Energy/Introduction
Pourqui certain concepts scientifiques connaissent-ils une vie nomade, d'une science à l'autre? Que deviennent-ils lorsqu'ils passent d'une science 'dure' à une science 'molle', ou inversement? Conservent-ils le même sens? Contribuent-ils à unifier le champ des sciences? Ou bien en compliquent-ils plus le relief? - Isabelle Stengers
While I write this Introduction, the meltdown of the three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 has made new energy-saving technologies the centre of attention at CEATEC, Japan's largest information technology and electronics fair, in October of the same year. Hope rises among environmentally-conscious scientists like Sasaki et al. that better management of the island’s many forests and policy reinforcements will allow the sustainable use of woody biomass or any other natural resource freely available as documented by the non-profit organization Japan for Sustainability or the German Energy Rich Japan Project in order to generate the 858.5 billion kWh the Japanese population currently consumes per year. The techno-natural disaster has also recharged the empty batteries of anti-nuclear movements, not only in Japan but world-wide, and fuelled pronunciamentos by political parties of almost all creeds for an ‚energy turn’.
To write the above paragraph dozens of google clicks were needed, each spending an amount of energy equivalent to letting a light bulb of 60 watts burn for 10 minutes. And many dozens of clicks more to search for open-access articles and other information to compile this collection. In addition, the Living Books about Life project has to rely heavily upon energy-intensive infrastructures and often coal-powered data centres and an equally energy-intensive cooling system for the server that never sleeps.
But this is not a book about renewable energies and how to turn the land of the rising sun into the Kingdom of Solar Energy or joining hands with Cheeky Cloud making windmills turn round and round while unfriending Facebook’s Dirty Coal as in the Green Peace compaign and video. An energetic transformation is depending on a climate change on all levels of society (including the microlevel of the individual) and not just on a technological fix. This book is, rather, about energy as a nomadic concept and material agent of transformation – call it a modest proposal to embrace a cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2010) or queer vitalism (Colebrook, 2010).
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Energy travels in/between and across subatomic particles, bodies, societies, cultures, and disciplines. (to be continued)
Energy Forms: TransForming Dynamics
Energy trans/forms ... dynamic systems ... nonequilibrium thermodynamics ... kinetic and potential energies ...
Energy Flows: Powering Cosmopolitics
Flux and flows ... vitalism ... ener-chi ...
Energy Matters: Entangling Physis and Signification
From energy to information ... meaning systems ... see also "biosemiotics" ...
Bibliography
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Beer, G. (1996) Open Fields. Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, B. (2001) Energy Forms. Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Clarke, B. & L. D. Henderson (eds)(2002) From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kirby, V. (2011) Quantum Anthropologies. Life at Large. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Schneider, E.D. & J.J. Kay (1994) 'Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics', in Mathematical and Computer Modelling 19.6-8: 25-48.
Seaman, B. & O. Rössler (2008) 'Neosentience - A New Branch of Scientific and Poetic Inquiry Related to Artificial Intelligence', in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 6.1: 31-40.
Stengers, I. (2010) Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.