Anyone who has followed much of my work at all, or talked to me about my research, will know that my central concept is “timenergy.” Timenergy, time-energy, time-without-energy, and energy-without-time for potential repetition are the central concepts for a framework I’ve been developing for the last few years, along with concepts such as structural stultification, psychological gerrymandering, cool downs, mindset mustering, and many more that are being worked out in unpublished thoughts and ongoing philosophical dialogue with peers. This chapter is where you will find a presentation of timenergy’s philosophical roots, at the intersection of Martin Heidegger’s existential-phenomenology and Marx’s critique of political economy.
What follows is the timenergy theory portion of my inter-disciplinary M.A. thesis from Boise State University, which was defended on April 8th, 2019. My “interdisciplinary Master’s degree” was like a choose your own adventure book/project, only for an academic degree. I had to put together a team of professors to be on my committee; they were supposed to critique my work in some kind of peer review process that gatekeeps degrees, but I would be lying if I told you that this was a rigorous process with any real standards. It was difficult, but not for the right reasons.
I don’t personally invest too much meaning in the Master’s degree because most of my theoretical work was “extracurricular,” and most of the critique that has afforded perspective also came from outside of the university. With that said, though, I do appreciate the inter-disciplinary program for empowering me to take on this research project—no thanks to the professors on my committee who focused on how often I use “passive voice” or thinkers they didn’t like instead of actually grappling with the concepts themselves, much less what was being said.
Do not take my disillusionment as wholesale renunciation of the value of formal education. College was one of the best things that ever happened to me, even if I remain fiercely critical of what has happened to that institution (and to be fair, I did not go to an elite private university, only a job-directed diploma mill called a “state university”).
To the professors who did help, thank you for your attention, time, and effort. Especially thanks for the pushback, constructive criticism, and recommendations for readings not on the syllabus. Without that critical engagement, I shudder to think what may have become of me, and I know for certain timenergy theory would not have gotten off to any start at all. Insofar as what follows could have been written or researched better, I take full responsibility for what it became.
Introduction
In this work, I develop and present “timenergy” as a useful concept for understanding, reconceptualizing, and organizing human society (what Alain Badiou, in his little book The True Life, calls “New Symbolization”). Theoretically, timenergy helps make sense of the most pressing problems we face today, and practically it shows the biggest obstructions or traps to avoid when organizing.
Failing to comprehend important aspects of how timenergy functions may doom projects from the outset. Strategic action must factor timenergy into its thought in as much of its systematic rigor as possible. Before turning to the theoretical development of this concept, some stipulations must be established. First I will describe the component aspects of timenergy and the problems this analysis raises for further research, then I will show how it develops from bringing the existential phenomenological approach to bear on the concept of labor power through the works of Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx.
[As seen on the front cover of this book] I symbolize timenergy as a vertical line through a lower-case e, for the combination of “t” and “e” for timenergy. By symbolizing it in this way, or by writing it as “timenergy,” I insist that this is not simply “time and energy” but that timenergy is instead meant to signify the phenomenal domain from which time or energy, as they are spoken of in daily life, both originate. Timenergy is not just the words “time” and “energy” mashed together. Timenergy points to a phenomenon that comes prior to commodification, which matters most in our experience.
“Time” and “energy,” as used in our daily lives, are secondary products of abstraction, separated from lived experience. Using Heidegger, I will argue that timenergy must be understood existentially, not just physically, psychologically, or structurally, though all three of these, as well as other scientific endeavors, no doubt will help us understand the concept better in various ways.
Timenergy is energy-with-time, and time-with-energy. For a human being, timenergy is the basis of real value. I will argue this primarily drawing upon theoretical components of Marx’s project. For Marx, the kind of value that exploits workers and sustains poverty is exchange value, whereas what really matters is the potential to actualize what matters to us, i.e. labor power. I will expand on this by making my own adjustments to argue that, without timenergy, there is no hope of doing anything that matters.
Consider the fact that time-without-energy is nearly worthless. Time-without-energy is time that must be spent recovering energy. As Theodor Adorno argues in “Free Time,” for one who works or studies full time, “free time” is really recharge time to get back to the grind.1 Because this “free time” lacks energy on a routine basis, it is spent in passive involvement with the world through entertainment or other forms of consumption. Similarly, energy-without-time is basically useless. But here we have to get a little more specific about this terminology. To really carry the weight of meaning meant by “timenergy” we have to keep in mind that what makes this kind of time valuable is not just that it is a moment like any other, an isolated moment, but rather it is time with the potential for repetition. This is an important distinction because if one happens to have energy but no time with the potential for repetition, one is incapable of investing timenergy towards the personal, communal, or cultural aspects of life that require sustained effort.
I. Sustained Effort
Sustained effort requires active engagement, which could also be thought of as routine sacrifice of timenergy. Sustained effort is the opposite of immediate gratification. Sustained effort is the essence of production. Immediate gratification is the essence of consumption.
These simple binaries are only pragmatic starting points though, not an ontological distinction,2 as they are easily problematized. For example, in an ontological sense there is no such thing as pure immediate gratification, because the background conditions affording what we are calling consumption themselves required the sustained effort of one’s human body, the labor of others, and the expropriation of nature.
The consumer-producer dichotomy is also complicated by how economies function.3 We work (produce) to earn money so that we can consume. While this is true in a certain sense, what matters for this analysis is the way wage labor undermines one’s personal ability to put sustained effort into other projects that are personally, communally, or culturally enriching. As Marx argues throughout all of his work, but most expressly in his early work, wage labor is alienated in its production for private interests (i.e. boss, banker, landlord, political class and the capitalists). As such, the tendency of wage labor is to use up your timenergy in a week, leaving nothing but weekends and evenings of time-without-energy, or sporadic bursts of energy-without-time throughout the year, compensated with little more than enough to provide for one’s basic necessities (means of subsistence). If one’s only real sustained effort goes towards building a company, or growing profit, for other people’s private interests, then they are not able to put sustained effort towards developing personal, communal, or cultural aspects of life.
Even though most people agree that it is worth our time, energy, and attention to consider ways to better spend our time, energy, and attention, it seems the people who should have thought the most rigorously about these have failed to do so. Everything comes down to time, energy, and attention, including any kind of accomplishment or the relationships developed along the way. Even house appliances, daily habits, or industrial technology, all exist as modes of strategic organization of time, energy, and attention. Without these, we can’t do anything worthwhile. But what is “worth it” in the grand scheme of things, and why aren’t the experts talking about this?
These are questions about fundamental economic value and the priorities coordinated by our personal values. Pastors, professors, politicians, and life coaches all have their own approaches, but there is no one go-to role or field of research for these questions. We only see “time, energy, and attention” brought up in passing in self help or business strategy books, where the tendency is to focus on time management. The self-help gurus make the same mistake as philosophers, who have tended to focus on time to the exclusion of energy, if not attention as well. Instead, attention and energy get presumed without any deeper or critical inquiry. Even “time” tends to get spoken of in speculative, logical, or metaphysical terms—rarely is it spoken of existentially.
Martin Heidegger is an exception to the general rule, at least in respect to time. One of the most renowned philosophers of the 20th Century, he was famous for the terribly difficult text called Being and Time, a book about how time and being have, historically, been thought of wrong by philosophers. In this work, he challenges the “modern” (Descartes, Bacon, Galileo) conception of time, arguing that the kind of time that matters to us as human beings is not some abstract logical time but instead the kind of time that is limited to our own horizons of what we consider possible. Being itself, existence, and “isness,” all variants of what philosophers tend to focus on, is not something outside of or neutral to us, but instead something we are always presupposing in every inquiry or analysis. The human kind of being is not something removed and abstract, it’s instead deeply personal and unique to how we ask the more general questions about life, death, truth, or reality.
Although Heidegger’s “existential analytic” brings us back to a very important consideration of what it means to be human, I think he misses something important. Heidegger asks, what kind of being asks the question about being in the first place? Not some mind in a vacuum like how Descartes imagines in his renaissance era Meditations.
Time, as well as the things we use in the world like tools or language, are all only interesting to us because we are here, now, relying on impressions or interpretations of the past used to inform how we face our finite future. Great, but what about energy? What about attention? What is time without energy or attention? What is the future horizon of possibilities without energy to tackle worthwhile opportunities? And what kinds of opportunities are available dependent on one’s embodied sense of finite energy reserves?
Maybe Heidegger didn’t think about these questions so much because he didn’t think too much about the body, but the existentialists who follow after him, ones who did focus more on the body like Levinas or Merleau-Ponty, nevertheless fail to seriously factor in the finitude of our energy, or of the different kinds of energy that we have at our disposal. Not only are there different kinds of energy operative in every person, but different people find different kinds of experiences energizing or exhausting —how has no existential analysis hitherto tackled this component of our lives?
Though Heidegger does not quite get there, his project clears the space and sets the stage for timenergy theory with his “existential analytic.” He shows how everything that matters in terms of “meaning and purpose” in human life boils down to the possibilities disclosed to us.
What we call reality is a general sense for what’s possible, because everything we have ever registered as real was a possibility that became actuality. Some things are mere logical “possibilities” in the sense that, technically, any kind of universe with any imaginable creatures populating it is logically possible given the right set of conditions are in place in that hypothetical universe. Philosophers in the analytic vein use the language of “possible worlds” to do modal logic. We don’t have to get into that, because our analysis leaves the nearly infinite realm of logical possibility and moves into existential possibility—limited by facticity (the way things stubbornly are in the situation within which we have found ourselves).
“Existential” designates that region of life that is felt and lived. Trauma, recognition, and purpose, as three basic examples, are aspects of human life that I would characterize as primarily existential. With logical possibility we could talk about rocks that experience trauma, are shaped in relation to the pursuit or abnegation of recognition, or of having a sense of purpose. But we’re not rocks and the words trauma, recognition, and purpose carry a kind of significance to us because they are existential categories or aspects of the human condition.
Philosophy and economics came close to talking about timenergy, but missed it in a particularly scientifically positivist moment when the motto of the age became if it isn’t quantifiable, then it isn’t real. Human labor power became more or less quantifiable thanks to clocks and increasingly refined methods of labor management. However, the only kind of labor that was really measurable was, like in engineering, “work,” or sustained application of force against various kinds of resistance. Labor was considered quantifiable because we can talk about the average number of hours the averagely capable person is able to convert X amount of cotton into Y amount of yarn.4 Whatever the newly normalized average technological productive turnaround times turn out to be is what gets called “socially necessary labor time.”
So economics has been, from its development into both an academic discipline and a matter of civil society and government, always unfolding in a specific set of historical discourses that have aimed towards objective measurement. Science is scientific insofar as it develops intersubjectively universal measurement systems that have self-corrective methodologies for refining our ability to clarify and predict the object under analysis. The object under analysis of economics is the market. Markets dictate value. Markets are made up by supply and demand of commodities.
Economics helps understand the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of commodities in markets, but it has traditionally not done so in existential terms. An existential analysis of timenergy reveals that economics has, hitherto, failed to speak of things like markets or labor in a way that is based in our experience and possibilities. Existential possibility (that is to say, what life can be and our sense of reality itself, with all of our experiences of things like trauma, recognition, and purpose) is too often lost to economics.
Even Marx, perhaps the most insightful critic of traditional political economy, still allows from the outset the assumption that labor time can be reduced to the simplest forms of manual labor; from this reduction he builds back up all the other kinds of labor, which are only made more valuable with the addition of skill or know-how. He recognizes that this is a reduction, but considers it justified.5 But labor time measured by average physical energy input is a baseline that, from the outset, puts us on a course away from existential possibilities.
Existentially, the only possibilities that matter for us are the ones that have been actualized already and the ones that might more or less plausibly be actualized in the near or distant future. Recognition and purpose are both only made sense of, experienced, or relevant insofar as they are related to where we have come from to emerge at now, which is all in respect to more or less likely possible tomorrows.
Our desire, goals, and choices occur within the frame of our life possibilities. Opportunities and the cost of missed opportunities mean nothing outside of a life wherein we seek personal security and fulfillment, meaningful relationships, and the positive regard of peers. All of our possibilities for actualizing a life worth living are framed and made more or less likely by how time and energy have been compartmentalized and subsumed into a system that sees these as mere mathematical quantities only measurable in respect to clocks, bank accounts, and a lifeworld calendar divided and coordinated by society’s prioritization of value extraction [and accumulation].
There is a huge difference between existential timenergy and the quantification of time or energy in mathematical or logical terms. Standardization in time management has given this illusion that, given the right input of time, any experience is obtainable; consumerism hinges on the presumption that anything worthwhile can be obtained as a commodity purchased by a share of generalized socially determined value (money) earned through the expenditure of labor.6 We shall call this the consumerist myth, defined as the belief that anything worthwhile can be purchased in exchange for money.
The consumerist myth would stand, if not for the fact that the most important aspects of human life are not exchangeable. Yes, food and water, shelter, transportation and security are all exchangeable, and obviously these are very important aspects of human life; but even just using Maslow’s Hierarchy as our example, the higher you go up the pyramid the harder it becomes to “commodify.” In other words, love commodified is prostitution; socialization commodified is Facebook.
To truly blow apart the consumerist myth, let’s use the example of a guy who specializes in engineering as a career. The consumerist myth claims that if he focuses most of his effort in a week towards making value through engineering, then he should be able to acquire any other good or service from others who specialize in the areas he might need met. Because he is paid so well, it wouldn’t make sense to hang his own Christmas lights or upkeep the yard; he is better off relaxing if he’s not working. So instead he puts his hard earned money towards directing the efforts of others. Money is indeed well equipped to, provided the right sum is afforded, satisfy needs such as lawn mowing or Christmas light hanging. But what about needs such as love, or developing skills in accordance with a talent or calling? If, for instance, he has a love for violin, he can obviously pay others to play for him, but he cannot pay others to play himself. He can pay others to raise his kids too, but I have yet to meet a person who did this who did not retire in regret and isolation. Retirement homes are, thus, a sad testament to consumerism’s failure to deliver on The American Dream.
Heidegger says nobody can experience our death for us—this is one of those most fundamental experiences only I can undergo for myself. Similarly, I can pay others to do almost everything except self-actualize me for me. Only you can self-actualize you for yourself. We can only do the things that require sustained effort to discover and build skills atop each one’s ownmost latent talents.
Beyond what I cannot pay others to do for me is the cultural stuff we cannot pay others to keep alive without the maintenance of relationships beyond the profit motive. Commodification of music, for instance, gives this impression that the experience of a song can be bought, either through recording or live concert. For most of human “pre-history” though, cultural activities like music were, however, always communal. Even if you weren’t the main player in the village, you at least knew the dances enough to have a more in-depth understanding of the song.7 Song streaming services and the commodification of music in general, then, bring us a sense of movement and belonging even though we are sitting still and alone, connecting with no one, nowhere.
Timenergy is not a category, it is an “existentiale.”
Timenergy is not a category, property, or aspect of human being in the world. Categories, properties, and aspects are all ways in which beings that are not human get perceived and interpreted by humans, but humans are the beings who ultimately derive such conceptual models for representing sides, frames, and takes of reality.
Categories confuse and confound just as much as they illuminate due to the fact that we, the humans who are supposed to use these theoretical distinctions, become used by these instead. Human being, or “dasein,” is a different order of being than chair being or rock being. Yet there is a prevalent mode of understanding that takes this to be a difference in mere quantity as opposed to quality. E.g. physical atoms and chemical interactions stack up to the human level of biological development—but instead of take the human experience as an emergent or new qualitatively distinct mode of being, it is instead too often reduced to nothing more than the kind of being associated with rocks, plants, and animals. “Being” is thus confounded like a bad analogy.
Human being, its quality or nature, is a different order of existence—a cat undoubtedly has similarities to us, but our ability to label the cat as a cat, to associate this to dogs, pets, wild and domesticated, as well as notions of companionship, and care, all of this is something rooted in the human experience and mode of being that is absolutely other to the existence of trees. We share a baseline, but beyond that springs a being that inquires, aspires, and thrives, all while suffering. To use Heidegger’s terminology for the fundamental structures of pre-scientific existential being-in-the-world, timenergy is not a category, it is an existentiale.
II. Kinds of Energy
Just as “time” in timenergy was stipulated to imply potential for repetition, “energy” in timenergy is very specific. It is not New Age energy, and it’s not just physical energy either. Physics plays its role as the material background conditions for the kind of energy implied by timenergy, but this particular analysis is an existential phenomenological one, meaning that we will, for the time being, assume those background conditions while taking as our point of departure the human experience. To say that we take the human standpoint as our point of departure is not to say that this analysis necessarily excludes other forms of animal life, nor does it claim all humans experience energy the same way. It’s also by no means a prioritization of subjectivity over objectivity, a binary thoroughly undermined by the Heideggerian project. Instead, we begin with the average-everyday sense one might signify by saying they do not have sufficient energy to do something, or that they have too much energy to sit still, focus, sleep, etc.
There are a variety of kinds of energy that correspond to different kinds of activities, requiring different motivators for different types of people, and each of these overlaps in different ways. For instance, there are physical, social, creative, emotional, and intellectual forms of energy, that correspond to activities such as athletics, political organizing, art, friendship, and science. Why does any given person care about any of these types of activities? What types of motivation factor in? There are of course, in the individual’s case, differences in disposition or personality. Some people are simply more extroverted than introverted, or feeling over thinking, but disposition is not everything. Just because social occasions take more energy for some people does not mean that those people desire social interaction less; it just means they either need more timenergy in their week to commit to such activities in a routine way, or that they strictly limit themselves to sporadic and non-routine bursts of social involvement. How one’s disposition or relation to a form of energy develops is, then, mediated by other factors.
Other factors impinging on one’s relation to timenergy may include the environment, diet, exercise routines, and structure of society. Personal, cultural, and world history all factor in to what Heidegger calls one’s “thrownness.” The statistical degree to which one is structurally sheltered from exposure to harm based on categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, religion, education, etc., must all factor in to how one’s physical, social, creative, emotional, and intellectual forms of energy develop vis-a-vis personal experience, physiology, and psychology. These are all pressing avenues for further research, but for my purposes here I do not aim to speak for all experiences, but merely begin this analysis from my own subject position.
This next section was not in the original thesis, but I need to pay a debt to Jung I was not aware of when writing my thesis. So this is a quick aside about physical, emotional, social, creative, and intellectual energy: Because dispositions, environment, and experiences vary, we all have different capacities and abilities for powerfully investing physical, emotional, social, creative, and intellectual energy. Everything I’ve read or seen on affect, vitality, power, or will, in philosophy, psychology, or new age and self help books, is incapable of grasping the complexity of these different dimensions of human being—though Carl Jung made a discovery that really helps.
People tend to assume that all forms of energy are strictly analogous to, or the same, as physical energy.8 Physical energy gets the most attention because it’s the most obvious or inescapable, and because the other forms of energy are all tied to our bodies in clear ways. For example, a fully rested body is almost always correlated with those other forms of energy being recharged (though exceptions sometimes arise).
With that said, energy doesn’t couple to time in a strictly linear and unilateral way. Calendars and clocks measure time in a universal and standardized way, but our bodies do not. There is no universal experience of timenergy or time-energy. We each experience it differently at different times. For example, what works for one person in the morning works best for another at night.
Personally, it’s impossible to go from highly physical activities to intellectual ones. In a simplistic dreamworld I could hit the gym for an hour and then hit the books for a couple of hours and then practice music before going to a social function and then winding down with some meditation or journaling, but each of these activities jams up my ability to do the next; each requires different degrees of effort put towards mustering the mindset necessary for the challenges ahead.
Some people juggle the competing pulls on their attention and energy by designating different days in the week. Thus there would be primarily social days, physical days, and then there are intellectual or creative days. For one, physical activities might prove a good precursor or close to a primarily social day. Whereas for the next person emotional management activities like journaling, long phone calls, or meditation are needed before or after heavily social days. All of these forms of energy bleed into one another. As Heidegger is keen to point out, there is no moodless intellectual labor or perception even, because intellectual work itself requires a certain mood of analytic distance.
Another example is that some skills have to be maintained daily, whereas others in bursts of intensity followed by breaks. Some pursuits, whether personal, communal, or cultural, are undermined by routine, whereas others are enhanced. What works for me might not for you, and vice versa. What experts advise is based in what statistically works for most people on average, but one never knows if such advice applies to one’s own personal routine and goals until finding out from firsthand trial and error. We are all outliers from the norm in our own ways, exceptions that prove general rules. Even if every activity, pursuit, or goal is enhanced by sustained routine, the fact is there are only so many routines one can take on over the course of a week, with some being more draining of various capacities than others—one’s own competing interests can, then, either build off one another, or else, conflict.
Taking a popular example, extroverts and introverts are technically defined by how a social situation affects the person’s energy. Even categories such as “introvert” and “extrovert” are far too basic, considering the fact that one might gain energy from certain kinds of “social” activities and not others. Myers-Briggs, and its derivations (such as 16-personalities.com and OCEAN) are incapable of handling the fact that different social structures, forces, beliefs, and experiences even, affect and produce the experiential result that gets called “extroverted” or “introverted.”
We all develop different relations with what Lacan calls the big Other, which is basically our primary imaginary, symbolic, and real conceptions of, and relations to, the symbolic order.9 In the simplest terms possible, we all have different ways of seeing ourselves in contrast to others, and we are all impacted differently by how the power relations in society shape desire. We all need recognition, resources, and opportunities, and we see different strategies modeled by different people for achieving these ends, all of whom/which we internalize aspects of along our life journeys.
I will inevitably catch flack for even referencing Myers-Briggs, the popular framework used by “16-personalities.com” as well as others. I’ve seen this framework called “astrology for middle management” more than a few times because managers can get a little too carried away with this mode of classification (totalization). Nevertheless, Myers-Briggs is based in a profound discovery on the part of depth psychologist Carl Jung. This was a realization that came only after this thesis had already been submitted and defended. I come back after the fact to add a little credit where it is due, because I thought categorizing human energy along the lines of “physical, creative, intellectual, social, emotional” was my own discovery, when in fact it was already established by Jung and operative behind the scenes of most personality tests.
The basic “types” used by Myers-Briggs are based off of the sixteen different ways people can self-report their experiences of sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. Sensation alone gives rise to the extrovert/introvert binary, which may be the most widely popular of the criteria. Whereas one person might be almost entirely introverted, people like me are more 50/50. The thing is, people tend to think “extrovert” just means “outgoing,” but this is false.
What defines extroversion or introversion is how one’s energy levels are affected by social interactions. Some are energetically drained by any social engagement, others get amped off of any, whereas people like me are drained by certain types of events, and amped off of others.
In some future work we will have to go deeper into how psychology and social context, stuff like nature to nurture, factor into childhood development and thereby create the diversity of our experiences. For now, just consider how we are each different in how we deal with separation or suffocation from one’s primary caregiver; how we each differed in how we sought affection (or at least attention)–especially if it was something we had to “win” in the first place (perhaps we had to win freedom from that attention instead!).
What counts as over-stimulation for one child is going to count as the best of all worlds for the next one, which is why many parents tend to scorn most parenting books after a certain point. Each relationship is unique, and the challenges that arise only compound with additional factors such as siblings, extended family, income level of neighborhood, resources available at the school, race, gender, ratio of teachers to children, ratio of structured to unstructured play, etc., ad infinitum.
Considering all the above listed factors, “natural disposition” becomes bereft of explanatory power. Interpretations of behavior that make appeals to “natural disposition” are not just counterproductive but also harmful when applied to children, as such characterizations give parents, teachers, and other children a fixed category to place a child under; thus the “reasons/causes” assumed are often a matter of projection, with all of the explicit and implicit/subconscious ways of treating the person marked as such (once again, this is part and parcel to “totalization”). The script goes, “They’re just like that, so we just deal with them like this.” TL;DR: Environment and experience really muck up personality analysis.
Once we internalize that introverts or extroverts experience their introversion or extroversion in fundamentally different ways from others who share their category, and that there are different reasons or causes for these differences, we can then extrapolate to the other sixteen types and say we have no idea how little we know when it comes to these things. We’ve all got a bad case of the Dunning-Kruger effect,10 and it’s not really helped by the fact that the internet tries to feed us attention-grabby confirmation bias satisfying content we will deem relatable, which is then easier to identify with when removed far enough from the things or people in question.
Tying this all back around, this elaboration has been on only one aspect of the complexity posed by phenomenology of human vitality and how it is tied to our experience of finite time. There’s so much work to be done on this end of the theory.
For now, suffice it to say that my point of departure starts with where I am both practically and theoretically. My own experience of timenergy stultification is mostly in the form of extreme deficiency until college, because I worked in the labor field in the United States for over a decade before enrolling. My parents were also always struggling financially and, because of how much they worked, were fundamentally and systematically deprived of time-energy. My move from the labor force to college exposed ways in which timenergy functions to shape our lifeworlds, as did my various attempts to organize through extracurricular community building and education related work. I studied philosophy and critical theory in college and the two theorists who best helped me to make sense of and articulate these experiences were Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger.
III. Heidegger and Marx
I claimed earlier that timenergy is the fundamental basis of value. But what do we mean by value? Is value primarily economic, cultural, social, or are there other senses of value that should be subscribed to? I am arguing that timenergy is a necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, condition for all of these forms of value. Let’s begin with the economic form.
“Time is money” is a common assertion that carries intuitive weight. Sure, money is also other things, and time is more than its transfer into cash, but the point of this saying is simply that time is valuable and can usually be traded for currency to buy other things. Marx shows why it would be more accurate to state that time and energy are money. Under capitalism the only consistent way to put a roof over one’s head is by being born into wealth or exchanging labor for wages. For Marx, it’s not labor in-itself that capitalists factor into production, but rather labor power.11 As Engels shows in the preface to Wage, Labor, and Capital, labor power is more than just the capacity to labor for a certain period of time, but it is also inherently powerful insofar as it creates more value than the cost of the laborer’s own reproduction (means of subsistence).
To think the value of labor in terms of its potential, or of surplus potential as the motor for evaluating and navigating horizons of possibility, we turn to the existential analytic of dasein laid out in Being and Time. Heidegger shows how our modern conceptions of time, as well as space, miss significant aspects of human experience that cannot be simply reduced to, or dismissed as, mere subjectivity. The Cartesian way of conceiving time and space (which proliferates the work of all modern philosophers) assumes that space and time are infinite, that the starting points on a spatio-temporal grid for running calculations are arbitrary. But time and space are not arbitrary for the human whose being is always already contextually thrown into the midst of non-arbitrary coordinates and meaningful relations.12 Our contextual relations are meaningful, and indeed valuable, because they are finite.
Our finite being is couched in the facticity of inevitable death, of facing an ambiguous though certain deadline. It is the fact that dasein has a finite number of days that gives its situatedness in the world meaning. Not only a finite number of years, but the fact that death can come at any time. For Heidegger, existential death is not when the heart in fact stops beating or the flesh begins decomposing, but is instead a virtual potentiality.13 Heidegger’s emphasis on death may distort his analysis or be problematized in various ways, but for our time now the relevant point is that, unlike arbitrary and infinite time, existential time is meaning-laden and this largely has to do with its particularity and limitations. It is the ever-present possibility of death, susceptibility to murder or natural caprice, that gives dasein its base level sense of alertness, anxiety, and care.
Anxiety and care should not be taken in their normal senses. Just as existential death is this deeper potentiality upon which actual perishing transpires,14 angst and care are the fundamental “existentiale” bases for discrete manifestations of any moods whatsoever.15 Even not caring is caring in Heidegger’s sense, because it is merely a deficiency of our normal mode. You do not “not care” simpliciter, you actually “do not care” vis-a-vis the routine background of everyone always already caring. For not caring to be a statement that bares any weight there is first the expectation that there is already care.16 This is Heidegger’s stance, though the following analysis will raise serious questions about the role and possibility of care in a world within which timenergy is systemically stultified.
So, what does Heidegger’s existential analytic have to do with Marx and timenergy? Marx shows how all economic activity and value assumes labor power vis-a-vis socially necessary labor time, all of which presumes the existence of timenergy, not just time or energy. Timenergy as a concept is derived from thinking of time and energy in existential terms, rather than strictly Cartesian terms abstracted from our meaningful engagement with the world. I propose that what Heidegger shows with time is likewise true of energy, that it is derived by the fact of dasein’s finitude, and that this is because timenergy is the existentiale primordial grounding conditions for “time” or “energy” as they are spoken of in average-everyday terms. Whereas time is limited by the length of the day, week, year, and lifespan, energy is limited by exhaustion and mood.
Cartesian17 metaphysics and neoliberal economics both treat time and energy as though these are decontextualized and separate aspects of reality whose only real value is in its conversion to labor, but for human experience, time and energy are codependent and primordially prior to labor. Human energy to do things is worthless without current and potential future time for repetition of a given activity. Likewise, time is rendered superfluous without energy to do things.
The meaning of my life, and the value of my days, stems from the fact that time is limited by the length of the day, week, and life. Likewise, energy is limited, its finitude confronts me existentially in the form of exhaustion, disinterest, or despair. Exhaustion comes from being emotionally, physically, or creatively drained. Disinterest is having nothing to do with the task at hand. Despair can arise in a variety of ways, but as a provisional example consider how despair in the face of obstructions to opportunity can immobilize a person. With “no way forward” that feeling of “giving up” can be fundamentally experienced at the level of not having any more energy to give to even the most mundane of tasks.
With this established, I hope to show that thinking with timenergy might prove useful to dissolve various obstructions imposed by contemporary economics or popular apologetics for the existing system.
IV. Timenergy in Economic Terms
Marx is commonly critiqued on the basis of his and other classical economists’ assumption of the labor theory of value. Marxists from Frederick Engels to David Harvey have pushed back against this trend to argue that Marx far surpasses the deadlocks of classical economics when it comes to conceiving the role that labor plays in economics.18 It may be more accurate to say that Marx extended the labor theory of value beyond classical economics with his more fundamental reevaluation of labor’s surplus-productive power.19 It’s easy enough to show how the competing theories of value actually presume the labor theory of value if we only maintain the existential conception of timenergy. We can hardly blame neoliberal economists for missing this, when they are mostly notorious Cartesians themselves (aren’t we all?), especially when all of the leading post-Cartesian existential phenomenologists seemingly missed this as well.20
The labor theory of value simply states that part of the cost of any good or service is inherently set by the cost of the labor necessary for producing the commodity in question. Neoliberal economists commonly brush this aside, stating that this in fact does not help us at all to derive or predict the actual price of commodities.21 Subjective theory of value is used as a competing theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is dependent on what the consumer subjectively considers the good or service to be worth.22 There is supply and demand, and the price of a good can be predicted rather well if we only understand the price those demanding consumers are willing to pay. On its face this makes intuitive sense. Halloween candy is worth less the day after Halloween because there is suddenly so much more supply than there is demand, the consumers subjectively desire this now outdated candy less, thus its price is lowered. However, the fact remains that even the subjective theory of value presumes the existential facticity of finite timenergy.
Economists who subscribe to the subjective theory of value commonly state that consumers enter the supermarket as rational actors calculating in such a way so as to maximize gains and minimize losses. While leftists might push back against this myth as empirically false,23 one might counter that it retains utility as an operating assumption. Just because we are not all so rational, not so calculating, and undoubtedly susceptible to all kinds of explicit and implicit manipulation in the forms of advertising, store layout, sales, or sign-value and how it is used to cultivate our identities within or opposed to groups,24 doesn’t mean we should dispose with this assumption so long as it is useful. Let us just assume this principle of rational, calculating, self-interested maximizers. Why am I willing to spend $12 to $15 on a dinner for one? Or why might you be willing to purchase a frozen meal instead of the ingredients to prepare yourself? In either case, an economic actor subjectively considers it worthwhile to spend the given sum of money instead of just doing it on their own. Opportunity cost plays into the decision to go with convenience. This subjective willingness to spend that much money would change if the cost were too high. Suddenly the actor would be buying the cheaper ingredients and preparing it in their own kitchen, or perhaps paying cheaper labor to do the task. So, does this prove the subjective theory of value, or does it prove the labor theory of value? It actually works for either, but technically shows why labor is deeper and more original of a source for subjective feelings about value, so long as we maintain that the existential analysis of timenergy underlies labor power.
Subjective desire is secondary to existential capability. With routinely available timenergy how many more of us would take some cooking classes and learn how to make amazing meals for our communities? With persistent limitations on our timenergy though we are too tired or have too little time in the day to prepare a decent warm meal on our own. After working all day, it just makes sense to use some of the money earned in the exchange of labor to purchase a meal prepared by the labor of others.
When I go into the restaurant and decide the cost of dinner is indeed worth $12 or $15, this may also be an implicit or explicit admission that I don’t have the timenergy left to do it myself, or even if I technically did, I would rather spend that little bit of remaining timenergy on other activities; the preference is not a mere matter of subjective whim, though, because we have other needs beyond nutritive consumption. Opportunity cost, when thinking about what to do with our remaining time in the day, means that if we spend it cooking we are missing out on some much needed sleep, social engagements, or education.
With that said, it’s more than just the ways my own timenergy or time-without-energy can be spent that factors into subjective valuation of a good or service. There is also the fact that any such valuation is done vis-a-vis the socially necessary labor time for production. This is the average [labor] time necessary for production which, if unable to somehow undercut, businesses will be hard pressed to make a profit. As Marx says in Capital, Volume One, Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.25
When I’m trying to decide to prepare a meal myself or just purchase one made by others, I am, at least subliminally, factoring in the market value of my own labor as opposed to the market value of the average socially necessary labor time to produce the meal. Whether one tries to explain this in terms of the labor theory of value or the subjective theory of value, in either case timenergy is presumed. Indeed, timenergy, as an existentiale, is presupposed whenever evaluating anything, or navigating any horizon of possibilities.
While Heidegger’s critique of how we tend to think about time is useful for understanding that it is valuable because of its non-arbitrary, non-universal, and always-already limited facticity,26 he does not apply this same analysis to the issue of human energy. Why does Heidegger fail to bring the energy factor into his existential analysis, and moreover never seems to consider the economic dimension of dasein’s being-in-the-world? While he critiques Marx for not paying enough attention to ontology,27 I hope to show how Heidegger might be critiqued for fetishizing, reifying, and mystifying economic relations and structural phenomena. On the one hand, timenergy proves a natural extension of the Heideggerian project, complimenting his existential-analytic. On the other, though, timenergy may prove useful for bringing Heidegger’s existential-analytic back to the basis of dasein’s being-in-the-world, as being-in-capitalism.
V. Timenergy in Phenomenological Terms
Being-in-the-world is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon that cannot be simply defined.28 Comprehending this requires considerable deprogramming of Cartesian (modern) assumptions, including the deconstruction of both linguistic and ontological assumptions derived thereby. Heidegger spends the first several chapters of Being and Time doing just this with the express purpose of developing a more thoroughly fleshed out look into this phenomenon. In chapter one I argued that this project cannot be summarized, because it is just as much praxis as it is a theory, and reading it in its complexity is part of the process for this deprogramming work.29 Nevertheless, a brief summary is in order.
The existential analysis begins with dasein. Dasein is the being-in30 who is always already in-the-world, i.e. the being who asks the question of being in the first place. As opposed to the traditional modern mode of analysis, Heidegger renounces the Cartesian assumptions of a decontextualized or universal subject. Dasein is always already particular, deeply embedded in a historical time, place, and culture. Dasein’s fundamental basis is care/concern,31 because of the ever-present possibility of no more possibilities, death. Death anxiety pushes dasein to run from its own particular possibilities and to instead distract itself from existential facticity by playing out the safe scripts written by others.32
What other philosophers and sociologists might call social coding or normativity are, in Heidegger’s thought, spoken of in terms of the “they,” or Das Man. Most of the time, and in most ways, a person does what people do in the ways that most people seem to do it. As in, we are all “inauthentic” insofar as we walk through doors like everyone else. We are all inauthentic insofar as the language and dialect we use is that of others. Our very sense of self is established borrowing seemingly endless habits and examples from others (this is largely Bourdieu’s source of inspiration for his key concept “habitus”).
For Heidegger, there’s really no such thing as an original self that could be understood as authentic, some original source one could get back to on one’s own through drugs or meditation, because the self is communally constructed in a world of others.33 Authenticity, insofar as it is possible (and it’s never entirely possible), is more of a process in becoming through deliberate practice. For Heidegger, this means mindfulness towards one’s ever-present possibility of no more possibilities, the promise of death. This works as a sort of acid bath for stripping away “the they’s” possibilities and desires, bringing one’s own deeply unique and personal opportunities into light. By seizing these and becoming something nobody else can become, dasein is able to sculpt for itself a more authentic existence, making life a work of art.34
The Nazi implications of this project are the subject of another work that we cannot delve too deeply into for now. Suffice it to say that “one’s ownmost possibilities” for Heidegger has a lot to do with geopolitical belonging and blood ties to certain traditions. Facing death, in this sense, means sacrificing oneself for one’s people, one’s rooted ties to a tradition and community. My bone to pick with nationalism, as well as ethno-nationalism, will have to wait for later though—I do not think anything about timenergy analysis hinges on that discussion.
Commonly overlooked by discussions of the existential analytic of dasein is the structure of being-in-the-world itself, where understanding, discourse, and mood are considered “equally primordial.”35 Understanding, discourse, and mood (also translated as “state-of-mind”) are thus reciprocally determinative, or each co-responsible for making the others possible.
Whereas Descartes would have put understanding before discourse and mood, Heidegger’s system proposes that understanding cannot come before or after discourse and mood, but that each needs the others. Note that mood here is far from what we commonly take to mean mood, but should be understood existentially like angst or care, in that it is the underlying basis for all moods.36 This is something beyond subjective feelings, and is in fact deeply discursive or communal. We could also speak of mood in terms of affect. We are affected by others and the possibilities or limitations within our world.
Being affected by others is how we develop language, as our primary mode of interaction with those who affect us. Affect is a mob phenomenon before it is individualized, because we feel with others. The child, who was brought into the world by its parents’ co-mingling discourse, understanding, and mood in the act of physical consummation, feels with its primary caregiver, feels with the room full of people, and feels loss when torn from the primary caregiver. We all feel the collective spirit or mood of our times when catastrophe strikes, if even only in its deficient form (“Everyone else feels in such a way, so why don’t I?”). Likewise, I feel overcast weather even if it does not directly impact me on a visceral level, the fact that it affects my loved ones or work associates ripples throughout and impacts my own quality of life and ways of perceiving or interpreting experience.
Understanding, discourse, and mood are each what Heidegger terms an “existentiale.”37 An existentiale is basically an existential category of dasein’s being-in-the-world, meaning it is the primordial and grounding possibility for a vast variety of phenomena experienced in the world.38 Care is also an existentiale.39
I am proposing that timenergy is an existentiale equally primordial to care, discourse, understanding, and affectivity, and that by missing this Heidegger’s initial project in Being and Time ran into problems. Heidegger wanted to explain world alienation in terms of inauthenticity. Inauthenticity had a lot to do with the inertia of culture, which he calls “falling,” but which other fascists just called degeneracy. This speaks to the fact that a rapidly changing world undermines a steadfast lifestyle rooted in tradition, community, and culture. But by using timenergy, a concept that signifies a phenomenon primarily used to illuminate Marx’s critique of capitalism, we are able to show that world alienation is more the result of capitalism than a supposed fall from tradition. This is not to say that tradition is not at all important, but simply that alienation and fragmentation of timenergy is at the root of social and cultural alienation. Without a social and cultural surplus of timenergy pooled for the non-economic engagement of humankind, the very conditions for participating in and transforming tradition and culture are fundamentally undermined.
VI. The Economic Stultification of Culture and Self-Actualization
Time is limited by the length of the day, and energy is limited by exhaustion. We have shown that this limitation is the basis of value. Beyond economic value in the form of labor power, timenergy is a necessary condition for the individual development of personal capacities, community building, and cultural production. What I have been calling individual development of capacities should properly be thought of as “self-actualization,” the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy.40
What I have been calling “community building” and “cultural production” can also be found in Maslow’s Hierarchy, but perhaps more importantly corresponds with what Pierre Bourdieu calls social and cultural capital, respectively. Cultural capital has to do with habitus (internalized practices, skills, and knowledge), which helps people navigate society and appear more valuable than others. Social capital has to do with relationships, social networks, and the degree to which one is able to mobilize others to one’s defense or credibility. Bourdieu argues that social and cultural capital both require sustained effort with the investment of time free of economic necessity.41
The unifying similarity between self-actualization, community, and culture is that they all require active participation and effort. This makes them hard, if not impossible, to commodify for passive consumption. The closest we get to commodified skill development is in the form of video games, where skill development is simulated to produce feelings of achievement faster than what most skills, such as playing the violin or learning to code, require. Social media likewise commodifies social connectivity, but we will return to this later.
Remember that the way we are thinking of timenergy here requires that we separate immediate gratification from sustained effort. There are surely aspects of one’s personal, communal, and cultural life that involve immediate gratification. Food, dance, and drink can be communal or cultural. But consumption can’t be all of it.
Truly partaking in one’s own culture is not just something done once a year or on holidays, it’s a way of life. Another aspect of life that might come to mind when “culture” is brought up would be the high arts. These are also a way of life, requiring a degree of knowledge, which may include practice in the production of those arts. Such arts are seen as elitist or aristocratic as a result, because leisure time and access to educational resources are necessary prerequisites for their enjoyment. We can’t really appreciate something unless we know how it is made. Thus our ability to develop personal skills means learning something you find interesting or fulfilling that is not just for making money.
Sustained effort builds value and power, whereas the tendency of immediate gratification, as a lifestyle choice, results in diminishing returns. Taking the violin for example, if you learn it through years of sustained effort, eventually you are an asset to your community and able to better participate in culture at large. You are able to move an audience to tears and inspire. Personal skills develop us in ways beyond what can be easily commodified, unless you’re very lucky and you literally don’t have any interests outside of your career.
The life of immediate gratification has diminishing returns. For example, bodily needs can only maintain satisfaction in consumption with constant diversification and intensification of the experience (i.e. always needing to mix it up or binge). This leads to addictive consumption in many ways, the most obvious being substance abuse, where you need more and more and more to keep getting the same high. Shopping can work the same way. Sustained effort in meaningful activity, on the other hand, makes you an asset to yourself and others. This is cultural enrichment. It tends to take the form of sacrificing enjoyment now for the cultural products you can share later, whether it be poetry or computer programming.
VII. Attention, Recognition, and how Consumerism Simulates the Social
One of the largest factors that motivates us in any of these activities are the reference points of our social field. This includes family, friends, teachers, employers, co-workers, comrades, or fellow worshipers. At an early age we desire the recognition of others. Recognition is not the same as attention. Just like how timenergy is the potential to get actualized into sustained effort, attention is the potential to get actualized into recognition. Recognition is the acknowledgment of our value. It is respect and appreciation. However, for it to be real recognition, it cannot be blind to our deficiencies. Recognition has a critical aspect, in that it means potential affirmation or negation. Negation meaning that others may disapprove or be disappointed in us.
We all need recognition from a diverse variety of others to really get a sense for who we are and what we are capable of. Communal and cultural engagements then, at an early age, form our understanding of how to go about achieving, earning, or gaming recognition. A lot of complex stuff happens during these formative years. For example, if all we see are people using their phones and going to work all of the time and there’s no real relationships being developed, we develop a skewed notion of how to achieve recognition. Commodified social life simulates communal and cultural engagement, but it’s rarely real. Online this takes the form of parasocial relationships, which are a simulated diminishment of recognition.
The problem is that real recognition requires timenergy. Not just your own, but of others. Getting to know a person is not done in a momentary glimpse, and not just in a passive way where one gives another some attention. Recognition comes from the sustained effort on the part of others to get to know one, to respond to and interact with their strengths and weaknesses.
Capitalism is certainly good at some things, chiefly its capacity to produce commodities for us to consume passively or in a hurry. Passive consumption is our default mode for spending time-without-energy during the weekend or evenings when we finish work and need to recharge. Here we use the wages we earned in exchange for our sustained effort to at least enjoy in the moment. But there was a huge abyss created when we didn’t have the communal and cultural recognition to really motivate us or show ways of using timenergy for non-commodified engagements. If others don’t have extra timenergy to pool with us towards building community and culture, community and culture are fractured.
What steps in to fill the void of fractured social life? Commodification of the social realm! How does this unfold? Through the attention economy online, where we are sold the images and signs of a social life without some of its most necessary elements. Here we are able to connect with others in communities based on interests, but we are severed from the kinds of relation that require truly getting to know a lot of very different people over sustained periods of time. Here we are all replaceable with a couple of swipes or clicks.
Attention is the currency, and we only have so much to give. We want more than we put out, but getting any requires giving significantly more. Most of our time-without-energy is spent giving passive attention into the attention economy, where we literally gamble for the opportunity to get some in return; but this attention is almost inherently limited because it is one-directional, meaning parasocial.
Without recognition we are driving ourselves crazy, and we go to more and more desperate lengths to gain it, but without the communal and cultural pools of extra timenergy there is just no real hope. On the attention economy there are two primary ways of gaining attention: Creation and coat-tail riding. There is always some coattail riding in the creative process, and always some creation in the coat-tail riding process, but the primary difference is a qualitative matter of how much time-energy has been invested as sustained effort. Riding on the coat-tails of other creators often requires significantly less sustained effort. This is where the fandom of lovers or haters flourishes.
Hating becomes easy. People fed up with giving so much attention without almost ever getting any back may feel resentful towards creators who they perceive as getting more than their fair share of attention. We also spend so much time giving attention to the spectacle of others that we get fed up with them pretty easy. We are not getting anything in return. They are not really people, they are figures that either affirm or negate our identities. As Peter Coffin would put it, we aren’t really in communities either, we are in validation gangs, fandoms created around brands that cultivate our identities.42 Cultural icons therefore either get our love or hate. Rarely are we simply indifferent when we don’t think someone is worth attention, we feel angry. “Why are people talking about this person?” (Read: “Why is this person worthy of the attention?”)
This fosters an environment of renunciation and betrayals. It fosters more than just call out culture, which is just one aspect of this, but it also breeds the hot definitive take posts. These are the kinds of posts aimed at gaming reactions from, and controlling, others. Because if recognition is not attainable and all we can get is attention, then any attention sure beats no attention.
VIII. Symbolizing Timenergy
In an era where economic labor, the sustained sacrifice of effort that gets siphoned away towards private interest, is increasingly devalued by rising automation, we need to learn ways to prioritize the real human wealth: timenergy. We must learn ways to put people and planet before profit (in its economic, cultural, and social forms), or we will only continue to see this rising spectacle where ‘others’ are seen as a drain on our economy or ability to gain recognition. We must push back against this system’s insistence that everything is zero sum competition.
A critique of this work is that it does not lay out a political solution. This presumes that the problem is reducible to politics, which may not be true. Insofar as any existing political “ism” or party wants to address these concerns, I am all ears. A future work will address the various ways I imagine people of different political affiliations or value priorities might address the timenergy crisis. In the meantime, in the cookshop of my mind I can imagine that the abolition of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” and the redistribution of essential labor is a good place to begin.43
By “redistribution of essential labor,” of course, I mean that merely being a part of society would require certain chores be done by everyone. Thus, whatever could not be automated would be turned from a full-time job that requires an exploited work force, into mere chores. “Essential labor” includes dangerous, disgusting, and demeaning kinds of necessary labor that must be redistributed if we are to have a society that purports to guarantee equality of opportunity. Being a Bloomberg, Bush, Clinton, Koch, Soros or any other kind of royalty would not get anyone off the hook. In such a world, there would be a lot of “extra” kinds of work people could do if feeling motivated by some reward system, but achieving the basic necessities, utilities, and access to opportunities would not require more than 5-10 hours. Everything above and beyond that would be for bonuses that are not necessary to living a dignified life.
Saying what one wants is not politics though, nor are demands or radical imagination enough to materialize our dreams. How to get to such a world is the question that ultimately drives many of us, but as Heidegger said, “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” It is my hope that by giving the phenomenon signified by “timenergy” a name, stipulated characteristics, and a functioning symbol (a lowercase “e” with a line through it to make a “t”), that it will become easier to talk about the ways our current social systems could be better structured to pool and prioritize timenergy as the fundamental basis of value.
With dwindling resources, ecological destruction, rising automation, the threat of another world war, forced mass migrations, and all increasing economic insecurity, we must push timenergy to the forefront. Money is not value. Profit is not value. These are only secondary to the most important form of value: Human timenergy. Without it we will only continue to eat ourselves out of community while destroying this planet.
1 Adorno, Theodor. Free Time. XenoPraxis.net. http://xenopraxis.net/readings/adorno_freetime.pdf (accessed February 2, 2019)
2 “Ontological” speaks to the fundamental reality of this or that object or set of objects. By saying my distinction is not ontological, I mean this is a merely useful distinction, not a metaphysical one.
3 The beginning of Marx’s Grundrisse is good for this.
4 Seeing Like A State and Taming Chance are both fundamental sources for this point, especially page 55 of Taming Chance.
5 2021 addition: This is in the first chapter of Capital, Volume One. Something beginners often do with Marx is read the first few chapters of Capital and then go off to do other things. As a result, someone like me makes the mistake of taking what Marx does/says/thinks from Volume 1 outside of its larger context that involves the other volumes and writings, which are essential for seeing the bigger picture. Those first few chapters are his summary of political economy, before he unfolds, from the form of the commodity, the bigger picture and, with it, his critique.
6 I didn’t get into this enough at the time of this writing, but it’s not just the immediate labor that you do—more importantly, it’s the promise of your future labor potential, i.e. labor power.
7 You can’t buy personality, experiences, or skills representing sides, frames, and takes of reality.
8 Besides so many self help books where I have seen this false equivocation committed, one good academic example is a book by the name of Forms of Vitality. A good book, though it constantly presumes vitality is reducible or analogous to how physical energy works.
9 Seeing as the big Other is such an important concept for theories of subjectivity, I recommend The Dangerous Maybe’s new post on the topic. He’s actually writing it right now, but I know by the time Waypoint is published you will be able to find it on his blog: https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/
10 Google says: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from people’s inability to recognize their lack of ability.”
11 In the Preface to Wage, Labor, and Capital, Engels explains the ways in which Marx surpassed the classical economists of his day in Capital Volume One by showing how the basis of value is not labor itself, but labor-power. For labor well invested necessarily creates a surplus of value over the cost of its own reproduction. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf
12 This argument is primarily made in chapter three of division one of Being and Time.
13 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. 281.
14 Ibid., 284-5.
15 Ibid., 231, 227.
16 Ibid., 83.
17 “Cartesian” here meaning “from Descartes” or of his influence, i.e. all modern philosophy is working within certain fundamental assumptions set forth by Rene Descartes, i.e. substance ontology, mind-body dualism, foundationalism, hyperbolic doubt, etc.
18 Harvey, David. Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value. DavidHarvey.org http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-ofthe-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/ (accessed March 21, 2019)
19 As cited earlier, see Engels’ preface to Wage, Labor, and Capital, or the chapter of Capital Vol. 1 on The Buying and Selling of Labour.
20 Explain this. What do you mean by cartesian?
21 Harvey, David. Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value. David-
Harvey.org http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theoryof-value-by-david-harvey/ (accessed March 21, 2019)
22 Ibid., In the Harvey article just cited he mentions that the needs and desires of the public were specifically cited as necessary conditions for value by Marx in the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1.
23 While most of my evidence for this claim is merely interpersonal conversations and therefore anecdotal, David Graeber gets a lot of mileage by refuting this claim through his anthropological treatise: Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Random House, 2012. 78,79, 90, 238.
24 See Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society for an analysis of signvalue, and Peter Coffin’s Custom Reality and You for the analysis of cultivated identity.
25 Marx, Karl. Capital Volume One. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. 129.
26 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. 310.
27 Heidegger, Martin. Martin Heidegger Critiques Karl Marx (1969). YouTube.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvmeemiBHz4 (accessed March 19, 2019)
28 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. 65.
29 Mckerracher, Dave. A Justification of Heidegger ’s Methodology of Obscurantism and Obfuscation Res Cogitans Volume 7 | Issue 1 Article 17, 2016.
30 Being-in is an existentiale—not something that can be said of a table which is definitely “in the world” but it is not meaningfully selfcomporting itself; if we say the table “stands” by the table, this is an anthropomorphism (we are speaking of the table as though it is dasein).
31 The difference between these two words, for Heidegger, has to do with what or who is under consideration. Care is of existence, the mode strictly delimited to dasein, whereas concern is for things in both their present-at-hand and ready-to-hand modes, equipmental totalities and the world of use. 157-158
32 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. 178.
33 Ibid., 168.
34 Ibid., 348, 299, 307.
35 Ibid., 172-210, or Section A of Chapter 5.
36 Ibid., 172.
37 Ibid., 182.
38 Ibid., 82-183.
39 Ibid., 84-5.
40 Maslow, Abraham H. 1970. Motivation and personality. New York: Harper & Row.
41 Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986) The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, Greenwood): 241-258.
42 Coffin, Peter. Custom Reality and You. Amazon: 2018.
43 Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit jobs: a theory.
