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Archiving is always political

"Observers of community archives have tended to distinguish between those politically and culturally motivated endeavours acting to counter to the absences and misrepresentations relating to a particular group or community in mainstream archives and other heritage narratives and those whose the inspiration is not so directly or overtly political or cultural, but rather is a manifestation of a shared enthusiasm for the history of a place, occupation or interest. Whilst it is an important distinction, the authors would also contend that even in the most nostalgic and leisure-orientated community archive projects there is something inherently political in individuals and communities taking an active role in the re-telling of their own history." (2013, 5)

"One of the consequences and dimensions of this commitment to independence and sustaining autonomy is the resulting dependence on the significant personal sacrifice (financial, physical and mental) of key activists and a network of volunteers, arising from great emotional and political commitment to the collections and their impacts. As we have already noted this commitment is both an enormous benefit to the archive but also a potential vulnerability with regard to the long term stability, succession and sustainability." (2013, 12)

Second wave community archiving

"[D]evelopments in the web and social technology were a significant factor in what in the UK we might term the second wave of community-based archives and heritage activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s." (2013, 13)

Search for definitions and the 'institutional gaze'

"[W]hy are “we” (and here we are referring not only to academics in archival studies, but also to archival practitioners) so focused on formulating definitions of and making distinctions between mainstream and community archives and their endeavors? For the most part, “we” are not the voices of, or even representing “community archives”– although that line is becoming more blurred with increased numbers of professionally-trained archivists coming from and returning to these communities. We are the ones applying the term “community archives” to these diverse social, political and cultural initiatives and we are the ones viewing their inception and flourishing as some kind of phenomenon or movement. But are they really, or is that our projection, possibly because we recognize how these initiatives address the shortcomings of our more traditional archival constructions and practices?" (2013, 14)

Energy is still seen as something we all need. The lights must say on, even under COVID-19, a national crisis with no end in sight, our current levels of energy consumption must remain the same. COVID-19 has not caused people to ask fundamental questions like "why do we use so much energy, do we need to? what even is energy?" We had even failed to do this to some extent. Electric companies offer payment options and plans, but their relationship to their customer has not fundamentally changed under COVID-19.

The main way I will use this text in our future survey project is when crafting questions about energy. Our previous energy survey was built without an understanding of how "energy" came to be. We didn't question the fundamentals of how our understanding of energy came to be. Now that we have this knowledge, I think we can ask questions that get people to think about energy. Simple questions like "what is energy" and "why is energy important to your life" can serve to test some of the books claims. We can see if people think of energy like the book states: the ability to do work and some scientific measurement of that ability.

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.

Daggett conducts a genealogy of energy in order to gain a new line of attack on the problem of energy transition that doesn’t fall into the contemporary trap of choosing between a future of ascetic sustainability or fossil-fueled growth that leads to cataclysm. She attempts to achieve this by decoupling energy from work. In her words, “Without challenging dominant practices of work and leisure, and the high valuation of waged, productive work in a neoliberal economy, it will remain difficult to dislodge fossil fuel cultures” (2019, 11).

The first half of Daggett’s book looks at the early history of energy science and the development of the first two “laws” of thermodynamics (largely through the study of steam engines), arguing that both the rationalizations of and the motivations for developing these laws can't be adequately explained without considering 1) the influence of Protestant ethics and worldview on scientific thought and 2) the social and political pressures of capitalist industrialization. Once developed, this new thermodynamic understanding of energy set the conditions of possibility for a new geo-theology of energy and a new work-waste mode of energopolitics.

In the second half of the book, Daggett focuses on the latter energopolitical turn, showing how these new ways of conceiving and using energy were taken up and applied as new metaphors and logics for understanding and governing society (primarily centered around maximizing efficiency and profit), arguing that these metaphors and logics enabled the powerful to naturalize and rationalize the various forms of racial, gender, and class oppression that persist to this day.

In her conclusion, Daggett employs a feminist conception of post-work politics to point towards a feminist conception of energy politics, where energy is conceived of as a means of reproducing human and nonhuman life rather than a means for producing commodities and profit. 

Evidence of sociocultural influences on Thermodynamics:

"As Andreas Malm argues, steam engines were not necessarily adopted because they were cheaper or provided superior power, especially given the advantages of water power in the early nineteenth century. Instead, as chapter 1 detailed, steam power was attractive because it better accorded with the needs of industrial capitalists in making a profit while simultaneously dodging the rising demands of laborers." Pg 35

"The two concerns—waste and the dissipation of energy into unusable forms—resonated not only with the capitalist drive for profit, but also with long-standing theological obsessions in Protestantism with sin and sloth." Pg 36

"We should pause here to marvel once again at the underlying irony: energy, which would come to serve as a unit of labor accounting and fuel supply, traceable and governable down to the nth degree as a sign for quantifiable, brute matter, is at its heart theoretical, and tends to escape, exceed, and stymie empirical measurement. Instead of discovering energy through experiment, then, it seems likely that Joule was motivated by a belief that something in nature was conserved, rather than by empirical proof; Joule “harbored a cacodemon that said ‘heat is motion’” and that drove him forward as a prophet of energy conservation." Pg 36-37

"This has led some historians to conclude that energy reflected the desires and beliefs of its discoverers rather than a thing of nature—that “the energy concept was not at all a descriptive entity, but rather an assertion of the very ideal of natural law: the mathematical expression of invariance through time, the reification of a stable external world independent of our activity or inquiry. This ideal, at first so very plausible and reassuring in its form and appearance, was turning out to be a ticket to Bedlam if followed to its logical consequences.” Pg 41

"One might say that energy is always conserved because we merely expand the definition of energy to include what is lost. The laws of energy are semantic entities as well as responses to natural forces." Pg 46

"Entropy and its tragic perspective “laid the foundation for a new cosmological synthesis” between science and Christianity, a synthesis that remains relevant to energy politics today. As the next chapter shows, figuring out steam engines in the nineteenth century was both a practical and a spiritual concern whose solutions touched upon the larger relationship between Christianity, industrialism, and the Earth." Pg 50

"Historian David Noble explains that the engineer’s work “was guided as much by the capitalist need to minimize both the cost and the autonomy of skilled labor as by the desire to harness most efficiently the potentials of matter and energy.” Pg 167

Evidence tying energy to work:

"...one of the hallmarks of energetic thinking, and of industrialization, is the universalization of energy as the unit that underlies all activity. The machine, the horse, and the human were all energy transformers when they worked, and their power (rate of work done) and efficiency (minimization of energy wasted) could be compared, as in the evaluation of engines according to horsepower. Watt’s standardization of the unit of horsepower is an exemplary precursor to the logic of energy. Work captures this larger sense of the planet conceived energetically and dynamically through the new sciences of energy and evolution." Pg 83

"But it was only with the advent of thermodynamics that the operations of heat engines, the preeminent industrial prime movers, could be explained in any detail. Henceforth, heat engines could be treated not only as metaphor, but as a practical model. They were functionally analogous to any other organ or body that transformed energy from heat into motion, and they could be governed as such. A machine’s inputs and outputs were systematically related as forms of energy, and the optimization of energy flows ensured both time well spent (now measurable as efficiency) and the maximal transformation of energy into commodity form (captured by productivity)." Pg 90

"The logic of energy thus involved a care regime, but it was care ex- tended in the pursuit of maximizing work. In critiques of overwork, the value of work itself was rarely, if ever, in question. For capitalists and many reformers, the goal in reducing work hours was to produce dedicated laborers who would perform their tasks with alacrity. Calls for better nutrition, more breaks, or shorter hours were often advertised as methods for increasing productivity. Lethargy and sloppiness were not sins, as idleness had been, nor resistance to hard toil, but understandable physical reactions to a poor balance of energy, whether as a result of malnutrition, inadequate sleep, or a lack of recreation and spiritual education." Pg 93

Evidence of the emergence of a Work-Waste framework:

"The obsession with the work of steam engines led to a preoccupation with one theme: waste. Importantly, this was not the waste produced by the operation of engines, but rather the waste of the engines in converting coal into motion. It was waste from the perspective of work, as that which detracted from it." Pg 35

"Reformers believed that, left idle too long, the public was prone to the vices of drink, prostitution, and crime. Thompson notes the sharp increase in histrionics in the Victorian era about the immoral leisure activities of the poor. The wage was important, then, not only to regularize workers’ time, but to instill in them the notion that time equals money, that time was to be “put to use” and not frittered away unproductively." Pg 89

"Unlike time measurements, energy efficiency offered a much more fine-grained picture of the quality of a worker’s efforts. Ensuring good work, then, whether by bodies or machines, called for comprehensive energy surveillance and accounting in order to track energy intake and consumption." Pg 163

"They always had in mind the cosmological, the metaphorical, the theological. Energy laws could be deployed to endorse an ethos—the ethos of the engine, the maximization of work, and the minimization of waste—that reconciled the spatiotemporal registers of Earth time and human time, God’s beneficence and cosmic indifference." Pg 50

Evidence of socio-political influence of the Work-Waste Paradigm:

"As Andreas Malm argues, steam engines were not necessarily adopted because they were cheaper or provided superior power, especially given the advantages of water power in the early nineteenth century. Instead, as chapter 1 detailed, steam power was attractive because it better accorded with the needs of industrial capitalists in making a profit while simultaneously dodging the rising demands of laborers." Pg 35

"Like energy, efficiency started out as a “technical invention, created by engineers and physicists” in an industrial context, but quickly “became promiscuous, describing activities of all sorts, including marriage, fuel consumption, use of leisure time, and political and moral behavior.” Pg 78

"By historicizing energy, we also appreciate how the embrace of a dominant, northern British logic of energy, with its stress on engineering principles and work, reflected only one possible interpretation of energy and its optimal flow through metaphorical machines and organisms (a metaphor further elaborated on in the next chapter). Managers like Taylor could only assert, but never satisfactorily prove, that the maximization of work was in the interest of the well-being of the state or laborers. The assertion was buttressed by its reliance on the seemingly universal, and apolitical, physics of energy. This allows us to appreciate not only how energy infused the governance of work (as in how Taylor deploys thermodynamics), but also how work infuses the governance of energy/fuel. In other words, in disturbing the work/energy nexus, we are carried forward to the concluding claim of this book: that our relationship to fossil fuels has been governed by a singular ruling logic of energy, and delimited by its idealization of work, its unquestioned drive to put the world’s materials to use for human profit." Pg 101-102

"First, engineering schools almost universally embraced the project of industrial capitalism and its goals of profit seeking and productivity. The primary aim of many schools was not to produce citizen-scholars or scientists, but rather to produce industrial workers and managers, to increase the “industrial intelligence” of workers, as a 1905 Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education report explains. Practicality, or the ability to apply scientific theories to the “real world” of technical apparatus, was the overriding goal." Pg 167

"Engineering schools, often affiliated with universities, were the most elite, and were intended “to prepare people for a life of managing labor” by producing industry-friendly engineers. … White managers were therefore reliant upon a second kind of industrial education, which ranked below their own engineering schools: those industrial or technical schools that aimed “to prepare people for a life of labor” by producing ideal workers. … Such education schemes were the preferred tools of a progressive racism that aimed to improve colonized others. Energy provided one metric by which to gauge status: lower-status workers had not yet proven a mastery of efficient energy flows, and in a feat of circular reasoning, this was supposedly evident in their resistance to menial, waged work." Pg 169-170

"These schools understood labor as energy conversion and labor governance as a striving for disciplined efficiency." Pg 185

"Over and again, the labor resistance of colonized peoples was read through the prism of idleness and waste. These came to be understood as no longer just moral vices, but as signs of insufficient evolution that could be accelerated through technical education." Pg 186

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