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Introduction: Energy as a Nomadic Concept

Pourqui certains 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, 1987

(Translation of above by Manuela Rossini: How come that certain scientific concepts lead a nomadic life, from one science to the next? What do they become if they travel from a 'hard' science to a 'soft' science, or viceversa? Does their meaning stay the same? Do they manage to unify the various scientific fields? Or do they complicate the picture rather? - Isabelle Stengers, 1987)

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, and fuelled pronunciamentos by political parties of almost all creeds for an ‚energy turn’ world-wide.

In order 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. Like all digital practices and social media, the Living Books about Life project depends upon energy-intensive infrastructures, partly coal-powered data centres (see dirty-data report by Greenpeace) and an equally energy-intensive cooling system for servers that never sleep.

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 and making windmills turn round and round while unfriending Facebook’s Dirty Coal as promoted by the Greenpeace compaign and video. An energetic (r)evolution is depending on a climate change on all levels of society (including the microlevel of the individual and his or her life-style) and not just on a technological fix. This book is hence not exclusively about E(nergy) as in Einstein's famous equation (E = mc2). It is, rather, a book about energy as a nomadic concept and material-semiotic agent of transformation. Tapping into energy as both an idea and a substance, I hope to add another atom to Vicki Kirby's recent 'quantum-anthropological' proposition of a 'meta-physis of life at large' (2011). Or call it a modest proposal to embrace a 'cosmopolitics' (Stengers, 2010 and 2011) in order to sustain good vibrations.

Energy Forms: TransForming Dynamics

As a cosmopolitan nomad, energy takes a ride in many media and forms to travel (in)between subatomic particles, bodies, societies, cultures, and disciplines. Having no passport, it belongs to none of the countries it traverses, yet leaves its footprints everywhere while also being (trans)formed by what it encounters and inter/intra-acts with. The online Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics (see Energy) explains that while the term “energy” was only spelt like this in 1599, its etymological roots can be found in Artistotle’s Metaphysics (c. 350 BC) where a state of functioning but also the ability “to bring about something else” is foregrounded. Yet, ἐνέργεια in the Greek philosopher’s ethical treatises also had the meaning of “activity” (to denote more than simply a disposition or state) as well as, in his Rhetoric, the meaning of “a vigorous style”. From the beginning then, the concept was an interdisciplinary composite and implying “the ceaseless transformation of the potential into the actual“ I would like to emphasise in Energy Connections: life or being as a crea(c)tive becoming with energy of all forms being vital to its dynamics.

(to be continued: energy forms ... dynamic systems ... nonequilibrium thermodynamics ...)

Energy Flows: Powering Cosmopolitics

In a natural universe governed by the laws of energy flow we must understand our true nature and how it is shared with other naturally occurring complex energy systems. - Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, 2005

(On its way: Flux and flows ... vitalism ... ener-chi ... see also LiviBL: Astrobiology ...)

Energy Matters: Entangling Physis and Semiosis

(On its way: From energy to information ... meaning systems ... see also LiviBL "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. (ed.)(1987) D'une science à l'autre: des concepts nomades. Paris: Seuil.

Stengers, I. (2010, 2011) Cosmopolitics I + II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.