mimicking expert authorities to become a good and deserving one; the Right PMC tend to relate to the working class via the individualistic ideology of pull yourself up by the bootstraps.²² McKerracher theorises that both of these paths, Left and Right class issues, are political dead ends and that:²³

“both sides have no serious plan for a future wherein families, communities, and individuals have the timenergy to discover talents, develop non job-related skills (like the violin, or a second language), or become anything beyond a worker or middle manager.”

This whole analysis of the way that contemporary Leftist politics uses race as a tool to structure all divisions in society, and especially as a way to eradicate a real class analysis, is something that has had a huge impact on my life, personally and practically. I am a * trigger warning * white man who also happens to come from a poor working class background. There are no people in my immediate or extended family who continued schooling into higher education, and I thus I had no familial models or guidance towards a path of success in higher education. While I could easily transfer my working class work ethic into the higher education domain, the path was indeed difficult, and at time seemed like a mistake or an impossibility.

Throughout my educational experience, I tended towards identification with progressive politics, and certainly was not against policies or perspectives, which aimed to rectify historical injustices against people of colour or marginalised identities. However, it was easy to see that just being a white man on campus, was itself becoming a type of targeted scapegoat identity for all the evils and injustices in the world, and that this discourse was in many ways preventing a more accurate and unifying analysis on the level of class. Moreover, it is hard not to recognise that the type of person driving this “racialised” and “genderised” discourse, were often those that, I could say retroactively, seem to be what McKerracher calls “PMC”.

The central contradiction is something like the racialised and genderised discourse is coming from people (black or white or other) who are not working class but a type of professional/managerial elite that have little contact with actual working class life (black or white or other).

Moreover, in my experience, it is precisely this super abstract and disconnected discourse, from my point of view, which led to my struggle with identifying as “Leftist” or as engaged in what I thought to be universal emancipatory politics. Here I found myself in the self-contradiction that seems to have been accurately identified by Marxist scholar Chris Cutrone, cited by McKerracher, that if you try not to identify as ‘neither Left or Right’, you tend towards the “Right”.²⁴ In other words, I think that a lot of progressive politics as metaphorically ‘shot itself in the foot’ by scapegoating white men and making the central contradiction of the culture a race and gender issue, as opposed to a genuine analysis of class contradictions. McKerracher notes, citing Mark Fisher’s idea of the “Vampire Castle”, is that this mega-political mistake:²⁵

“was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.”

However, again, this is not solely an issue of the Left, as it seems to unify both Left and Right analysis, as Mckerracher notes, citing the Right-leaning philosopher Nick Land:²⁶

“What [Fisher] was calling the “Vampires’ Castle” is what Nick Land called The Cathedral. Both of these ways of describing the situation are poetic mystifications of the PMC, which has a material and historical basis in historical developments that were lost on Fisher and Land. Even the usage of the word “bourgeois” in this case is the sign of being out of touch.”

The next major obstacle to Timenergy theory seems to involve the technological and historical status of automation.²⁷ McKerracher notes that:²⁸

“Never before has automation been so advanced and capable of universally abolishing the least dignified kinds of work, bullshit jobs, and redistributing the rest of what must be done in a way that frees up timenergy for families everywhere.”

Here he takes on this problem and potential of automation by connecting it also to one of its potential blindspots in the discourse of the PMC. Here he cites Catherine Liu, one of the most polemic critics of PMC culture, who suggests that the discourse around automation and the abolition of manual labour jobs, is a result of a PMC discourse, which is itself out-of-touch with actual physical labour. McKerracher, who wrote Timenergy while working in an Amazon factory, speaks from a perspective that has existential contact with this reality. He suggests that, even if the idea that automation can replace physical labour is coming from a disconnected PMC discourse, that automation itself is a political problem that is not going anywhere. In what can only be described as one of the most convincing parts of the text, he writes that:²⁹

“I wrote most of this book while working at an Amazon warehouse in Boise, Idaho. I can't tell you much about my experiences there thanks to the nondisclosure agreement they made me sign. But I can tell you the obvious: that warehouse was 90% robots. The work I was doing could have been automated as well, but that would have cost more. Once it becomes cost effective any task might be automated. The new McDonald's in Texas that has no humans inside and is fully automated should be some indication of the direction we are headed.”

He ends his reflections on automation with a sobering note:³⁰

“Anyone who wants to make a genuinely positive impact must first center freeing up timenergy for everyone with automation. If this is not done, then we’re fucked.”

I, for one, appreciate McKerracher’s emphasis on the power and potential of automation, as a force that will have huge political consequences. These political consequences seem to open up utopian potentials on the level of timenergy, but also open up dystopian potentials on the level of neoliberal capture and destitution. As basically everyone in the world of artificial intelligence knows, and has known for quite some time, we cannot expect to survive this century in the way we are currently organised socially and politically. The force of artificial intelligence is so great, and its potential to replace what most humans are currently doing so high, that we have to dramatically rethink the basic social contract, and the distribution of resources.

This topic became absolutely central during the writing of my doctoral thesis, Global Brain Singularity, is a few different articles, most notably in “History of the Future”,³¹ and “Global Commons in the Global Brain”.³² While I do not have the time, and it is beyond the scope of this article, to unpack both of these papers, the basic point is that artificial intelligence within the current sociopolitical paradigm, seems to break the sociopolitical paradigm itself. Thus, unless we think through a new sociopolitical paradigm adequate to navigate and mediate a world of artificial intelligence, I tend to agree with McKerracher when he says:³³

“we’re fucked”

As already suggested at the beginning of this article, David McKerracher’s Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, is a book that sets the necessary groundwork for the deeper philosophical mediation to come. Namely, that in the future, ideally mediated by the on-going course work at Theory Underground, there will be a more researched and rigorous book on the concept of Timenergy, that is informed by the great philosophical works on time and energy. McKerracher ends his work by asking questions in this direction: how would an Aristotle, or a Kant, or a Bergson, think about timenergy?³⁴ Or: how does Aristotle, Kant, or Bergson’s notion of time fit within a concept of timenergy? Does Timenergy break the concept of time in the same way that Einstein’s concept of space-time fundamentally breaks our old concept of Space and Time conceptualised as separate from one another?³⁵

Moreover, how are we to think the concept of energy in time? How are we to think through fundamental concepts in philosophy that seem related to energy, like will, vitality, motivation, drive, power, force, determination?³⁶ These all seems like questions that will represent the future motivating force for both McKerracher’s work and the work of Theory Underground more generally. He suggests this himself at the opening of the final chapter:³⁷

“My main work on timenergy is still forthcoming. I have given myself several more years to do the necessary research for the book that will be titled Time and Energy. That book will develop timenergy in a much more rigorous and sustained way. I have hundreds of pages of theory on this concept that could not make it into this little book, and that is just the way it has to be for now.”

Until that time, McKerracher’s work leaves us with a deeper analysis of the contemporary social, cultural, and political landscape from the point of view of (the seeds of) Timenergy theory. As I suggested at the outset of this article, McKerracher’s work gives us a picture that is not totalising, highly practical, and may help us make better life choices, and unfold different life processes, in our quest to guard that which seems most precious for future creativity and community: timenergy.

In this direction, the Afterword of the book, should not be missed or skipped. There you will find many brilliant ideas focusing on contemporary philosophical discussions related to the underground theory scene, with references to Daniel Tutt, Nina Power, and many others, that may be crucial for our thinking through the problematics that McKerracher’s work brings to our attention. One of the most powerful of those ideas, was inspired by McKerracher’s reflections on Descartes’s dream at the beginning of modern science, about the future of technology as potentially liberating us from labour, and the way it impinges on question of class and politics:³⁸

“Descartes says “our workers” while simultaneously saying science and technology would help make “ourselves masters and possessors of nature.” So the class question forces itself: does Descartes include the workers in his usage of the word “we”? For he proposes that the infinity of devices unregulated science could invent would help “us” enjoy the fruits and wealth of the earth “without labor.” Did he, in 1637, foresee the potential of automation to free everyone from labor? Or does he, by “we,” mean to designate those already belonging to his leisure class?”

McKerracher continues:³⁹

“While there remains a little interpretive wiggle room that allows us to argue about whether Descartes thought the “infinity of devices” unlocked by unregulated science would make it so everyone would be free from labor, or if he only meant by “we” those who would understand what he meant by the phrase “our workers,” there remains no question that most people belonging to the few who get leisure-time presuppose the “natural right” of their privilege at the expense of most humans toiling. While most academics throughout history have presupposed this without acknowledging it head-on, there are a few who just come right out and say it.”

As the title of Chapter 15 (the last chapter before the Afterword) asks us: “Is this the end, or just the beginning?” Perhaps that is a question that will be best answers, in tomorrow’s Book Club in The Portal. Indeed, The Portal strives to be a place where, timenergy permitting:

“we [can] truly appreciate those finer arts, or explore and cultivate our talents for their own sake, [as well as] for the sake of others or any kind of higher community or culture.”

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This Monday April 1st The Portal will be hosting its first Book Club focused on David McKerracher of

Theory Underground

book Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. To find out more, or to join us, see: The Portal.

Philosophy Portal’s next course focuses on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, find out more, or get involved here: Philosophy of Right.

1. McKerracher, D.. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 178.

2. Ibid. p. 1-2.

3. See: “Every course offered by Theory Underground is, in some way, essential to the development of timenergy theory. This includes courses whose goal is ultimately to help others get a shared basis in the field with me.” Ibid. p. 135.

4. Ibid. p. 131-2.

5. Ibid. p. 13.

6. Heylighen, F. 2012. Gifted people and their problems. Davidson Institute for Talent Development, 1.2: 1-12.

7. McKerracher, D.. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 16.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid. p. 19.

10. Ibid. p. 18.

11. Ibid. p. 20.

12. See: Last, C. 2017. Big historical foundations for deep future speculations: cosmic evolution, atechnogenesis, and technocultural civilization. Foundations of Science 22: 39-124.

13. See: Last, C. & Muh, B. 2013. Effects of human presence on chimpanzee nest location in the Lebialem-Moné Forest landscape, southwest region, Cameroon. Folia Primatologica 84.1: 51-63.

14. See: Last, C. 2020. A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 257-292.

15. McKerracher, D. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 21.

16. Ibid. p. 33-4.

17. Ibid. p. 34-5.

18. DiAngelo, R. 2022. White Fragility: Why Understanding Racism Can Be So Hard for White People (Adapted for Young Adults). Beacon Press.

19. McKerracher, D. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 51.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid. p. 77-8.

22. Ibid. p. 78.

23. Ibid. p. 79.

24. Ibid. p. 94.

25. Ibid. p. 89.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid. p. 91.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid. p. 100.

30. Ibid. p. 101.

31. Last, C. 2020. History of the Future. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 39-64.

32. Last, C. 2020. Global Commons in the Global Brain. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 107-147.

33. McKerracher, D. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 101.

34. Ibid. p. 131.

35. Ibid. p. 16.

36. Ibid. p. 132.

37. Ibid. p. 129-30.

38. Ibid. p. 148.

39. Ibid. p. 149.