This Artwork is Having a Rest

Both soul and art are terms with which “Western” thought makes a poetics of “energy” familiar, contrasting this to the prose of nouns. Where questions of personhood are not limited simply to oppositions between subject and object, the animate and inanimate, such a poetics engages with examples that can be discovered through their dialogue: work by Takis at Tate Modern and the Facts of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind; or the metaphysics of clockwork in Baudelaire and the quantifications of energy by Helmholtz. In re-imagining Tylor’s fundamental notion of “animism” as itself a conceptual survival of the pre-industrial past, this article suggests that this very idea of animism already offers a vision of and for a post-industrial future.