Energy/Introduction

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 is it that certain scientific concepts lead a nomadic life, from one science to the next? What do they become as they travel from a 'hard' science to a 'soft' science, or viceversa? Does their meaning stay the same? Do they help to unify the field of the sciences? Or do they rather complicate the picture?)

While I write this Introduction, the meltdown of the three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 is apparently still not under control and 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 18 seconds. 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. Moralistic finger-pointing at the big Western cooperations, greedy capitalists or, worse perhaps, nature as an evil force will not do any longer - if ever it did. An energetic (r)evolution is depending on a climate change on all levels of the material, social and cultural fabric of the world, including the micro-level of the individual and his or her life-style, 'energy mentality' and values, and not just on a technological fix and a call for new legislation. A more connected and holistic ecological approach, moreover, entails not only a political and ethical awareness that energy use, capitalism, imperialism and anthropocentrism are hard-wired into each other but also that reactors, tsunamis, electricity, transmission cables, among other 'things', have each an agency of their own, affecting and being affected by each of the other aforementioned elements (cf. Chapter 2 on the North American blackout of August 2003 in Bennett, 2010: 20-38).

This book is hence not exclusively about the E(nergy) of scientific equations such as Einstein's famous formula E = mc². Nor primarily about energy as an un/limited resource and consumer good. It is, rather, a book about energy as a nomadic concept and - on the basis of its defining capacity to do work - a material-semiotic agent of trans/formation shaping not only "technologies, politics, societies and cultural world views" (Möllers & Zachmann, 2012, Introduction) but each and every life. Travelling through time, a concept has a history and different names in different periods. It will therefore be useful to consider earlier terms like vis viva (Leibniz) or élan vital (Bergson) and non-Western notions such as the Chinese principle qì as well as  19th-century artistic expressions of vibratory forces as residual elements of the conceptual frame of what we mean by "energy" in its broadest sense today. Tapping into energy as both an idea and a dynamic substance, or intensive flow and affect rather, I hope to add another atom to Vicki Kirby's recent 'quantum-anthropological' proposition of a "meta-physis of life at large" (2011). More broadly and theoretically speaking, the aim is to contribute to the project of critical posthumanism. Or call it a modest proposal to embrace a cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2010 and 2011) in order to sustain the good vibrations of all that matters.

Energy Forms: TransForming Dynamics

In the era of classical thermodynamics, the cultural allegory of energy forms proceeded from the universal moralization of heat into the relativistic decoding of light, preparing both matter and energy for further metamorphoses into the chaotic orders of information. - Bruce Clarke, 2001

As a cosmopolitan nomad, energy takes a ride in several forms and media of transportation to travel (in)between subatomic particles, neurons, bodies, societies, cultures, stories 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 interacts with - or, more appropriately, intra-acts with: material agents, to follow Karen Barad, do not meet as already constituted and discrete entities, usually separated in space and time, but only emerge as seemingly individual forms through and from their mutual quantum entanglements in spacetime (Barad, 2010). Energy is no exception in this matter. 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 implied that physical as well as discursive powers are in charge of "the ceaseless transformation of the potential into the actual" that I would like to emphasise in Energy Connections: life - whether human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic - as crea(c)tive becoming with energy of various states and forms (including narrativizations and even artistic anti-forms) being vital to its dynamics. 

The dynamic definition and interdisciplinary use of energy I want to draw on and promote here was set in motion by polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in his 1695 paper "Specimen dynamicum", where he introduced the term vis viva as a relational concept to complement a more mechanical, Cartesian notion of energy as a dead force with a living force or what is now called kinetic energy. Leibniz's idea was that a collision between two bodies transfers vis viva from one to the other, giving each a kind of 'life' by putting it in motion. Arguing that even when two colliding objects seem to come to an apparent halt, vis viva is always conserved in the form of small chaotic motions invisible to the eye – in the form of heat, in other words. Leibniz was thus the first to recognize the conservation of energy, which was formulated as the first law of thermodynamics (i.e., as the the conversion of mechanical energy into heat) in 19th-century physics and then became a ruling principle in all science. His Monadology of 1714 can also be credited for endowing matter - even inanimate matter - with life, insofar as in this book he assumes an infinite number of substances he calls "monads" making up any entity as an arrangement that is liable to continuous rearrangement and change through internal action. Since every composite is different, each can unfold in a singular manner depending on its inner energy or potentiality. Accordingly, evolution is seen as the actualisation of these individual potentialities, which foreshadows epigenetic propositions about the origin of life at the end of the 18th century that challeged the preformation theory of organisms articulated in natural history so far. While preformationists denied nature an energy of its own and saw all forms of life corresponding exactly to how God had designed them when He created the world, epigenesis postulated a generative and form-shaping power within nature and bodies (epigenesis/preformation). As with Leibniz, the focus of analytical interest is thus on the becoming of forms and a living and motive force immanent to a system.

The articulations above can be regarded as prescursors of an intra-active dynamism of matter-energy or "microscopic forms of energy" (Dincer & Cengel, 2001: 120) that we find in post-classical physics, an umbrella term for atomic physics, quantum mechanics and theories of relativity, from the 1920s onwards. Diametrically opposed to dominant mechanistic and deterministic views of natural phenomena and the universe as perfect clockworks set in motion by and running on divine power, these 18th-century theories are paralleled in modern times by emerging notions of the unpredictability of living systems and the irreversibility and indeterminacy of their trajectories. In Energy Forms, the book that gave this subchapter its title, Bruce Clarke charts a cultural poetics of the energy concepts in classical thermodynamics and early electromagnetics that not only dominated science but also influenced the narratives of modernity at large. He mentions William Thomson’s paper „On the Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy“ of 1852 as the moment in Anglo-American science when the Galilean-Newtonian ‘marriage’ of mathematical and dynamic principles produced as its off-spring an authoritative discourse of energy as a calculable “closed-system phenomenon seeking a final state of thermal equilibrium”. In the secular age, the harmony was no longer orchestrated by God but by gravitational laws. Within this framework, life as a whole, social processes and cultural developments could all be approached as problems in mechanical engineering and “subjected … to the material economies of physical systems” (Clarke, 2001: 5). During the same era, however, creative literature not only supported these “positivist scientisms” (ibid.) but also presented a counterdiscourse to them. It did so precisely by putting centre-stage the tension within classical thermodynamics itself, namely that most energy forms – heat, light, electromagnetism – are not solid but fluid occurrences, flows that cannot be captured and controlled for perfect and complete conversion into work. Slowly but surely, the discipline had to learn that dynamic systems oscillate between states of order and chaos, and that energy flux is a crucial aspect of life which renders complex systems open to each other (while being operationally closed) in order to enter into couplings indispensable for symbiosis (see Symbiosis in this book series) and conducive, at the same time, to self-organisation and the autopoietic, biophysical and neurodynamical construction of individuality, or what Francisco Varela preferred to call "interbeing" (reported in Rudrauf et. al., 2003). In order to more fully grasp such recursive feedback loops for the emergence of life and the circular operations of internal self-production, it will be necessary to not only follow energy flows as theorised by vitalist thinkers, in biology, physics or philosophy, but also "information dynamics" in computation (Dodig-Crnkovic, 2011 and forthcoming) and, as always, in the arts and literature (Clarke & Henderson, 2001).

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. - Dorion Sagan, 2009 (blog post)

(On its way: purpose of life ... vitalism (Bergson, Colebrook 2010 - link) / vibrant materialism (Bennett 2010) ... flow of movement or ener-chi (L.E.P.) ... see also Astrobiology)

Energy Matters: Entangling Physis and Semiosis

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder ... most evidently perhaps ... when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. - Karen Barad, 2007

(On its way: 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.

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke 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.

Möllers, N. & K. Zachmann (ed.)(2012) Past and Present Energy Societies. How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

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.