Poetry, entropy, crisis: refusing the nuclear housework

This essay follows entropy as a figure of anxiety for growth. Taking up this figural form as an energetic and aesthetic category materially linked to crisis or exhaustion, I trace an extended attempt to capture the decline of capitalist growth in feminist praxis and art practice. Articulating a hinge point between postwar surplus and secular stagnation in the cascading energetic and economic crises of the 1970s, this archive struggles to come to terms with ‘capital's endemic tendency to devolve towards its own generalized crisis of reproduction' (Beverley Best, ‘Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-Form', Theory & Event, 24.4 [2021], p. 897). My thinking, here, tends toward recent scholarship on the ‘measureless and entropic character' of both art and housework while counterposing earlier Marxist-feminist critiques of social reproduction against contemporaneous accounts of material boundaries to growth (Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis, & Contemporary Art [London: Mute, 2016], p. 71). Critically, these coordinates reorient degrowth discourse away from planetary limits, predominant since the 1970s, and towards questions of reproduction, labour, and, ultimately, value. Turning to Beverly Best's account of capital’s incapacity to valorise social reproductive activity as a demonstration of its intrinsic crisis tendency, I argue that entropy – as an expression of the limits to harnessing energy for work - offers an operative trope for reading growth through and against its limits.