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I. The Purportedly Progressive Post-Enlightenment Administrative Elite and its discontents
There was a time when the progressive establishment purported to believe in universal emancipation and, most importantly, enlightenment—i.e. that we would each learn to develop our critical thinking capacities and understanding towards universal truths and collective harmony. Such a vision has long since atrophied, or been coopted, into this idea that “education” is the only real solution to individual ills, because if one applies oneself hard enough, then one will be sorted into one’s deserving placement in society. This is, in part, how the progressive vision for enlightenment turned into “jobs training” for professions only the deserving, i.e., prize students, obtain.
In Listen, Liberal, Thomas Frank shows how the legitimation narrative of capitalism, meritocracy, gets increasingly wielded by a professional elite who claims to speak on behalf of those who are oppressed, selling “education” for job advancement as the grand solution to all our ills. Abolishing poverty, much less the rapidly accelerating impoverishment of our world, is not on the table. Frank shows how Bill Clinton, who ran using a lot of populist and working class sounding rhetoric, once in office, consistently framed poverty in terms of education. For example, he quotes Clinton at an economic summit in 1992:
“Our new direction must rest on an understanding of the new realities of global competition. The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn. There’s a direct relationship between high skills and high wages, and therefore we have to educate our people better to compete. We will be as rich and strong and rife with opportunity as we are skilled and talented and trained.”1
Frank highlights the above sentence, “Where what you earn depends on what you learn” because, “Here, in a single sentence, is the distilled essence of the theory that has governed the politics of work and compensation from that day to this: You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school. Furthermore, this is supposedly true both for individuals and for the nation. Everyone says this. Barack Obama says it, David Brooks says it, George W. Bush says it, even Wisconsin governor Scott Walker says it, by implication, when he demands that the mission of the University of Wisconsin be changed from the “search for truth” to “making people employable.”2
Does your life suck? It is your fault, because you didn’t do X, Y, or Z things correctly in school. Unless, of course, the Democratic party recognizes your historic oppression, in which case you may be deserving of a little extra consideration, lofty sounding (patronizing) phrases, maybe a pat on the head or a token position on some council or board somewhere.
“Historic” oppression matters, in this framework, not because injustice itself is the issue, but because the current system is considered to be neutral and just, a true meritocracy, where only those who have been historically disadvantaged fail to “fit” into their deserving place in society. This is, as Walter Benn Michaels will show, the pivot from caring about inequality to caring about identity; from caring about the inequality between the rich and poor, to caring about the inequality of who is statistically represented within the classes of rich and poor. It is the bait and switch that any bright up and coming college student with plenty of opportunities is likely not to notice.
Instead of poverty itself, the focus became making sure the right people are not in poverty. If you did poorly in a decently funded school, you really have no one to blame but yourself, unless you are marginalized in ways deemed legitimate by the liberal institutions. As the New Left took its working class base for granted while trying to rebrand itself as professional throughout the 70s and 80s, the emphasis became trying to make sure all identity categories are equally represented in poverty and wealth alike.
“Intersectionality,” a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw at Harvard Law in the 70s, is often used by people in a colloquial sense to simply mean that when thinking about oppression we need to keep in mind how it stacks up more against certain individuals. In its organizing-busting form this is used by a certain kind of activist to try to police who gets to speak, lead, or who gets sympathy vs. who gets bullied. If you have not seen this in action, then the chances are you do not get out very much.
However, the way intersectionality is used within the professional managerial legal framework is to improve affirmative action programs designed to achieve equitable and compensatory representation on the boards of Fortune 500 companies and within the halls of government. While this gives some individuals who have had the deck stacked against them a leg up, it only opens opportunities to a few of the best and brightest while leaving everyone else behind. If the reasons your life has been a struggle do not have a stamp of legitimacy from the Democratic party or its academic wing, then you are shit out of luck.
As Walter Benn Michaels says, “A society free not only of racism but of sexism and of hetero-sexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated. Thus, when it comes to antiracism, the left is more like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right.”3
There will be those who are shocked by, offended at, or otherwise incredulous of the above analysis. Surely no Democrat would ever think of saying something so audacious! Nobody would just stand up and say that their emphasis on identity marginalization is driven by a desire to legitimate the existing order. But when the emphasis is on marginalized identities “over represented” in poverty, on “statistical distribution of privilege or precarity,” the point is never to tackle poverty itself, but to instead get a certain percentage of who is statistically represented in poverty to shift. Being able to show relative “progress” in the statistics of who is represented in poverty vs. the professions allows bureaucrats to feel satisfied that they are doing something.
The left version of the professional managerial class is, in this view, the intellectual vanguard who will be able to move the needle of progress forward so long as we achieve more equal representation. The rest of us need only vote and say the things they tell us to say. To replace the goal of enlightenment with the goal of education, in this professional vision, is for the less deserving to listen to their betters. Instead of learning to think for ourselves, we need to learn to defer to the experts.
According to Kant, in his famous little newspaper article replying to the question “What is Enlightenment?,” the project of enlightenment requires that we each learn to take responsibility for our own immaturity.4 This is a truly radical idea—that we could all learn to think on our own! To come to truths independent of outside authority! Kant thought we could use the tools of philosophy and science to learn the fundamental truths of reality on our own, thus each taking personal responsibility for our own understanding. Call his optimism “utopian” if you must, but keep in mind that, from Kant’s perspective, humans were coming out the other side of an apparent dark age thanks to the tremendous efforts of science, the protestant reformation, and the bourgeois political revolution.
Whereas the bourgeois political revolution proposed that those who produce in society ought to be its proper beneficiaries (not some parasitic feudal lord and his retainers or the king), both science and the reformation proposed that individuals have the universal capacity to think critically, evaluate evidence, reason from first principles, and thereby reach fundamental truths that would allow us all to work together to build a better world.
“But… wait,” someone is bound to say, “you’re seriously proposing people don’t believe in progress anymore? Teachers harp on and on about critical thinking, and science is a basic educational requirement!”
Of course, teachers emphasize critical thinking, and education is lauded by all. But if it is not philosophical, in the sense of teaching how to research and think for oneself as opposed to being told what is true and then tested on one’s ability to repeat the correct answers, then that education can only really be called indoctrination. Not just indoctrination into having the correct takes or answers, but also indoctrination into accepting that one’s success or failures within the existing system are one’s own fault for how one has behaved in school.
Thus, schooling, political propaganda, and activists who consider themselves the legitimate representatives (or “voices”) of social change go on “teaching” sacred dogmas like religion rather than initiating students into the life of the mind. Anti-philosophical education is embraced by both sides of the political spectrum, because existing politics has goals that would only be undermined by a populace empowered with the conceptual means for its own understanding. Rarely taught in high school and only taken as an elective in college by the lucky few, philosophy withers away while genuine thinkers, profoundly estranged from all that exists, slip through the cracks into the darkness of conceptual deprivation and petty acts of rebellion through lifestyle consumption choices.
Not everyone maintains the optimistic facade though. The professional managerial class has its discontents. These discontents are defecting from the pre-defined roles set forth by existing institutions on both the right and the left. There are of course people like Thaddeus Russel with his Renegade University, online educators like Gregory Sadler, Todd McGowan, or Justin Murphy, as well as amazing institutional experiments like Deep Springs College.
Though not all forms of “defection” need be anti or outside of the institution, many who are defecting from currently established modes are still experimenting with a foot in the academic world. We turn now to two movements away from the established ruts, not because I want to claim either has a monopoly on truth, but because, insofar as they have struck a nerve, I suspect they are at least getting at something. After teasing out what I find most essential, timenergy theory will be applied.
II. Accelerationism and populist leftism
Accelerationism and populist leftism are two tendencies that have emerged within the last decade. Of course, both have their roots in the past, as Marx has his accelerationist moments, and populism itself was a homegrown genuinely working class and anti-racist movement that started back in the 1870s. If the word “populism” rubs you wrong, if it just triggers all the images and rhetoric of the Trump years, then check out Thomas Frank’s book on the topic The People, No!. Populism is not reducible to how it gets appropriated in the form of rhetoric.
Both of these purported movements have seriously challenged the old and pre-determined modes in which theory and social change tend to operate. Nick Srnicek and Angela Nagle are two of the main authors who come to mind when I think of these tendencies, the former being a key to accelerationism and the latter a type of populist leftism. Both operate in different spheres and seem to speak to different audiences, but both have caught flak for their critiques of the existing left. Their critiques of what social change movement circles have become provides us with two angles on our current deadlock that I aim to enrich with timenergy analysis in the next section.
Before I commit the terribly unjust act of simplifying their critiques into one sentence characterizations, who are they? Srnicek is one of the two authors of the The Accelerationist Manifesto, whereas Nagle is the author of a culture war analysis called Kill All Normies. These two texts lay the basis for what became accelerationism and populist-leftism, respectively. Neither are “solutions” for which I want to advocate so much as points of possible departure from our current deadlocks that are being explored by increasing numbers of “defectors.”
Srnicek and Williams are best known for their Accelerationist Manifesto. A pity, because their more elaborate and sophisticated argument can be found in their longer work called Inventing the Future. Everyone should read it, not for the solutions so much as their history and diagnosis of today’s deadlock.
In the first couple chapters of Inventing the Future, Srnicek and Williams do a thoroughgoing critique of “folk politics,” or what they, in the afterword, claim should have been called “politics of immediacy.” What they illustrate in the first few chapters is how the Left, since the 1960s, has been more or less self-confined to a bunker mentality that fixates on symbolic performances instead of the substantive long-term future building coalitions necessary to effect large-scale systemic change.
Srnicek and Williams contrast the New Left’s fixation on immediacy with the neoliberal project’s long-term planning and emphasis on strategic compromise that has, in recent decades, achieved hegemony. Neoliberalism did not gain hegemony by doubling down on left or right rhetoric or pet issues but, instead, includes people across the aisle from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Obama.
Neoliberalism is, in effect, a (ruling class) reductionist organizational success orchestrated by intellectuals, think tanks, and policy makers who disagree on social issues but fundamentally unite on the question of deregulating markets and pushing austerity. Srnicek and Williams’s brand of accelerationism proposes a break with the left’s fixation on immediacy and suggests a politics that would take note of what worked for those neoliberals. Instead of crying to institutions for changes, they suggest we must become technologically proficient and focus on constructing new, or fundamentally altering current, institutions.
Whereas the left-accelerationists predictably catch some hate for advancing this critique, it is nothing compared to what the populist-left is subject to. Angela Nagle gets called a dirtbag, reactionary, and even Nazi because she argued in an article that there is a left case to be made for maintaining national borders. People also say they hate Kill All Normies, the book that made her relatively infamous, because it supposedly plagiarized (inessential) prose or played into certain stereotypes of the left. I have also heard that, because she talks to Tucker Carlson on Fox, she is therefore more interested in courting a reactionary audience than a leftist one. Indeed, she does show indications that your rank-and-file, habitually online, liberal-leftist is not her audience.
If the liberal-left is not her audience, then who is? As Amber Lee Frost says in the documentary based on Kill All Normies,5 “There are two internets. One is edgy and dark, the other is moralistic and shrill.” Frost says it is no surprise that (mostly) teenage boys go the direction of the dark and edgy side of the internet, where they can experiment with their developing freedom in zones free of judgment and thought-police.
If we stop caring about, or trying to understand and communicate with, people who are turned off by an ever-increasing culture of moralizing platitudes and censorship, then who is there to catch those kids but extremists on the right like Nick Fuentas or Richard Spencer?6 To the politically naive and socially isolated, those guys seem fearless and edgy—a breath of fresh air from the circle of liberal-leftist protest and elections.
“Edgyness” gets us to what I take to be one of the main points of Kill All Normies: that social change has, since the sixties, been caught up in the fantasy, aesthetic, and rhetoric of transgression. The 1950s moral order, as well as the so-called moral majority of the 1980–90s, was suffocating, backwards, and wrong-headed as could be. Whereas the rebellion of the ‘60s was political, the 90s rebellion was merely cultural (think of the mainstreaming of shock rock and gangster rap). Thanks to civil rights and anti-war activists of the ‘60s, transgression really was more or less virtuous. By the ‘90s, though, transgression had been coopted as an aesthetic; thanks especially to neoliberalism, the institutions in society decided to play along with transgression so long as its ruling class reductionist designs for austerity and de-regulation were followed.
In Kill All Normies, Nagle’s fundamental concern is that transgression only attracts certain kinds of people and, moreover, that the kinds of people attracted to transgression for its own sake are just as likely, if not more, to be pulled towards reactionary causes or modes. Say what you want about how she supposedly plagiarized some uncited fragment of prose or whatever. One can sort through hours of “criticism” of this book without finding any of her critics ever seriously contending with her fundamental concern regarding how bad of a political goal “transgression for its own sake” actually is. Call her a reactionary all you want, but I think she is onto something considering the fact that punk, goth, gangster, and metal head all became politically neutral ways to rebel. Old school punk rockers coming out in support of Trump and the likes of Paul Joseph Watson, popularizing “conservatism is the new punk rock,” speak to how transgression is not, and cannot be, monopolized by the left.
Liberal capitalism has no issue with you rebelling. It will even sell you the Che T-shirt!7 Make it about your consumer identity some more, just don’t compromise on your preferences for enjoyment, and whatever you do, don’t organize with people who are radically different from yourself.
I hope you will take the time to read Inventing the Future and Kill All Normies yourself, but for now I want to focus on their two basic characterizations of the left: stuck in politics of perpetual immediacy and the aesthetic of transgression. Being focused on immediate thrills and edgy rebelliousness are both just two aspects of immaturity, something we expect of infants and detest when exhibited by adults. Calling the liberal-left “infantile” goes back to at least Lenin (of course, “left” meant something very different then), but is more likely familiar due to baby boomers who characterize everything wrong with society as being the fault of infant-like, entitled, and whiny “kids these days.”
Rather than argue for or against such analyses, I want to suggest that, insofar as people act infantile today, it has a lot more to do with our structural conditions, regardless of whether the humans in question are conservatives, liberals, centrists or a-political normies—old or young.
III. Infantilization and Timenergy Stultification
I propose that these characterizations (or diagnoses) of “the left” as fixated on immediacy and transgression are both symptomatic of a “culture” where communities are structurally stultified from the conditions necessary to live a fulfilling life. In other words, we are all deprived of timenergy; our society revolves around the commodification, or exchange, of “labor power,” which is what timenergy becomes in capitalism.8
Timenergy is existentially prior to the economic divorce and separation of time from energy. Timenergy is not just time or energy, but comes before they are fragmented and compartmentalized. Timenergy is energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly sacrifice towards building sustained symbolic and material value for oneself and potential communities of recognition and care.
Put under the sign of the law of value, timenergy is structurally suppressed, retooled, and co-opted in its most basic sense: That which had previously been timenergy is now labor power, a commodity, something that must be exercised towards economic ends. In place of the various symbolic and material modes of coexistence or domination previously experienced by humans who did not count their every minute in the day, subjectivities formed within capitalism learn early on to measure their worlds in terms of universal exchangeability. This is the symbolic framework and behavioral system that sets upon the earth and all its species as though they are limitless, expropriating and exploiting like a scourge.
IV. Language skills vs. Bike skills
Without timenergy to invest towards meaningful activities, and to sacrifice for others, we are deprived of the conditions for meaningfully organizing outside of the pressures, logic, and mandates of capital. Our entire existence revolves around the reproduction of world annihilation. We are addicted to it—possessed by it! Our horizons of possibility are limited, and we are reduced to weekends and evenings of dead time, where even if you can find motivation to do something, your time does not have the potential to repeat the exercises necessary for developing useful skills not already subsumed into the service of capital.
Perhaps counter-examples come to mind: “Well, you could ride a bicycle every weekend and train for a marathon!” Sure, you could repeatedly cycle every weekend, but your options are extremely limited. If you want to master the violin, you will have to commit all of your weekends just to add that one language skill.
“Language skills” are a lot more demanding than what I call “bicycle skills.” If you don’t use a language, you lose the language, whereas with bikes we actually have a saying, “It’s like riding a bike.” Once you get the hang of it, you basically won’t lose it. Notice how our society’s normal “hobbies” skew in the direction of bike skills and away from language skills.
Language skills are what make us valuable to others, and within reason to capitalists too. A proper division of labor requires some degree of alienation from the means for understanding our worlds. Language skills provide a more in-depth understanding of the world we live in. Every “disciplinary field” within academia is its own language, as are all the languages spoken by Earth’s inhabitants.
This is not to say we don’t have opportunities to acquire language skills, just that those are severely limited. Provided the capacity, interest, and resources, you could learn computer programming, engineering, Spanish, logic, or the violin. The problem with this is that you have to specialize.
Our society has, until recently, been largely focused on specialists who have hobbies. In other words, a specialist is someone who learned a certain small collection of language skills in exchange for money, leaving only dead time or energy without time to freely invest in a sustained manner. Such time is not “useless,” or value-less, but because most of our highest potentials are dependent on time-energy, we find ourselves with dead time instead. We can also call this “garbage time.”9 So, we pick up “hobbies” which typically only have one significant learning curve. What separates these from language skills is that we usually don’t have energy on the weekends, but if we do happen to have some once in a while, we waste that energy on trying to learn something that will be lost if not repeated soon enough (Spanish, computer programming, etc.). Instead, we use this rare burst of energy to do some consumer activity (movies, the bar, etc), or we pick up a hobby. You only need so many rare bursts of energy without time for repetition before you will have mastered whatever the bicycle skill in question’s learning curve requires.
Due to the commodification of timenergy into this thing called labor power, our entire lives are reduced to humans with disproportionately large amounts of bicycle skills and small sets of language skills. We are proud of our language skills! In fact, the more impoverished and separated we are from multiplicities of language skills, the more seriously we take the ones we have acquired. Extremists of all types will take their hard-earned and isolated language skill as Gospel. Ideology looks worst in those demographics of a population most deprived of language skills. Without them, even having all the time in the world doesn’t amount to time-energy because the world seems transparent; without a multiplicity of language skills, the world is taken “at face value.”
We live in the realm of immediacy as consumer animals, stripped of the ability to see from a multiplicity of perspectives while understanding “the given” from a variety of bases shared with the broader world of other language skill wielding subjects.
Before you go thinking “the elite” in society are necessarily equipped with a vast multiplicity of different highly functioning language skills, remember that even among the elite, the people who exercise a strong and dynamic set of language skills are relatively rare. They usually stand out. In fact, we take them to be geniuses. And perhaps they are, but maybe, just maybe, they were only really exceptional because whatever their unique series of life events with its contingencies, traumas and advantages alike, resulted in the perfect conditions to freely sacrifice timenergy towards projects that would not “prove valuable” for decades longer than what Capital, or previous ruling orders, demands.
Elites have their class interests to maintain and therefore also structure their time management of the language skills they require towards the maintenance of this machine that has made their lives relatively comfortable, or at least, a lifestyle that allows them to feel relief and lucky to live above the stupid masses of “practical people” who have “street smarts” and usually a diverse array of bike skills. But Marx was keen to point out that these elites are likewise victims to the abstract domination of this thing called capital, which puts timenergy under the sign of exchange value.
The overwhelming mass majority of us have to structure our lives in accordance with the abstract economic measures of what we are worth. The person born with a silver spoon in their mouth, tutors, and money to travel and participate in serious extracurricular activities has opportunities to acquire language skills, and if they’re lucky, they might even receive some recognition from their parents—an opportunity afforded less to those whose parents are busy working three jobs, coming home exhausted all the time. But I said “if they’re lucky” because even the elite rarely have time to build relationships outside of reference to capital—maintenance of status within the existing system requires constant self-improvement towards certain ends.
What happens is a class develops with lots of language skills but few practical normal person skills—there are people we can pay to wash the dishes. Pay a chef to cook, a nanny to child rear, and tutors to coach the kids on homework. That’s right, they’ve got a world to win and their time, also fragmented and removed from the possibility of timenergy, is worth “too much to waste” (unless, of course, by “wasted” we mean “free time” spent recouping energy to get back to ruling or working, which Adorno pointed out is still time spent in deference to the clock).
At this point, readers usually assume they’ve got the concept enough. “Sure, timenergy is not energy without time to repeat and it’s not time without energy either. I hate those weeks when I don’t have timenergy.” When you say it this way though, it makes it sound like you’ve had weeks where you actually had timenergy, but the point is that under the global domination of the commodity form where timenergy is reduced to labor power, nobody has timenergy.
However, let’s just say “time-energy,” not uppercased and with the hyphen between words, is relative and particular to an individual. It is logically possible, if not existentially possible, for you to change how you live life so as to free up time-energy, but you will never have timenergy because that is a generalized form within society that cannot exist simultaneously to capital.
The concept of timenergy is a little bit more complex than I have let on so far because we are social subjects. As presented in chapter two, authenticity and solitude are both reciprocally dependent on solicitude, i.e. being with others. Genuine being with others opens the horizon of possibilities for both nurture and respect, two aspects of recognition—but our chances of gaining either are significantly undermined by structural stultification.
Without timenergy to pool, our relationships are reduced to interactions between subjects without energy, or energy without time with the potential to repeat. The preconditions for meaningful relationship-building put under constant attack, our horizons of possibility are consequently foreclosed—resulting in alienation from sense of self, others, community, or the knowledge (and language skills) necessary to win meaningful recognition outside of actions driven by the profit motive or base survival.
Structural stultification, therefore, does not only impact timenergy in the sense that you are no longer able to be constantly exercising and learning a broader and more diverse array of language and bike skills, but it also forecloses the horizons of possibility that would otherwise be opened if not for the obstruction of access to potential recognition beyond the domination of capital. But that’s a long sentence, so to reiterate: Potential recognition is one of the most motivating aspects of our social life, so when that potential is undermined, so is our motivation.
Recognition as respect is not just acknowledgment for an accomplishment. It is when you have proven yourself to a community of potential recognition. That community might be minor league baseball, academia, or your workplace; however, the tendency of institutions is to “simulate” recognition in the form of “formal acknowledgment” like a degree or promotion. Though institutionalized forms of recognition via formal acknowledgment can step in to try to fill the void, we all still need genuine recognition. Genuine recognition, what we will call ur-recognition,10 comes before institutionalized forms and is the basis of conscious development, premeditated thought, and what gets seen as maturity. Ur-recognition is not something that can be generalized and reproduced the way a degree or position in a franchise can be.
Ur-recognition is based on the fact that individuals only have so much time-energy to invest in building relationships; time-energy is a finite resource that can be sacrificed. Elders, mentors, and teachers (role models in general) are people in our lives whose time-energy is in extremely high demand. They usually spend most of their time just trying to recover their energy and ability to focus on anything since there are so many demands on their attention. If they invest in us in a sustained effort to get to know us, that is a tremendous value to our development.
Parents will ideally sacrifice untold amounts of attention on their children. The question is, does that attention come with comprehension and understanding? Are the conditions for knowing (language skills) present in this dynamic, or are we trained to hold parents to standards too high for most capitalist subjectivities? Beyond parents, though, there should be other social reference points for potential recognition. Most humans for most of human history were not limited to a two parent household so much as a village of relationships.
Notice I did not use the word “connections” because connections are what we generally maintain on social media, whereas relationships are another order of existence, and they demand higher value investments of time-energy. You can buy me everything, but if you never spend time with me, do we have a relationship? Insofar as capital has robbed our relationships with others of substance, we all suffer.
Like most self-help books, parenting books tend to presuppose time-energy and likewise fail to understand the structural conditions imposed by capitalism against timenergy in its reduction to labor power on the market. Insofar as we have hope for a future, parents and educators everywhere must develop strategies towards building relationships with the coming generations that go beyond passive or automated involvement. Without sustained effort and focus, there is no relationship there. Children have historically been neglected, if not outright abused.11
While I think approaches such asNon-Violent Communication and Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting propose useful ways of moving forward that could foster healthier relationship dynamics, these nevertheless also fall into the assumption that parents have time-energy when they usually do not. I realize this is a pretty big thesis I’m just throwing in here at the end of the book, but after losing both David Graeber and Michael Brooks last year to early deaths, I am not going to let this book close without at least proposing one of the most important directions for timenergy theory. If I live long enough, my goal is to write that book too someday.
Not having time-energy and attention to build skills atop our talents and follow our callings, much less to develop relationships with those who mean the most in our lives, are symptoms of abstract domination. Too often “abstract” is taken to mean not-real, but abstraction used in this sense speaks to that which goes beyond immediate sense perception but that, nevertheless, produces what is sensed. In terms of structural stultification, the ways it hollows out and limits our horizons and relationships, “abstract domination” has to do with the non-optimal ultimatums forced on anyone just trying to survive under capitalism, where we all exist on an auction block that undermines our dignity and ability to pursue our callings.
“Abstract domination” and the ways it impacts us from the existential standpoint will continue to be developed using concepts such as timenergy, structural stultification, and psychological gerrymandering. This book has been really nothing more than an attempt to draw together pieces of my thought and effort from all over the place into a waypoint, like a cairn.12 For now, the point of this final chapter has been just to say that timenergy can be used to talk about a lot of different phenomena that shape our lives in absolutely crucial ways.
In summary on critiques of The Left today, though I have learned a lot (and have much to learn still) from the likes of Srnicek or Nagle, almost every cultural analysis, political argument, or structural critique I have encountered fails without, or at least would benefit from, timenergy critique. If you find the concepts developing in my thought useful for thinking about your own life, or for cultural critique more broadly, I hope you will take note and maybe even write to me. I said at the beginning of this work that anyone who reads this now and seriously engages my work is considered a fellow traveler. Keep this in mind moving forward and send me responses to the email in the “About the Author” section at the end.
As I have (perhaps a little too hastily) illustrated here, critiques of “politics of immediacy” or “transgression” are limited without a structural illumination of the conditions that keep us locked into modes of immediacy and the childish mindset this fosters. Infantile behavior, and the ad hoc rationalizations it comes up with along the way, are symptomatic of structural stultification and psychological gerrymandering produced by the technological, economic, and political conditions of our world today.
While I prepare to write that book (and many more), if you are bored and want to read something terribly difficult (much of which I hope to eventually make more accessible), I recommend Time, Labor, and Social Domination—for Moishe Postone’s insistence on understanding domination and alienation structurally might be the most fruitful reminder of what so often gets lost to both philosophy and critical theory, much less to those who attempt to put these into practice.
1 Frank, Thomas. 2016. Listen, liberal, or, What ever happened to the party of the people? PDF version pg. 76.
2 Ibid, 76.
3 Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The trouble with diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books. 75.
4 Kant, Immanuel. 1784. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”
5 Watch “Trumpland: Kill All Normies” here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC-fFzxZGJI, but beware, it probably won’t be available for all time seeing as it got made private on Vimeo recently.
6 Actual self-proclaimed white nationalists.
7 There was a time when Wal Mart and peak capitalist outlets at the mall were selling T-shirts that showed the iconic image of the infamous anti-imperialist Che Guevara. Because this is about as ironic as selling copyrighted books that argue against copyright, it has become something of a meme.
8 Sadly, nobody on my thesis committee caught this one. One of my incisive critics pointed out that, for Marx, “labor power” is not just “within the market” but is human energy capacities in general, in all historical periods. While this seems to be true, Marx was often careful to specify that the kind of labor he is concerned with is specific to the form it takes under capital, as wage labor. As Moishe Postone argues throughout Time, Labor, and Social Domination, the tendency has been for Marx’s readers to “trans-historicize” whatever Marx has to say about labor, which leads to some serious misunderstandings. If Marx indeed happens to trans-historicize our energetic capacities as labor power, then this is an interesting concern for future research. Until I have re-read everything he’s written, I won’t be sure. For the time being, suffice it to say that for my purposes “labor power” is the form timenergy takes in a society where exchange value reigns supreme.
9 Thanks Eamon / The Swoletariat for this one.
10 “Ur” as a prefix means “original”
11 Read the work of Lloyd deMause and others who continue the heretical tradition of psychohistory: https://psychohistory.com/
12 A stack of rocks used as a landmark in Scotland.
