From Energy Humanities to Human Energetics: The Noetics of Approximate Knowledge in the work of Gilbert Simondon

The notion of energy has gained much traction as a concept and guiding principle to understand major processes of anthropocentric shifts of terrestrial life. While energy as energeia already appeared in Aristotle’s work, it is the historical conjuncture of ‘fossil fuels, steam engines, global capitalism, human terraforming, the slave trade, climate systems, empires’ – that is, Victorian thermodynamics since the 1840s – which inform this re-focusing of energy today. In relation to the genealogies of petrocultures and carbon imaginaries, the energy humanities has emerged as a field of study taking shape over the last decade or so. Principally, scholarship in the energy humanities seeks to contribute to the natural sciences through methods and concerns predominantly associated with the human and social sciences. In the following, we briefly outline some key concerns of the field of energy humanities, while contrasting the duality upheld between the human/social and natural sciences with a different approach, that of a ‘human energetics.’ Gilbert Simondon developed the latter in the 1960 talk ‘Form, Information, and Potentials’. Therein, he entertains the physics concept of ‘potential energy’ and suggests that a new ‘human Science’ should be founded, eliding the division between the human and natural sciences. More radically, his transductive approach proposes a rethinking of the human-technology-ecology nexus as the general relational principle of existence. It is in this general shift in problematising disciplinary divides and modes of thought where Simondon’s valuable contribution to a noetics without a mind resides.