Energy Dreams

Of Actuality

Michael Marder

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542838
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of humanity and the flourishing of life on this planet. Yet, only very rarely (if at all) do we ask what energy is, what it means, what ends it serves, and how it is related to actuality, meaning-making, and instrumentality. Energy Dreams interrogates the ontology of energy from the first coinage of the word energeia by Aristotle to the current practice of fracking and the popularity of "energy drinks." Its sustained, multi-disciplinary investigation builds a theoretical infrastructure for an alternative energy paradigm.

This study unhinges stubbornly held assumptions about energy, conceived in terms of a resource to be violently extracted from the depths of the earth and from certain living beings (such as plants, converted into biofuels), a thing that, teetering on the verge of depletion, sparks off movement and is incompatible with the inertia of rest. Consulting the insights of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychoanalysts, economic and political theorists, and physicists, Michael Marder argues that energy is not only a coveted object of appropriation but also the subject who dreams of amassing it; that it not only resides in the dimension of depth but also circulates on the surface; that it activates rest as much as movement, potentiality as much as actuality; and that it is both the means and the end of our pursuits. Ultimately, Marder shows that, instead of being grounded in utopian naïveté, the dreams of another energy—to be procured without devastating everything in existence—derive from the suppressed concept of energy itself.

1

ENERGY DREAMS

Energy Dreams—the title came to me all of a sudden, as they say “out of the blue,” when I least expected it. It surprised me and, just as swiftly, energized my thought and swathed me in its opacities.

Who dreams, and about what, when energy dreams? Is energy the subject here? Or the desired object of a fantasy? Is dreams a noun in the plural? Or a verb in present tense, third-person singular? Or, perhaps, both at once? Does energy dream in us, as us, through us? Does it, by so sweeping us off our feet and into its vortex, promote its own increase, its insatiable growth? Is it horrified, if not paralyzed, by the sense of its dwindling? Is it forgetting that, regardless of its peregrinations, it will be conserved, in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics? Or is its reverie one of fullness, completion, and accomplishment outside the instrumental rationality of means-and-ends, which has mutated into the logic of means-as-ends?

These are not idle questions that personify a nonhuman concept, now replete with a strangely subjective figuration. Resonating in them is the crisis of energy (which is not the same thing as an energy crisis), more serious still than the energy worries that have been a part of our lexicon and daily life at least since the 1970s. A salient grammatical expression of the crisis is the equivocation between the verb and the noun we have witnessed in the title of this chapter and of the book as a whole. By force of habit, we think of energy as a resource—a thought not so outlandish considering that, as a word, it is a substantive. A noun, an object, a cause for wars and diplomatic alliances, something to divide, extract, lay claim to, possess. So irresistibly seductive is the grammatical and ontological substantivization of energy that it undercuts our appreciation of its meaning: we begin with different types of fuel or “power” (carbon and oil, solar and hydro) and generalize until we reach a poorly understood and reliably unquestioned umbrella term. The effects of energy, however, surpass a strife-ridden or consensual division of resources. Far from a mere object to be appropriated, it energizes us—our bodies, psyches, economies, technologies, political systems…Its sense, then, is evenly split between substantive and verbal significations. The will to energy is none other than the will to willing, where the object, the objective, is not some inert material but an active, activating event—that of the subject. The crisis of energy is that, though treated as a finite resource to be seized in a mad race with others who also desire it, it seizes both “us” and “them,” taking, first and foremost, our fantasies and our dreams hostage.

Let us isolate two precipitating factors behind this crisis: the relative and absolute ambiguities of energy. Relative ambiguity ensues when something is not only unthought but also obdurately resistant to the questioning drive. That is the historical predicament of energy today. Desired in a wholly unconscious manner, dreamed up, even if we keep discoursing and strategizing about it in waking life, it has become little more than a blank screen onto which to project our fantasies of planetary destruction or salvation, enrichment and security, shortages and excesses. Consequently, whatever we say about energy says more about us than about it. Absolute ambiguity, in turn, has to do with the meaning of the concept, incredibly resistant to a univocal determination, unclarified and—to a certain extent—unclarifiable.¹ Preceding the wedge modernity drives between activity and passivity, or subjects and objects, energy breaks out and through every frame we wish to impose upon it. So much so that it is, itself, a term in crisis, divided against itself between its current and ancient significations, its ontic clarity and ontological obscurity, its economic desirability and philosophical marginalization.

The absolute ambiguity of energy is an opportunity, rather than an obstacle, for thinking. The situation I have only started to outline reveals that before putting anything or anyone in motion, before releasing heat or the explosive potentialities of things, energy will effect a certain doubling. It will split the atom of meaning in a semantic sort of nuclear fission. This splitting is also happening at this very moment. As I am writing these lines, I am working “on” the thing itself and its concept, but I also cannot avoid paying attention, inadequate as it may be, to the work its chemical, kinetic, mental, and other types exert on me, activating me. After all, the human pleating of consciousness into consciousness and self-consciousness, our attention to ourselves-attending-to-the-world, the whole schizophrenia of humanization is but one of energy’s more sublime permutations. Such rifts in what is seemingly unitary (a hobbyhorse of deconstruction) are unavoidable. They fuel every energy dream, including the quenchless desire for its stringent definition and assured possession.

Of Greek provenance, the word energy is stamped by a double entendre. Composed of the prefix en- and the noun ergon, energeia can be literally translated as “enworkment,” putting-to-work, activation. Moreover, the work in its midst is nowhere near transparent; we have to work at it, at this work, if we are to appreciate its many nuances.

The range of what ergon signifies is quite broad: from task to function and from work to its product.² The word repels our ventures to hem it in within manageable confines. It does not keep the distance between the trajectory of a project (work as a process, a task to be fulfilled) and its destination (the function discharged, a product made). With regard to ergon, we are at a loss when it comes to deciding whether we are on our way or have already arrived. In English, we get a taste of this uncertainty when speaking of work: a work (say, of art) or to work, to produce, to bring to fulfillment. Our relation to energy is fraught and befuddled in part thanks to the plurivocity of ergon, which has in the meantime migrated to other languages, and as far as Japanese with its borrowing enerugi.³ How did what the Greeks launched or put to work in their idiom drift to other linguistic realities? In what shape has it been received? Has something launched from such a distant time and place really ever arrived? Has it reached us? Is work, still unqualified as to its status as a verb or a noun, a singular intimation of the Greek linguistic investment into “energy,” which everyone is eager to reap on a global scale?

Consider two alternatives. If the work of enworkment is a process, then energy refers to activation. It sets to work, presumably by interrupting a period of rest, and is itself at work. If it is an outcome, a product of work, then it evinces what happens in actuality, in existence. This second energy is synonymous with the state of affairs, with whatever is the case, the thing itself. We are conversant with the distinction when we classify energy as “stored” or “released.” A bomb contains its explosive potential while it is kept in a military warehouse or transported, and it releases its deadly force when detonated. An apple stores the solar energy it imbibed while ripening, but as you bite into it, energy is liberated from its molecules “at rest” (though they are never actually static), counting toward your caloric intake. To us, then, it appears that the divagation from one modality of energy to another is only a matter of time. That which is stored is not yet released, and that which is released is not stored but morphs into another state.

A strange conclusion ensues: energy absorbs time. It does not come about in time; rather, time is activated, or temporalized, in the transitions from one kind of energy into another. Physics corroborates our conclusion through the law of the conservation of energy, which, immune to destruction as much as to being-generated, is merely converted into other forms. Prior to time itself, energy thus veers toward a pantheon of classical metaphysical conceptions and partakes of the dream of indestructibility. In Martin Heidegger’s thought it finds its place in the illustrious line of misnomers for being, among the Platonic Ideas, “actus, perceptio, actuality, representation…gathered together in the will to willing.”⁴ Jacques Derrida, in his wake, tacks it onto the list of “names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center [that] have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.”⁵ Seeing that energy enwraps the subject and the object, the copula invariably articulates it with itself and paves the way for a tautology at the basis of ontology: energy is energy; the work is at work. (One of Aristotle’s minimal definitions we will review here strongly resembles this formulation.) In an abbreviated form, the fundamental assertion will profess: energy is! Which is to say that nothing is but energy and its enigmatic play, work, or dance around the copula distended into a totalizing movement.

After deconstruction, our theme—wherein we ourselves are ensnared—is understood as a tainted, culpable concept, a dirty word of philosophy, too scientific, too metaphysical, or too economist for our sensibilities. Such stigmatization is inexcusable. The desistance from energy at the theoretical level silently sanctions the most ecologically detrimental methods of procuring it. At any rate, we can proscribe it in thought only by way of its simplification, at the price of its undecidability, its crises and doublings. It is too soon to determine the fate of energy because it is still moving us, we are moved and seized by it, all the while doing our best to seize it under the umbrella of “resources.” And it is also too late to determine its fate because the objectified depositories of energy have long become unmanageable and are now threatening if not to annihilate, then to deactivate, to put out of work, out of actuality, the world as such.

Much speaks against a harsh and sweeping judgment that energy, even in the original Aristotelian elocution of energeia, is metaphysical, and so rotten to the core. That is one more energy dream, the chimera of putting it out of action, deactivating it with the help of a relatively straightforward association, by relegating it to the bygone history of metaphysics, the defunct realm of “essential” being. In the text that follows I advance the thesis that the notion, experience, and—if I may put it so—self-experience of energy is infinitely more variegated and conflicted than Heidegger and Derrida concede. Instead of soaking in the stagnant waters of the same, energy is a matter of difference, of transit, transition and alteration, of alterity in being and becoming. A thoroughly homogeneous field would be that of entropy, of energy’s divestment, or at least of equalization, where there are no differences between quanta of force, no tension, no life.

In our frenzied activities, we are fleeing from the encroaching shadow of entropic homogeneity, which is why we cling to energy resources so desperately in our personal, national, and globalized existences. The fear of entropy is so intense as to blind us to the kinds of energy we crave, the environmental harm caused by their extraction and burning, the adverse health effects of consuming beverages laced with excessive sugar and caffeine (the so-called energy drinks). The dread of energy starvation, of the looming entropy of reality, pushes us toward what we dread. In response to these fears, which suffuse thought and everyday action alike, one cannot simply denounce the prevailing energy dreams for being the toxic by-products of Western metaphysics, aspiring to an eternal activity, life everlasting, a never-ending erection. Myths do not magically melt away immediately after they are spotted and named as what they are. As far as energy is concerned, we cannot stop dreaming of it, and it cannot cease dreaming us. All we can do is learn how to dream it up otherwise, with our eyes open, knowing ourselves dreaming.

More than anyone else, Aristotle is careful to avoid determining energy, the word he invented or dreamed up, through the apparatus of philosophical definitions. Neither sloppy nor evasive, this theoretical decision gives the thing itself its due, respecting its indeterminacy and singularity. At most, Aristotle offers examples and delineates the term negatively, by contrast to what it is not. In book 9 of Metaphysics he breaks his earlier promise to define energeia and suddenly concedes that “we must not seek a definition for everything [οὐ δεῖ παντὸς ὅρον ζητεῖν], but rather comprehend the analogy” (1048a, 35–36). The examples of building and seeing follow (and we will track them shortly). For now, Aristotle defines energy by declining to define it; he substitutes sundry analogies for it in the manner his teacher, Plato, talked of the Idea of the Good by analogy with the supreme and egalitarian dispensation of solar energy. Insofar as Aristotle refrains from defining energeia, in which Heidegger and Derrida recognize his word for being, he resists the urge to behave toward it as if it were an object, a philosophical resource, boundlessly fertile and ready to be tapped into. Doing so, definitively and categorically determining it, would be interrupting its activation, stopping its proper movement in its tracks. But his reticence does not prevent him from saying something (indeed, a great deal) about energy.

Energeia, Aristotle states, “means the presence of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by ‘potentially’ [ἔστι δὴ ἐνέργεια τὸ ὑπάρχειν τὸ πρᾶγμα μὴ οὕτως ὥσπερ λέγομεν δυνάμει]” (Met. 1048a, 31–32). Plainly, he leans toward qualifying energeia and ergon in terms of actuality, rather than activation, a qualification that pins the work and the at-workness of presence on what is not a potentiality, not dunamis. Immediately we see that our conception of energy, qua a potentiality waiting to be unleashed into a wide spectrum of activities, is the inverse of Aristotle’s. For us, energy is, precisely, not actuality, unless we are sufficiently sophisticated to detect in what presently exists the storehouses of a yet unreleased force. Is this a mere “inversion” of the Greeks? Is our world the Greek universe upside-down? Or, more intriguingly, is there not only a logical-semantic but also a historical, epochal break in the meaning of energy? Didn’t the premodern ethos correlate it largely with the accomplished work (the actual, the actualized), even as the modern attitude privileged the moment of a work-in-progress (activation)? If so, then energy’s double entendre is not a simultaneous enunciation of more than one meaning but something that takes millennia to work itself out in historical “actuality.” Only now, when the livable world is on the brink of collapse, is the concept coming back into its own (albeit not knowing it), in that it connotes the always incomplete activation overwriting the earlier signification of assuagement in the actualized.

Appealing to the values of philosophical rigor and consistency, we might accuse Aristotle of narrowing down the scope of energy in flagrant disregard of his own pledge not to define it (which, in turn, breaks the previous promise to provide a definition). If so, then his energeia is disappointingly one-sided, almost static, boringly present. But this assessment is hardly fair. Being is ceaselessly guided from potentialities to actualities, as “everything changes from what it is potentially to what it is actually [μεταβάλλει πᾶν ἐκ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος εἰς τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν]” (1069b, 15). What is the energy of this change from what is not to what is energeia (being)? How can something issue from nothing, specifically in ancient Greek thought? Taking care not to dispense prematurely with the disquietude of these queries, note that the other pole, against which Aristotle first negatively defined energy, is not nothing but another ontological condition—dunamis or “what is potentially.” (Is the state of this is itself potential or actual? That will be the gist of Plotinus’s inquiry in Ennead II.5.) Needless to say, when we mouth the words actuality and potentiality, we do so in Latin, not in Greek, though, in Latin they also say more than what we habitually glean from them. Potentiality derives from potestas, which, as one possibility for translating dunamis, signifies power and capacity. Strangely, then, the global movement from potentiality to actuality implies a diminution of the ontological power-capacity, its desaturation. Insofar as a being is actualized, or energized, it fulfills itself. Less and less does it require the enabling power of dunamis to attain the condition that corresponds to it according to what it is. τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν, what it is actually (say, a fully grown oak tree, rather than an acorn), is the outcome of the work performed by the essence of the being it is (here: oakness) in the world. It is and therefore it has no need of the power-capacity to become. Its past workings rejoin the ensuing work in energetic plenitude. Aristotle’s energy is thus markedly powerless and incapable, not in the sense of lacking these qualities, not by way of deprivation, but because it is beyond the vicissitudes of dunamis, which names an incompletion to be overcome. In its powerlessness it is possible to detect a nonmetaphysical trail through the proverbial thickets of metaphysics.⁶

We are still circling around the vagueness of energeia in Aristotle, who qualifies the makeshift contrast he has established by allowing for degrees of actuality and hence of being. If a fully grown oak tree still keeps on growing, that is due to the necessary incompleteness of its accomplishment, imperfect (atelos) in its very idea, a haunting absence persisting in its presence, calling for more power-capacity to be discharged. Alth...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Opening Words
• 1. Energy Dreams
• 2. Theological Musings
• 3. Economic Chimeras
• 4. Psychological Reveries
• 5. Political Fantasies
• 6. Physical Fancies
• The Last Word: Energy or Energies?
• P.S.—The Very Last Word
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index