Abstract

We are home after work on a Friday night and feel completely wasted and exhausted from a hard, long week; too tired even to get up from the sofa, switch off the TV and go to bed. We are drained of all life and energy. Suddenly, the doorbell rings and some friends ask us to come out and play cards, or soccer, with them, or to visit a theatre play together. To our own surprise, we agree to join them, and it turns out to become a great evening. When we return, we feel full of energy, alive, and kicking. How is that possible? We had no power left, we embarked on an activity that seemed to require a lot of energy investment, and afterwards we seem to have more rather than less energy? In the 21st century, we tend to speak of ‘batteries reloaded’, but what does that mean? How do we load our battery?

The claim I want to make in my contribution is that what we need in critical theory (and in sociology writ large) today is a viable concept of social energy. We need it in order to grasp the connection between structure and culture, or between individual and society. If, in the natural sciences, “energy” can be defined as the potential to initiate movement, to create heat, and/or to perform some sort of work, we can loosely define “social energy” as the capacity to get things done in the world (Ian Morris). But this potential, I claim, cannot simply be located in individuals, nor is it an aggregate of individuals’ energies. Whether a social movement, a political party, or a country is capable of really getting things done depends neither simply on the state of technological development and physical power nor on individuals’ strength and resolve. To develop conceptual tools to grasp this issue, we need a concept of circulating social energy. The paper will set out preliminary ideas and tools to develop such a conception.

Short Bio

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt. He has been an Affiliated Professor at the Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York, 2001-2006. In 1997, he received his PhD in Political Science from Humboldt-University in Berlin. After that, he held teaching positions at the universities of Mannheim, Jena, Augsburg and Essen. His publications focus on Social Acceleration, Resonance and the Temporal Structures of Modernity and have been translated in more than 25 languages.

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