Hi, Friends! Remember me? 

I have been down an academic job market rabbit hole for a couple of months, so I’ll ask that you give me some grace if your inbox surprised you today with tidings that I’m alive and am, indeed, still a writer. 

And as I apologize for temporarily deprioritizing my Substack writing, I’m popping in to acknowledge that I’ve been “energizing below [my] maximum,” as nineteenth-century psychologist William James would say [1]. This post unpacks the athletic language of productivity culture and argues that, when we use athletic and energy language to discuss our work’s efficiency, we are drawing upon a specific and exploitive lineage in the history of energy physics and its impact on the western cultural imagination.

What do I mean by athletic language? Here are some examples:

• Life coaching

• Work sprints (and other agile-like terminology)

• Efficiency training and performance

• Best Known Method (or BKM)

• Fatigue management

I am also talking about productivity as a genre. Think: guru imparting wisdom to followers who want to compete against their colleagues and distinguish themselves in their careers. I’m talking about the time management advisors stewarding the greatest return on our attention, as if our attention were capital.

The athleticism of competitive office work intersects with energy terms like efficiency, fatigue, and waste elimination. These are loaded terms and, as such, I believe that an awareness of the history behind this arm of the self-help genre allows us to parse the widespread cultural desire for productivity at the expense of health and work-life balance. Striving for productivity performance enhancement, and even using those terms, shores up the capitalist agenda of furthering exploitation in order to maximize extraction. Even when self-help rhetoric promises to help readers thwart burnout or prune back their commitments, the writer often suggests how to implement efficiency strategies with the intention of coaching the reader to get even more done with less wasteful effort.

If the goal is simply to work smarter so that you can ultimately work more, then the argument remains couched in productivity dogma. In other words, efficiency should not be the means to extract additional surplus value from an already saturated work day. And workers should never be reduced to their economic attributes, especially under the guise of efficiency hygiene. This post attempts to break down some of those distinctions. 

Actually, my writing this post was galvanized by the frequent discourse in my household about auditing the efficiency of knowledge work. My husband is a data scientist who endorses the idea that knowledge work requires an overhaul of the individual worker’s best practices to streamline process flow while maximizing work output. As a humanities scholar, I am naturally skeptical of the value such initiatives create for actual working humans. Unless the outcome of efficiency is more time for rest and leisure, the goal remains rooted in exploitation. 

Nick and I mostly agree to disagree on the ethics of efficiency logic. But I hope that by tracing the lineage of energy science and athletic language adopted by the self-help and productivity genres, I’ll finally convince him (and also you 🙂) of their discursive violence.

One small note before we dive in.

Long, well-researched, essay-type posts are my M.O., and this post is… it’s long. Apparently it’s “too long for email,” according to Substack 🙃. Not everyone loves to sit down and read an essay-length piece of writing, and that’s okay! If you find anything to take away from this post, at least read the conclusion section, where I weave the argumentative threads together and make a case for why we should stop idolizing people who work all the time and never sleep.

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Transcendental Materialism and Industrial Physiology; Or, Biohacking Because “Everything Is Energy”

What if I claimed I could teach you how to minimize (or eliminate!) fatigue during your work day without recourse to wasting all that time on sleep? Or, what if I claimed I could guarantee your career success by sharing tips and tricks to maximize your work output? Would you buy my book?

I have been fascinated and repulsed by the self-help genre for literally half of my life. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of publishing a satire of your typical best-selling self-help text. I think this impulse was guided by my desire to investigate the nuts and bolts of the genre. What do these texts have in common? Can we trace the history of self-improvement manuals to a specific provenance? And why are they so popular if many of them dress up the same stale advice in cute terminology (e.g., “eat the frog” [2]) or snappy acronyms? If I had chosen to write a different dissertation, maybe I would have tackled the history of the self-help genre.

Luckily for me, it turns out that Melissa Gregg pretty much already did this! Her excellent book, Counterproductive, is a deep dive into how “over the course of many decades, productivity accrued virtue as a framework for living ethically through work” [3]. Gregg argues that today’s productivity dogma resembles, yet ultimately departs from, capitalism’s traditional orthodoxy that one must strive for efficiency in order to grow closer to God. Productivity today is post-secular, as Gregg puts it, because activity, itself, is the goal now. The gaze is inward, and the “calling” of work no longer aligns with the goal of doing good for others. Today it is all about “keeping busy” in general, and competing with others’ levels of busyness, in particular [3]. Busyness functions as cultural capital in our world, where complaining about or simply having an overbooked schedule is an asset.

Bonus points if you are busy and productive. Have you ever opened a social media app to discover your colleague’s/friend’s/distant relative’s humblebrag of writing 27 pages yesterday? AND they went to the gym. AND they graded 100 papers. And, of course, took care of their children. Sleep be damned! If so, you probably felt guilty that you didn’t also manage to carpe diem so aggressively. Why are you lazy? Why do you have anxiety? Get to work immediately. If a worker’s sense of accomplishment was once linked with collective achievement, we now emphasize individualized work ethic and performance above those of the group. Instead of simply feeling pleasure for our colleague’s/friend’s/distant relative’s success (which we do feel - at least, I hope so!), we also tend to train an inward eye on our own perceived shortcomings.

I am, in no way, arguing that activity and productivity aren’t virtues. I love feeling accomplished as much as the next person: trust me. But I am asking us to remain skeptical of just how virtuous busyness should be. Gregg’s book demands a similar task of the reader. The critical inquiries in Counterproductive excite me because I’ve found plenty of intersection with my own research on energy science and its influence on productivity culture. For instance, Gregg argues that time-and-motion studies in the early twentieth century shifted industrial work into the realm of athleticism. Turning workers into efficiency athletes meant applying energy science to human labor. For the first time, workers could view their own performances from a distance, on film. By scrutinizing even the minutiae of their bodies’ movements, workers and their employers could tweak the performance of tasks to meet time and output goals. “Applied to manual work,” Gregg explains, “the cinematic apparatus transforms the worker’s conception of her job away from a team or gang to a personal achievement” [3]. This is where athleticism meets productivity. You may even be incentivized to compete with your peers to achieve the leanest and most prolific output. According to thermodynamic logic, minimizing waste while maximizing production was an imperative.

Classical thermodynamics added another layer to the idea of “training” for maximum productivity. Workers’ bodies were measured and quantified by the very principles that optimized the machines they operated. Humans and industrial machines alike were imbricated in the mid-nineteenth-century concept of energy as a universal force underpinning all processes, biological and mechanical. Put another way, if everything is energy, all working bodies are subject to identical physical laws and can therefore be regulated, measured, and improved via identical principles. Anson Rabinbach has labeled this metaphor “the human motor,” and he calls the idea that the laws of energy subsume all sources of productive power “transcendental materialism”  [4].

Transcendental materialism placed labor and the “athletics” of work squarely in the realm of the laboratory, where scientists measured worker fatigue and ostensibly optimized energy expenditure. “If the cosmos could be subsumed under the universal laws of energy,” Rabinbach explains, “society too was subordinate to natural laws of development that favored productivity, performance, and progress” [4]. Early Victorian thermodynamicists embraced the idea that nature favored a progressive telos. They maintained that responsible resource management meant directing each transformation of energy towards the greatest possible work output. As far as the human body was concerned, specialized fatigue scientists believed that the fatigue of brain and body was an ultimately conquerable impediment to productivity [4]. Think of how much more productive we’d be if scientists measured, studied, and adjusted work to eliminate fatigue! That was the idea.

Although fatigue science appeared in 1870s medical literature [4], it really took off in the early twentieth century. This was the age of scientific management (otherwise known as “Taylorism”) in the United States and industrial physiology in Britain. 

In the States, mechanical engineer and consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor instituted a “new managerial capitalism” [5] defined by standardizing tasks and determining the “maximum capacity” of the worker during a working day. Scientific management insisted that there was a single “best” way to perform each task. Workers were monitored for efficiency: they adopted standard movements and their tasks were timed. Unsurprisingly, workers subjected to this new surveillance disliked Taylor. Indeed, scientific management animated its fair share of class conflict, particularly during World War I [5], when industrial efficiency dovetailed with values of national strength and excellence, and when workers were pushed exceptionally hard.

And, even though the spirit of capitalism fueled Taylor’s system, Bolshevism, too, adopted scientific management. Stalin believed Taylor’s ideas were the ideal combination of capitalism’s efficiency and Russia’s flattening of market competition [6]. So, lest you were defending Taylorism’s austerity as a necessary evil of market forces, consider how optimization virtues appear in the tenets of Communist Russia.

In Britain, another flavor of efficiency science emerged. Steffan Blayney calls this movement “industrial physiology,” after American physiologist Frederic S. Lee’s term for the new science of work [7]. Despite its gesture to the science of living organisms, industrial physiology aimed to maximize profit margins by reducing worker fatigue to a variable of work output and, more broadly, of national power. Indeed, industrial physiology was designed to reorganize labor such that each worker’s individual productivity contributed to and was representative of Britain’s prosperity [7]. 

The idea that the energy of the individual was part and parcel of Britain’s “national energy” shows up as early as the Victorian period. In Samuel Smiles’s 1859 Self-Help, a popular mid-Victorian text with bootstrappy advice for young men, Smiles co-opts thermodynamic language for his argument that discipline, self-denial, and steady work are strong, British virtues of social mobility. According to Smiles, the energy of each individual who helps himself, in turn, helps the nation, for “the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society is composed” [8]. If you think you’re hearing the stirrings of social hygiene in Smiles’s prose, it’s because you are. Forty-ish years after Smiles’s writing, Britain’s anxiety about national decay (see my primer on “degeneration” and its racial connotations here) prompted eugenics-like movements to invigorate the energetic constitution of the nation. Industrial physiology was of such ilk.

Although proponents of industrial physiology distanced themselves from scientific management, which was evidently not “scientific enough” [7], the industrial physiologists often applied the language of scientific management to their own memoranda. For example, a memo from the Health of Munition Workers Committee (HMWC) argues that “[i]t was the responsibility of ‘scientific management’ - and not the worker - to determine [the point of worker fatigue] and to ‘determine further the arrangement of periods of rest in relation to spells of work that will give the best development… of the worker’s capacity’” [7]. In other words, industry will use experimental data to tell you when you’re tired. You don’t get to make that call. This was similar to scientific management’s logic that the “best” way to perform a task prevented fatigue, regardless of actual workers’ experience of the task.

Seriously, though: think about that. 

As Blayney rightly points out, “[w]ork became the fundamental telos of the body” [7]. There was no recourse to human experience, or even to actual bodies, because human performance was an index only of economic success. Health, too, was reduced to a measure of work output. Blayney explains: “When industrial physiology referred to the health of the worker - as in the title of the handbook prepared by the HMWC for munition factory owners, The Health of the Munition Worker - it was usually explicit that this meant the health of the worker only insofar as he or she was a worker: that is, as far as he or she could meet the minimum bodily requirements to maintain productive efficiency” [7]. Pretty grim. But we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we still stake the value of our bodies on our employability. As David Harvey puts it, “Sickness is defined under capitalism broadly as inability to work” [9].

And is it not? (It is.) No matter how sick you are, as long as you can drag yourself to work, your employer can benefit from your labor. Also: We are terrified of losing our jobs and income because of illness, and it’s no surprise why. Consider how our culture derides those on welfare, Social Security Disability Insurance, or other government support. (Our efforts to push our bodies to their limits for the sake of work makes us sicker; but that’s a can of worms for a different post.) Even when corporate health initiatives exist, they typically aim only to reduce health insurance premiums and to keep employees in the office. “The most anti-capitalist protest,” Johanna Hedva declares, “is to care for another and to care for yourself” [10]. If you don’t reduce your worth and your body to its energy output, you are sticking it to the Man.

Of course, I am not arguing that we just shouldn’t work. That’s silly, and I doubt many of us would be satisfied without meaningful labor. However, I do want to poke some holes in behaviors we seem to take for granted, like pretending we’re well and soldiering on when we are ill (I am as guilty of this as anyone, and I can remember doing it as early as the first grade); reducing our value as humans to our capacity to produce; feeling shame when we aren’t “busy”; and obsessively measuring and attempting to optimize our productivity. 

The history of fatigue science, including scientific management and industrial physiology, reminds us that when productivity language asks us to improve our performance, often with machine-like qualities, it draws on a specific lineage of flattening workers into their economic attributes. Remember that the “productive body” [11] is divorced from actual human bodies. This logic transforms workers, and the health of workers, into measurable and apparently optimizable surplus value. 

But can’t we apply efficiency science to get our work done faster and thus free up time for leisure? 

The answer is that we can!

But we usually don’t. Instead, we work just as long (or longer) than ever, while drawing on efficiency gospel to extract more surplus value and increase production. Moreover, even the suggestion that one is working more and longer improves one’s value as a company (or institutional) asset. Think: we often praise or admire the first one in the office and the last to leave, regardless of whether this person actually accomplishes more during the extended time at their desk. It’s more like: wow, that person is committed. A+ to them.

The next section investigates why more is always better under capitalism, and why we should be skeptical of arguments claiming that sleep and rest are necessary because they helps us work more, or that taking periodic breaks during the working day increases our productivity.

The (Mostly False) Assumption that Efficiency Frees Up More Time for Leisure

It’s not that efficiency can’t free up time for leisure, but rather we most often choose to simply get even more done. Or to act like that’s what we’re doing.

Consider the following statements:

• “The American Institute of Stress says more than half of all doctor visits are prompted by stress-related illnesses. By some estimates, businesses in the United States alone lose more than $300 billion every year because of absenteeism and health-care costs related to stress and anxiety” [12].

• “Repeated studies show that taking time off boosts productivity, creativity, and creative problem-solving” [12].

Ironically, these statements appear in a book titled, Do Nothing. The author, Celeste Headlee, critiques the intrusion of the workplace into every corner of our lives. (Screw you, Slack!) Headlee even discusses her own health crisis as a result of overworking. However, some of the book’s arguments suggest that if you work less, you often end up producing more. This is popular logic, and it appears in many self-help texts that promote a more mindful approach to labor. The idea is that if you work too hard you get sick; and when you’re sick you can’t (or shouldn’t) work; and when you can’t work, your employer can’t make money. Therefore, we need to take better care of ourselves to remain productive and valuable to our employers.

The first bulleted statement, in particular, underscores wellness as a function of capitalism. Rest and self-care are not - should never be viewed as - functions of economic growth. They should be acts of self-respect and care in and of themselves. No one should ever feel as if they need to sacrifice their body to make ends meet; but that is a reality for many of us. As Jenny Odell puts it in her excellent book, How to Do Nothing, “beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth” [13]. Odell also points out that many self-help writers offer mindfulness tips as a means of “increasing productivity upon our return to work” [13], which undercuts the intention of true mindfulness.

Productivity does not need to be a tool of capital. In itself, productivity isn’t bad. Even Karl Marx envisioned that productivity would emancipate the worker from the arduous production process [4]. Marx hoped that bourgeois machinery would prevent alienation once the workers took charge of the means of production. But Marx’s views on technology vary with the time of his writing. Pre-1860s Marx regarded labor as a creative impulse awaiting liberation from capital; and post-1860s Marx revised that view to concentrate on emancipation from productive labor by increasing efficiency [4]. Gavin Mueller reminds us that Marx wasn’t necessarily technophilic, but rather felt technology would help dismantle hierarchies of struggle maintained by capitalist economics [14].  

Marx wasn’t the only critic who hoped that productivity might liberate us from production. Even though John Maynard Keynes was a capitalist, he famously projected that technological growth would eventually prune Great Britain’s working week to fifteen hours by the year 2030 [15]. Keynes’s writing appears frequently in self-help texts whose arguments run the gamut from “we are doing work wrong and here’s how to work better” to “the point of work should not be endless growth.” Obviously my own views align with the latter.

Many have pointed out that jettisoning a growth mindset is recessionary. Admitting that the “jobs, jobs, jobs” [16] argument is a difficult nut to crack, Cara New Daggett proposes that “[t]he threat of lost jobs only works if, in losing one’s job, one loses access to the necessities of life, to the respect of society, and to the rights of citizenship” [16]. Daggett draws on Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work and explores what a feminist post-work society might actually look like. (Spoiler: it doesn’t mean no one works anymore.) The point is not to remove labor, but rather to remove the micro-economic insistence that one’s labor and consumption patterns are entirely responsible for one’s basic subsistence and identity.  

Whether you dream of freeing up time for leisure and shortening the working week, or working smarter to produce more in an eight-hour workday, critics like Keynes, Weeks, Daggett, and even Marx remind us that we used to view efficiency as a tool of freedom and nation-wide prosperity. As we actually approach 2030 (!! *freaks out about time flying*), it is clear that Keynes’s expected bounty reaped by technological progress is benefiting the world’s wealthy without suturing our income gap.

When Things Get Muddled: The Cognitive Dissonance of Productivity 

Okay, that’s great, you say. A feminist post-work society sounds amazing. But shareholders expect profits. So what about the bottom line, here? 

I happen to agree with Anne Helen Petersen on this one, i.e., that work “got so shitty” and “stayed so shitty” because “in the current iteration of capitalism, fueled by Wall Street and private equity, the vast majority of employees do not benefit, in any way, from the profits that the company creates for its shareholders” [17]. But maybe you are a shareholder. Maybe you do benefit from all that growth. What is so wrong with a general desire to collect a return on our investments?

I believe there is a fair bit of cognitive dissonance when it comes to keeping an eye on our investments; and I can’t say I’m personally off the hook on this one, either. No one wants to harm others. And yet we still want to prosper. When I try to parse the contradictions of accumulation, I frequently encounter troubling discursive gymnastics that aim to empower us while simultaneously collapsing human bodies into extractive potential. I am especially reminded of how colossally screwed up our obsession with productivity is when I bump into language suggesting my brain is a tool of capital.

Discursive gymnastics, example 1: When we are told that one’s brain is one’s “biggest asset” and we should strive for brain-healthy habits, sometimes the takeaway is not health for the sake of well-being, but extracting the most economic value from our noodles for as long as possible. Take Jim Kwik’s approach, which underlines the athleticism of brain power, as an example. In his book, Limitless, Kwik identifies as a “brain coach” who “want[s] you to get the greatest results and return on your attention” [18]. By assuming the role of coach, Kwik leans into the athletic metaphor and, perhaps unwittingly, draws on the history of enhancing performance for the sake of economic productivity. Limitless ostensibly teaches the reader how to “unlock” their brain’s potential and thus optimize memory and knowledge work. 

The concept of reducing our brains to tools of efficiency bemuses me, and I disagree with some of the advice Kwik dispenses, such as speed reading by “ignoring” punctuation and certain “less important words” [18]. It should go without saying that I (trained as a literature scholar) value the deliberate language and punctuation choices an author employs as much as I value the high-level content of a text. Close reading is a skill! But some of Kwik’s advice isn’t worth throwing out. He prescribes exercise, healthy foods, and seven to nine hours of nighty sleep, and I can’t argue with that. The sticking point for me is Kwik validates these healthy habits as a means to reap that “return on our attention.” After all, you can’t work productively or concentrate properly when you’re ill-fed or sleep-deprived. Like Headlee’s argument for self-care, Kwik’s upshot subverts the good advice he imparts. For me, it is too reminiscent of industrial physiology’s “productive body,” with no concern for real human bodies.

I’m convinced most writers either aren’t aware of these contradictions, or they don’t write with them in mind. But some productivity advocates are self-aware, even addressing their critics’ concerns that our obsession with productivity has overstayed its welcome. Cal Newport’s New Yorker article, “The Frustration with Productivity Culture,” is a response to criticism that his texts on knowledge work optimization are at cross-purposes with an anti-productivity zeitgeist. I give Newport a lot of credit here. He breaks down the etymology of “productive” as it appears in economics, and clarifies that he doesn’t endorse economic growth at any cost to the individual worker. In what Newport calls “classic productivity,” “there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better” [19]. By contrast, if we try to optimize systems, rather than the workers who design and run them, we can improve our lives and the economy without compromising our leisure time [19].

Discursive gymnastics, example 2: I still find myself scratching my head at some of Newport’s logic, which feels like a gesture to anti-productivity politics without actually satisfying the objectives of the movement. Newport’s book, A World without Email makes much of Henry Ford’s assembly line, for which we have as yet found no knowledge work equivalent [20]. Newport examines a German entrepreneur’s adoption of the five-hour workday, arguing that by not checking email constantly, employees were able to wrap up their important stuff and head home [20]. I’m here for it! And I get what Newport’s saying here: streamline the system and you can spend your time on what matters.

But then Newport proposes that we can achieve similar results by adopting his “Attention Capital Principle,” or the idea that we can improve the knowledge sector by “identify[ing] workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information” [20]. I find the language here troubling, not only because attention is treated as capital, but also because the assumption is that additional surplus value can be extracted from the time spent working if we “optimize” our brains. The Attention Capital Principle does not say that optimization will add rest or free time to a worker’s day, it implies only that working better and working more are not the same thing. 

Newport does try to address the elephant in the room with a short section titled, “An Aside: Weren’t Assembly Lines Awful for Workers?” …but this section truly is an aside. Newport concludes, “Henry Ford took radical steps to rethink how to get more out of his factory equipment. Knowledge work leaders need to take radical steps to get more out of the human brains they deploy” [20]. To me, this undercuts the initial claim that Newport is distancing himself from the violence of scientific management. He is applying Rabinbach’s logic of transcendental materialism by analogizing factory equipment and human brains. 

The assumption that we “energize below our maximum,” or that we use only a fraction of our brain’s potential, can be traced back to William James’s famous essay, “The Energies of Men.” In true nineteenth-century fashion (à la Samuel Smiles), James yokes the energy of the individual to that of the nation.

James writes, “In rough terms, we may say that a man who energizes below his normal maximum fails by just so much to profit by his chance at life; and that a nation filled with such men is inferior to a nation run at higher pressure” [1]. Each time I read this essay, I am shocked anew at how James wields the language of energy to insist that “only very exceptional individuals” try their hardest [1]. 

This essay continues to appear in self-help books. Angela Duckworth’s Grit quotes James in earnest, stressing that “[t]hese words, written in 1907, are true today as ever” [21]. Instead, I suggest we consider how placing the onus on individuals to “energize” with vigor echoes the early-twentieth century virtues of social hygiene and wartime nationalism. 

Even well-intentioned writers and thinkers wind up using language that is either contradictory or reminiscent of early-twentieth-century efficiency rhetoric. Some even draw on the ideas of industrial-era critics and innovators, like William James and Henry Ford. While striving for meaningful and effective labor is a wonderful thing, I believe that we must be prudent with the language used to communicate these goals, lest we wind up reanimating the ghosts of erstwhile labor conflicts and importing them into our own troubled relationship with work.

Do You Still Idolize People Who Work All the Time and Never Sleep? (A Conclusion)

Recently overheard at the gym:

• “How is Taylor Swift so productive? Like, what even…”

• “I’ll bet she doesn’t take naps. Or sleep at all.”

My problem with such conjecture has nothing to do with Taylor Swift and everything to do with the leap to sleep deprivation. In our culture, sleep is for the weak and lazy. Our heroes are too disciplined for rest. 

When we lionize “doers” and “grinders” (don’t even get me started on David Goggins or Gary John Bishop…), we buy into the philosophy that what we produce, and how much of it, determines our value as humans. We accept the premise that busyness is cultural capital and that only those who grind themselves into oblivion reach their “potential.”

Thankfully, not everyone is on board with productivity dogma, and the culture seems to be shifting. Evidence of an evolving zeitgeist abounds: from an emerging archive of anti-productivity texts to critiques of the gig economy (see the infamous Fiverr advert backlash [22]), many of us are resisting the call to rise and grind. Even some productivity advocates, like Cal Newport, address the necessity of redefining what we mean by “productivity” in the first place.

As for me, my contribution to this conversation underlines the history of violence and exploitation baked into the language of productivity dogma. When we embrace the athleticism and energy aesthetics of self-help, we invoke a long history of “transcendental materialism,” or the idea that the laws of energy map to a telos of boundless growth in nature and society. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century fatigue scientists believed that worker fatigue was both measurable and conquerable. Such assumptions reduce the human body to a function of surplus value. At best, movements like Taylorism and industrial physiology were deeply dehumanizing. At worst, they were eugenic, testifying that the strength of a nation depended on the vitality of each individual citizen. 

Most of us no longer labor under the conditions of scientific management per se (though there are certain exceptions, *cough* Amazon *cough*). Instead, the logic has evolved within the self-help genre and now appears as advice promising to help us work smarter, not harder, and as tips and tricks for unlocking our personal potential. 

Once again: I am not against work or working! I actually love working, and I derive a sense of meaning and purpose from what I do. But I don’t think we need to always strive to “energize at our maximum,” as William James put it.  And if we do energize below it, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up, especially if we are prioritizing sleep and self-care. Sleep, by the way, is non-negotiable. Losing sleep puts our brains and bodies in danger (like, serious danger! See Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep [23]). Moreover, sleep, rest, and self-care should never be the means to work more or better. Sleeping and resting should be viewed as radical acts of self-respect. Period.

In 2020, a viral sound bite made the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: “Darling, I have no dream job. I do not dream of labor.” Attempting to trace this sound bite to its origin, Amanda Montell concluded that we actually don’t know where it came from. And I sort of love the idea that it generated spontaneously during a period of resistance to work’s status quo (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic). But Montell points out that, even if we do not dream of labor, we still enjoy work that makes us happy and that does not compromise our health [24]. I agree. The trick is to refuse the “dream” of extracting maximum value from our labor at all costs, and to always keep in mind the history of unconscionable exploitation hiding behind a desire to do more, ever more.

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Citations

[1] James, William. “The Energies of Men.” The Energies of Men. Moffat, Yard and Company, 1914. [Note: This essay was originally published in 1907 in the journal Philosophical Review.]

[2] “Eating the frog” refers to the strategy of performing the most difficult and dreaded item on your to-do list first. See Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. 

[3] Gregg, Melissa. Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Duke University Press, 2018.

[4] Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. University of California Press, 1990.

[5] Waring, Stephen P. Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory since 1945. The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

[6] Beissinger, Mark R. Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power. Harvard University Press, 1988.

[7] Blayney, Steffan. “Industrial Fatigue and the Productive Body: the Science of Work in Britain, c. 1900-1918.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 32, no. 2, 2019, pp. 310-328.

[8] Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help: with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverence. 1859. John Murray, 1868.

[9] Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

[10] Hedva, Johanna. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine. Mask Media, n.d. Web. 27 Aug. 2017.

[11] Guéry, François and Didier Deleule. The Productive Body. Zero Books, 2014.

[12] Headlee, Celeste. Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Harmony Books, 2020.

[13] Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019.

[14] Mueller, Gavin. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job. Verso, 2021.

[15] Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” (192-202) in Essays in Persuasion. 1930. Classic House Books, 2009.

[16] Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke University Press, 2019.

[17] Petersen, Anne Helen. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

[18] Kwik, Jim. Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life. Hay House, Inc. 2020.

[19] Newport, Cal. “The Frustration with Productivity Culture.” The New Yorker, 13 Sept. 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/the-frustration-with-productivity-culture. Accessed 1 May 2024.

[20] —. A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Portfolio/Penguin, 2021.

[21] Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2016.

[22] Scott, Ellen. “People are not pleased with Fiverr’s deeply depressing advert.” Metro, 10 March 2017. Updated 12 Dec. 2019. https://metro.co.uk/2017/03/10/people-are-not-pleased-with-fiverrs-deeply-depressing-advert-6500359/. Accessed 2 May 2024.

[23] Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner, 2017. 

[24] Montell, Amanda. The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. Atria, 2024.

Happy New Year! 

As we welcome 2024, I keep thinking about the paradoxical stillness and movement of January: when we refresh the calendar and perhaps make resolutions, but the earth remains dormant and cold, here in the northern hemisphere.

I love winter. Even after the holidays, when winter settles in for three or so quiescent months, I wish I could stretch those months into five or six. Winter is so clean. It’s the unforgiving, cleansing purity of winter that invigorates me. 

But winter doesn’t energize everyone. My best friend, who grew up in Arizona and spent most of her twenties in Southern California, purchased a sun lamp to counterbalance the darkness of Utah winters. The literal darkness, she tells me, amplifies any signs of burnout. If she’s burning out, she’ll burn out faster without sunshine. 

That explanation conjures up almost literal imagery for me: a flaming woman, chasing the sun’s energy so she won’t burn out.

I can’t remember the first time I heard or used the term, “burnout,” to describe the condition of exhaustion and disillusionment that afflicts many overworked, and often undercompensated, individuals. In the early 2000s, when I fueled my pre-lupus body with energy drinks stashed underneath my bed (*grimace*) and committed to chronic over-studying and under-sleeping, “burnout” was not the word I reached for when I crashed or failed. As a young student, I took it for granted that I wasn’t working hard enough when I sensed the inertia of overwhelm; and any time I grew apathetic towards my work, I assumed it was because something tangential or exterior, like hopping on the job market after the 2008 recession, had sucked the joy out of learning. It did not occur to me that I might have, or even could have, burned myself out.

By 2015, though, when I started my graduate studies, the word for this phenomenon was decidedly “burnout.”

“Burnout is real.” That’s what my colleagues and I reminded each other and our students as we juggled concern for well-being and achievement anxiety. Like when a professor wishes you a “restful and productive” winter break.

Despite what I’ve perceived as a shift in the zeitgeist between my undergraduate and postgraduate years, burnout is not a recent, or even relatively recent term. It emerged in the mid-1970s, from the research of American psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Christina Maslach [1]. At that time, burnout was recognized as a social phenomenon only. The academic community had decided that burnout, if it existed at all, was the problem of mentally disturbed individuals only. 🙃 

Today, academics find the concept more interesting. 

I am not a psychologist and therefore have never studied burnout from that angle. But as a humanities scholar with a focus on energy language, burnout fascinates me. Figuratively, burnout suggests not only too much labor, but too much passion. To burn out, there needs to be a fire in the first place. The conservation of energy principle is invoked here: energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transformed from one form to another. The entropy law, too, seems relevant. With each transformation, energy becomes less work-available. So, what are we shoveling into that furnace, transforming it into the burn of impassioned labor until nothing remains? Some scholars suggest the fuel here is our self worth, displaced by or mistaken for labor. Others suggest burnout is caused by sustained affective labor.

 Or, thinking back to my best friend’s winter burnout, can we burn out from too little fire? If our flame flickers in the cold and burns out into darkness, how are the implications different from  those of burning too passionately, too quickly? What if we burn steadily, but for too long? Is there a metaphorical wick length?

Such questions are the crux of this post, and I only just scratch the surface here. Truly: the shallowest little scratch, and this post is much too long. There’s a lot to dig at. The energy language of burnout comes straight from the cultural imagination. Scholars did not christen this phenomenon. As we will see, it was coined independently within two completely different disciplines: poverty law and health care. Maslach and her co-researcher, Susan Jackson, noticed that both lines of work demand affective labor from professionals, and they concluded that the “helping professions” create a risk of burnout [2]. Over time, however, our study and understanding of burnout has broadened. I believe one of the most convincing definitions of burnout is Ayala Pines’s “existential perspective,” which argues that individuals who stake their life’s meaning on their work are candidates for burnout. This is why, Pines explains, “burnout tends to afflict people with high goals and expectations” [3]. I understand this on a deeply personal level; although, to my mind, it’s also a myopic explanation of how existential burnout operates and needs a little more breadth.

Surely, whatever we’ve been calling “burnout” since the 1970s has been around for much longer than that. We’ve been burned out by existential threats more dire than our career identities. Maybe the existential fire isn’t a passionate one, re: my work is who I am and all I do, blah blah blah. Maybe it’s simply the combustion that drives the labor of surviving generational trauma. Tiana Clark reminds us that, “[n]o matter the movement or era, being burned out has been the steady state of black people in this country for hundreds of years” [4]. I may have burned myself out by mistaking my worth for my academic and job performance, and the consequences are indeed material (would I have lupus today if I’d done [fill in the blank] differently?), but that is a privileged experience of burnout. As I’ll cover later, the stakes of achievement mean more to those with marginalized identities, and taking on more work puts one at risk of burnout. To generate a broader picture of burnout, we need to integrate diverse perspectives into its definition.

So what is it? Who burns out and how? And how can we read the energy language when we study examples of burnout? I peel back some of those layers in this post. Unlike my nineteenth-century energy research, burnout is a newer research interest for me. I’ve been chewing on this material for about a month, perhaps holding onto it for longer than necessary for an initial post. But considering the richness of labor and energy baked into its language, I feel like burnout has been waiting for me to take a crack at it. Let’s get started.

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What Is Burnout?

These days we use the term, “burnout,” quite liberally compared to its original definition. Social psychology researcher Christina Maslach credits health care professionals and poverty lawyers for contemporaneously and independently coining the term. In the ‘70s, she was studying the condition that health care workers called “burnout.” When she described her research to an attorney friend, he mentioned that poverty lawyers used the same word to express their own affective exhaustion [1]. Maslach concluded that burnout afflicted those in “helping professions.” She defined burnout as “a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who work with other people in some capacity” [5].

If you’ve ever worked a service or caregiving job, then you know what Maslach was driving at. Helping professions often extract a deep physical and affective toll from their workers. The definition of burnout ends there for Maslach; and yet, if we look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the scope broadens to generic work, rather than limiting burnout to helping professions.

Here’s the OED definition: 

• “originally U.S. physical or emotional exhaustion, esp. caused by stress at work; depression, disillusionment” [6]

As the OED definition indicates, more recent work on burnout extends this phenomenon to practically all professions, a change to which Maslach has responded with skepticism. She argues that “the focus on the social interaction between the provider and the recipient has been lost in recent years as there has been an increasing emphasis on job factors and the use of I/O [Industrial/Organizational] theories and variables” [5]. I am not here to criticize Maslach. She developed the leading psychometric measure of burnout (the Maslach Burnout Inventory, or MBI) and dedicated her career to defining, measuring, and legitimizing a phenomenon that seemed beyond the pale of serious research fifty years ago. But without any formal psychology training, I’m team-OED on this one.

I believe anyone can burn out, which is why I want to consider burnout from a different angle. Let’s unpack some of the energy language involved. As I mentioned earlier, the concept of burnout had a grassroots beginning. Because the term, burning out, wasn’t coined by academics, and because it surfaced from the cultural imagination, there is something especially visceral about the imagery of burning out.

If you look at it one way, burning out is almost Romantic. Like, big R Romantic: feeling big, burning bright, being consumed, dying young. The Romantics believed that we generated art and poetry from our energetic core, yet there seems to have been a price involved for expending vitality too liberally. As William Blake’s Devil reminds us, Romantic energy favors passion above pure intellection [7]. The energetic core is physical. The Romantics meditated on emotions recollected in tranquility and emptied those recollections into poetry. And despite its egregious meditations on “purifying” the “real defects” of the common man’s vernacular, we all remember Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads for its argument that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” [8]. Producing Romantic poetry was not a mere intellectual task; it was energetic, affective labor. John Keats obviously did not contract tuberculosis from writing poetry, but the image of the twenty-five-year-old Keats, consumptive and dying, wasting away and writing feverishly, gestures to the energetic passion of burning and consuming. 

I don’t know about you, but when I was twenty-five I was a tiny baby and had accomplished hardly anything substantive. I certainly wasn’t flaming out at the height of my career. But I also can’t write poetry.

There was, even before the codification of thermodynamics laws, a sense of energy conservation that extended to bodies and their limitations. And because the concept of energy is often flattened into capital, or metaphors of capital, we have long been accustomed to describing energy as something we can spend or save. In Susan Sontag’s seminal Illness as Metaphor, she considers consumption from this angle, as both tuberculosis and capitalism. “Early capitalism assumes the necessity of regulated spending, saving, accounting, discipline - an economy that depends on the rational limitation of desire,” Sontag explains. “TB [tuberculosis, or consumption] is described in images that sum up the negative behavior of nineteenth-century homo economicus: consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality” [9]. Consumption, as disease and as economic behavior, is therefore anathema to the logic of early capitalism. 

In other words, because the consumptive patient does not regulate the expenditure of their passions and energies, because they squander their vitality, they waste away. Here, I am reminded especially of Dickens’s Richard Carstone, who, after a long period of dissipative behavior and reckless expenditure in anticipation of inheriting a fortune, literally wastes away. In the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, Richard dies of tuberculosis. But Dickens’s novel suggests that Richard’s death is related to the entanglement of energy and capital: that he wastes away because he has recklessly expended. He has been consumed. There’s a kinship here, I think, with the logic of burnout.

It’s not perfect, though. What about the “depression / disillusionment” part of burnout? That’s not giving me Keats or Wordsworth. It’s not really giving me Richard Carstone, either. Definitions of burnout in psychology literature indicate that depression and / or disillusionment are key elements of a burnout diagnosis. One doesn’t usually flame out and stop working, but rather flame out and keep going. Once the burn is gone, you’re just coasting as a husk. Psychologists acknowledge this as a crisis of morale, as well as exhaustion. Maslach and her colleague Susan Jackson argue that “reduced personal accomplishment” is a pillar of burnout, and is recognized by “reduced productivity or capability, low morale, withdrawal, and an inability to cope” [5]. The feeling I get from this angle isn’t so much the energy of self-immolation, but rather of running on fumes. 

What gets one to this point, of course, depends on who you are. It depends on your lived experience, your embodiment, and how you move through the world. It depends on your privilege and on what life throws at you. But Anne Helen Petersen opines, and I don’t disagree, that burnout is “the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves. It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above the water, and even the slightest shift - a sickness, a busted car, a broken water heater - could sink you and your family” [10].  Burnout is when you’re hanging on by a thread, and you keep hanging on.

The Question of “Calling”

The advice that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life feels ludicrous enough that I’m not sure people buy it today, if they ever did. I’m not saying I’m good at chasing the dollar and doing work I like sort of fine. I’m not. I am very, very bad at this. If I’m not researching and writing (not lucrative and definitely work) I start drooping and eventually wither like the saddest plant you never watered. But at least I know when I’m being exploited. 

The narrative of being “called” to your work elevates the moral imperative of your labor above your compensation for that labor. Unless one has been called to do religious work, which has a different valence and a literal connection to one’s belief in God, the idea of being called to a profession implies that one’s labor is holy work. For most of us, it isn’t, yet when “called,” we behave as though we should be honored to submit to exploitation. If you pick up recently-published books critiquing contemporary work culture, you are likely to find a section in each on America’s love affair with the Protestant work ethic. For example, Petersen’s book on millennial burnout, Can’t Even, explains that the “idea of a ‘calling’ stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God” [10]. Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist likewise traces what he calls the “laziness lie,” or the myth that if you’re not consistently productive you’re lazy and slacking, to the Puritan mindset [2]. (Puritans were English Protestants.) All of this is true: we’ve infused a Puritanical moral code into the ethics of labor. As a Victorianist and an Energy Humanities scholar, though, it troubles me for reasons that trace back to the initial framing of the thermodynamics laws. 

Because the scientists who developed the thermodynamics laws were Protestants (they were Scottish Presbyterians), the original language of thermodynamics is steeped in the Protestant work ethic and its economic implications for Britain. I discuss this in slightly more depth here and will absolutely expand on this subject in a future post. For now, though, the upshot is that the science of work production (i.e., energy) is the bedfellow of the Protestant work ethic. The morality of labor is therefore the historical bedfellow of work production in any of its modalities: mechanical, biological, economic, and so forth.

So when you think about a consequence like burnout, you’d assume that all this apparent morality, all that passion, would sustain one’s labor. If the Protestant work ethic were a watertight ethos, then indexing work and holiness (or at least morality) should be enough to prevent burnout. Right?

That’s psychologist Angela Duckworth’s argument, anyway. In her book, Grit, she argues that we should all find ourselves a “calling,” rather than a “career” or a “job” [11]. Despite the tone deaf impracticality of this suggestion, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to find meaning in one’s work. Like I said, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t do just that with my own work, and every one of my student evals has included a comment along the lines of: “Man, she really gets passionate about that Victorian stuff…” But Duckworth isn’t telling us, “find meaning in your work.” Instead, she’s telling us to make work our calling in life.

That distinction can mean the difference between burning out and laboring healthily. There’s a famous study by J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffrey A. Thompson about zookeepers called “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Meaningful Work” [12]. Bunderson and Thompson expose the high educational requirements and low average pay for zookeepers’ jobs. The reason zookeepers put up with that kind of exploitation, according to this study, is that they feel “called” to zookeeping. 

When Duckworth cites this study, it appears as supporting evidence for her argument that finding a “calling” keeps you going and going like the Energizer Bunny, burnout be damned! But I haven’t discovered mountains of literature agreeing with her. Moreover, I have yet to find an actual, living zookeeper who agrees with her. I’ll admit, my sample size here is small: I know only one zookeeper. And yet! That zookeeper left her “calling” because her working conditions were abysmal; she burned out; and now she works a corporate job she likes just fine, more or less. 

Duckworth’s argumentative thread throughout Grit maintains that passion is an antidote to burnout. When we look at the clinical research published by burnout scholars, though, the opposite seems to be true, with the caveat that burnout is precipitated by perceived failure when one is emotionally involved in one’s work. Pines’s existential perspective on burnout argues this position. She explains, “If you don’t feel a devotion to your cause… if you are not emotionally involved in your work - you are not likely to burn out. But if you are devoted to your work and are emotionally involved, if you expect to derive from your work a sense of existential significance - and you feel that you have failed - you are a likely candidate for burnout” [3]. Passion does not insulate us from burnout; but it can, coupled with perceived failure, precipitate burnout. 

Burnout Isn’t Monolithic

I’m ending this post with some thoughts on perspective. We can’t discuss burnout without considering how embodiment, privilege, and lived experience color one’s burnout and its particular existential flavor. 

Working too hard never felt like a choice to me, but the truth is that it was. If I’d slowed down a little, I wouldn’t have lost my food security, my home, or likely even my job. I did lose my excellent health. I almost certainly developed lupus, in part, because I prioritized my work above the material needs of my body. I made some of those choices because I am a woman. But even so, my race and class position have given me advantages like health care, a medical team, support networks, and physically non-demanding jobs. 

This is not what the wake of everyone’s burnout looks like.

My generation, those of us born between 1981 and 1996, may have popularized burnout. Anne Helen Petersen’s book on Millennial burnout proposes that this is because we Millennials have internalized the idea that our value as humans is the same as our value as workers. She writes, “Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as ‘human capital’: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy” [10]. I can’t argue with this. I hear a version of this critique from my husband all the time. Middle school was all about how you’ll never do well in high school if you don’t work hard enough now. High school was all about how you’ll never do well in college (or even get in, and you’d better get in) if you don’t work hard enough now. College was all about how you’ll never get a job if you don’t work hard enough now. And then there was the recession and student loans…

Say what you will about Millennials and our avocado toast, many of us have never learned how to not work all the time.

Yet the whole concept of Millennial burnout seems a little narrow. Petersen acknowledges the limitations of angling burnout from a generational point of view, especially when critics of color have responded to Petersen by flagging the intergenerational complexity of burnout in marginalized groups. For instance, Tiana Clark explains, “I wonder if this zeitgeisty phenomenon - this attempt to define ourselves as the spent, frazzled generation - has become popular because white, upper-middle-class millennials aren’t accustomed to being tired all the time? Aren’t used to feeling bedraggled, as blacks and other marginalized groups have for a long time?” [4] And as one of Petersen’s interviewees, a Black woman named Elly, puts it: “As a black woman I feel as if I were born tired. Every woman in my family has always worked since adolescence almost until the day they died. [...] I was born burned out” [13]. Black people of all generations and all socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States experience chronic burnout from dealing with systemic racism and the fallout of enslavement. And people who arrive in the US experience assimilation burnout. Gabriela, a first-generation immigrant, explains: “On top of everything else, you have this constant guilt of never being enough for this country. So you have to excel” [13].

And one last thing!

Now that we’ve established that burnout isn’t a monolith, I want to return to burnout and chronic illness in the context of embodiment. Burnout has real, material consequences on health, and these consequences stratify along lines of privilege.

Let’s take lupus as an example. Lupus is a chronic, autoimmune disease. Symptoms include joint pain and swelling, chest pain, low-grade fever, fatigue, rash, mouth sores, hair loss, and other obnoxious surprises; but mostly you tend to look pretty “normal.” Because lupus oscillates between periods of flare and remission, it’s easy to pass as able-bodied when you’re in remission and it’s possible, at least sometimes, to push through flares without raising suspicion that you’re in agony. It is too easy to limp along this way, actually. Unless you can’t raise your head (which happens) or your hands develop a debilitating rash (which also happens), you look pretty much like your old self. In fact, you look so “normal,” whatever that means, that you’re terrified any mention of your illness or any absenteeism will elicit suspicions of malingering. So you work harder, and it makes your disease worse.

Now add some intersectionality to this subject position. You’re a woman of color and you have lupus. Actually, most people with lupus are women of color [14]. In addition to fielding the burnout of intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, you’re facing the sisyphean task of either a) hiding your disease so people will take you seriously, or b) convincing people (including doctors) to take your symptoms seriously. Black women deal with racist medical stereotypes tracing back hundreds of years. While all women with chronic pain or mysterious and troubling symptoms are at risk of facing skepticism from medical professionals, Black women are both diagnosed with more conditions of chronic pain, and are dismissed more often when they present with it [15]. As a white woman with this disease, I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to live with lupus in a Black femme body.

At this early point in my research I’d tentatively say that burnout is a problem of both too much and too little energy. Clearly, flaming out like a Romantic poet is not the same as the never-ending slow burn of intergenerational trauma. But working too hard too fast, investing too much of yourself and failing, and laboring too long without rest or fair compensation are all pathways to burnout. While the topic of burnout does seem to be “trending” now, I’m still troubled by our glorification of grind culture and hustle culture. Stick around for more energy and anti-grind content. Thanks for subscribing, and if you enjoyed this post, please share it!

Citations

[1] Maslach, Christina, and Wilmar B. Schaeufeli. “Historical and Conceptual Development of Burnout,” (1-16) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993. Routledge, 2017.

[2] Price, Devon. Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked. Atria Books, 2021. 

[3] Ayala M. Pines. “Burnout: An Existential Perspective,” (33-51) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993. Routledge, 2017.

[4] Clark, Tiana. “This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like.” BuzzFeed News, 11 January 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tianaclarkpoet/millennial-burnout-black-women-self-care-anxiety-depression.

[5] Maslach, Christina. ”Burnout: A Multidimensional Perspective,” (19-32) in Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research. Wilmar B. Schaeufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (eds.), 1993, Routledge, 2017.

[6] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “burn-out (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1105766921.

[7] Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1790.

[8] Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 1800. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads. 1798 and 1800. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (eds.). Broadview, 2008.

[9] Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors. Picador, 1977.

[10] Petersen, Anne Helen. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

[11] Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2016.

[12]. Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2009). “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32-57. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.1.32

[13] Petersen, Anne Helen. “Here’s What ‘Millennial Burnout’ Is Like for 16 Different People.” Buzzfeed News. 9 January 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennial-burnout-perspectives

[14] “Women’s Unseen Battle: Shining a Light on Lupus.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 25 May 2023. https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/lupus/index.html#:~:text=People%20from%20certain%20racial%20and,and%20have%20more%20severe%20symptoms.

[15] Cleghorn, Elinor. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. Dutton, 2021.

October has come and gone, November is just about over, and we’re still talking about Dracula. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I spent part of November traveling internationally, and then paying for it with a truly nasty bout of COVID. The month seemed to escape! But indulge me with a Dracula post one last time and I promise you won’t regret it. We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in Posts 1 and 2 , but because the topic of logistics is a big deal in Stoker’s novel, I don’t want to leave it out! We’ll soon move onward and upward, and I have some good stuff planned. 😊

Apropos of logistics, I have written most of this post while traveling abroad. It often felt like I was cobbling my writing together while riding in trains, planes, and while waiting out layovers. If you know me well, you understand I feel most secure and focused at my home desk, and that I hate writing “on the go” (or in environments that don’t include my dogs). But, actually, there’s hardly a better desk for writing about logistics in Dracula than your own itinerant lap as you book it around Europe. While writing, I marveled at the ground covered by Dracula and his western pursuers, as Mina puts it: by road, by rail, and by water. Things move in this novel. Boxes are shipped; warehouse workers are bribed; trains are taken; teams of horses are hired. 

When you read Dracula, you’ll notice that the last third of the novel features a logistical campaign to, first, locate the Count’s scattered boxes of earth, and, second, chase him all the way back to Transylvania to kill him. Because a vampire can safely rest only in the soil of his homeland, Dracula arranges for “[f]ifty cases of common earth” [1] to be shipped to England and subsequently distributed among his six English estates. He literally ships himself to England in one of these boxes. The remaining forty-nine are for redundancy. The vampire hunters must track down each house, “sterilize” each box with a holy communion wafer, and then - when the Count realizes he’s losing ground (literally) - hunt Dracula as he retreats back east.

Considering the time frame of the novel’s narrative action, there is a remarkable amount of travel, shipping, and communication going on. Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania to meet Dracula for the first time in May, and by early November the whole vampire hunting Scooby gang is back in Transylvania, cutting off the Count’s head. Within those six months, Van Helsing travels and telegrams between Antwerp, Whitby, Amsterdam, and London; Mina spends extended time in Whitby before trekking east to marry an ailing Jonathan; and all the men (except Jonathan) travel to Whitby to care for Lucy. Meanwhile, Dracula ships himself to England on the Demeter, wreaks havoc for a bit, and then ships himself back to Transylvania on the Czarina Catherine. Lucky for the vampire hunters, Mina has memorized the train time-tables and knows exactly which trains will take them to Galatz, nearest to Dracula, as quickly as possible. She even calls herself the “train fiend.”

The movements of Dracula’s characters, and how they generate, extract, and order information, are markers of the fast-paced advances Harker references when he describes his shorthand diary as “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” [1]. Technologies of modernity like the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway reordered the experience of space and time. They expanded Britain’s empire, enhanced its supply chains, and allowed its subjects to travel long distances and communicate across the globe in minutes. But these logistical feats of empire came at a cost. In thermodynamic language, we might say that by creating localized order, or by funneling wealth and raw materials to the metropole for production, Britain created disorder in the larger system. The associated entropic consequences were, and are, located in the slow violence [2] of colonial and environmental disruption. 

In this post, we will explore some of the darker sides of nineteenth-century modernity, and how Dracula exposes anxieties “that the empire might strike back,” as Barri Gold puts it [3]. 

The technologies of logistical control allowed the British to expand their empire. It makes sense, then, that Dracula’s study and manipulation of western energy systems threatens their infrastructures of influence, and reflects on colonial violence.

Dracula, of course, represents both the colonizer and the colonized [3]. This means that, though Van Helsing repeatedly trivializes Dracula’s intellect and powers of movement in daylight, Dracula is brilliant at controlling the infrastructures of influence by night. He enrolls animals, women, and asylum patients to work for him at a distance. Moreover, even in the daytime he manages to spread out his resources so thoroughly that his adversaries cannot efficiently focus their efforts in tracking him down. They lose precious time as the clock winds down on Mina’s humanity, and they only manage to succeed in tailing Dracula because they put their own hefty resources and privilege to work.

All of this is horrifying to British sensibility because, like their own empire, Dracula operates as an “entropic individual” [3], or an entity who creates islands of localized order only by increasing entropy or creating disorder in the larger system. Dracula is so good at controlling logistics for the production of new vampires, i.e. the creation of his own empire, that if we’re comparing empires to empires, Dracula is arguably more British than the British.

Sympathy, Colonialism, and the Nasty Side of Telegraphy

Back in Part 1, we discussed how the telegraph was celebrated as Britain’s “Great Peace-Maker” [4], whose feminized powers of sympathetic connection promised to enjoin all of Britain’s diasporic subjects to sentimental fellow-feeling. Here, I’ll expose some of the realities behind that image. 

We know that, along with industrial expansion, the enslavement and trade of African peoples, and the trade of goods abroad, the telegraph was a tool of imperial accumulation. Far from simply connecting British subjects, international telegraphy was privatized and remained inaccessible to those who couldn’t afford the cost to cable long-distance messages [5]. Overpricing aside, the telegraph played a more sinister role in Britain’s peripheral territories, where it was used as a military tool to track the movements of adversaries [5].

The 1857 Indian Rebellion is an example that bears out telegraphy’s Janus-faced affordances, at once soliciting the “thoughts and prayers” of English Christians and targeting the subjects of those prayers for military attack. The 1857 Indian Rebellion (this is a contested name and is also called the “Sepoy Mutiny,” the “Revolt of 1857,” the “Indian Mutiny,” and the “First War of Independence” [6]) refers to an uprising against the British East India Company, who ruled the subcontinent on behalf of the British Crown. As Jill Galvan explains, “preachers in England declared [the telegraph] a conduit for rousing the hearts of the nation in sorrow over reported brutalities against Anglo-Indians. On the other hand, on the ground in India, wired communications helped the British to track their opponents’ movements and arrange troops rapidly, making telegraph lines a repeated strategic target for destruction by the insurrectionists” [5]. So, the telegraph cut both ways: apparently amplifying prayers for the people its communications elsewhere targeted for attack.

In addition to targeting the telegraph, itself, insurrectionists found discrete ways to organize by sending surreptitious messages through networks unknown to the British East India Company. Reporting on these opaque modes of transmission, the British sometimes referred to them as the “Occult Telegraph” [5]. Now: Imagine you are a late-century Victorian. You’ve lived through the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Maybe you’re currently living through the first or the second Boer War (they were both bad news for the British). It looks like the empire has some serious weaknesses. Maybe you open a newspaper and read about the clever ways colonial subjects, or those who don’t want to become them, are refusing subjugation. When eastern invaders with occult variations of electromagnetic technologies of communication and control show up again and again in late nineteenth century gothic literature, are you surprised? Probably not.

“Bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money”: How Many Millionaires Does It Take to Kill a Vampire?

Before Dracula retreats to Transylvania, he sneers at his western adversaries: “You think to baffle me, you - with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest; but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side” [1]. He’s right. Dracula spent centuries planning his invasion of Britain, and he can stand to wait longer and try again. Meanwhile, Mina’s soul is on the line for the western team. She will be literally damned if they don’t hurry up and slay the Count. 

But Dracula doesn’t just spread his revenge over centuries, he spreads it out spatially. Tracking down each and every one of those earth boxes is a very inefficient process, requiring many bribes and all the conveniences money and privilege can bring. As Mina puts it, “I felt so thankful that Lord Godalming is rich, and that both he and Mr. Morris, who also has plenty of money, are willing to spend it so freely” [1]. Too bad for Dracula that these dudes are loaded because, otherwise, England would have been crawling with Dracula’s spawn. 

At the risk of boring the reader, I’ve condensed Jonathan Harker’s quest for the location of Dracula’s earth boxes to the bulleted points below. Give it a read. Seriously. Consider how much ground Harker covers and how much time he wastes tracking down what the team needs to make any progress killing the Count. Consider, also, how many times Harker must catalyze his progress with a bribe or a name-drop:

• He starts by tracking down all the papers concerning the consignment of the boxes before talking to the Customs officers at the port where they landed. The harbour-master remembers the boxes (because they were super weird) and puts Harker in contact with the men who physically received the boxes. 

• Harker next visits King’s Cross, where he asks the station-master about the arrival of the boxes. The station-master puts Harker in contact with the proper officials.

• The carriers of the boxes report that when they delivered them to Dracula’s house, it was absolutely disgusting and covered with dust. Harker knows he’s on the right track.

• Harker drives to Walworth to talk to a Mr. Smollet, who checks a barely-legible notebook and gives Harker the destinations of the boxes. It’s pretty clear to Harker at this point that Dracula means to scatter his earth boxes all over London.

• Harker asks Smollet if he knows anything else. Smollet is mum until Harker bribes him. Well, as a matter of fact, Smollet does know an address! But he spells it wrong and Harker is misled. Lots of time is wasted.

• By way of more bribes, Harker manages to locate some workmen at a coffee shop. These fellows are discussing a warehouse and Harker overhears their conversation. 

• So Harker goes to this warehouse. There, he bribes a foreman and learns that this man had made two journeys from Dracula’s Carfax house and a house in Piccadilly. The foreman had taken nine earth boxes from the Carfax house to the Piccadilly house. 

• At this point, Harker needs more information about the Piccadilly house, including who purchased it. They really want to be certain that Dracula is the homeowner here because they plan on breaking and entering. So, Harker goes to the real estate agent and asks who bought the house. The agent refuses to release this information until Harker name-drops his very good friend, the eminent Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming), and then he gets whatever he wants. 

• When it’s time to break into the house, Van Helsing assures everyone not to worry - just act like you own the place and call a locksmith. No one will even notice. When I taught this novel, one of my students balked at this: “Wait, they’re just… they’re just breaking in and no one cares… at all???” Correct, friend. Again, Lord Godalming comes in handy here because, come on, he wouldn’t break into a house. He must own the place. It all goes according to plan, they break into the Piccadilly house, and BAM! Earth boxes are discovered and sterilized. 

What a ride! 

The text reads like a victory for the western team, but when you think about it, Dracula has these guys running all over London, throwing their money around and influencing people with their connections. This tactic of forcing his adversaries to scatter their energies is what leaves Mina vulnerable to Dracula’s attack, a fact he impresses on his western foes when he tells Mina: “They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me - against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born - I was countermining them” [1]. As we discussed in Part 1, some of the mistake here is their decision to cut Mina out of the loop while they put their man brains together. But as logistics and energy flows are concerned, the western team lacks Dracula’s ability to focus energy for movement and production. Instead, they are forced to track Dracula and his resting places down inefficiently, traveling long and winding distances, gathering information from sources that sometimes mislead them, and leaving Mina open to attack while doing so. 

It is questionable whether Dracula’s ending is “happy” for the British. Although they slay the Count, the task requires enormous energy and resources. Defeating Dracula is not an easy victory, even with the advantages of wealth and privilege. At the end of the novel, Lucy and Quincey are dead; and, as far as reproductive futurity goes, it looks pretty bleak. Jonathan and Mina’s son Quincey is the only child among all of the vampire hunters. 

When we consider the effort spent in this saga - the physical, emotional, national, and sexual energies expended - the cost to our Scooby Gang is enormous. Referencing Stephen Arata’s work on Dracula, Laura Otis has suggested that the vampire “brings to life Victorian fears of an energy drain, a degeneration of the nation’s vital force” [6], [7]. We discussed general fears of degeneration and energy dissipation in Part 2, where, recall, I explained that the virtues of productivity and production were written into the language of thermodynamic laws. Otis describes the fear of dissipation when she explains why Dracula is so horrible, even though he’s been slain: “Bled by a foreigner who reproduces himself infinitely, the British men are barely able to produce to the next generation” [6]. Dracula has thus disrupted the flow of bloodlines and inheritance, much like the wealth he’s taken out of circulation by hoarding it in his castle.

Wrapping Up

The technologies of modernity that allow Dracula’s characters to move and communicate are technologies of empire. While they organized and enriched Britain, they also created the slow violence of colonial entropy. 

When we look at Dracula as a villain, then, we can see echoes of just such energetic manipulation, where efficient production and localized order create disorder in a larger system. Dracula also underscores cultural fears of colonial retaliation, in language similar to the descriptions of the “occult telegraph” that followed conflicts like the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Of course, the general fear that Britain was losing its grip on energy control contributed to the novel’s frantic logistical campaign to exterminate a counter-colonial fiend. 

To this latter point, we see in the novel a clear energy loss on the western side as the vampire hunters inefficiently rush around, tracking Dracula down and leaving Mina vulnerable, then race to exterminate the Count before it’s too late to save her. In the end, even though they’ve killed their foe, all of these inefficient movements and energy expenditures leave the westerners (and, by extension, the empire) somewhat wasted. Lucy and Quincey are dead, Jonathan has sort of frittered out and gone grey, and the only couple to produce a child is Mina and Jonathan. 

…And there you have it! Thank you for joining me on three separate Dracula journeys! Stay tuned for something completely new next time; and if you enjoy this content, be sure to share it!

Citations

[1] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.

[2] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

[3] Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, The MIT Press, 2010.

[4] Horne, Richard Henry. “The Great Peace-Maker: A Sub-Marine Dialogue.” Household Words. 14 June 1851. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucl.b3352548.

[5] Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919. Cornell University Press, 2010. 

[6] Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, University of Michigan Press, 2001, 2011.

[7] Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45.

Happy Halloween!  

My Dracula series continues today with truly spooky topics: an exploration of scientific racism, degeneration theory, and the idea that energy language carries implicit moral weight. 

If you haven’t yet, check out part 1 of this series, which explains why the Victorians considered sensitivity and mediumship fundamentally feminine, electromagnetic traits. Spiritual and technological mediation were thought to be analogous communication modalities, and biological essentialism insisted that sensitive women like Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker possessed a uniquely feminine neurology allowing them to access networks of feeling and telecommunications alike. If Mina handles the data of vampire hunting, then by channeling her, Dracula breaches the empire’s security. 

You’ll notice quite a bit of overlap in this post with our previous discussion of the women in Dracula. Lucy and Mina again represent the boundary points of empire. This time, though, the loss of boundary integrity by monstrous infiltration signals racial degeneration and a reversion to a less “civilized” state. Count Dracula is coded as an ambiguously non-white parasite, threatening to turn England’s pure-blood, Anglo-Saxon race into white “savages,” one English woman at a time. 

The Victorians, everyone. They really were something.

Again, there is no need to have read Dracula, but you’re bound to get more out of this analysis if you’ve brushed up on your Stoker.

Energy and Decay at the End of the Century

Dracula was published in 1897, at the fin-de-siècle, so named because the century was literally ending, but also because it was very much a mood. You may have encountered or studied the aesthetics of “decadence,” produced during this period. One day I will write about Decadence as a movement, which deserves special attention; but for now we will apply the term to describe late-Victorian anxieties about the British empire and the state of its society. 

Decadence conjures up images of luxury, sensuality, hedonism… perhaps overdoing it, but without regret. Of course, decadence also means decline and decay. (Dorian Gray and his picture are a paradigmatic example of aesthetic decadence.) “Decadence” comes from the Latin verb decadere, or, to decay, as in the decay of the Roman Empire [1]. And finally, decadence has a moral valence. It signals depravity, corruption, and degeneracy. In fact, decadence is a term so rich with energy language that I’m practically jumping at the promise of unpacking it in the future. But let’s get down to business here and paint a picture of Britain at the time of Stoker’s writing.

By the end of the century, the British empire was huge but unstable. In the 1880s and 1890s, Britain had reached the apex of its imperial dominance in the so-called “scramble for Africa,” but not without opposition from the United States and Germany. And, with its increased reliance on fossil fuels, Britain depended more and more on the raw materials and labor of its peripheral territories. Britain employed what John Darwin calls “informal empire.” This means that they influenced colonial subjects “informally,” or by disrupting sociopolitical life and enacting violent cultural and economic transformations, rather than by simply conquering and dominating. Darwin reminds us, though, that this was really “the maximum influence that Victorian governments could exert… rather than the most they wanted to” [2]. So, again: the sun may have never set on the British empire, but the fear was that this victory could turn Pyrrhic if they didn’t maintain dominance as the empire grew. 

And maintenance requires energy. 

There is a whole word about this, actually. Entelechy, a Greek word coined by Aristotle and related to energia (see The Trouble with Defining Energy), is a special term that translates as “being-at-work-staying-the-same” [3]. Maintenance always requires ongoing effort. We understand this experientially, of course. Any homeowner will complain that maintaining a house is a never-ending saga (do not get me started about my basement water damage this Fall…). Even staying alive requires massive and ongoing work. If you are an empire, then, the larger you grow, the harder you are to maintain. So it follows that the larger the empire, the more it tips precariously towards decay.

Dissipation, Degeneration Theory, and the Decay of (White) Englishness

There was a general and widely-debated sense of fear as the century ended that Britain’s empire was decaying, and that English society was rotting along with it. Victorians debated whether certain elements of art and culture could contribute to the downfall of society. Even science seemed to point towards decay. The laws of thermodynamics were codified mid-century, so quite a bit before the late Victorian period; but even so, we can read the virtues of productivity written into scientific law when we examine how thermodynamics was originally framed. These virtues of energy science made a difference in justifying theories of degeneration and other modes of scientific racism later in the century.

The entropy law suggests that energy in the universe, taken as a closed system, becomes increasingly dissipated, or decayed. Less work-available. In Maxwell’s Demon: A Tale of Two Entropies, Part 1, I introduced Rudolf Clausius as the scientist who coined the term, “entropy.” In 1865, Clausius adjusted the second law of thermodynamics so that it described entropy as tending towards a maximum. However, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) had originally framed the second law fourteen years earlier in somewhat different terms. Thomson’s “Law of Dissipation” stated that there is a universal tendency towards energy’s dissipation, and that energy transfers result in progressively less concentrated forms until the sun and all other sources of energy in the universe burn out. Here’s where things get political. Thomson opined that only the Creator may restore energy to its original concentration, and so we (The British)  have a responsibility to use natural energy stores judiciously, directing each transfer to the benefit of mankind [4]. 

Exactly what the benefit of mankind meant was very clear: the expansion and progress of the British empire, and keeping that empire stable. 

Unlike Clausius, Thomson didn’t coin a new term to describe energy’s increasing diffuseness in a closed system. He used the term, “dissipation.” In the nineteenth century, “dissipation” carried both moral and physical weight. The trusty Oxford English Dictionary illustrates what I mean here. During the Victorian period, and well before, “dissipation” meant:

• “Waste of the moral and physical powers by undue or vicious indulgence in pleasure; intemperate, dissolute, or vicious mode of living”

• “Wasteful expenditure or consumption of money, means, powers, faculties, etc.; squandering, waste”

• “Distraction of the mental faculties or energies from concentration on serious subjects”

And, oh yeah, it also meant:

• “The passing away or wasting of a substance, or form of energy, through continuous dispersion or diffusion” [5].

When I reference the virtues of energy, then, I mean that there is a moral undercurrent built into the language chosen by physicists to describe what they observed about energy. Here’s the code: 

• Waste is bad

• Progress is good

• Excess without purpose is bad

• Work is good

• Letting resources sit there without using them is bad

• Growth and expansion are good 

Sounds pretty good for capitalist and imperial expansion, if you ask me. 

If you open a thermodynamics book today, you see the original equations but not the original language of the thermodynamics laws. I mean, really: when was the last time you cracked open your heat and mass transfer text and saw, next to your steam tables, a blurb about Englishness and a moral duty to direct energy transfers properly because only the Creator can undo entropy? That didn’t make the cut when I was in engineering undergrad. 

There is so very much more to say about this, and believe me: one day soon I will. 

For now, though, let’s jump back to the end of the nineteenth century and think about how decadence and fears of decay might have been received through these virtues of energy. 

The Decadence movement was an aesthetic rejection of these capital-driven morals of energy logic, and so we see quite a politics of pleasure in the face of the puritanical virtues of energy. Oscar Wilde, for example, famously published during this period, although I believe he took some issue with the term, “decadent.” But despite the ironically artistically productive conditions of apparent decay, far more sinister discourses emerged that suggested the English, themselves, might be dissipating. Like, as a race.

For one thing, evolutionary discourse threatened to muddy boundaries between races previously thought to be genealogically distinct. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, just after the codification of thermodynamics, which, itself, suggested that boundaries could not be trusted. Thermodynamics held that energy was fungible and transferable, slippery and polysemous. Victorians funneled these slippages between self and other towards long-held race, class, and gender prejudices. If Natural Selection favored evolution in one direction, could not a sort of dissipative degeneration happen in the opposite direction? In the fin-de-siècle, degeneration emerged as a new figure in the cultural imaginary - as “a locus of belief about transcendent forces affecting the pace and direction of change as well as the vitality of races and nations” [6].

Degeneration theory tied Victorian concern over energy dissipation, species isomorphism, and questions of origin to racial and social anxieties. Moreover, it found a way to use science to describe those anxieties, thereby reaffirming the authority of the British imperial project using the language of natural law. As Patrick Brantlinger explains, “an aspect of colonial modernity, racism in its supposedly scientific forms was basic to the colonizers’ mapping, census taking, legal and taxation systems, anthropology, and general understanding of the colonized” [7]. Degeneration theory contributed to this with the central assumption that civilization was an unstable condition, or that there were “degenerate types” lurking within characteristics of race, class, and gender that threatened to pollute English society. 

In the logic of degeneration discourse, races that had developed into higher states of civilization (read: white) might slip backwards, regressing to a lower moral state by allowing its degenerate populations to thrive. Clearly, the virtues of energy abhorred this possibility because it suggested dissipative laziness and general waste: not keeping up with the work required to maintain a productive state of civilization. At the same time, however, races that were considered naturally degenerate (read: not white) might mimic civilized races with the assistance of higher races, but they could never reach the full achievement of Europeans, even if they were morally developed. You know, through the civilizing project of missionary work or somesuch. Therefore, Brantlinger argues, “[t]he threat of racial degeneration among whites at home or in the colonies raised the specter of ‘the imperial race’ itself falling prey as a collective form of going native” [7]. The fear was that the Anglo-Saxon race would waste its resources and slip into some kind of atavistic form, while a non-white race advanced just enough to mimic English society, take over, and control civilization. 

Yeesh. 

But wait! There’s more.

The physician Max Nordau wrote a whole book (it was titled Degeneration, big surprise) in which he claims one can actually diagnose the “disease” of degeneration, based on its symptoms. He argues that forces of culture can create degeneration in individuals and, once present, these traits can be passed to offspring [8]. Degeneration was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, and a key figure in nineteenth-century theories of degenerate “types.” Lombroso famously wrote a book titled The Criminal Man, which was published in five editions between 1876 and 1897, the latter the year that Dracula was released. Lombroso’s criminology was famous for its essentialized notions of race, class, and gender. Whereas Nordau mentions the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lombroso refers to stigmata as markers of “born” criminals. For Lombroso, you either are a criminal or you aren’t [9]. 

Even before Stoker’s novel, the fear of Britain’s “going native” en masse within the heart of civilization is a striking overtone in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, a journalistic account of urban poverty. Like a good humanist, Mayhew attempts to taxonomize London’s urban population. He works hard to transform a chaotic mixture of humans, animals, and refuse into categories legible to sociology. Street people are therefore grouped under six “distinct genera.” And as he describes the people belonging to each “genera,” Mayhew appropriates the language of race to illustrate them, calling the unhoused “the wandering tribe of this country,” for example [10]. 

The composition of London’s street population was in flux with Irish immigrants escaping Ireland’s famine, but Brantlinger points out that many of these unhoused and disenfranchised of London were, in fact, non-British or non-white [7]. For example, Mayhew dedicates an entire chapter to “The Negro Crossing-Sweeper, who had lost both his legs.” Regardless of the actual racial composition of Mayhew’s subjects, there is slippage in his use of racialized language to describe the race-marked actions of generally class-marked bodies. For example, just as he maps racist descriptions of “nomadism” and “tribalism” onto London’s unhoused population, he also describes the street children as “Arab” thieves [9]. Mayhew’s account of the parasitic [10] drain on England’s resources by its street population is indicative of a growing zeitgeist in mid-to-late Victorian culture, captured by a fear of unbounded and contagious bodies consuming the neatness of empire.

Paranoia and Boundary Loss in the Imperial Gothic

So let’s think about how anxieties of degeneration and decay appear in Stoker’s novel. The European characters in Dracula represent the zenith of western civilization. They are, for the most part, rich white guys who mobilize technologies like the Kodak camera, the telegraph, and the typewriter with ease, even as a racially-ambiguous monster cannibalizes the blood of British women and infects the purity of the metropole. The figure of the vampire as a liminal, decayed state of Britishness is what we will discuss now. 

In her book, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that women were consistently the “boundary markers of empire,” ritualistically “planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” [11]. McClintock describes the “virgin” territories of land occupied by Indigenous peoples but considered unknown and unsettled by Europeans. She argues that the aesthetics of imperial conquest involves an “erotics of engulfment.” And while this may seem somewhat straightforward along a patriarchal binary, McClintock insists that, actually, the whole business of feminizing contested zones hints at a deeper paranoia of boundary loss and “male boundary confusion” [11]. 

If any of that is confusing, let’s place it into some context. Dracula performs the colonial anxieties of boundary loss, liminal status, and transitional states. The Count, himself, is a racially-ambiguous Other, a “whirlpool of European races” [12]. Recounting the history of his lineage, Dracula asks Jonathan Harker, “What devils or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” Blood in Dracula signifies not only sustenance for the vampire, but also racial composition and, for England, clear lines of inheritance. 

The women Dracula turns into vampires become both monsters and boundary figures. Although Lucy dies, becoming a vampire and a cannibal figure preying on street children, she is considered salvageable until her ultimately irreversible “undeath.” Her fiancé, her two unrequited lovers, and Professor Abraham Van Helsing pump Lucy full of male, virile, western blood in an attempt to counteract the Count’s drain on her pure Englishness. Similarly, Mina Harker is tainted by Dracula’s baptism of blood, but she is still a liminal body until the Count’s extermination at the novel’s conclusion, when her purity is redeemed. 

When Lucy does become a vampire, however, she becomes unreadable, unclassifiable, and must be eliminated by a penetrative death: a stake through the heart. When all the boys in the vampire hunting club approach Lucy’s tomb, they check out her vamp face for the first time and it is not cute. Seward attempts to describe it, but he does a terrible job, overusing words like “voluptuous” and “wanton.” Lucy’s face, ultimately, is unreadable to him:

“Never did I see such baffled malice on a face; and never, I trust shall ever be seen again by mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greek and the Japanese. If ever a face meant death - if looks could kill - we saw it at that moment” [12].

Because Seward does not have a suitable heuristic for making Lucy’s changed face legible to him, he attempts to read her features through a comfortable western template. He compares the expression on her face to the “coils of Medusa’s snakes,” using Greek mythology to read the new configuration of her flesh. Likewise, he sees the “open square” of her mouth as akin to passion masks, which reflect on but do not reproduce human facial expressions. When this fails to categorize Lucy’s new form accurately, she becomes monstrous. She’s a body out of control, the “bloofer lady,” cannibalizing the children she didn’t have the chance to produce during her natural life. 

The “bloofer lady” is the nickname given to Lucy by her child victims as transcribed by the Westminster Gazette [12]. The nickname is a class marker for these children, since they seem to be describing her as “beautiful” in their Cockney accents [13]. Both the Westminster Gazette journalist and John Seward miss the signification of the word, however, and instead reproduce in writing the phonetic spelling of the children’s sounds. What is meant to be “beautiful,” or what means lovely, pleasant, and positive is transformed into the monstrous “bloofer” word, a mystery in signification and utterly foreign to a formal British imagination. But if the lower-class children Lucy preys on find her beautiful in vampiric form, John Seward certainly does not. Instead, the best way he can describe her is a thing resembling yet perverting Lucy. The vampire is a boundary: a monstrous seam between Lucy and not-Lucy.

As McClintock suggests, women are boundary markers of empire, and in Dracula it is no different. Lucy is a “bloofer lady,” somewhere between beautiful and monstrous, an object unrecognizable to its observer. Similarly, the threat of “going native” in Stoker’s novel plays out at the traditional margin of imperial conquest, or the feminine body.

Lucy can degenerate, but the Count can aspire to only mimicry of Englishness. Dracula, who has spent centuries studying the British and planning his counter-colonial attack, could not possibly fool these vampire hunters, who can see straight through what Van Helsing repeatedly calls his “child-brain,” and his failure to be successfully assimilable [12]. Actually, Van Helsing parrots this child-brain refrain throughout the back half of the novel, to the point where it really gets old. He uses the language of degeneration theory and Lombroso, specifically, to insist that Dracula is a born criminal, predestined to crime. He is a degenerate “type” whose brain has not matured and cannot mature to the intellectual capacity of his western vampire hunters. Gesturing back to the fear of “going native,” Dracula is described by Van Helsing in terms similar to so many western renderings of Indigenous peoples: Dracula has not progressed, he’s atavistic, under-developed, and he’s supposed to be extinct. 

Summing It All Up

As always, I am left gobsmacked by the Victorians. What a time to have been alive. I’m convinced, though, that the vestiges of even the most unconscionable Victorian discourses (like degeneration theory) linger in our own cultural (sub)consciousness, and in the way we treat one another. As such, we should take the study of Victorian literature and culture seriously, even as we shake our heads and click our tongues at them. 

So let’s sum up and wrap this thing. 

The end of the nineteenth century invited a general mood of decay, as the British empire required more peripheral labor and resources to maintain and expand its limits, and as scientific discourses like evolution and thermodynamics suggested that society might degenerate. The fear was that Englishness, and indeed whiteness, might collapse into some kind of atavistic, pre-evolved state, while other races advanced enough to occupy British territory and respectability. In Dracula, women serve as liminal bodies at the contest points of empire, and while English bodies can degenerate, Dracula can advance enough to only mimic Englishness. You know, with his “child-brain” and all. 

What a ride! Thanks for sticking with me through it all. The Dracula series will conclude next time, and we’ll talk about logistics! Stay tuned!

Citations

[1] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “decadence, n., Etymology,” September 2023. <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9917799144>

[2] Darwin, John. “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion,” The English Historical Review 111, no. 447 (June 1997): 617-619. https://www.jstor.org/stable/576347.

[3] Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke University Press, 2019.

[4] Thomson, William. “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr. Joule’s equivalent of a Thermal Unit, and M. Regnault’s Observations on Steam.” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 4(1852): 8-21.

[5] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “dissipation, n.’, September 2023. <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6954397392>.

[6] Chamberlain, F. Edward. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by F. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, Columbia University Press, 1985.

[7] Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Cornell University Press, 2011.

[8] Nordau, Max. Degeneration, 5th ed. Translated from the 2nd edition of the German work. D. Appleton and Company, 1895.

98] Gibson, Mary. Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology. Praeger, 2002.

[10] Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 1851. Oxford University Press, 2012.

[11] McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. Routledge, 1995.

[12] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.

[13] Wike, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 467-493, www.jstor.org/stable/2873351.

Happy mid-October!

Let’s talk about energy and gothic, spooky things… like Dracula!

But if you’re picturing one of the film adaptations, especially the one where Keanu Reeves is Jonathan Harker and Dracula is in love with Winona Ryder (the biggest sigh), forget the whimsical and frankly sometimes baffling choices the twentieth century imposed on Dracula lore, pick up Stoker’s novel, and read the story of what happens in the original 1897 text. Trust me, you won’t regret it!

Detailed knowledge of Dracula is certainly not required to understand this series of posts, but you will extract more from the analysis if you’ve read the novel. Plus, it makes for great Halloween reading. 

Picture this: 

You are a late-century Victorian and the scariest thing totally ever is having your empire breached and your women violated by a caricature of a non-white European foreigner who wants to set up camp and turn the entire world (read: Anglo-Saxons) into equally ghastly versions of himself. That’s what went bump in the night for those people. 😑

Let’s jump right in!

“Sensitive” Mediums and Channeling Ghosts

When the esteemed Dutch polymath and vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing tries to expunge traces of Count Dracula from Mina Harker’s body by placing a communion wafer on her forehead, the plan seems to backfire. Instead of protecting her, the Host sears her skin, branding the Eucharist into her flesh and eliciting wails uttered in what her husband Jonathan describes as “an agony of abasement”: “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!” [1] Dracula has infected her. He has colonized her body and she is no longer pure. 

Literary criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has long acknowledged the English female body as the battleground of vampire hunting. When he lands on British soil, Count Dracula chooses Lucy Westenra as his patient zero because, as Mina puts it in a diary entry, “Lucy is so sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more acutely than other people do. …I greatly fear that she is too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world without trouble” [1]. Feeling too much causes trouble for poor Lucy: she wants to marry all three dudes who propose to her; she’s such a sap that she’s easily influenced by stronger minds; and because of her ostensible sexual appetite and sympathetic receptivity, she becomes the penetration point of Dracula’s countercolonial attack on Britain.

Despite her concern that Lucy is dangerously soft and receptive, Mina is not without her own sensitive qualities. She is essentially the “mediating woman” of Dracula. It is Mina who mediates communications data: translating, transcribing, and collating the narrative that becomes the novel’s text. Through Mina’s labor, we receive the story and the sympathies of its characters. We do not receive, the editor’s note reminds us, any “needless matters”; and as such we understand that the text is mediated through a politics of selective omission. The sympathies we glean arrive only via the narrative Mina delivers. No other voices or information are included. 

The points above, re: women, sensitivity, mediation, and information security are crucial, and they are what Part 1 of my Dracula Series is about. 

What does sensitivity have to do with communication?

And what do emotions and mediation have to do with energy in Dracula?

Why is the sensitive, mediating woman as penetration point for a foreign invader so horrific in the fin-de-siècle Victorian imagination?

In this three-part series, I merely scratch the surface of interpreting the wealth of energy language in Dracula. I have been thinking and writing about energy in this novel for seven years and am comfortable with the extant criticism on energy in late Victorian gothic novels, so please accept my disclaimer that I am not generating any new knowledge here, but rather synthesizing some important, though not exhaustive, arguments.

For those interested, I do have an article on Dracula, colonialism, and electromagnetic field theory that’s published in the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Check it out if you can!

Now: On to the good stuff.

The idea that women were inherently “sensitive” appears repeatedly in Victorian science and in late-century Gothic literature. When I say “sensitive,” I mean in qualities of sympathy and communication. Today, we might call this trait “empathic.” The Victorians believed that women instinctively picked up on others’ emotions and feelings, and that perhaps this ability followed from physiological structures that differentiated women’s nerves from those of men. The logic was that feminine nerves endowed women with what Jill Galvan describes as “sympathetic excess - an affective or spiritual quality” [2]. Women were just so extra because of their nerves. Also, maybe they could talk to ghosts. 

This spiritual quality arising from women’s sensitive nerves was highly coded as electromagnetic or electric. During the transatlantic Spiritualist movement, beginning in the 1840s and ‘50s, mediums claimed to channel the souls of departed spirits, transmitting messages from the dead by reaching through the void and sensing ghostly energy. Spirit energy was thought to exist materially in the “luminiferous ether,” or the invisible yet ubiquitous medium that facilitated the propagation of heat, light, electricity, and magnetism through space. Just as the ether conveyed radiation, it supported the transmission of spiritual energies. Think of it like this: the ether allowed radiation energy to travel through space; and when you died, your spirit’s energy ended up as another kind of radiation in the ether. 

Some late Victorian scientists took this idea quite seriously. There was a whole cohort called the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) whose mission was to investigate psychic phenomena with all the rigor of institutional science. Ghosts, the SPR reasoned, weren’t so much supernatural as they were natural phenomena waiting to be mapped and described [4]. Along these lines of reasoning, the spirit medium channeling the dead became a kind of electromagnetic technology, like a radio transmitter and receiver. She was sensitive enough to “tune into” spirit energy, where regular people sensed nothing. Jeffrey Sconce goes so far as to describe spirit mediums as “wholly realized cybernetic beings - electromagnetic devices bridging flesh and spirit, body and machine, material reality and electronic space” [3]. 

(Brief interlude. This, by the way, is why the Nefastis Machine in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is so funny to me. It bridges thermodynamics /  information theory with notions of mediumship, sensitivity, and communication. Plus, the Medium communicating with the “actual” Maxwell’s Demon has to stare at a picture of James Clerk Maxwell, as if channeling the spirit of the physicist who made such eminent contributions to ether and electromagnetic field theories in the nineteenth century. See my Maxwell’s Demon post for more!)

For the most part, only women were sensitive enough to do the complex, affective labor of channeling the dead or sensing another individual’s mind at a distance. It was the feminine nerves that provided the crucial apparatus for telepathy. And, though this history certainly has the trappings of “hysteria” and nerve pathologies that the Victorian establishment used to control women, Spiritualism was a nuanced beast. The Spiritualist movement involved all sorts of creative resistances to patriarchal control, as well as gender fluidity - think: gender could be unstable during channeling or trance states. So Spiritualism wasn’t only about how women are affectively excessive. And, if they are, maybe that’s a good thing. 

The Flow of Data: Mediums and Other High-Tech Communications Devices

Okay, great, so we’ve established that women were considered physiologically, and thus affectively, more sensitive than men, which apparently predisposed them to mediumship and telepathy. What does this have to do with communications media and administrative labor like that performed by Mina Harker in Dracula? 

This question is the topic of much relatively recent scholarship. For instance, Jill Galvan points out that “the development of female mediumship parallels women’s increasing involvement over the course of the period in technological modes of communication mediation” [2]. Women on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to occupy a sizeable chunk of the telegraphic workforce, and by the early twentieth century telegraphy was a feminized field. Similarly, typing, shorthand, and telephone operation were solidly female occupations [2]. Recall that this is Mina Harker’s area of expertise. She studies shorthand and teaches it to Jonathan. His knowledge of shorthand is what allows him to keep a diary in the Count’s presence (Dracula doesn’t know shorthand), so Jonathan really owes her one. Mina is also a skilled typist and produces a typed manuscript of the vampire hunters’ narrative in “manifold” (three copies at once on her typewriter) by transcribing, translating, and pasting epistles, diary entries, and other information when necessary. 

Where Lucy is exceptionally receptive in her affective sensitivity, Mina channels all vampire hunting data. Dracula attacks both women, and he even uses Mina as a sort of telepathic radio. Once Dracula has exchanged blood with Mina, she unwittingly becomes a double agent, tapping into Dracula’s thoughts and feelings when Van Helsing hypnotizes her. However, she also relinquishes information to Dracula when he taps that same telepathic flow. Dracula makes rather literal here the notion of the “mediating” woman as a receiving and transmitting device. That is, the concept of the mediating woman considered the actual human woman part of the circuitry of sympathetic communication. She relayed thoughts and feelings by sensing and transmitting them, either telepathically or telegraphically. 

The Victorians considered the telegraph, itself, the nerves of the empire. Seemingly wrapped around the globe, the telegraph cables carried national sympathies to Britain’s diaspora in the spirit of unifying sentimentality. The idea that the telegraph would enjoin British subjects the world over to peaceful communication was so popular that Charles Dickens even published Richard H. Horne’s poem, “The Great Peace-Maker,” in Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words. “The Great Peace-Maker” is a drawn-out dialogue between the Telegraph and the Sea, in which the Sea is a NIMBY and tells the Telegraph to get lost, but the Telegraph announces that he’s “the instrument of man’s desire / To hold communion with his fellow man”, and, after all, “science is man’s destiny” [5]  so quit belly-aching. The future is now, old man.

You can’t shut the telegraph up in Horne’s poem; but, really, personifying the telegraph was a popular trope at the time. Telegraphy was often allegorized in political art. Below, for instance, the joined hands of America and Britain create the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. In the image of white women’s bodies, peace and goodwill, like a telegraphic message, flow from one nation to another through physical touch and feeling. It’s hard to read, but the message flowing from one woman to the next is: “Glory to God in the highest, on Earth peace goodwill toward men.” (And all this despite telegraphy’s totally unabashed and pivotal role in exercising authority and military control over Britain’s colonial territories! More on this when we get to Part 3 of this series - on logistics!) Women, of course, mediate international sympathies at the boundaries of empire, simultaneously protecting national integrity and expanding national influence. 

But because women mediate sympathies (and, frankly, information) at Britain’s infrastructural seams, penetrating the sensitive and mediating woman was most horrific to the late Victorian cultural imagination.

Enter Count Dracula. Dracula violates the purity of England’s women, but he also makes a beeline for the sensitive ones who will submit to his thrall, and whom he can tap to breach data crucial for a successful countercolonial campaign. 

Mina’s “Man’s Brain”, “Woman’s Heart”, and Precious Womb

The thing about the sensitive, mediating woman was that, though she provided a service in transferring energy, it didn’t drain her own resources. In a trance state, a spirit medium was a vessel for energies that moved through her. Analogously, the telegraph operator, typist, or secretary was responsible for transmitting and organizing information, but not for producing it. Jill Galvan suggests that a reversion to automatism or a state of unconsciousness is a key trait depicted in portraits of female mediumship of all sorts [2]. If the woman in charge of your messages (spiritual or technological) is a feeling automaton, but not a thinking one, then she can transmit your data while protecting its privacy. 

As the Victorians saw it, this was good news for everyone involved. For Britain, having a feeling automaton with her brain idling at the switchboard was a win because she could patiently and confidentially organize and transmit information without interfering with its message. For the women doing the labor, reverting to a sensitive, automatic state freed up energy for her womb, which was thought to require so very, very much. Biological discourses at the time interpolated the conservation of energy law to argue that women should devote most of their resources to child bearing, rearing, and tending the home. There was only so much energy a woman could draw upon in the first place, and her silly womb sucked most of it dry [6]. That’s why women were no good at book learning, didn’t you know?

But they could be great telegraph operators and typists because that kind of work required lots of sympathetic reception and little original thought. 

So, in Dracula, the vampire hunters really don’t know what to do with Mina. She poses a problem for them because even though she, like Lucy, is a sensitive woman, Mina is also sharp as a tack. Unlike sweet Lucy, who is, until her death, an empathic airhead (and the object of desire for nearly all the men in this book), Mina is a feeling and thinking woman. It simply won’t do. Van Helsing decides she is not vampire hunting material and the men have to cut her out of their boys’ club. He explains to Jack Seward that Mina “has a man's brain… and a woman’s heart.” Moreover, if they let her play Buffy any longer, who knows what might happen? “Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer… And, besides, she is young woman and not so long married; there may be other things to think of some time, if not now” [1]. 

Read: We have to protect her womb from that vampire hunting nonsense. Can’t let that thing go barren. 

Combining these threads, then, we can understand why Dracula goes for English women first when he mounts his attack on Britain, and why this choice would have been specifically monstrous to a late Victorian readership. Remember: the British empire at the end of the century was large, but unstable. Nineteenth-century technologies like telegraphy facilitated even more growth, and allowed Britain to use its “Great Peace-Maker” as a military tool within its colonial sphere of influence. As more women occupied jobs in technological modes of communication, particularly following the trans-Atlantic Spiritualist movement, Victorians began to conceptualize the mediating woman as an especially sensitive, electromagnetic apparatus. There she sat at the switchboard, receiving and transmitting messages to and from all over the empire. She was an infrastructural node. 

By tapping that especially sensitive, electromagnetic woman, Count Dracula not only draws on the insecurities layered into discourses of telepathy and gender, but he also penetrates (literally and figuratively, in a number of ways…) an imperial node through which information flows. He breaches the security of the empire and violates its women in one fell swoop.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this Dracula series, where I’ll discuss more about Dracula, race, and theories of degeneration in the nineteenth century. Finally, I’ll wrap up all the Dracula stuff by analyzing logistics and energy flows in Part 3.

Citations

[1] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.

[2] Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919. Cornell University Press, 2010. 

[3] Sconce, Jeffry. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Duke University Press, 2000.

[4] Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford University Press, 2002.

[5] Horne, Richard Henry. “The Great Peace-Maker: A Sub-Marine Dialogue.” Household Words. 14 June 1851. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucl.b3352548.

[6] Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. The MIT Press, 2010.

So far in this series, we have discussed how Maxwell’s Demon emerged in 1867 as a thought experiment designed to reveal the statistical nature of the second law of thermodynamics. If you’re new to this thread, be sure to check out the historical background and politics of Maxwell’s Demon in Part I. Part II takes us to the Information Age, where the question of entropy reframes Maxwell’s Demon for a different set of cultural concerns. Therefore, I want to begin Part II of “A Tale of Two Entropies” by hopping forward roughly a century to 1965, when Thomas Pynchon published his short novel, The Crying of Lot 49. By that time, both entropies had circulated in the public imagination such that Pynchon could insert a tongue-in-cheek Demon in his novella, yoking the two interpretations of entropy. 

A Literary Prelude

As an expert of Victorian literature and science, I claim no mastery at all over postmodernism or the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon. With that disclaimer out of the way, I’m now going to muddle through a gloss of entropy in a passage from The Crying of Lot 49. This novella captured my interest when I first read it as an undergrad, and it has remained a personally generative text as I’ve learned more about the Victorians over the years. Despite the definitively postmodern exploration of representation and semiotics, there is, to my mind at least, something surprisingly Victorian about how the characters in this novel grasp at representations to render a physical reality. And equally, yet ironically, as Bruce Clarke puts it, there is also something “un-Maxwellian, if not un-Victorian” about that same point. 

After all, Maxwell’s particular strategies were successful indeed because his models remained metaphorical or analogical [1]. Victorian physics relied on various strategies of representation, from mathematics to metaphor, to coax energy out of its capacious and imponderable invisibility. Yet Maxwell, unlike some of his contemporaries, never let those “factual fictions” [1] stand in for reality. He instead used them as scaffolding or mediating devices. As such, the Demon is an aid for Maxwell, rather than something to be hardened into anthropomorphic form or objective agency. Pynchon’s novel plays with this Victorian question in a postmodern context.

By and large, The Crying of Lot 49 is not “about” entropy; but it does place Maxwell’s Demon in the center of a larger allegory on communication and representation. What concerns us here, specifically, is the “Nefastis Machine,” or Pynchon’s satirical version of a perpetual motion engine. Spoofing on Victorian spiritual and telepathic valences of electromagnetic field theory and the luminiferous ether, Pynchon positions “communication” at the nexus of thermodynamic entropy and information entropy.

I’ll mention here that the Nefastis Machine is something I puzzled over as an undergrad in a postmodern lit class, but whose imagery is now hilarious to me because I understand how the Victorians collapsed energy science, spirituality, mediumship, and communication technologies. There is so much to unpack from the Nefastis Machine, but I’ll explain the entropy parts and how they map to communication theory at the time of Pynchon’s writing.

The Nefastis Machine is a box containing an “actual” Maxwell’s Demon with which a “sensitive” individual communicates by staring at a picture of Maxwell in profile [2]. Inside the box, the Demon sorts gas molecules, and then telepathically communicates the information about those molecules to the sensitive. The sensitive feeds that quantity of information back to the Demon (again, telepathically), and a piston moves. 

Nefastis, the machine’s inventor, explains his fascination with entropy to the novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, but she finds the entire affair confusing and overwhelming.

“He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy… She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the ‘30’s, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where” [3].

Pynchon stuffs fifty years of Information Theory and its mutagenic consequences for Maxwell’s Demon in this tidy paragraph. No wonder Oedipa’s head is swimming. In short, we now have two entropies: one thermodynamic, and one informational. Their equations look the same, but they are not the same. Somehow, Maxwell’s Demon connects them. 

Nefastis concludes, “Entropy is a figure of speech, then…a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.” Feeling like a “heretic,” Oedipa asks, “But what… if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?” [3]

And this is the crux of the issue. Very much like metaphor, which operates based on similarities and differences between two objects, the differences between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy matter. In fact, N. Katherine Hayles made this very point in her book, Chaos Bound [4]. We cannot collapse these two entropies into sameness, even if their differences are culturally and mathematically suppressed. 

So, I wanted to begin with The Crying of Lot 49 because it provides us with a vivid image of the dilemma: the allegory as a shifting, changing, and (not quite) material unit. Maxwell’s Demon in the Nefastis Machine is a blackboxed variety of what was originally a neat thought experiment about the second law of thermodynamics. Now we have a Maxwell’s Demon, purportedly a concrete agent that we can never see but that definitively communicates with some, but not all, individuals about the locations of gas molecules. The Nefastis Machine belongs to Pynchon’s commentary on the information model of entropy. He intertwines thermodynamics and information theory not as natural bedfellows but as paradox: perpetual motion through communication where it is thermodynamically impossible.

We are now in a position to understand how entropy acquired another definition, as information, and how Maxwell’s Demon figures in that scientific and cultural shift. 

Reconfiguring Entropy: From Boltzmann to Shannon

Let’s backpedal now, returning to the Victorians. Recall from Part I that Maxwell engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Rudolf Clausius about the kinetic theory of gases. It was Maxwell who extended Clausius’s work on molecular physics and thermodynamics. 

There was another important physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who adopted Maxwell’s premise that the second law of thermodynamics had only statistical certainty, and who derived a formula called the “H theorem” to describe the statistical distribution of thermodynamic molecular motion [5]. Boltzmann’s stance on the thermodynamics of microstates adjusted through the years; but by the 1870s he favored a statistical over a mechanical model, thus shifting entropy into the domain of probability. 

The H theorem supplied a proof of the second law of thermodynamics using probability calculus. In Jos Uffink’s analysis of this initial iteration, Boltzmann had not yet maneuvered his way into probability theory; rather, he marshalled the usefulness of probability calculus to further the description of a mechanical theory of entropy [6]. Nevertheless, he was inching towards his eventual description of entropy as a statistical measure of randomness in a closed system. The more random or dispersed the state of the molecules, the higher the entropy.

At this point, we need to make an important distinction. For Clausius, the scientist who initially coined the term “entropy,” a hot gas is more entropic because its molecules move faster and it therefore undergoes a swifter thermal exchange. For Boltzmann, however, the hot gas is more entropic because faster-moving molecules intermix more thoroughly, producing a more random configuration. 

The more arrangements, the more randomness, the more entropy. 

In 1929, Maxwell’s Demon returned to the conversation when Leo Szilard argued that, in order to sort molecules, the Demon needed a “kind of memory.” Sitting in his chamber, he needs to remember where fast and slow molecules are located [7]. Leon Brillouin famously took up the “memory” question in 1951. His paper, “Maxwell’s Demon Cannot Operate” [8] argues that the Demon can’t do his sorting job at all because the vessel he lives in is too dark. In technical terms, it has the radiation properties of a “blackbody,” or something that radiates as much energy as it absorbs. If we equip the Demon with a headlamp, on the other hand, he can see his molecules and sort them. But by doing this, we also introduce a new source of illumination in the system. The system must now absorb this new radiation, and so the information the Demon acquires is offset by an increase in entropy. 

Where we once had a “neat-fingered being,” or even a valve (as Maxwell preferred it), we now have a Demon with a headlamp. Most importantly, Brillouin’s paper concludes that information and entropy are connected. As Hayles summarizes, “the potent new force of information had entered the arena to combat entropy” [4].

In a 1987 article in Scientific American [9], Charles H. Bennett claimed that the Demon doesn’t necessarily need a headlamp. This is a question of memory storage, not of measurement, he argued. Because the Demon needs to remember the measurements he makes, at some point he will also need to clear out that space to make room for more data. The destruction of that information results in entropy increase. 

Bennett’s point is significant because it signals a shift in the imagination of entropy. No longer is entropy attached to Victorian anxieties of the universe running down and growing cold; no longer are we awaiting an apocalyptic “heat death” as prophesized by our scientific authorities in one sweeping cosmological gesture. Now we are dealing with the fear of information pile-up, until, as Hayles puts it, “[information] overwhelms our ability to understand it” [4].

But Bennett did not bring us to the thermodynamic/information isomorphism that Pynchon grapples with and satirizes in The Crying of Lot 49. That move we owe to Claude Shannon. 

In 1948, an engineer at Bell Laboratories named Claude Shannon published a paper titled “A Mathematical Theory of Information” [10]. This two-part paper issued an argument that became the foundation of what we call Information Theory. 

Simply, Shannon argued that information and entropy were the same thing. 

Shannon based this claim on the fact that his equation for entropy took the same form as Boltzmann’s equation for entropy. Hayles calls this “Shannon’s Choice” [4], i.e., the choice to equate these two entropies based on the similarities of their equations, despite a crucial gap in meaning. 

Let’s think about what she means here. For Shannon, less information means less entropy. It defines the state of a system that is easy to predict, that does not surprise us much. This is like saying you have a drawer of 10 pairs of socks, but 8 pairs are black. If you reach into the drawer with your eyes closed, there is a high probability that you will grab a black pair. That’s low entropy. 

But for Boltzmann, choice has nothing to do with entropy. Entropy probability is derived from not knowing the microstates of a system. Here, think about that slow-moving, low-entropy gas. The molecules are less intermixed, and so we know more about them. It is easier to make predictions. 

Obviously, there is a difference. 

Circling Back

Remember that in Pynchon’s novel, Nefastis told Oedipa, “Entropy is a figure of speech, then… a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”

Having glossed a history of information entropy, I want to return to this moment one last time to consider Nefastis’s comment.

Let’s start here: “Entropy is a figure of speech.”

Entropy is a term coined by Rudolf Clausius in 1865, in part chosen for its similarities to “energy” (an ancient word, then new to science: see my post, “The Trouble with Defining Energy”). Clausius chose and designed this word as part of a deliberate agenda to codify the two laws of thermodynamics. 

Therefore, we would say that entropy “actually” is a material-discursive entity. That is, while we cannot reduce entropy to simply a figure of speech, simply a metaphor, entropy is also not an objective thing, out there in the universe, that Clausius and his colleagues “found” and “discovered.” 

Entropy, like energy, is both physical entity and discursive construction. It is what Donna Haraway (and other feminist science and technology studies scholars) would call a “natureculture,” or the entanglement of natural phenomena and the historical/cultural/semiotic practices through which we make sense of natural phenomena [11].

So, Nefastis is not quite right here; but he’s also not completely wrong. Particularly, what makes entropy so perplexing is its transformation along cultural and historical fault lines. In the Victorian era, Thomson and his colleagues weaponized entropy against the secular materialists like Darwin and Tyndall in order to shore up support for a North British theological agenda in physics. In the Information Age of the twentieth century, however, the cultures shifted; the anxieties shifted. Shannon could argue that information and entropy are the same thing based on mathematical isomorphism, but also because, as Bennett argued, information pile-up was a novel cultural threat. The Victorians did not worry about dealing with too much information, but people living in the mid-twentieth century did, and I imagine those twentieth-century folks would be horrified by the information pile-up in our lives today.

And where is the Demon in all of this? 

“The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally gracefully, but also objectively true.”

What does it mean to make a metaphor “objectively true”? If you think about it, a metaphor can never be objectively true. It’s anathema to figurative language. If I say, “my love is a fire,” let’s truly hope my love is not literally fire. In fact, it can’t be; that makes no sense. This metaphor operates because love and fire are different entities. We see a fire in our mind’s eye. We know how hot it is, how it burns, how we can kindle a fire, stamp it out, or let it rage out of control. All that sensory richness we pack into the word “fire” and then attach it to the word “love.” Fire is the concrete anchor, and love is the floating abstraction that we pin down with that anchor. And, in doing so, a sort of magic happens where “love” acquires new dimensions. But love is never literally fire. 

Returning to the Demon, then, what does it mean when Nefastis says that Maxwell’s Demon makes the metaphor of entropy objectively true? I would argue that Pynchon is alerting us to the reality that has emerged from a heuristic of representation. In fact, most of The Crying of Lot 49 questions what is “real” and what is representation. In the case of Maxwell’s Demon, though, the original metaphor that Maxwell used in his letter to Tait is stacked beneath other metaphors. In other words, the “anchor” of the metaphor is no longer a concrete entity, but rather another metaphor. The Demon becomes its own anchor: the sorting Demon is now a headlamp-wearing Demon. From here, new science and cultural context emerge intertwined. To my mind, that’s what Pynchon is getting at. 

So, the Tale of Two Entropies is still unfolding, particularly because contemporary data science uses the concept of information entropy as a modality that will inevitably shift as time progresses. Again, as a Victorianist, I don’t claim familiarity with that domain of knowledge, and when my husband, a data scientist, discusses his work with me I sometimes nod politely because I just don’t know what on earth he’s talking about. However, you don’t need data science expertise to work through the history of entropy, luckily for me. I think that tracing out the historical trajectories of scientific metaphors is a useful exercise because it reveals how figures like Maxwell’s Demon mediate between our desires and our measurements in and of the world around us. 

Citations

[1] Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. University of Michigan Press, 2001.

[2] Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. HarperCollins Publishers, 1966. 

[3] Maxwell, James Clerk. Matter and Motion. 1876. Macmillan, 1920. 

[4] Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Cornell University Press, 1990.

[5] Harman, P.M. Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics. Cambridge University Press, 1982.

[6] Uffink, Jos, "Boltzmann's Work in Statistical Physics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/statphys-Boltzmann/.

[7] Szilard, Leo. 1929. “On the Reduction of Entropy as a Thermodynamic System Caused by Intelligent Beings.” Zeitschrift für Physik 53: 840-856. 

[8] Brillouin, Leon. 1951. “Maxwell’s Demon Cannot Operate: Information and Entropy. I.” Journal of Applied Physics 22 (March): 334-357. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1699951

[9] Bennett, Charles H. 1987. “Demons, Engines, and the Second Law.” Scientific American 258 (November): 108-116. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/demons-engines-and-the-second-law/. 

[10] Shannon, Claude E. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Information.” Bell Systems Technical Journal 27 (July and October): 379-423, 623-656. 

[11] Haraway, Donna, and Thyrza Goodeve, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway. Routledge, 1999. 

See also: Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 1993. 

Even if you don’t know what it is, you have probably heard of “Maxwell’s Demon.” 

Like Schrödinger’s Cat, Maxwell’s Demon circulates in the cultural imagination more potently than the actual thought experiment it originally signified. The brainchild of James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, what we call “Maxwell’s Demon” has survived more than a century of technological transitions and remains wedded to the concept of “entropy,” though what that means, exactly, is complicated and differs from its Victorian origins.

In this two-letter series, I will explore the birth and evolution of Maxwell’s Demon. Part 1 lays the historical, political, and conceptual groundwork for a subsequent discussion of what entropy means to basic Information Theory (Part 2). Depending on your background, or from where you’ve acquired familiarity with the term “entropy,” you might associate this word with one of two very different registers: on the one hand, entropy signals disorder, dissipation, and “heat death.” On the other hand, it also means information, “equivocation,” and the destruction of information as memory. 

What feels like a tension between these groupings of definitions is really more like a point of rupture in cultural association, where a Victorian allegory (the demon) gets imported into the information age and is forced to fine-tune how he mediates between cultural anxiety (or desire) and physical theory. What is fascinating about Maxwell’s Demon, I think, isn’t as much what Maxwell’s original thought experiment was, or how that concept mutated to fit the twentieth century, but rather how allegory performs those operations across time. 

So, what follows is a Tale of Two Entropies, and the story of how Maxwell’s Demon remains the hinge point of two different, yet generative, scientific applications. 

Introducing Thermodynamic Entropy

Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment designed to reveal the statistical nature of the second law of thermodynamics. In order to understand what the demon does, we need to establish a basic understanding of this law, and the kind of cosmological resonance it had in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The second law of thermodynamics (sometimes referred to as the “entropy law” or the “law of dissipation”) places a directionality constraint on energy transfers. It states that, in a closed system, the amount of work-available energy moves down a gradient from availability to diffuseness. This is why restoring a closed system to a higher state of order requires an outside input of energy; or, taking the universe as a closed system, this is why the universe naturally drifts towards a state of cold, workless equilibrium, or “heat death.” This is also why your coffee will not spontaneously reheat itself, and why perpetual motion machines (i.e., getting work output for nothing) cannot exist. The arrow of time is inextricable from such processes.

In 1865, Rudolf Clausius attached a new word to this dismal concept. He coined the term, “entropy,” to denote the energy unavailable for work production, a value which necessarily increases over time in any closed system. Clausius arrived at “entropy” partly because it sounded like “energy,” and partly because its roots include the Greek word for transformation [1]. For Clausius and his contemporaries, entropy was a measure of the disorder in a system. 

One of those contemporaries was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who, like Clausius, published an interpretation of the two laws of thermodynamics. Thomson formally synthesized his own findings with those of James Prescott Joule, Clausius, and Macquorn Rankine; and, in 1852 Thomson presented a short series of papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh that clarified what he called the “dissipation” of mechanical energy as a universal tendency in nature [2]. 

“Dissipation” was as much a mood as it was a state of matter. Thomson selected “dissipation” to describe the energetic tendency to drift towards diffuseness; but dissipation was also a common nineteenth century term used to modify subjects as wasteful, unproductive, morally depraved, or frittered out [3]. The world and its irreversible processes were getting less and less productive, Thomson argued. And it was up to man (read: the British) to direct each transfer of energy in the most useful, work-extractive manner possible.

Moreover, Thomson attached a cosmological, Judeo-Christian reading to the inevitability of universal heat death. In his 1862 lecture, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat,” he weaponized the logic of thermodynamics against Charles Darwin and his secular colleagues by calculating (incorrectly, as it turned out) the age and fate of the sun. Thomson declared, 

“It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life, for many million years longer, unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouses of creation” [4].

By deploying thermodynamics to argue that the sun simply could not have been burning for as many years as Darwin claimed natural selection had been at work, Thomson threatened the then-nascent theory of evolution in an attempt to shore up evidence for the theory of Creation. His, again incorrect, calculations also generated an estimated death date for the sun. Such an end-days vision of entropy or dissipation brought a sense of material finality to traditional Christian cosmology. It certainly worked to shut the secular materialists up for a while, and it unsettled Darwin, in particular. 

So, when James Clerk Maxwell introduced entropy as a statistical law, his thought experiment – “Maxwell’s Demon” – became the center of a thermodynamic controversy.

Maxwell Invents a “Being”; Thomson Creates a “Demon”

It’s not that Maxwell was opposed to Thomson’s theological agenda; and in fact Maxwell’s own Anglo-Scottish background perpetuated his tendencies to reify a Platonic sense of spiritual idealism in mathematical and physical law. However, Thomson and Maxwell happened to approach the entropy law from different perspectives. 

Maxwell had been corresponding with Clausius for some time on the molecular behavior of gases. Specifically, where Clausius introduced several important and novel concepts to illustrate how the temperature of a gas can be described in terms of its energy, Maxwell raised the stakes of Clausius’s kinetic model by arguing that a statistical method must replace a strict dynamical method of calculating molecular motion [5].

This means that, because spontaneous fluctuations in the motions of individual molecules are always occurring, we can only ever talk about molecular averages. In the deep cold of space, for instance, there are individual molecules zooming about with heat energy. However, because the average molecular motion remains so tiny, those zooming outliers do not represent what we perceive. What this means for the second law of thermodynamics, more importantly, is that it has only statistical certainty, or that the law itself describes the properties of a system, but does not describe the properties of any individual molecule in that system. 

Let’s think about what that means for Thomson’s elaborate, apocalyptic prescription for the end times. While defining entropy as a statistical law does not endanger its “truth” (the second law of thermodynamics has never been “in danger”), it does question the absoluteness of entropy. It certainly asks us to think about the finality of “heat death” differently. Even if we can’t extract work from the universe, or from any closed system, because it has reached thermodynamic equilibrium, we can only ever describe heat energy in terms of its macrostates. Maxwell insisted that it was impossible to go pointing at this or that molecule and report on its individual energy. Certainly some individual molecules are moving faster than their average macrostates. This fact doesn’t undo entropy, of course, but it confines the second law of thermodynamics to the realm of statistics. All this talk of being “statistically certain” dilutes the cosmic register of Thomson’s apocalyptic heat death. 

Enter the demon. 

In an 1867 letter to Peter Guthrie Tait, another British thermodynamicist, Maxwell illustrated his statistical argument with a thought experiment in which a “neat-fingered being” “knows the paths and velocities of all the molecules” in a chamber, but “can do no work except open and close a hole in the diaphragm by means of a slide without mass” [6]. In his 1871 Theory of Heat, he elaborated on this concept:

“Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower ones to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics” [7]. 

The being monitors the microstates of a thermodynamic system and acts as an internal agent, vetting the pathways of molecules based on their respective energies. By preventing the entropic drift from a hotter to a colder state, the being can thus extract continuous work from such an engine. It operates as a perpetual motion machine, giving us work for nothing. Simply by observing the movements and ordering these molecules into different chambers, the being prevents thermodynamic equilibrium. Of course, there are no tiny beings with massless, frictionless doors; and so we don’t know the energy states of individual molecules. Entropy remains statistically reliable. 

You may have noted that Maxwell did not call his being a “demon.” In 1879, Thomson delivered a lecture titled, “The Sorting Demon of Maxwell,” in which he described (and popularized) Maxwell’s molecule-sized homunculus in far greater detail than Maxwell ever did [8]. In fact, Maxwell rejected Thomson’s moniker for his being, urging his colleagues to think of it more as a valve than a demon [5].

But Thomson’s appropriation of the term, “demon,” is adequate, considering what “daemonic” figures do. 

Bruce Clarke’s reading of scientific allegory offers up a neat definition: “Daemons are agents of communication, typically taking the shape of messengers, or guardians, or other figures of admonition. The crucial thing is that they can take whatever shape the larger conceptual scheme demands: they are inherently metamorphic.” The daemon operates by “bridging conceptual gaps and bearing important cultural information” [6].

The daemon balances abstract concepts, theories, and desires with concrete images or modeling. And, in the interstices of those physical phenomena and cultural desires, a concept – like entropy – can harden into something new. Indeed, this is exactly the function Maxwell’s Demon occupied in Victorian scientific culture. As an agent of communication, the demon performs a physical impossibility to undercut the theological absolutism of the entropy law, and, with it, the authority of William Thomson’s projection for the end of life on earth. 

Clarke suggests that Maxwell’s Demon gestures to a “desire to secure conceptual salvation from the finality of that last judgment” [6]; yet, I wonder whether the being/daemon/demon wasn’t performing more of Maxwell’s desire to concretize the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics, particularly from the perspective of (human) beings less “clever” and “neat-fingered” than that of his thought experiment. Maxwell was not irreligious; he, like Thomson, maintained that only God could restore energetic order and prevent thermodynamic equilibrium. But by jettisoning the dynamical theory of gases, he also recognized that we can only ever calculate that entropic drift with statistical certainty. 

The Demon Evolves

Despite Maxwell’s intention for his Demon, several of his colleagues did feel threatened by the implications of the thought experiment. They worked deliberately to tame the Demon back into Thomsonian cosmology. 

In particular, Tait (the recipient of the letter where Maxwell originally described his Demon) and another scientist, Balfour Stewart, anonymously published a notorious volume called The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875). Like most Victorian texts, The Unseen Universe belongs to the public domain and can be found here. If you have time, you really should explore this gem of whackadoodle logic. Think of it as you might Ancient Alien theory: a little bit of scientific popularizing, a whole lot of far-fetched speculation, and packed with politics about the authority of science. 

The Unseen Universe was published in response to John Tyndall’s infamous “Belfast Address.” In the autumn of 1874, Tyndall delivered the address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, arguing in favor of secular materialism. Tyndall argued that only science, not religion, offered a way to learning the “true” nature of phenomena [9]. It’s important to understand here that he was contributing to an ongoing debate on how to define the contours of the scientific establishment. That is, what counts as legitimate science? How should we (the British) define disciplinarity? Where should religion fit here, if at all? 

As traditional Christian moralists, Stewart and Tait countered in The Unseen Universe that indeed the physical laws of science pointed to a real yet invisible spiritual reality [10]. They co-opted Maxwell’s Demon, turning it into an “army” of demons with many doors, operating against entropy seemingly at the command of a higher intelligence. By altering the narrative, the Demon becomes assimilated into Thomson’s apocalyptic entropy: in The Unseen Universe, we cannot escape entropy because, as Clarke puts it, “the fallen material constitution of the world is bound to foil any attempt we might make” [6]. 

It’s important to understand that this is different from Maxwell’s original interpretation. Maxwell never intended his “being” to offer the possibility of escape from the second law of thermodynamics. Yet the “many demons” narrative twists the Demon into a fallen hero who tries yet cannot outwit the Law of Nature. 

Born in 1867, Maxwell’s “neat-fingered being” had already evolved by 1875. By the dawn of the information age, he would evolve much more. This is what we will explore in the second part of “A Tale of Two Entropies”: what Maxwell’s Demon did for Information Theory. 

Citations

[1] Clausius, Rudolf. The Mechanical Theory of Heat, with Its Applications to the Steam-Engine, and to the Physical Properties of Bodies, edited by T. Archer Hirst, Introduction by John Tyndall, London: John Van Voorst. 1867.

[2] Thomson, William. “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy,” in The Philosophical Magazine 4, 1852.

[3] “dissipated, adj”. OED Online. September 2020. Oxford University Press.

[4] Thomson, William. “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1862, 388-93. 

[5] Harman, P.M. Energy, Force, and Matter: The conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics. Cambridge University Press, 1982.

[6] Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. University of Michigan Press, 2001. 

[7] Maxwell, James Clerk. Theory of Heat. 1871. Ninth Edition. Longmans, Green and Co., 1888.

[8] Thomson, William. “The Sorting Demon of Maxwell.” Proceedings of the Royal Institution. Vol. ix, February 28, 1879. 113.

[9] Tyndall, John. Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. Longmans, Green, and Co. 1874.

[10] Stewart, Balfour, and P.G. Tait. The Unseen Universe of Physical Speculations on a Future State. Macmillan, 1875.

“Energy was not out there in the world waiting to be found, a fact of nature finally revealed to human consciousness” – Cara Daggett; The Birth of Energy

When I want to draw out the capaciousness of the term, energy, I ask my students to turn to one another and define it. What is energy? If an individual from an alien planet needed a description of energy as Earthlings know it, what would you tell them? What does it look like? Smell like? Feel like? 

As you can imagine, this exercise elicits responses running the gamut from the standard scientific definition of energy (i.e., the ability to perform work) to creative descriptions like, “a child running around on a sugar high,” to a run-down of the chakra system. Regardless of the responses I receive, each group of students contributes a unique collection of definitions. Of course, that is my point: that energy has no singular definition. 

Energy is somehow everything and nothing all at once. We learn that everything is energy; that energy is constantly operating in transfer to do things like keep us alive, fuel our machines, heat the planet. But energy is also, ironically, nothing, in that it is almost indescribable. If you attempt to describe what energy is on an elemental level, you will find yourself struggling to some degree. Richard Feynman famously lectured that “we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount” [1]. So, why does energy feel cosmic and universal if it is, in fact, a floating signifier? Where does this term come from, and why does it have so many applications?

On Etymology: Energy Is an Old Word, but Not for Scientists

Energy began as a rhetorical term. We can trace it all the way back to Aristotle, whose energeia (ἐνέργεια) is a combination of the Greek en- (“in”) and -ergon (“work”) [2]. Related to energeia, Aristotle discusses two senses of the Greek term dunamis, which denotes possibility, potential, and the power for change. For Aristotle, there is a kinêsis, or a movement, but also a second meaning of dunamis where the capacity for change exists [3]. You might see here a resemblance to kinetic energy, the energy of an object’s motion, and potential energy, or the energy of position. If so, you’re not wrong, but it would still take centuries before energy found its way into scientific canon.

Aristotle’s energeia is the foundation for the Latin word energia, the French word énergie, and the English word energy. The latter two originated in the sixteenth century and connect work to virtue and goodness [2]. 

A quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary [4] is also eye-opening. The OED entries for energy include:

• “With reference to speech or writing: Force or vigour of expression.”

• “Impressiveness (of an event).”

• “Exercise of power, actual working, operation, activity; freq. in philosophical language.”

None of these definitions is scientific, and all bear traces of energy’s classical associations. In fact, displacing energy from physics may render the term poetic or peculiarly moralistic. If you’ve ever read William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), you’ll recall that Blake’s Devil has much to say about energy. “Energy is eternal delight,” akin to physical passions. Reason, contrasted with energy, is like intellection. As such, Blake’s Devil comes down firmly on the side of energy [5].

It makes sense that energy is the bedfellow of British Romanticism, the school to which Blake belongs. The Romantics emphasized the power and importance of the individual spirit, and the sublimity of the imagination. Art and poetry originate from this profoundly energetic locus at our core, producing the famous “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that Wordsworth tells us are recollected in tranquility. 

But then, where does that leave physics? If Blake’s Devil was contrasting energy and reason at the end of the eighteenth century, when did science appropriate energy for its own agenda? 

When and How Did Energy Become a Scientific Term? 

Energy had no formal place in physics until the late 1840s, when a group of northern British scientists appropriated the term to unify a range of natural phenomena including heat, light, and electromagnetism. In addition to heuristic unification, these scientists, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell included, were motivated by a desire to secure institutional authority for their mostly Scottish Presbyterian cohort [6]. They selected the word energy to reorient physics towards the areas of research that studied transfers and potentials. The Newtonian term force, previously used in these cases, was just too limiting to perform the unifying function that energy promised. Thus, energy was scientifically defined as “the ability to perform work.”

Energy now had a scientific home; yet the process of codifying energy wedded the political and theological agendas of these scientists to an emerging concept of how fuel and labor should be managed. In other words, defining energy in science was a political and historically specific act, not purely the outcome of detached, objective investigation. This point should be underscored, and it is the topic of another (future) post.

Because energy had centuries of humanistic usage behind it by the 1840s, these prior associations layered into the nascent science of energy. As you can imagine, this overdetermined thermodynamics during its crucial years of codification, and remains one of the reasons why we, my students included, can find so many definitions for a single term. 

But then, why would nineteenth-century scientists want a term that already existed? Why wouldn’t they just create a new one? 

There were several justifications for choosing an extant, patently non-scientific word to generate an entirely novel branch of science. Consider the following:

1. In the mid-nineteenth century, “science” did not remotely resemble the highly-disciplinary, extensively-institutionalized systems we now have under that name. The differentiation of scientific disciplines was a late-nineteenth century affair. For most of the century, and long before, Britain’s educated persons received training in the classics. Garnering authority for a new scientific regime meant convincing an existing intellectual public that such an enterprise mattered. And so, of course, reaching back for energy’s Greco-Roman pedigree made quite a bit of sense. 

2. Recall that energy was also a poetic term. In the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for scientists to use poetry to shore up support for their scientific arguments. These classically educated “men of science” marshalled the authority of poetry to shift conversations in their own fields. For example, physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell parodied Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in a paper he delivered at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1876. He wrote his own poem about “Energy” dethroning “Force” and shedding its Newtonian limitations [7].

3. Lastly, the phenomena that the North British scientists tried to unify under the term energy were abstract. Unlike objects dimensionally difficult to access, as in tiny microbes or planets too large and far away, energy’s objects are hard to grasp because they gain no purchase without language and structure to give them form. In other words, you can’t go out and simply find heat, pick it up, bring it home, photograph it, and expect that anyone else doing the same will arrive at the same result. Electromagnetism is even more difficult. One needs language, as well as experimental rigor, to guide these concepts into form. And, because the North British crew wanted to describe the phenomena of conservation and transformation, energy seemed like a perfect word. Remember that, for Aristotle, energeia meant activity, movement, vigor, and dynamicism. It did not conjure up images of stasis. 

Transformation is key. The final point I’ll make is that energy is beautifully situated towards the literary because, in both its scientific and its pre-scientific registers, it is fundamentally about transformation. Energy is about preference for movement, which primed its application in governing fuel sources. However, its metaphysical and literary connotations far predate the industrial era. When we consider that energy physics required models, language, and other representational forms to coax energy out of its elusive abstractions, it becomes clear how much the transformations of figurative language complement the energetic transformations of physical phenomena. 

Figurative language – like metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and analogy – takes one thing and transforms it into another thing. Using metaphor we might say, “the moon was a face lit from within.” The moon is obviously not a face, yet we turn it into one with language, inspiring imagery that transforms both “the moon” and “a face” on their own into something novel. So, too, does energy describe transfers and relationalities in states of being. When we dive into the weeds of nineteenth-century physics, we find figurative language everywhere. The Victorians applied analogy and metaphor (i.e., the language of transformation) to define and describe energetic phenomena (i.e., the physics of transformation). Take a beat to admire the synergy. 

To sum it up, energy began as a humanistic term and accumulated centuries of meaning before physicists appropriated it in the late 1840s for the new science of thermodynamics. At that point, energy’s prior classical associations layered into its new definition as the ability to do work, as well as buttressing a new unifying agenda meant to reorient physics away from Newtonian “force” and towards energy’s potential for conversion, transformation, and also conservation. All this polysemy and layering has left us with an overdetermined term that, astoundingly, manages to extend from the physical to the metaphysical while also escaping an elemental definition. 

That is why, I argue, deconstructing energy’s capaciousness is worthwhile: because it is not stable. This means that there is enormous potential to dismantle the governing structures of energy that we now find most violent, as in fossil fuel infrastructures. A topic for another time.

Citations

[1] Feynman, Richard. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. I: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat, Basic Books, 2011.

[2] Daggett, Carla New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Energy, and the Politics of Work, Duke University Press, 2019.

[3] Cohen, Marc S. “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/

[4] “energy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, Aug. 2020.

[5] Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1790.

[6] Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. University of Chicago Press, 1998.

[7] Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. University of Michigan Press, 2001.

There is a short answer and a long answer to this question. The short answer is simple: the steam engine predates thermodynamics. But the long answer is much more interesting when we consider the cultural and industrial variables at play during the birth of energy science.

Simply, the steam engine predates thermodynamics by over a century. In fact, its practical and industrial applications drove the development of what became thermodynamics in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The implications of this point are worth unpacking. We are somewhat used to thinking about theoretical science as the driver of experimental and applied sciences. That is, we might be tempted to believe that scientists develop a theory and then apply it to produce new technologies. The history of science shows us that this is not always how science operates. In the case of thermodynamics, theoretical physics certainly did not steer the course of what became the science of energy physics. Industry did. 

This post provides a brief overview of the development of the British steam engine, and how the science of thermodynamics emerged from the problems produced by industrial shifts. Most importantly, though, I explain how these laws were not just discovered, but rather addressed specific worldviews, technological complications, and material questions tied to commerce, imperialism, and the ideal of progress. This is important to understand because such ideals set the tone for writing energy into scientific natural law, and for how, almost two hundred years later, we continue to imagine energy and its possibilities. 

The Invention of the Steam Engine

The Victorian period was the age of steam power. It was the steam engine that released textile mills and other industry from water power’s geography-dependent architectures, driving populations to new, smoky factory cities. But this iconic steam imaginary owed nothing to thermodynamics at the outset. In fact, it was the other way around. 

Historians trace modern mass politics and ways of living to industrial organizations of fossil fuel energy [1]. England burned coal as early as the thirteenth century, yet it wasn’t until what we call the “Industrial Revolution” (the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century) that humans transitioned to a coal-based energy system. Until then, steam engines consumed more fuel than they could extract from England’s water-filled coal mines. After improved engines abetted mining and industrial iron production, England began to harness its network of waterways to cheaply transport coal. This self-reinforcing system of geography and industry is why, rather than superior technology or innovative ability, Britain’s development “diverged” from other parts of the world such as China, Japan, and India [2]. 

As early as the 1690s, inventors played around with steam-pressured pumps. Thomas Savery patented his “engine to raise water by fire” during this period and published an accompanying text, The Miner’s Friend, in 1702 [3].

Savery’s steam pump was not particularly useful for coal extraction, however. It was Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) whose atmospheric steam engine was effective enough to address the demand of Cornish miners [4]. Newcomen’s engine worked by letting low-pressure steam move from a boiler into a cylinder directly above it. As soon as the piston reached the top of this cylinder, the engine operator sprayed cold water directly into the cylinder, condensing the steam. By doing this, the operator created a partial vacuum which allowed the atmospheric pressure to push the piston downward. 

Understanding how the Newcomen engine works helps us appreciate James Watt’s contribution to this history. 

But wait! Didn’t James Watt invent the steam engine? Obviously no, he did not; though “inventor of the steam engine” is a title that histories do sometimes bestow upon Watt. It was Watt, however, who separated the boiler and condenser chambers in his engine, and that made a huge difference in engine efficiency. Additionally, Watt built a partnership with Matthew Boulton, who we can think of as the commercial mastermind of the steam engine. Boulton found a market beyond Cornwall miners: the factory. He realized that mill owners were desperate to add energy-saving technologies to their machinery, and Watt’s engine delivered [4]. By the early 1800s, inventors were beginning to experiment with other energy-saving tweaks, which brings us back to the question of thermodynamics. 

Sadi Carnot and the First Stirrings of Thermodynamics

If you’ve studied thermodynamics or taken a heat transfer course, you likely learned about the “Carnot cycle.” In this classic model, a system moves through a series of what are called adiabatic and isothermal stages, returning to its original state in the completion of one “cycle.” Thus, the cycle is theoretically reversible, performing mechanical work on its surroundings with maximum efficiency. It isn’t important to understand the ins and outs of the Carnot cycle for this discussion, but it might be helpful to see it represented graphically. We calculate the mechanical work of the Carnot cycle by measuring the area enclosed in the curve created by the changes in volume and pressure.

What you may not know is that the Carnot engine cycle nearly slipped into obscurity after Sadi Carnot’s early death; and, were his writings not excavated by a few key individuals, thermodynamics may have failed to materialize under the precise conditions that it did. 

Sadi Carnot was a French military scientist, following the footsteps of his father, Lazare Carnot (1753-1823), who served as one of Napoleon’s leading scientists and was forced into exile after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 [4]. In the summer of 1824, Sadi published a slim volume titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power. Few read this book during Carnot’s lifetime, and it was nearly lost forever after his death in 1832. However, a French engineer named Émile Clapeyron uncovered Carnot’s text and recast many of his verbal arguments into mathematical form in 1834. From this, the “Carnot Cycle” captured the attention of scientists trying to retool the steam engine into a more efficient machine. 

One of these scientists was William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who combined Carnot’s and the young English physicist James Prescott Joule’s ideas to carve out what is arguably the first iteration of the laws of thermodynamics. Thomson wasn’t alone in doing this work: classical thermodynamics was a discipline built from the collaborations of many nineteenth-century scientists. But it is important to understand how and why Carnot’s insights motivated Thomson to codify thermodynamics.

What Carnot gave us was a powerful metaphor for conceptualizing heat transfer. Carnot argued that a steam engine works like a water wheel: a water wheel produces work because water falls through a height. Similarly, he said, we extract work from a steam engine because heat falls from a higher temperature to a lower one. You can maximize work extraction by raising the height that water falls. Likewise, allow heat to “fall” through a larger temperature differential and you can maximize work output [5]. 

Let’s take a moment to think about this revolutionary concept.

At the time of Carnot’s writing, scientists thought that heat was an invisible fluid called “caloric.” Much like water moving from one height to another, the amount of caloric was thought to remain constant as it moved from one temperature to another. In passing from the boiler to the condenser, caloric simply transferred from a concentrated to a diffuse state. It did not disappear. The water wheel metaphor tracks in this regard: we move the water from a high state to a low state, but the amount remains consistent throughout the cycle. 

Despite that heat is not a substance, and despite that scientists knew this by the time Thomson pored over Carnot’s work, Carnot more or less demonstrated the principle of entropy. He argued that the amount of work a steam engine can produce is limited by the temperature differential, or the difference between its hottest and coldest temperatures. And thus, heat always flows from a hot temperature to a colder one: we can’t make it flow backwards. 

The banality of a statement like this today makes us lose our respect for its revolutionary potential in a pre-thermodynamics world. Carnot was demonstrating that there is an upper limit on how efficient an engine can be, and he argued that his proposed cycle was that limit. 

So, we have our answer: the steam engine came first, and it inspired the science of thermodynamics. In fact, William Thomson and his brother James were deeply wedded to Carnot’s metaphor of the waterwheel, and they even built models to study Carnot’s approach. James Thomson’s practical training in marine engineering and steam engines directed both Thomson brothers to the problem of industrial waste, or machine power consumption. 

This is where the intersection of thermodynamics and steam engines is particularly important. William Thomson admired Carnot not just for his scientific insights, but because Carnot believed that with an “ideal” engine, France might efficiently “carry the fruits of civilization over portions of the globe where they would else have been wanting for years” [5]. He was a favorite among scientists and engineers who puzzled out the problem of industrial work losses because a win for industry was a win for the nation. 

Carnot envisioned, for France rather than England, that revolutionizing the steam engine cycle would enable miners to release far more coal energy from the ground than an engine expended. In Carnot’s words, “The most signal service that the steam-engine has rendered to England is undoubtedly the revival of the working of the coal mines, which had declined, and threatened to cease entirely, in consequence of the continually increasing difficulty of drainage, and of raising of the coal… To take away today from England her steam-engines would be to take away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to annihilate that colossal power” [5]. For Carnot, the military scientist, this was an imperial mission, and a civilizing mission. The nation with the easiest access to coal would have the strongest military, the tools to conquer and occupy remote lands, and the industrial power to funnel resources back from the periphery and commercialize them.

Of course, Britain accomplished all of that, reaching the zenith of its imperial status by the end of the nineteenth century. Consider that coal abundance in Britain freed up agricultural populations whose land had previously supplied fuel and food. Unfettered by the seasonal and geographical limitations of waterpower, industry thrived in urban locations, where populations grew dense during the remainder of the nineteenth century. As labor forces turned increasingly to producing industrial goods, Britain relied on its peripheral territories for food and raw materials. Without such uncompensated labor and lifeways, Britain could not have sustained its growth and imperial status. This is a conversation beyond the scope of the present discussion, but it is too important not to mention. 

Therefore, we are left with an easy answer with far more complicated resonances. The steam engine predates thermodynamics, and therefore it was what we think of as “applied science” that precipitated the development of classical energy physics. Yet a crucial combination of imperial expansion, industrial necessity, and colonial violence produced thermodynamics, rather than the detached discoveries and observations of scientists. To my mind, the cultural forces involved in the birth of thermodynamics are some of the most important reminders that energy science always was, and remains, wedded to the ideals of extraction, accumulation, and exploitation.

Citations

[1] Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso, 2011.

[2] Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000.

[3] Savery, Thomas. The Miner’s Friend; or, An Engine to Raise Water by Fire. 1702. Reprinted London: W. Clawes, 1827.

[4] Hunt, Bruce J. Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 

[5] Carnot, Sadi. Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power. 1824. Translated by R.H. Thurston. Edited by Eric Mendoza. Dover Publications, 1960.