Energopower - An Introduction
Energopower - An Introduction
Energopower - An Introduction
Dominic Boyer
SPECIAL COLLECTION:
Energopower:
An Introduction
Dominic Boyer, Rice University
ABSTRACT
This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways
of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically,
the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with
institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks
into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential
paradigm of biopower developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays
explore how modalities of biopower (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower
(the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice-versa. We emphasize especially the critical importance of exploring the juncture of biopower and
energopower in the context of the rising importance of scientific and political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. As human use of energy
is increasingly linked to the disruption and destruction of conditions of life
(human and otherwise), the tensions between dominant energopolitical
systems (like carbon fuel) and biopolitical projects (like sustainability) are
increasingly evident, opening new possibilities of anthropological analysis.
Both energopower and biopower, we conclude, are entering into a pivotal
transitional phase.
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2, p. 309-334, ISSN 0003-5491. 2014 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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Dominic Boyer
Energopower: An Introduction
fission set off a great deal of scientific and popular speculation about what
a possible several million-fold increase in the energy at humanitys disposal would mean for all aspects of social life (see, e.g., ONeill 1940, Potter
1940). Then, just months before the publication of Whites landmark article, Enrico Fermi and his Manhattan Project team accomplished, although
in secret, the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reactionthe pioneering
controlled operationalization of nuclear energy that would pave the way
towards the atomic age. White noted the terrific potentiality of nuclear
energy in his famous article: To be able to harness sub-atomic energy
would, without a doubt, create a civilization surpassing sober imagination
of today (1943:351), although he ultimately seemed more attracted to the
possibility that the sun would become directly our chief source of power
in the future (1943:351).
Although prescient in these and other ways, White probably was as
much an obstacle to future anthropological research on energy as an inspiration. His politics and personality won him a few friends but many
more enemies, enemies who succeeded in isolating him and minimizing
his work for many productive years (see Peace 2004). Not only did his
universalist model stand in sharp contract to the Boasian historicism and
individualism that dominated American anthropology of the 1940s and
1950s, but White also compounded this contrast with a strident insistence that the evolutionist thinking of figures like Lewis Henry Morgan and
Edward B. Tylor was more coherent than and theoretically superior to the
work of Boas. It was many years before some rapprochement could be
found between White and the Boasians, by which time other less controversial figures like Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service
had become more central to the movement that had come to be known
as cultural materialism, pushing Whites thermodynamic and energetic
focus deep into the shadows of mainstream social-cultural anthropology.
There is thus less of a lineage than one might expect between the first
generation of anthropological interest in energy and the second generation, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Some Whitean influence remained, particularly through the networks of Michigan anthropology (see,
e.g., Adams 1975, Rappaport 1975), but there were concerns as to how
to develop Whites energy theory further. In his 1977 Presidential Address
to the American Anthropological Association, Richard Adams recalled his
tutelage under White and the problems that arose from importing physical
and chemical conceptualizations of energy into social analysis:
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Energopower: An Introduction
that were designed foremost to help improve relationships among indigenous groups, corporations, and governments as regarded energy development (see, e.g., Jorgensen et al. 1978, Jorgensen 1984). But it also
expressed the sense of theoretical impasse to which Adams had alluded
as well as the progressive retreat from anthropological holism that was
occasioned by the growing subspecialization of anthropological research
and the waning capacity of the subfields to communicate and collaborate
effectively with each other.
An important exception to this trend was the work of Laura Nader (1980,
1981), whose participation in the late 1970s in the US National Academy
of Sciences Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems
(CONAES) served as an inspiration to Adams as to what anthropologists
might be capable of accomplishing (Adams 1978:307). Through her research on behalf of CONAES, Nader became interested in the contribution of worldviews, both popular and scientific, to the rejection of ideas of
energy conservation and energy transition (Nader and Beckerman 1978).
As the first anthropologist to research the energy policy community and
energy scientists, Nader became both fascinated and deeply disturbed
by the culture of energy experts (2004:775). She saw energy policy as
grounded in fear of deleterious change in life-styles and options despite
considerable evidence of the very wide range of choices of life-styles
that is available in any plausible energy future (2010:241). Energy science meanwhile was plagued by an inevitability syndrome (2004:775)
that resisted models not predicated upon ever-increasing resource use
and energy expenditure:
Also striking was the omnipresent model of unilinear development
(a concept that anthropologists had left in the dust decades earlier),
with little general understanding of macro-processes. For example,
the recognition that civilizations arise but that they also collapse was
missing from the thinking about the present. Prevalent was the nineteenth century belief that technological progress was equivalent to
social progress. In such a progressivist frame science too could only
rise and not fall or wane. Furthermore, the possibility that experts
might be part of the problem was novel to the expert who thought
that he stood outside of the problem. (2004:776)
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Nader ended up laying much blame at the foot of the specialization and
hierarchization of scientific communities in which standardization and
conformity ruled the roost and prevented much needed creative thinking
about energy futures (2004:776). Among anthropologists, Nader remains
the only scholar to have researched the expert imagination of energy futures in such depth. Her work also paved the way for more recent ethnographies of energy experts (Mason and Stoilkova 2012) and for political anthropologies of carbon (Coronil 1997) and nuclear (Gusterson 1998,
Masco 2006) statecraft.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the timing of the first two generations
of anthropological attention to energy, it is that they have accompanied
vulnerable or transitional moments in dominant regimes of energopower.
In Whites case, his positioning of energy as the key to understanding all
human culture (and indeed all existence) accompanied the nuclear energy
revolution and its new magnitudes of creative and destructive power. In
the case of the second generation, the context was what Nader termed
the energy decade of the 1970s. The oil shocks of 1973 signaled the end
of a certain phase of northern imperial control over carbon fuel (discussed
below in more detail). A short-lived political willingness to explore alternative energy sources followed, helping to generate energopolitical fissures
and tremors that attracted anthropological attention. The political recommitment to carbon and nuclear energy across the industrialized world in
the 1980s blunted the aspirations and urgency of energy research in anthropology as elsewhere in the human sciences. Indeed, between the mid1980s and the mid-2000s, anthropological research on energy seemed
to go into a kind of hiatus (see, however, Traweek 1988, Dawson 1992,
Coronil 1997), before displaying signs of renaissance (Henning 2005, Love
2008, Mason 2007, Sawyer 2004, Strauss and Orlove 2003, Wilhite 2005).
Over the past several years, a mounting body of intriguing case studies
has begun to generate more profound theoretical challenges (e.g., Reyna
and Behrends 2008, Sawyer 2007, Winther 2008) including, we modestly
hope, the rethinking of political power through energic power that is the
subject of this special collection.
But if earlier iterations of the anthropology of energy clustered around
moments of energopolitical change, then it is worth reflecting further on
what is occurring now that helps to explain the recent and quite rapid accumulation of disciplinary interest in energy. Some 70 years after Whites
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industry of climate change skeptics (Boykoff 2011), the mediation of extreme weather and pollution events has become so commonplace that
facticity of the Anthropocene is becoming an increasingly secure feature
of everyday knowledge.
At the same time, one hopes it is obvious that the Anthropocene is
more than a discursive phenomenon. However one stands on the truth
and accuracy of news representations, evidence of the ecological effects
of human use of energy is mounting from new patterns and intensities of
temperature, drought, and rainfall across the world to the poison skies
of Beijing and the toxic soils of Fukushima. It has been an eye-opening
experience to hear rural farmers and ranchers in remote parts of southern
Mexico speak of cambio climatico as though it were an obvious environmental condition. But, as we have seen in the excruciating serial failures
of the UNCCC (United Nations Convention on Climate Change) to limit
carbon emissions on a planetary scale, empirical obviousness is no guarantee of serious political attention, let alone action. A panel set up by the
UN in 2012 to evaluate its Clean Development Mechanism and the carbon market meant to rein in global emissions concluded that the system
had essentially collapsed (Clark 2013) with the right to pollute now being so cheap as to offer no disincentive whatsoever. To return to Whites
glimpse of modernitys carbon core, it may well be the case that trying
to fight overheated consumption with consumption-oriented remedies
like carbon markets risks reinforcing rather than rupturing problematic
modes of thought and action.
The sense of urgency intensifies with each super storm, record-setting heat wave, and endless drought. Apocalyptic imaginaries swirl in the
wake of political impasse; the well-founded fear of nuclear winter that I
grew up with in late Cold War America has now mutated into nightmares
of flooding, burning anthropogenic summer, threatening equivalently to be
humanitys last season. These visions are symptomatic of the third generations energopolitical rupture, parallel to the birth of nuclear energy in the
1940s and to the carbon imperial crisis of the 1970s. Today, we try to navigate the rising waters of certainty that our current course of intensive carbon and nuclear energy use combined with exponential human population
growth will lead to unprecedented miseries for human and nonhuman life
and probable civilizational collapse. All the modern promises of endless
growth, wealth, health, and productive control over nature now appear
increasingly deluded and bankrupt, designs for Malthusian tragedy.
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The crisis may be showing up on the public radar only now, but we
have been feeling the ache for decades. Before energy burst onto the
scene again, we were already sensing a powerful dis-ease within modernity. In academic life, that sensibility manifested, for example, in a
series of conceptual turns in the human sciences that for lack of a less
ugly term, I will call anti-anthropocentric.1 First, just at the moment that
the dominant energopolitics was recalibrating itself to the rise of OPEC,
science and technology studies began to come of age, exploring the
contingencies of the production of expert knowledge across space, society, and time. Figures such as Michel Callon (1986) and Bruno Latour
emerged as early prophets of the bankruptcy of modern nature/culture
oppositions (1993) and of the actancy of objects and materials (1988).
The parallel rise of Foucauldian analysis of power/knowledge (e.g., 1979)
further underscored a lost faith in modern expertise and the rejection
of the technocratic imaginaries that had seemed so robust until the oil
shocks changed everything.
Subsequently, posthumanism (e.g., Haraway 1991) challenged the human empire over other forms of life, especially human species-ism and the
careless manipulation of companion species and companion materials.
In the past decade, we have seen a marvelous array of new conceptual
movements working through the implications of banners such as new
materialism, objected oriented ontology, new realism, speculative
realism, and so on (see, e.g., Bennett 2010, de Landa 2002, Harman
2002, Meillasoux 2008). Such thinking is far from homogeneous. But they
have a family resemblance to one another as collaborators in extending
non-anthropocentric reasoning in the human sciences. Although concept
work typically believes itself undetermined by its socio-environmental circumstances of origin, one cannot help but find the timing of these movements uncanny. They are all taking shape in the deepening shadow of the
Anthropocene and intensifying public discourse on environmental degradation and disaster. Whatever more specific intellectual agendas they are
pursuing, all of them index the problematic legacies of human-centered
thinking and action. And thus, in more or less remote fashion, I believe
they offer commentaries on carbon modernitys accelerating death-bringing in the name of enfueling human life.
The anti-anthropocentric turn in the human sciences should not be
underestimated in its inspiration and reinforcement of third generation
energy research in anthropology. But it has more and less constructive
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Energopower: An Introduction
the Mexican federal government in recent years, meaning that every aspect of Mexican biopower also depends critically on the now fading light
of the black sun. In the state of Oaxaca, Cymene Howe and I have been
studying the attempt to capture a powerful but elusive new energy form,
the winds of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Those winds are literally a force to be reckoned with. When El Norte
blows strongest in the winter months, with routinely tropical storm-like intensity, its 110-120 km/h winds can easily blow over tractor trailers and
mangle turbines designed for less fierce and turbulent air. Transnational
energy companies are enchanted by the vision of harnessing this perfect
storm of energy and by Mexicos high electricity tariffs, which guarantee
profits as strong and steady as the wind itself. But, alas, these winds blow
across land, much of it organized under the collective stewardship of indigenous binniz (Zapotec) and ikojts (Huave) communities, where the political climate is no less fierce. For centuries, the Isthmus has prided itself
on negating international, national, and regional projects of control over its
people and resources. In response, the area has come to be regarded as a
dangerous and murky margin to the exercise of legitimate political authority. The Istmeos are known in Oaxaca City and Mexico City for their ignorance and poverty, for their inclination toward violence, for their manipulation by corrupt political bosses who ritually practice a liderazgo (leadership)
of impeding state development projects until blackmail demands are satisfied. The managing editor of one of Oaxacas largest newspapers lamented
to us, we have the most blockades and occupations of any Mexican state
but also the fewest schools and the most poverty.
Still, the lure of the wind, the most perfect jewel as one government
official described it, is too great to give up. Numerous representatives of
the federal and regional levels of the state have assured us that wind development is biopolitical, a project to jolt this poor and highly indigenous
region into a state of modernizing progress. And, yet in the first several
years of serious wind development, we have found that the installation
and exercise of institutional biopower (schools, medicine, even factories
and prisons) has been little more than an afterthought. Instead, the dominant politics are the politics of transnational investment, grid extension,
and electricity provision, a politics that is being orchestrated by another
parastatal CFE, the electricity utility, whose biopolitical imagination is rudimentary to say the least. In Ixtepecknown locally as Tristetepec for
its lack of employment opportunitiesthere is a plan now to build the
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first community-owned wind park in Latin America. The Ixtepecan comuneros want, above all, funds for social development and sustainable
progress, and to become a beacon for community-owned energy in the
Western Hemisphere. But neither the government nor the utility supports
themrenewable energy is costly and complicated in terms of current
grid technology and communities cannot be forced to pay for infrastructural improvements like new substations and grid extensions in the way
that transnational corporations can. CFE, as a para-state, has thus literally taken it upon itself to overwrite sections of the Mexican constitution
and tender law to prevent the community park from happening. As one
of the leaders of the community park project growled, CFE is strong but
they are also working against the interests of the Mexican people. In the
overlapping of neoliberal and neocolonial modes of abandonment that
Mexico knows all too well, biopower in southern Mexico is, for good or
for ill, an often forgotten partner in the transactions between old and new
regimes of energopower.
Defining Energopower
Another lesson learned from Foucault is that it is sometimes better to offer
a provocative placeholder than a definite statement, some rolls of intriguing fabric rather than a dazzling corset. We wish to lure imaginative designers to our workbench. In this spirit, I would describe energopower as an
alternative genealogy of modern power, as an analytic method that looks
in the walls to find the wiring and ducts and insulation, that listens to the
streets to hear the murmur of pipes and sewage, that regards discourse
on energy security today as not simply about the management of population (e.g., biosecurity) but also about the concern that our precious and
invisible conduits of fuel and force stay brimming and humming. Above all,
energopower is a genealogy of modern power that rethinks political power
through the twin analytics of electricity and fuel. Energeia, for Aristotle,
was being-at-work. In modern physics, power is the rate at which energy
is transferred, used, or transformed. We thus regard energopower as a
discourse and truth phenomenon to be sure, but as one that searches out
signals of the energo-material transferences and transformations incorporated in all other sociopolitical phenomena.
I would reiterate that our intention is not, in the tradition of Leslie
White, simply to import the truth propositions of physical science into
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has long excelled in gathering and analyzing epistemic signals from elsewhere. What we advocate here is that that elsewhere be reconsidered
not only as encompassing other places, cultures, and times but also the
signals of force and fuel surrounding us in the here and now, the humming
of enablement. And for those of us who wish not only to analyze the world
but also to change it, we can take heart in one thing: alternatives to the
anthropocentric status quo are emerging abundantly in the human imagination if not yet in human institutions. The articles here have much to say
not only about the limits and dead-ends of thinking about energy today;
they also offer a great many moments of inspiration in the many minds
and handswhether in the dust and wind of lvaro Obregn or in the labs
of Manchester and Masdarwhere new alignments of life and energy are
being brought into focus and form. n
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank especially Cymene Howe, Timothy Morton, and Hoon Song for close critical engagement with, and improvement of, this text. All of the arguments in this introduction emerged from conversations with the collaborators in this special collection as well as with colleagues in the Cultures of Energy
Faculty Working Group at Rice University (who have now gone on to found the Center for Energy and
Environmental Research in the Human Sciences [CENHS]). Several distinguished visiting speakers in the
Cultures of Energy Sawyer Seminar inspired the formulation of energopower, including especially Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Timothy Mitchell, and Laura Nader. Finally, I would like to thank Alex Dent and Roy Richard
Grinker for their support of the collective intervention and for excellent editorial guidance throughout.
Collaborating with Anthropological Quarterly is always a singular pleasure.
Endnotes:
1There
are a large series of glosses that capture more specific aspects of this turn such as, for example,
ontological, neomaterialist, post-constructivist, post-Kantian, and anti-correlationist. A major
recent conference clustered several of the philosophical and theoretical trends I cite here as a nonhuman turn (Center for 21st Century Studies 2012, see http://www.c21uwm.com/nonhumanturn/). While
all these adjectives capture certain elements of contemporary debate and discourse very well, I find antianthropocentric the more compellingly accurate term at the level of the human sciences. For one thing,
these literatures share more strongly in a critical project than in any positive project. Many fall well short,
for example, of articulating positive biocentric or ecocentric positions. Also, their conceptual and thematic
stakes vary: some grapple with metaphysical questions of ontology and materiality, others concentrate on
the rights and politics of biotic nonhumanity, still others explore the possibility of eco-phenomenology.
Where they intersect is in the rejection of intellectual traditions that manifestly or latently assume human
superiority or centricity as a pillar of their epistemic practice.
2Massumi
has stated, for example, How can we master what forms us? And reforms us at each instant,
before we know it? But that is not to say that were impotent before ontopower. Quite the contrary, our
lives are capacitated by it. We live it; the power of existence that we are expresses it (as quoted in McKim
2009:11).
3There
will undoubtedly be those who wish to contest this characterization. I do not mean to diminish in
any way the importance, for example, of Marxian models of power, which have been resilient in anthropology and which are clearly resurgent in the past few years as well. Rather, I mean to suggest that Foucaults
work has served as an especially intuitive and generative theoretical resource for conceptualizing power
in ethnographic contexts.
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F o r e i g n L a n g u a g e Tr a n s l a t i o n s :
Special Collection Energopower and Biopower in Transition
Energopower: An Introduction
Coleo Especial - Energopoder e Biopoder em Transio
Energopoder: Uma Introduo
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