Today, ‘energy’ is most often associated with the global North’s – and increasingly the global South’s – vital dependence on the combustion of fossil fuels needed for heating, transportation and food production. All are threatened – as we know all too well by now – by anthropogenic climate change. Although there is no shortage of ‘green’ energy innovations, many cause more problems than they solve, as the example of wind farms in Oaxaca, which caused aridification while reinstating colonial relationships, shows (Dunlap 2018). One reason for this is the sheer volume of energy extraction. The other is the conceptual framework that underpins this activity: this is a source-conversion-end-use concept of energy that is embedded in the Greco-monotheistic-scientific tradition. This conception views the world as composed of individual phenomena, separates animate from inanimate existents, privileges solids (substance) over liquids, and privileges teleological developmental trajectories over complexity (Irigaray 2010; Stengers 2018).
Despite the fact that an unbroken line of inquiry can be traced from Aristotle to Einstein, taking in, for instance, Aristotle’s notion energy as energeia (the ability to do work and set things in motion), entelecheia (the power of a completed action, or the state of ‘being-at-an-end’), and invariance amidst change, the passage from pondering the functioning of pulleys to the discovery of mass-energy equivalence in the 20th century wedded energy irrevocably to technology. Potentiality, which, alongside flux, is one of energy’s main ‘aggregate states’ so to speak, was here reduced to entelecheic end-use. This gave rise to a ‘standing-reserve’ view of energy where the actual is ‘enframed’ within the usable: a forest is a wood-producing resource; a beach an ‘object on call for inspection by a group of tourists ordered there by the vacation industry’ (Heidegger 1977).
If Heidegger’s notion of enframing seems dated, a quick glance at algorithmic platforms of companies such as Amazon shows gig labourers as a standing-reserve, on permanent call (Srnicek 2017). Likewise, synthetic biology, which designs biological entities, shows future entities to be a standing-reserve of function (Schyfter 2021). This ‘use orientation’ has been contested; however it has not been contested by many. Bataille, and to a lesser degree Libbrecht attempted a culturally informed theorisation of energy. Bataille’s argument that energy is not instrumental to satisfying society’s needs but that, on the contrary, the institution of society, with all its forms of production, is the expression of the excess of energy, was based on his study of pre-colonisation Mesoamerican cultures (Bataille 1949). Although Bataille’s theory cannot be applied to the current exhaustion of all energies – natural, cultural, and mental – it shows two things. First, that neither ruthless fossil fuel extraction nor a return to an imaginary pre-industrial frugality is possible; and second, that energy stewardship is inseparable from culture.
Libbrecht’s comparison of the Greek, Indian and Chinese concepts of energy, clarified the difference between the Greco-scientific cause-and-effect logic and culturally different views, such as the Chinese, where qì permeates everything (Libbrecht 2005). However, it didn’t do much more. The relation between zìrán or nature, understood as ‘thus-ness’ rather than greenery and qì has remained underexplored (Yao and Zhao 2010). Similarly, Native Science, where energy is a field-force (Little Bear 2012), has been underexplored. In the past two decades, Energy Humanities has produced new epistemologies by theorising ‘scapes’ that direct ‘ontologically flattened mobilities’ through shared flows of matter-energy (Urry 2010). Acknowledging that matter is not inert but vibrant (Bennett 2010), and that, as many quantum experiments have shown, individual things with their own set of determinate properties, do not exist (Barad 2013), EH has argued for the necessity of thinking in terms of intra-action to destabilise the inherited notion of causality (Barad 2010); understanding that environments as trans-corporeal (Alaimo 2017; (Braidotti 2019); and that social events are material-energetic (Latour 2018).
Building on this work, this transdisciplinary conference explores philosophical, scientific, historical, artistic and cultural accounts of contested, suppressed or erased energy knowledges: principles, practices and inventions.
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