Redirecting the Flows of Energy in Natural Systems

John Hopkins 09::December::2009 12:26 → permalink

(but wait a minute, LIFE is, by definition, a redirecting of the flows of energy in a natural system — a redirecting that is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of living systems — according to basic non-equilibrium thermodynamics of living systems.)

However, there is a scalar difference between humans and other living entities where some humans attempt this kind of control on wide scales, with others re-directing those same energies to completely different configurations, some only images of what their ‘original’ pattern of flow once were. (it’s a question of degree?)

The juxtaposition: humans re-organizing the ‘natural’ flows around them (as technology), and humans re-organizing the flows which are human — other humans (as society).

These processes are indistinguishable in their application and only express some difference in the materialized extremity of their results. Humans are simply an other expression of the natural system. It is only in the degree or scale of re-organization of flows that they extend that distinguishes them from other expressions of life. One could argue that earlier Archean life on the planet, utilizing the energy available in certain chemical bonds over eons, completely transformed the composition of the atmosphere in a process of dynamic equilibrium — something we humans are apparently doing yet again in a vastly shorter time. Life, via evolutionary developments, integrally tapped into an available energy source/flow with gusto until the source was depleted or another ‘easier’ source was encountered. Life based on photosynthetic processes of energy utilization is a example that has a long and continuing evolutionary history.

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, explores this process of (the human) redirection of flows as the idea of “fabrication” — as a god-like means to artificially re-create and temporarily reify natural systems. She squarely positions this energy exertion as part of the “external subjectivization of the modern world.” This condition of externalization is a necessary precedent condition for the social and represents the ‘mechanism’ which draws granular and embodied human power from the individual into the social system (for cumulative and disgressionary use by that system). This energy consequently becomes unavailable to the individual, although the pathways that the social system constructs for the expression of its energy may be utilized by the individual, depending on their particular positioning within the system.

(Working at a job for “The Man,” that vaguely persistent image that arose in the times of African-American slavery, frames this dynamic. While most individuals in the middle- and upper-class would consider that their work in the service of someone else is merely a fact of existence and that the convertible and abstracted instrumental returns (money) more than suffice as a reward for the life-time and life-energy expended in this way. It is this collective faith in the abstracted social instrument of money (and other codes) (see Code and Money), expressed as a crucial social adhesive, which gives the social system a form for the expression of the cumulative energy of individual participants.)

Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have the strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly between means and end in terms of human behavior, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the laboring body with its implement, the movement of laboring itself acting as the unifying force. Labor but not work requires for best result a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many laborers gang together, needs rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements. In this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until the body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is not longer the body’s movement that determines the implement’s movement but the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. — Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”