The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work === > [!tldr] Tags > #notion #cat/énergie #discipline/philosophie #discipline/cosmologie #discipline/épistémologie #cat/féminisme #discipline/généalogie #discipline/sociologie #cat/travail #cat/litterature #type/book > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstAuthor**:: [[Daggett, Cara New]] ~ > **Title**:: The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work > **Year**:: 2019 > **Citekey**:: [[2019_daggett]] > **itemType**:: book > **Publisher**:: Duke University Press > **Location**:: Durham > **ISBN**:: 978-1-4780-0501-8 978-1-4780-0534-6 > **ISSN**:: > > [!Cite] > Daggett, C. N. (2019). _The birth of energy: Fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work_. Duke University Press. > > %%[@2019_daggett]%% > **URL**:: . > > **Related**:: %%[@2023_aberg.ekberg.ea]%% ([[2023_aberg.ekberg.ea_Pervasive petrocultures]]) , %%[@2015_hartog]%% ([[2015_hartog_Régimes d'historicité]]) , %%[@2023_grimaud.wacquez]%% ([[2023_grimaud.wacquez_Le vertige futurologique]]) , %%[@2023_furuseth]%% ([[2023_furuseth_Petrocultures in the making]]) , %%[@1943_white]%% ([[1943_white_Energy and the evolution of culture]]) , %%[@2022_daggett]%% ([[2022_daggett_Green-ing masculinity]]) , %%[@2022_daggett.labuski.ea]%% ([[2022_daggett.labuski.ea_Designing feminist energy systems]]) , %%[@2023_champion]%% ([[2023_champion_Pervasive extractivism]]) . > > **Attachment**::. --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] > > "In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work--most notably, the veneration of waged work--will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled"-- -- Provided by publisher >> --- # Note Sur la permanence de l’énergie et son immuabilité dans la marche du monde : «"everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy," including living organisms and human civilizations, anthropologist Leslie White proclaimed in 1943.' » (p. 1) Sur la construction d’une épistémologie thermodynamique (“cosmology of change” occidental) de l’énergie : - “All this is to show that energy, even before it became a scientific thing, was always about more than fuel or the material potential for action. Energy provided the grammar for a preference for the transformation of fuel, for putting it to use to do work and make change, and for stamping teleological activity as a virtuous achievement. Even after thermodynamics adopted the term energy as a concept for physics, these older meanings of energy continued to be used alongside, or interchanged with, energy as a scientific term, such that the metaphysical and scientific connotations inflected and supported each other. Indeed, Bruce Clarke points out that, following the advent of the science of energy, "its prior layers of meaning did not vanish. The already overdetermined term energy became even more charged with powerful semantic currents. Emotional and spiritual meanings were mingled with the letter and interpretation of physical concepts."' Energy continues to be a slippery word, traveling easily between vigor, virtue, and fossil fuels, and implicitly disparaging its oppo-sites: rest, stasis, stillness, lassitude.” - “As a Western concept, **energy combines a materialism, in the description of activity, with moralism, expressing a bias toward dynamism over stasis**. The bias toward dynamism accords with what Arjun Appadurai has described as "trajectorism," a "narrative trap" of the West that serves as the central faith of modernity. Trajectorism assumes "that there is a cumulative journey from here to there, or more exactly from now to then, in human affairs, as natural as a river and as all-encompassing as the sky." Importantly, for Appadurai, trajectorism is about more than temporality, more than an awareness of time's arrow and irreversibility. Trajectorism has political effects. As a Western imperial project and a "bad habit" of thought, trajectorism became an ideology of expansion in which time's arrow must lead to a single destination, "the world written in the image of Europe." The West, then, is unthinkable except as a trajectory, as an act of expansion from here a region, a piecemeal dominion) to there (world as Europe). Such an expansion could be synonymous with faith in pro-gress, but its possibilities are broader.” L’énergie est utilisé comme vecteur et comme cadre de penser du changement pour l’impérialisme occidental. - « While energy is not a transhistorical fact of nature, neither is energy purely a concept or metaphor, an invention of the human mind. Energy cannot be reduced to an artifact of Victorian culture, nor merely to a set of fuels. It is a hybrid assemblage where these things are entangled, what Donna Haraway (and others) has called a natureculture, a term that points to the inseparability of nature and culture. » p. 5 avec référence à Haraway qui est intéressante et pas à Déscola. - A propos de la notion Qi présenté dans la section Cosmology of change me fait penser aux écrits de Yuk Hui. Notamment : « The morality attached to these earlier presentiments of energy did not necessarily share the West's bias toward dynamism and trajectorism. For example, goodness might involve understanding and sometimes governing the flows of qi or prana, while evil involved their blockage or misapplication. Good governance of qi or prana might entail balance and harmony rather than constant change ». En effet, Yuk Hui milite pour le déploiement d’une cosmotechnique propre à la Chine par exemple, là ou celle plébiscité par l’occident est omniprésente et écrasante dans chacune des parties du monde. Le chantre de cette cosmotechnique prométhéenne reste la thermodynamique qui s’empare conditionne scientifiquement le mot _énergie_. A ce propos Daggett écrit : « It is through thermodynamics that energy became a newly soluble problem for the state, as a unit of work that was amenable to technical governance. It is also through thermodynamics that energy became a problem for the Earth, and a crisis-global warming-that also seems to demand new human governmentalities. What distinguishes thermodynamic energy from its other cultural dimensions is its emphasis on heat-work, on the transformations made possible by burning fuel. The thermodynamic rendering of energy —as the measurement of productive, valuable work—has arguably become so dominant in the modern West as to crowd out other possible ways of imagining » Sur la construction de l’intrication entre énergie et travail - « Energy is a thoroughly modern thing that became the linchpin of physics only after it was "discovered" in the 1840s, at the apex of the Industrial Revolution, and then proselytized by a group of mostly northern British engineers and scientists involved in the shipbuilding industry, undersea telegraph cable building, and other imperial projects. Prior to its emergence in thermodynamics, energy did not have a strong association with fuel, nor a scientific definition, especially since, as Barri Gold points out, energy had fallen out of usage as a result of Isaac Newton's "disdain" for the word. » p. 3 - « Since the nineteenth century, the human relationship to fuel has been governed by this singular ruling logic of energy, which justifies the indexing of human well-being according to the idealization of work and an unquestioned drive to put the Earth's materials to use for a profit. Just as energy became tightly bound by the governing logic of work, so too work increasingly came to be governed through the metaphors and physics of energy. » p. 4 - « The intertwining of energy and the Western ethos of dynamic, productive work was produced as cosmic truth. » p. 5 Sur le sujet des **représentations** : - « Figurations are neither true nor false; Cynthia Weber explains that figurations "do not (mis)represent the world, for to do so implies the world as a signified preexists them. Rather, figurations ... condense diffuse imaginaries about the world into specific form or images that bring specific worlds into being." » p. 6 a lié avec le concept marxiste de « ruling ideas » («Marx writes that ruling ideas "are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance."») - « A genealogical approach to energy means treating energy as a condensed map, a set of tropes and metaphors that help to describe a "historical kind of interaction," one that is continually generated at the intersection of bodies, machines, and fuels. » p. 6. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2024-02-07T22:36:02.566+01:00 %%