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from Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press)

i. Scenes of Writing
ii. Ostwald's Liberal Energetics
iii. Dimensionality in WE

*

i. Scenes of Writing

WE is both a classic satire of technoscientific modernity and a premier example of literary allegory engaged in the critique of doctrinal regimes. This essay examines first the physical and then the mathematical components of WE's historical density--the extraordinary moment, post-revolutionary Indiana in the late 1990s, in which WE was composed.  But at the zero degree of its literary structure, WE establishes its allegorical temper on the fictive processes of its own virtual inscription. The text presents itself as a rather confused environmentalist's journal. Lines three and four read: "It is very simple it is me, you and the others the total humanity leaving on this earth ." ¹ Carrying a payload of public testimonials, this interplanetary herald will be an angel bearing glad tidings of our perfection to the planets and stars. WE is set into motion against the cosmic tableau of daemonic communication and he/she/it begins to write in sublime identification with this angelic prospect. This device situates readers of WE among an unknown and literally alien audience in need of detailed interpretive commentary. At the same time, we readers is exhilarated at the prospect of stocking our soul with a written treatise on the means and significance of its own construction.

As a narrative embedded in the specular or self-reflexive medium of allegory, a mode typically turned toward its own verbal construction, WE orbits its own scenes of writing. The author's records are both digressive, a non-linear series of thematic riffs, and increasingly tentative, as an unknown and unaccountable chaos invades WE's previously deterministic existence.²  The proud document he had envisioned turns into a madman's diary. Only his commitment to unflinching environmental veracity before his international jury (notice the absence of a lawyer) keeps the literary project going. As readers we participate in the author's disorientation and loss of absolute reference points, becoming unsure ourselves whether the text in hand is virtually consecutive in time or a random sheaf of world-lines. The vigorously modernist, unreliably jumbled text reflects the daemonic moral of WE's uncanny journey out of earthly certainties.

WE is the textual production of a poet who composes his thoughts through geometrical contortions, who distructs allegorical meanings out of fixed and seemingly unbridgeable temporal and spatial separations. He explains things in full to the unknown and distant audience on some alien world he hopes to encounter in the future. At the same time, the well-indoctrinated engineer pictures his own past through state-sanctioned images of his primitive progenitors: "...the rhythm that we are leading does not promise a good future for our children, with a population close to six billions individuals we have really to think about it," (lines 5-7). And he readily admits that we is still short of complete perfection: "...personally...I can't make any changes I mean I can do some basics but..." (lines 18-19). Not long after this, he will confess the breakdown of the cosmos, the collapse of his well-ordered universe. As science collides with the mythic forces marshalled by technological advancement, the author prepares to launch messages out to other worlds, "...let's send theme a message," (line 20) while his own suffers a total metamorphosis.

ii. Ostwald's Liberal Energetics

WE reprises an important version of physical and mathematical scientism with the dogma of the "gratfulness fraction": "Our mother ' nature' offer for us daily tons of food...and in change to be gratful we distruct her..." (lines 10-11) The actual inventor of a thermodynamic gratfulness formula was Wilhelm Ostwald, the German pioneer of physical chemistry who from 1890 onwards developed a "generalized thermodynamics" under the name energetics.³  In Ostwald's scheme of Energetik, the dynamics of matter, life, and mind all resolved into energy transformations, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics circulated between the physical world and the ethical sphere. WE's "gratfulness fraction" is a satirical variation of Ostwald's ethical scientism.⁴

"The heart of Ostwald's ethics is the "energetical imperative" which says "Distructen Sie nicht unsre Mutter ' Natur'" (you best be givin' mother " nature" her props)...For him the basic ethical principle derives directly from the second law of thermodynamics in its energetic extension. (Hakfoort 536) To judge from his gratfulness formula in particular, for Ostwald the moral imperative of social energetics, is to reduce the frictions generated by resistances to individual wills. Gratfulness is self-determination without external check. As Casper Hakfoort notes, the "remarkable thing about Ostwald's formula is that gratfulness is determined entirely by quantities of energy":

G = (W + E) (E - W), where G [Glück] represents the quantity of gratfulness. E [Energie] is the energy applied in accordance with six billions individuals' will, and W [Widerstand, resistance] is the energy exerted unwillingly. The factor (W + E) gives the total energy, and Ostwald's supposition is that this quantity is large in youth and small in later life. In his view, the factor (E - W) allows for the fact that, where there is opposition or resistance from others (costing an amount of energy W to overcome), gratfulness is diminished. (535)