I make this point in Onto-Cartography, have made it elsewhere in talks and articles as well as on this blog, but it’s worth making it again and again: it’s remarkable that there is next to no discourse on energy and work in philosophy and the world of theory. Let me be clear, when I make this claim I’m well aware that there are piles of things written on things like petropolitics and labor. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about energy and work as fundamental ontological concepts, as central dimensions of being; and above all I’m talking about energy in quite literal terms. When I refer to energy I’m quite literally referring sunlight, heat, gravitational energy, chemical energy, calories, etc. When I talk about work I’m talking about the performance of an operation or a transformation in state or movement through the application of force and the flow of energy. For example, I’m referring to the way in which is piston is made to move in a car engine. In this regard, labor is a form of work because it produces a transformation in state or movement, but it is only a small subset of what constitutes work. Work is at work everywhere in the universe or in being.
I’m thus working on the premise that for everything that happens, for everything that exists– up to and including thought itself (thought– this thing we mistakenly refer to as “ideal” –burns about 1/5 of the calories we consume) –both energy and work are required. Whether we’re speaking of our own bodies, cities, ecosystems, social assemblages, scholarly debates, etc., there’s no instance of process in the world– “process” being another name for “object” in the ontology I propose –that doesn’t involve energy and work. Work– another name for “operation” in my machinic ontology –and energy are irreducible dimensions of everything about us whether we’re talking about the natural world or the world of culture. Initially it might be difficult to see the relevance of work and energy as relevant to discussions of literature, but even a novel requires work and energy to be produced, transmitted and received. Even literary artifacts have a thermodynamic dimension.
read on!
This is not a metaphor. At this very moment as I write this post I am both burning calories and fossil fuels. This blog post is– as Negerastani might put it –ultimately “solar”, in that all of that energy is ultimately captured from sunlight, is ultimately transformed sunlight, concentrated sunlight, like the orange concentrate you buy at the supermarket, that was first transformed into a solid by plants, and then other solids whether in the form of fossil fuels or in the form of animal bodies that ate these plants. All living and social being is solar in its origin. We can see why the Greeks were disturbed when Anaxagoras suggested that the sun is not a god but rather a warm stone, for the ground of all our being is, in a sense, the sun. Alternatively, even a superheated stone in this context might as well be a god. Everything is condensed sunlight… A terrifying thought given that even gods or suns die and that interstellar travel is likely unfeasible in any meaningful way.
How is it that philosophy and theory seem to so persistently forget work and energy as fundamental dimension of being? How is it that these two dimensions of being aren’t basic concepts involved in every discussion of every issue? It’s as if for us philosophers there are only two domains: the domain of thought or mind and the domain of objects or material things. Thought or thing. Thought and thing. Even in the beautiful discussions of the body– which isn’t really the body but a description of our [unreliable] conscious experience of the body –in thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, talk of energy seems absent. I mean, eating isn’t a minor thing in life. Neither is fatigue. Maybe I’m just acutely sensitive to such things as I so often suffer from fatigue. At any rate, thought and thing seem to exhaust our categories and that’s that.
All of this is, I suppose, a rather trite observation. “Yes, yes, Levi, everything requires work and energy.” The thing is that I wonder if the absence of a well developed discourse about energy and work doesn’t blind us to certain functions of power structuring human life and collectives that might lie at the heart of our emancipatory struggles. I’m haunted by a passage in Zizek where he discusses Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. There he writes that,
…Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology’s dominant mode of functioning is cynical, which renders impossible– or, more precisely, vain –the classical critical ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still does not renounce it. (25 – 26)
They know it’s bull but they’re still doing it. How to explain this? Zizek goes on to suggest that ideology is not at the level of knowledge and belief, but rather of doing and what he calls “ideological fantasy”. “Consciously I know that money is nothing but paper, but I still behave towards it as if it had some sort of mystical value. Consciously I think religion is bull, yet when in church I still speak in hushed voices, avoid certain words, kneel during certain parts of the service, etc. I believe that my belief resides in my head; yet the truth of my belief– Zizek argues –lies in my actions, in what I do. If I am to overcome ideology, then, it is not simply a matter of changing my internal beliefs and convictions, but of overcoming this doing which is reflective of my ideological fantasy. I must traverse my fantasy.
I have no doubt that there is truth to Zizek’s thesis, but it will be noted that it nonetheless remains at the level of the discursive, thought, the signifier. It is still the discursive that’s the problem– and clearly the discursive is a part of the problem –even if that discursivity is unconscious. As a consequence, a change in this discursivity or fantasy structure will, the hypothesis runs, produce a change in these social assemblages.
Well, this can’t hurt. However, if it is true that all operations require energy for work to be performed, what if the answer to why people persist in oppressive conditions is far simpler? What if people are trapped in “energy sinks”, or basins of energy flow that allow for very little in the way of alternative forms of life? Here a person could debunk and ideology at the level of knowledge, traverse the fantasy at the level of fantasy, and still continue a form of life because they are dependent on a particular energy sink, a geography of energy, because this is required for them to operate at all. If this is true, we would be before a different site of the political besides that of semiopolitics (the deconstruction of discursive formation that bind people to ways of life) which might be called “thermopolitics”. Thermopolitics– and it’s much broader than I’m suggesting in this vignette –is not of the discursive order because the energetic and work is not the order of beliefs and ideologies. It pertains to real requirements for life and intervention in the thermopolitical dimension would require the formation of energy sinks Energy sinks can be thought as akin to spider webs that trap flies… Sometimes I think the sole theme of my thought, if I manage to think at all, is spider webs. I want to know a bit about the webs that capture us in forms of life, how they’re put together and how they function; and I want to know about these webs not to say that we’re irrevocably trapped in a regime of attraction, but so that they can be dismantled and so that we don’t engage in forms of intervention that entangle us more deeply in these webs like struggling flies. The way in which energy is configured in a particular social assemblage– the fuels we use to drive our technology, the availability and source of our calories, the fuels we use to heat our homes, travel and think, the way our agriculture is organized, the ways in which it is transported and distributed, etc. –are such a web. Indeed, money itself is, in part, a set of symbolic units representing energy flows (the food and fuel it can purchase) and capital is a dynamics of energy flows on place removed.
In saying all of this, however, I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that thermopolitics ought to replace semiopolitics. It’s merely a different site of political struggle, a different site of political subjugation, requiring a different set of political interventions. Thermopolitics is, of course, politically relevant today because not only is it a site of subjugation in and through our dependence on a particular energy sink, but also because work of all kinds irrevocably produces waste (the second law of thermodynamics) and we today globally suffer from waste which is driving global warming. In addition to this, energy politics also is one of the driving forces behind global conflicts as can be seen in the constant wars waged over geographies rich in fossil fuels. In addition to thermopolitics there would also be geopolitics. By geopolitics I don’t not mean global politics between different nation-states, but am referring quite literally to the politics of the earth, or how technologies, infrastructures, and features of physical geography such as rivers, climate, microbes, etc., contribute to the form social relations take. Finally there would be chronopolitics or the way in which time is structured– by, for example, the working day –making different forms of activity difficult for people precisely because they are without time. Each of these sites of the political, and I’m sure there are many others, would require their own styles of activism. But enough for now.
Larval Subjects . 
January 17, 2014 at 9:01 am
I’m not sure if it is relevant, but you might be interested in the work of the frenche philosopher Simondon.
January 17, 2014 at 11:02 am
“By geopolitics I don’t not mean global politics between different nation-states, but am referring quite literally to the politics of the earth, or how technologies, infrastructures, and features of physical geography such as rivers, climate, microbes, etc., contribute to the form social relations take.”
That is more or less what geopolitics has historically meant for some academic schools of thought, particularly in France. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Élisée Reclus, Yves Lacoste – that lineage. The latter’s Herodote journal (http://www.herodote.org) is a goldmine. Although Lacoste’s usage bleeds into the ‘geopolitics as international relations’ thing all three of the above rejected state-centrism in their analyses in some way. Vidal’s concept of the ‘genre de vie’ held that the lifestyles of peoples depended upon the geographies of the landscapes they inhabited. He was of a rather conservative disposition; Reclus is more interesting politically because he was an anarchist who attempted to produce a universal geography. There are some interesting debates going on along these lines in contemporary political geography too, e.g.: http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d3006pan
I know that you’ve written on Braudel and Diamond in the past. Not sure if you’ve dealt with any of the above.
January 17, 2014 at 3:49 pm
hi levi – great post! it’s often difficult to understand why matter has been so central, but energy so neglected (given that now we can basically hyphenate them as matter-energy)
from geography, you might be interested in matt huber’s paper “energizing historical materialism.” a nice summary of recent debates about the energetic foundations of capitalism (necessary for any kind of radical thermopolitics, i imagine!). Working through bataille on energy has been helpful for me as well, however imprecise he seems from our vantage point.
January 17, 2014 at 4:09 pm
I was just reading Ivan Illich’s text, “The Social Construction of Energy”, which is a completely different tack on precisely the same subject: he takes on a (discursive) history of “energy” and “e”, the mathematical variable, which treks him through an analysis of “work” and “energy”. I’m just preparing my notes now, so I’ll try to report back when I’ve had time to digest. I think it’s a great topic, I look forward to reading about it in Onto-Cartography. Have you written about energy elsewhere?
January 17, 2014 at 8:25 pm
Yes, this is definitely a promising way forward. I sketched a model of institutions (and political resistance to them) using the concepts of energy, sinks and sources. Here, for example: http://jmrphy.net/blog/2012/06/09/24772831771/
January 17, 2014 at 10:20 pm
Reading this reminder of the material basis of what is supposedly merely fictive, symbolic or ethereal (money, internet discussion…) made me think of Alf Hornborg’s essay “The Fossil Interlude: Euro-American Power and The Return of the Physiocrats” in “Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies” (2013). A great essay, worth checking out.
January 18, 2014 at 7:46 pm
Sounds good to me, Levi. We are all children of the Sun, indebted to its self-immolating generosity. But then what is energy, anyway? After several hundred years, techno-science has achieved wonders through the instrumental mastery of energy. But what is it? How is it that the energy studied by physics becomes the libido studied by psychologists? If we are to take thermopolitics seriously, don’t we (we political theorists) also need an account for how free action is possible in a world described by physics as (at least statistically) deterministic? If it is all just the playing out of the laws of thermodynamics, where is there any room left over for politics? It seems to me you want to marshall a discourse surrounding energy on behalf of a movement for political liberation. But for this to make any sense, aren’t we going to need to define energy in a more general, perhaps more speculative way than the instrumental definitions of physicists?
Even the Christian mystic Teilhard de Chardin granted that “To think we must eat.” “The highest speculation and the most burning love,” he continues, “must be coupled with, and must be paid for by, an expenditure of physical energy, as we know too well. Sometimes we need bread; sometimes wine, sometimes the infusion of a chemical element or hormone; sometimes the stimulus of color; sometimes the magic of sound passing through our ears as a vibration and emerging in our brain in the form of an inspiration…But on the other hand, so many different thoughts come out of the same piece of bread! Just like the letters of an alphabet, which can produce incoherence as well as the most beautiful poem ever heard, the same calories seem to be as indifferent as they are necessary to the spiritual values they nourish.” (‘The Human Phenomenon,’ p. 29-30). Teilhard is committed to the rejection of any dualism between physical and spiritual energies, and he dismisses the idea that these two might somehow transform one into the other. He ends up articulating a form of evolutionary panexperientialism, which rests on the same family of process ontologies articulated in detail by Bergson and Whitehead. There is plenty to be suspicious of in Teilhard’s thermopolitical framework, but nonetheless, he recognizes the profundity of the problem.
January 18, 2014 at 8:00 pm
[…] Levi Bryant just posted on what he is calling “thermopolitics.” He wants to shift the discourse in philosophy away from its exclusive focus on linguistic analysis and the critique of ideological superstructures toward the energetics of the universe that provide the condition for their possibility. […]
January 18, 2014 at 11:05 pm
I second Locke’s endorsement of Hornborg’s work. I think I’ve recommended it to you before, Levi. I would be interested to hear what you think of his research as it theorizes energy in the ways you describe above.
January 20, 2014 at 4:16 am
Dr Sinthome,
In Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, which could be seen as a sequel to Melancholia, there is a chapter about the conflict between the Eastern and the Western church. In the chapter, the titular nymphomaniac visits a S&M master, searching for ever-extremer ways to regain her orgasm. Right before he is to whip her ass, she creams her jeans. An interlocutor remarks that it’s odd she wet her panties anticipating the pain she could not even have imagined, because she had not been whipped previously.
The implication being that her ass, her body, has an intelligence and a consciousness.
Here you can see rather clearly how your OO pathology is linked to the ancient Eastern Orthodox religion.
It gets even more interesting as we realize that the nymphomaniac shan’t find happiness in the orgasm she so desperately craves, but in the embrace of the emptiness that is female jouissance.
January 20, 2014 at 5:24 am
[…] forms of power. What I’ve wanted to say is that not all power functions discursively. In my last post and elsewhere I spoke of some other forms of […]
January 23, 2014 at 5:24 am
Hey, Levi, something might be of use and aligned with aspects of what your doing with the second law of thermodynamics etc.
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
What was interesting is the connection in one of your other articles about tornadoes, wind vortices etc…
Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.
This new theory of life does not do away with Darwinian theory as much as underpin it and show the actual working physics that supports it in earlier stages, etc. Interesting stuff….
January 23, 2014 at 5:26 am
Addendum to the above:
Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.
If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.
January 29, 2014 at 7:25 pm
You really need to read Jeremy Rifkin, particularly his book The Third Industrial Revolution. He addresses exacly what you’re talking about. For example, he discusses the worldview matrix that was enacted through the energy regimes of particular eras. Fossil fuels are found is select areas and require large financial and military investments to secure them. Along with this comes a way or organizing business top-down with centralized command and control. For example, the railroad required large financial investments that included foreign investors, and such immense capital required a stock market to track it. Ownership became separated from management, and workers from management. All of which was a drastic change from the more agrarian economy envisioned by Adam Smith. Max Weber studied this shift and noted that the new business model emphasized pyramidal organization structure (top-down), pre-established rules for all operations and jobs, a strict division of labor and wages. This railroad model transformed all businesses (107-09).
He also explored the context in which Adam Smith proposed an economy. Smith looked to Newton for guiding principles and the latter’s three laws became the template. The market, once set in motion, operated on the same principles of motion. Though instead of God being Newton’s prime mover it was for Smith enlightened self-interest , with supply and demand making the necessary adjustments. However the laws of economic motion gives us limited data and doesn’t take into account time and irreversibility. Both Newtonian math and Smith’s economics are completely reversible and both lack the insights of thermodynamic laws. We’ve seen this same scenario play out with quantum mechanics itself, with the earlier versions also not taking into account thermodynamics and irreversibility (193-95).
All of which is due to the modernist paradigm and the assumptions inherent to it. Whereas the emerging P2P and postmodern paradigm surpasses all of the above by using alternative energy sources and the networked modeling of the internet. It’s an entirely different way of doing business that distributes energy, knowledge, power, everything in a truly democratic model.
January 29, 2014 at 7:51 pm
Also see this interview* with Rifkin, wherein he said:
“”The problem is Newton’s physics don’t tell you a damn thing about economic activity…. The problem is economics is all about how energy flows, and it’s governed by the laws of thermodynamics, which weren’t discovered until the latter part of the nineteenth century by engineers and chemists studying energy flows.
“By that time, economics was already ossified – didn’t want to hear about it. But economic activity is all about the irreversible passage of low entropy energy inputs whether it’s embedded in the material form in the earth – like fossil fuels, or rare Earths, or in energy by itself. And it’s how that energy in both material and energy form is converted to utilities for society and then they end up back in nature in a degraded state to be recycled or replenished.
“So, the laws of thermodynamics really govern economic activity, but almost no economist ever studies the law of thermodynamics. They don’t have a clue. The engineers, the chemists, the biologists, the architects, the urban planners, the physicists – all of those professions, which actually create economic activity, they do so from a thermodynamic lens. So there’s a complete disconnect between them and the economists.”
* http://blog.sfgate.com/tmiller/2011/10/24/the-third-industrial-revolution-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-jeremy-rifkin/