Timenergy

Description

Theory Underground:

"Timenergy is not just the words “time” and “energy” mashed up together. Timenergy points to the phenomenon that comes first and matters most in our experience. “Time” and “energy,” as used in our daily lives, are secondary products of abstraction, separated from lived experience. Timenergy is to 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 value. Value is the potential to actualize what matters to us. Without timenergy, there is no hope of doing anything that matters.

Think about it, time-without-energy is nearly worthless. Time-without-energy is time that must be spent recovering energy. If you work or study full time, then your ‘free time’ is really recharge time to get back to your grind. Because this routinely lacks energy, it is spent in passive involvement with the world through entertainment or other forms of consumption.

In a similar way, 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 you happen to have energy but no time with the potential for repetition, you are incapable of investing timenergy towards the personal, communal, or cultural aspects of life that require 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 makes you a producer. Immediate gratification makes you a consumer."

(https://medium.com/@theoryunderground/timenergy-an-existential-analysis-of-labor-power-5fc5b0071452)

More information

* Book: David McKerracher. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy.

URL =

Cadell Last:

"without it (timenergy):

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I read Timenergy as a book that functions as the necessary groundwork for the philosophical mediation which centres and legitimises the existence of Theory Underground into the future."

(https://philosophyportal.substack.com/p/stakes-for-timenergy-theory)