Analyze

Concept of citizen science (top-down/ bottom-up), and also dealing with the question of the politicalness of data, I think that's quite interesting. As one of the members says: "We agreed that if we just measure accurately, the truth will shine through. If we start saying that we are against [the government], people will label us as against [the government]. So it becomes more difficult for everyone to join us. [...]" (p. 4) - so data is configured as something apolitical, neutral here, and so the citizen science groups also can be like this. I think this is interesting, that they have this concept of data.

I think the concept of citizen science and participation is interesting when we look at the participatory project of the Höchst Industriepark for the residents: They are invited to discuss about impacts of the Industriepark on the districts around. But in this context, the citizens they don't acquire data, but are invited to get informed about what Höchst Industriepark wants to do, what their plans are. I think the aspect of participation is a little hypocritical here: For me it seems to be a measure of making residents feel like they can participate, but there is no decision-making power with them.

Could we see the acquirement of data by citizen as unpaid work? Who gets the credit for this work? (In the context of top-down citizen sciences)

What about participation as a technology of governing?

I think the text is not very critical in terms of top-down citizen sciences.

The text builds on the concepts "biopower" and "capital" and introduces the concept "energopolitics" to exisiting anthropolitical minima. In the text's introduction, Boyer disucsses the limitations of these concepts when universalized, because they are multiplicities that have been bundled into more nominal forms as part of analytic projects, and then expands on these concepts in order to situate them within anthropolitical and technopolitical domains in Mexico. For example, biopower, which can be defined as a practice of governance that denotes vast networks of enablement with many infrastructures and actors in order to optimize human life, and in Mexico the government put forth discourse around renewable energy development that discusses it as a means of guaranteeing or imporiving the health and welfare of human enviornments, economies, communities, and individuals. 

As the title of the work hints to, the text builds on discussions surrounding energy policy and energy investments. Throughout the work, Boyer (2019) discusses dimensions of energy transitions that range from job creation, forms of development (industry and otherwise). Most significant to take into consideration is the fact Boyer (2019) acknowledges energy development often occurs without at par social, political, and economic transitions. Boyer (2019) advances discussions of energy politics and transitions by highlighting the inherent problems energy transitions bring into communities where wind farm and green projects are envisioned. Here, we should note the impacts energy transitions may have on the most vulnerable populations, which have been and continue to be documented. In fact, it is documented that LMI communities tend to be least likely to sport energy-efficient, carbon neutral energy systems and appliances (Cluett et al., 2016; Elnakat, 2016; Kaza et al., 2014).

This text builds off of Marx's concept of the ruling idea. According to Marx, many concepts and ideas that are embedded as "common sense" in our society today exist to profilerate and benefit the ruling class. The book builds of this theory in multiple ways. For example, we view coal as one of, if not the only viable ways to power our sociey because the characteristics of coal most benefit the ruling class. It does not require communual effort like water and can be used all year round. On top of this, the way energy and work are intertwined also benefits the working class. We think of those that don't work as wasting their energy, when in reality they show that people do not need to work in the capitalistic sense of the word.

The biggest example of this is the scientific study of energy and entropy. The first two laws of thermodynamics somewhat contradict each other, but play into this idea that the earth is under our control. The second is even used to often justify forcing people into work, stating that if they waste energy, they cannot reuse it.

Energy as ...

Natureculture: "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." Pg 5

Figuration: "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.” Pg 5

Boundary Project: "Approached as the unit that flows through organisms, energy served the “boundary project” of defining the borders of living assemblages. Boundaries are inherently political. As Haraway argues, “[w]hat boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.'” Pg 8

Anthropocene

"Indeed, Timothy Morton argues that it was precisely in the Victorian era that humans began to confront what he calls hyperobjects, or “entities that are massively distributed in time and space.” Hyperobjects like climate change, species extinction, and the other calamities of the Anthropocene have proliferated in the twenty-first century, but in the nineteenth century there was already a growing awareness of other, Anthropocenic hyperobjects, including “geological time, capital, industry, evolution, cities, the unconscious, electromagnetism, climate phenomena such as El Niño, and so on.'” Pg 56

Energopolitics/Energopower

"Biopolitics: to make live. Energopolitics: to put all energy on Earth to work." Pg 131

"Energopower, a concept first proposed by anthropologist Dominic Boyer, offers an important complement to biopolitics in that it helps to explain how the governance of populations could be directed toward the project of productive work, not only at the expense of the bodies expelled as wasteful, but even at the expense of the life of the population itself." Pg 111-112

"Boyer argues that one cannot understand the biopolitical projects of Foucault’s prisons, schools, and factories without attending to their dependence on industrial energy apparatuses to supply building materials, light, and heat, such that “power over energy has been the companion and collaborator of modern power over life and population from the beginning.”55 This nascent energopolitical project can be further enriched by focusing on the birth of energy in thermodynamic science. Such a focus reveals that the very notion of the possibility of “power over (and through) energy” often mobilizes an energy logic that dictates which energy is most useful, and which is to be minimized or expelled." Pg 124-125

"Appreciating the science of energy helps us to understand how biopolitics so often turns to genocidal, and even suicidal, projects, by adding another layer of complexity to sovereign efforts to produce docile bodies for the project of waged work. ... First, energy helps to construct the norm of efficient work, so that working processes can be policed as energy flows. Where biopower aims for a healthy human population by separating the living from the dead, and the sane from the insane, energopower seeks to increase the metabolic rate of the organism by maximizing work and evacuating waste. This requires the definitional separation of work from waste, of ordered energy use from disordered entropy increase, which infers a more active governance of the environment than that assumed by Foucault’s milieu. ... Second, energopower is not practiced on human populations alone. Biopolitics, and likewise evolutionism, offered strategies for governing humans as populations or species, with sex becoming a significant political problematic because it is “located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.”66 Meanwhile, the knowledge of energy is focused on a different fulcrum. Rather than traverse human bodies and populations, with sex as the waypoint, energy connects human–technological apparatuses to the energetic transformations of the cosmos. The key problem posed for energetic governance is not sex and its regulation, but instead the provision and use of fossil fuels and other material resources that make possible the production and reproduction of populations. … Foucault’s inattention to the remarkable shift in the physical sciences in the nineteenth century, which no longer viewed the material world as “inert,” is thus a lacuna that energopower addresses. Third, while the object of biopolitics is life, the object of energopolitics is more circumscribed: work. Although the object is narrowed, the targets of governance are expanded from organic bodies, assembled as a population, to sociotechnical systems, both human and more-than-human. You do not have to be alive to do work; the only real requirement is energy, paired with a channeling or transforming apparatus." Pg 126-127

"Energopower thus describes a valence of biopower that is not directed toward the life of a population but toward the project of fossil-fueled work. The question is not which humans are allowed to die for the good of the population, but rather which waste—a more-than-human entity— can be made more useful, and which waste is intractable and in need of expulsion. Waste is produced both literally (spent fuel, pollution, trash) and as a manufactured category marking that which is in need of improvement or, barring that, disposal. Entropy, or waste, can be governed, and even minimized, but never eliminated altogether, as waste is an inevitable outcome of work. Making order in one place creates disorder in others. Energopower aims to quarantine waste from the work project, and in the process, ideally render it invisible to privileged humans." Pg 128

Post-work Energy Politics

"Weeks (like many in the anti-work tradition) does not address environmental or energy issues in her text, and yet, because thermodynamics equates work and energy as scientific units, we can gain new insights by transposing energy into the concept of work." 197

"Second, Weeks argues that work is not necessary to life, but is instead a disciplinary apparatus through which political subjects are produced.29 Something similar can be said of energy, although thanks to energy’s as- sociation with physics, such a statement feels even more counterintuitive. Energy—the energy that I followed in this project, that thermodynamic unit that has been captured by a dominant, fossil-fueled logic of work and waste—is not necessary to life." Pg 198

"It is the anti-asceticism of these utopian demands that offers the most opportunities for energy politics. Environmental movements have struggled to counter the pleasures of energy consumption without embracing constraint, thrift, or simplicity as an antidote. While such values may be necessary in a post-carbon society, environmentalists would also do well to continue to multiply other pleasurable, desire-based visions for the future. A feminist post-work politics suggests one such mode of hopeful politics, one that shifts from the impetus to save energy, to give up energy, to use it more thriftily and efficiently, toward a practice of liberating energy from work." Pg 203-204

Energy Freedom

"Energy freedom—by which I mean an attempt to free more energy from the strictures of waged, productive work— would short-circuit the dominant logic of energy and its assumption that freedom is equivalent to a nation’s industrial capacity for maximum fuel independence." Pg 204

Like many other systems, energy systems are grounded in gender, race, and social hierarchies. Similarly, we can think of energy infrastructures today as continuing racist, gendered, and classist systems, particularly when we think of the energy vulnerbale populations that are particularly affected by the pandemic. Just as Dr. Daggett suggests, we need new energy systems to move away from energy wastes, energy inequality but also energy systems to account for compouded vulnerabilities as faced by the most at risk populations.