Elements and Energies

Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe, Rice University

Chaired and co-organised by Dr Jamille Pinheiro Dias (ILCS/CLACS) and Dr Gianfranco Selgas (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL)  

In this presentation, Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe will bridge their respective work on energies and elements. The modern sense of “energy” is strongly attached to the concept of “work,” an association forged in the 19th century by Protestant, industrial, and thermodynamic epistemic contexts (Daggett 2019). Elements, meanwhile, have evanescent qualities—as they are rendered as fire, air, water, and earth, for example. Elements are also fundamentally ontological—in the periodic table of elements we find the body of the universe defined, the matter of the natural world. Both elements and energies have much to say to our contemporary ecological predicaments and to the projects of civilizational transformation that are beginning to take shape around the world in response. Energies elicit qualities of activity and becoming; elements are at once ambient conditions and foundational components. Boyer and Howe argue that placing these concepts in dialogue can help illuminate paths forward and away from the genocidal and ecocidal conditions of our times.