The object turn changes register?

Green living experiments, material practices of

engagement, or how to handle entanglement in public

Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths, University of London

Prepared for:

Oxford Ontologies Workshop, Saïd Business School,

Oxford University (25 June 2008)

DRAFT – DO NOT QUOTE.

Introduction

One of the promises opened up by social research that takes objects seriously is that

of thinking differently about “involvement.” An important contribution of science and

technology studies (STS), but also of other area’s of social and cultural studies, in the

last decade or two, has been the accounts provided of the role of material things,

technologies and other stuff in the organisation of social, cultural and political

practices. Whether or not this contribution can or should be called by the rather

ominous name of the “ontological turn,” I am not sure. There are a number of

possible problems with this term, such as the difficulty that onto-logy may keep us in

a frame in which we are concerned, either implicitly or explicitly, with a logos that

structures an ontos, rather than a world in which stuff happens, and sometimes

things are articulated, by a variety of means and circumstances. And the latter

precisely seems to me the general outlook that object-centred perspectives have

usefully introduced in social studies: a commitment to consider the contingency and

eventiveness of material practices, and the ways they complicate, are indifferent to,

or possibly defy established discursive assumptions, presumptions to know

beforehand what is likely to happen, what the issues are, who will benefit, and so on

(Barry, 2001; Fraser, 2008).1 But whether or not ontology is the appopriate term here

(and I will return to the question below), there is little doubt that the preoccupation,

1 One way of posing the question is to ask whether it is possible to ‘have’ an ontology and still be an empiricist.

in STS and elsewhere, with artefacts, materiality, non-human entities, and so on, has

potentially important consequences, in terms of compelling a reframing of questions

of social, cultural and political theory. And although the historian’s intuition that “it’s

still too early to say” how things will pan out seems appropriate here, much work has

already been done to explore and document these consequences. In STS, most effort

in this respect has arguably gone into the question of representation, in science, art

and to a lesser extent politics (Latour & Weibel, 2002; Lynch & Woolgar, 1990). Here

I’d like to consider another category in more detail, one that is philosophically

speaking perhaps less self-evident, but normatively no less charged, that of

involvement.

For a long time already, sociologists of science and technology have been

pointing out that a material perspective on social practices has implications for how

we conceive of people’s engagement with, or implication in, social, cultural and

political formations. Thus, authors like Knorr-Cetina and Bruno Latour have

proposed that such a perspective enables us to appreciate scientific and technological

practices as sites of sociability (Knorr, 1997; Latour, 2005). Their proposals build on

critiques developed in STS of the view that activities involving science and technology

are rationalistic, individualistic, and calculative, and therefore contrary in spirit and

form to practices of human sociability. Starting with STS accounts of the roles of

technological and scientific objects in the mediation of all sorts of relations usually

defined as “social,” they argue that some more general inferences can be made from

this regarding the question of engagement in technological societies. Thus, Latour

and Knorr reject the diagnosis that, in societies permeated by science and technology,

forms of human sociability are under threat, and they propose that these societies are

marked instead by on-going experimentation with alternative, object-oriented forms

of sociability, centering on things like wind turbines, micro-gravity, the twin towers,

and so on. In this paper, I will engage with this argument by considering an empirical

case, that of green living experiments. This type of experiment, in which people take

it upon themselves to lead a less environmentally damaging life, and report about it

in publicity media, can both be seen to confirm this notion of object-centred practices

of social involvement, and to challenge it. On the one hand, green living experiments,

such as home tests of eco-appliances like kettles and smart electricity meters, seem

perfect examples of the alternative forms of sociability that STS scholars have written

about. These experiments deploy material entities to foster and amplify relations

among a variety of human and non-human actors (people at home, kettles, electricity,

the environment, and so on). As such, they can be seen to make the point that

engagement with technical objects is not necessarily a calculative and individualistic

activity, and that it does not have to be associated with the disarticulation of

communal forms of life. However, green living experiments also present a potential

complication for object-centred social theories, insofar as the more-than-human

forms of sociability enacted here do not quite fit with these theories.

Generally speaking, sociologists of science and technology have tended to

characterize object-centred sociability as an alternative form of involvement.

“Alternative” should here be understood in two senses of the word: firstly, object-

centred sociability is said to differ from mainstream, predominant understandings of

“involvement,” and, secondly, it is seen to open up a mode of engagement that is

somehow more interesting and more viable than other alternatives, and thus carries a

normative promise. Regarding the former, entanglements of humans and non-

humans have mostly been described in STS as proliferating below the radar of official

discourses, and as extending beyond common sense understandings of what

constitutes social, as well as political and moral, relations (Callon and Rabeharisoa,

2004). Now green living experiments could be be said to disrupt this latter

assumption, insofar as material entanglement here becomes an object of publicity,

and indeed, a target of public scrutiny. Indeed, as I will discuss below, green living

experiments can be said to explicitly redefine involvement as a form of socio-material

entanglement. In doing so, these experiments can also be seen to unsettle the notion

that object-centred practices present an “alternative” form of sociability in the second

sense, that of promising a different way of being involved with others and the world

around us. These experiments namely show that insofar as socio-material

entanglement is openly embraced as a form of engagement, the “viability” of

entanglement as a mode of involvement is called into question once again. This paper

thus interrogates the relations between social and public involvement, on the one

hand, and material entanglement, on the other, as they have been conceived of in

object-centred social theories, by exploring a contemporary case. It suggests that

material practices of engagement, as they are exprimented with in the area of green

living, may be taken as an invitation to stop thinking of entanglement as something

that allows us to take “a holiday from public life,” to use William James’ phrase, and

to consider its viability as a challenge faced in public.

The object turn and entanglement as a dimension of involvement

The object-centred perspectives that have been developed in studies of Science,

Technology and Society (STS) can be traced back to the laboratory studies that were

done in this field in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That is, the preoccupation with

material and physical entities first took hold of STS scholars during ethnographic

studies conducted in sites of scientific research, where they developed accounts of

science as a socio-material practice, in which instruments, settings and substances

play a constitutive role (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, 1985). However, the

adoption of a socio-material perspective on scientific practice also had important

implications for the ways in which the relations between science and other social

worlds came to be viewed in the field of STS, and indeed, for its conception of social

engagement with science and technology. Thus, empirical studies of laboratory

practice led some authors to develop a more comprehensive understanding of

“techno-science” as a device for the re-organisation of society by material means

(Latour, 1988; Law, 1986). In a sense, this general idea already frames the relations

of social actors with science and technology in object-centred terms: it directs

attention to the fact that social actors are implicated in scientific and technological

projects by being materially caught up in them. A socio-material perspective on

science and technology, then, emphasises that people are brought in relation to

techno-science by way of the things they live with, their bodies, and the spaces they

inhabit (Irwin and Michael, 2003; Wynne, 1996). In this regard, it should be kept in

mind that a concern with the “involvement” of social actors in science and technology

is itself partly a result of adopting a socio-material perspective, as the latter relocates

science and technology in society. However, an object-centred approach to social

involvement with science and technology also has potential consequences for wider

moral and political questions about public and/or civic engagement.

In recent years, STS scholars have done much work concerned with

explicating the implications of a socio-material perspective on science and technology

for questions of involvement, participation and engagement. Karin-Knorr-Cetina’s

work on object-centred sociability can be read in this vein, and others have explored

the implications for the more specific question of “public” involvement (Latour &

Weibel, 2005; Leach et al, 2005; Irwin and Michael, 2003). The latter have proposed

that a socio-material perspective enables a significant reformulation of this question,

breaking with predominant deliberative and discursive approaches to it (Marres,

2007). This perspective, they suggest, namely invites or compels us to view the

engagement of outsiders, laymen, and/or “everyday people,” with a given

institutional practice, controversy or affair, in the light of the socio-material

entanglements by means of which people are already implicated in them. Now in

committing to an “object-centred” approach to public involvement, work in STS

opens up both a particular conceptual approach and a particular normative

commitment in relation to it. However, it is important to note that Science and

Technology Studies also share this commitment to consider questions of involvement

from the standpoint of socio-material entanglement with other fields of study. Thus,

the material turn advocated by some STS scholars has much in common with other

recent turns in the social sciences: the turn towards the body, the affect turn, and the

spatial turn (Fraser and Greco, 2004; Thrift, 2008). In a way, each of these turns

involves the attempt to broaden questions of engagement and participation beyond a

deliberative framing of these questions. Thus, they all seek to move beyond narrow

concerns with upholding standards of rational argumentation and the ideal of

conscious intent, and to rearticulate questions of involvement as pertaining to

embodied actors who are variously situated in socio-technico-materially configured

spaces. All these “turns” involve the attempt to resituate engaged and to-be-engaged

subjects in a socially, materially, technically, emotionally, aesthetically “thicker”

world – and, especially importantly in the context of this paper, a world in which

technologies make a difference to the modes and forms of their involvement. But

there is also something distinctive about the ways in which object-centred

perspectives have made socio-material entanglement relevant to questions of

involvement.

Perhaps most importantly, object-centred perspectives have directed

attention to the positive affordances of objects, and especially the complex objects

that proliferate in techological societies, in enabling involvement. In considering the

proliferation of techno-scientific entities like nuclear powerplants, contraceptive pills

and genetic diagnostic instruments across societies, studies in STS have extensively

catelogued the ways in which such entitites implicate people in controversies about

science and technology, as well as in wider social affairs and societal transformations.

In recent studies, the question of how the proliferation of such complex entities affect

social actors has morphed into the more “constructive” question of whether these

entities can be ascribed special capacities for enabling involvement: the capacity to

mediate relations of sociability, as well as engagement with social and political issues,

of environment, reproduction, health, and so on (Irwin and Michael, 2003). This is

the broad sense in which object-centred perspectives involve a commitment to

demonstrate the viability of socio-material practices as sites of engagement.

However, this approach has also been used to direct attention to the affordances of

specific material entities, as for example organic food, to enable alternative forms of

involvement with political and ethical matters (Bennett, 2007; Hawkins, 2006).

Importantly, the latter studies have constrasted the modes of engagement that are

enabled by things with information-based and discursive forms of “public

participation.” Characterizing object-enabled modes of involvement as affective,

experimental and creative, they ascribe significant advantages to these practices over

other forms of engagement. Perhaps most crucially, socio-material practices are

valued for the possibility of doing without the demand of “distentanglement” from

everyday life, which information-based and procedural forms of participation tend to

place on social actors: the requirement that they must extricate themselves from their

on-going social lives, if they are to participate in a public. Thus, Callon and

Rabeharisoa (2004) have contrasted the open-ended modes of engagement that are

enabled by socio-material practice, with the restrictive, detached styles of

argumentation that actors are required to adopt when entering the public sphere.

One important implication of such a perspective that I want to flag here, is that

it undoes, to an extent, the classic-modern understanding of material entanglement

as something “pre-political,” a pre-condition for involvement. Thus, in political

theory it has been customary to understand actors’ affectedness by political issues

and decisions as principally relevant to the demarcation of the political community.

Here the material dimension of people’s entanglement with political issues matters

only insofar as it helps to determine the legitimacy of claims to involvement

(Archibugi, 2003; Fraser, 2005). But it is considered largely irrelevant when it comes

to the enactment of involvement. In proposing that people’s associations with non-

human entities deserve appreciation for enabling involvement, object-centred

perspectives undo this bracketing of the question of entanglement as a pre-political

one.

However, when it comes to the question of how exactly the relations between

practices of material entanglement and forms of social and/or political involvement

should be viewed, proponents of object-centred approaches have taken at least two

very different views. Some authors have stressed the need to maintain an analytical

distance between the two, even if they emphasise the relevance of entanglement to

involvement. Thus, the actor-network theory developed by Bruno Latour, Michel

Callon and John Law has perhaps done most to establish the entanglement of

humans and non-humans as a relevant dimension of social and political life. But

these authors tend to characterize entanglement as something that largely plays itself

out subterraneously, as an under-articulated phenomenon that is unlikely to be

acknowledged to its full extent within the scripted encounters that predominate

public life (Law and Mol, 2008).2 Thus, Callon and Rabeharisoa (2004) establish an

opposition between, on the one hand, public forms of involvement and, on the other,

the intricate entanglements with things and people that come about in the vaguely

2 Note that this also accounts for some of the epistemic problems associated with the object turn – how to get to these subdiscursive attachments?

defined elsewheres of a social life outside the limelight.3 They thus propose that

socio-material entanglement, as an alternative mode of engagement, is unlikely to

ever be recognized as a viable form of involvement in public discourse (and, in their

view, its merits as a mode of engagement partly depend on this not happening).4

Others, however, have emphasised the cross-overs that may occur in practice

between projects of social and/or public engagement and practices of socio-material

entanglement. Thus, Thrift (2008) and Lash and Lury (2007) have proposed that

certain object-centred forms for engaging publics, such as the distribution of freebies

and platforms for user-involvement in product design, precisely disrupt the

distinction between being implicated and being involved, between being caught up in

something materially speaking and being engaged in it. As I want to discuss now, the

case of green living experiments suggests a further complication of this distinction.

Green living experiments and doing entanglement in public

Public experiments have long been recognized in sociology as sites where the role of

science and technology in the organisation of social life, and more specifically, of

publics, becomes clear (Barry, 2001). Some authors have characterized public

experiments as ritualistic forms for the enrolment of social actors in techno-scientific

projects. Such performances then present important stations on the trajectories along

which techno-scientific entities move towards their “domestication” in society

(Latour, 1988). Studies of historic public experiments, with Robert Boyle’s

demonstration of the air pump before the Royal Society as the most well known

example, have used such cases to demonstrate that the invention of empirical science

involved the invention of formats of publicity, revolving around the reporting of

verifiable observations (Shapin and Shaffer, 1989). Focusing on a more recent

historical context, that of post-war social science, Javier Lezaun has described how

the social experiment came to serve as a notable format for projects of public

participation, conducted in specific locations like the workplace (Lezaun, ms.). And,

more generally speaking, experimentation is frequently put forward as the proper

modus for public involvement in techological societies, as they are marked by

continous innovation, and thus the on-going need for learning (Keulartz et al, 2002).

Against this background, contemporary public experiments with “green living”

3 As such, the object turn has been associated with a kind of underdeterminacy, in as far as socio-material relations here are seen as part of the unformed. However, the object is also associated with a lingering facticity, reminiscent of materialist conceptions of relations of affectedness, where entanglement acquires the status of a de facto implication, “whether one likes it or not” (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2004). 4 More generally speaking, much work in ANT upholds the analytical distinction between the messy proliferation of stuff and attachments on the “ground level,” and the preservation of modern instutitional forms of science, democracy and so on, on another, “higher” level.

present an intriguing case, as they are both heavily publicized in the media and

enacted in the intimate setting of the home. These experiments, one could say, give

an all too literal filling in of actor-network theory’s notion of the “domestication” of

techno-science mentioned above, and in doing so, they raise further questions about

the deployment of the experiment as a device of public involvement.

The formula of the green living experiment, in which individuals report on their

household’s attempts to adopt a less environmentally damaging lifestyle for a set

period of time, emerged in recent years on so-called “carbon blogs.”5 Since then, it

has been adopted by mainstream media, and, in the English language media space,

the Web’s “No Impact Man,” has been joined by the Guardian’s “Green Guy,” and the

BBC’s “ethical man.”6 These publicity projects can be contextualized in a number of

different ways. Thus, they can be seen in the light of a broader shift in discourses on

environment and society, where everyday life is today widely recognized as the

proper site for engaging people in green issues (MacNaghten, 2003). But the formula

can also be traced back to the literary tradition of ecology writing, in which people

keep diary records of the day-to-day progress made in reconnecting with nature

(Bowerbank, 1999). When seen in the context of contemporary media, green living

experiments appear as a progressive version of recent adaptations of domestic social

experiments as a publicity format, as in reality tv-shows like Big Brother. Thus, in

green living experiments too, “ordinary” domestic subjects are subjected to a set of

scripted, out-of-the-ordinary interventions, such as as the removal of certain objects

from their habitat, such as their fridge, paper towels, or the microwave.7 And their

actions and responses tend to be extensively recorded and reported by way of photos,

writing, lists, and various ways of adding up the numbers, on the Web, and in other

media. Moreover, the domestic experiments of reality television have been described

in terms of the performance of mediated intimacy, whereby intimacy makes possible

an ethical discourse of “self-improvement.” (Wood et al, in press). In this respect, too,

5 http://uk.oneworld.net/section/blogs/carbon ; see also these portals: http://www.bestgreenblogs.com ; http://greenblog.ir/en/ The green blog now has acquired the status of a “media format,” as is also indicated by the number of blank green blogs. See for instance, that of the London Documentary Festival. http://www.pocketvisions.co.uk/lidf/?cat=13 Accessed on March 14, 20086 That is also to say, many of these experiments have a strong gender bias. In at least three cases, male bloggers broght in their girlfriends to demonstrate that eco-gadgets like smarts meter are “really captivating,” managing to engage those with no interest in technical matters. 7 Green living experiments can seem like controlled versions of an effect much discussed in the philosophy and sociology of technology, that of un-blackboxing, and the transformation of an intermediary into a mediator, i.e. the point that technology only becomes noticeable when it stops performing the role expected of it (Harman, Latour, Knorr). However, in green living experiments the effect plays out differently, insofar as they directs media attention to everyday technologies. These experiments than make technological breakdowns “publicially interesting.” For more on accounts of public media as a dimension that deserves more attention in the sociology of technology, see Marres, 2008.

something similar might be said to be going on in green living experiments. Thus, an

experimental formula such as that of living with smart electricity meters, which I will

discuss below, can be understood as foregrounding the intimacy of our lives with

material objects, from toasters to showerheads. And the demonstration of our

personal dependency on these things, and thus of certain hidden background

conditions of everyday life, here tends to be framed, too, as an occasion to learn and

change one’s personal ways. Thus, green living experiments are probably best seen as

a mixture of different experimental genres and forms, containing elements of nature

writing, social experiments, but also of technical demonstrations.

However, especially important for my purposes here is the ways in which green

living experiments confer onto material things and arrangements the capacity to

enable involvement with environmental issues. Thus, whether or not the normativity

of green living experiments must ultimately be understood in terms of “an ethics of

self-improvement,” it seems important that they pursue a tactic of deploying objects

to enact engagement with the rather open-ended and nebulous entity called the

environment. This deployment of domestic things seems very much in line with the

sociological and cultural perspectives that I mentioned above, which ascribe to

material entities the capacity to enable embodied and affective modes of engagement.

Also, it is perhaps no coincidence that these perspectives has been elaborated in

relation to the environment in particular, and that social scientists have written quite

extensively on the merits of things like stoves and rubbish bins to enable different

modes of relating to sustainability issues (Hobson, 2006; Verbeek, 2005). Web

accounts of green living experiments also provide demonstrations of such

affordances. Thus, things are very much in the foreground on the blog by the

Canadian free-lance journalist “Green-As-A-Thistle,” which provides daily reports of

her experiences in “spend[ing] each day, for an entire calendar year, doing one thing

that betters the environment.” She describes, for instance, how enchanting it is to

have a tomato plant growing on your balcony,8 and her daily struggles with things

from organic hair conditioner to biodegradable cat litter. But perhaps most

remarkable about such accounts is that they publicly report on dealings with

relatively ordinary things. Indeed, in some respects it seems no exaggeration to say

that these blogs provide public demonstrations of the powers of engagements of

household objects. Thus, in his Guardian report on living with a smart electricity

meter for one week, the “Green Guy” refers to Dale Vince, the founder of the

renewable energy company Ecotricity, who described his experience of bringing an

8 http://greenasathistle.com/2008/02/29/the-final-post/

smart meter home, and “how his wife and two children went round the house

switching off lights one by one, watching the watts go down.” And “how surprised he

was by the degree to which it engaged them all.” 9

There are quite a few accounts of home experiments involving smart electricity

meters on offer on the Web. Most of them are careful to consider both pro’s and con’s

of this household addition, noting, for instance, the potential disquiet caused by a

sizable display in the living room that provides constant updates of money spent and

CO2 emitted as a result of routine domestic activities, like boiling the kettle. But,

generally speaking, these accounts tend to praise smart electricity meters, in

particular for their ability to inform people about opaque domestic arrangements in

an engaging way. Thus, smart electricity meters are said to “drive home the

realisation that devices that heat things, like kettles and toasters, really do lap up the

volts, and that our homes are full of nasty little things that use electricity without

telling us.”10 Of course, the emphasis placed here on the legibility of domestic

settings does not necessarily help to address the forms of measurement and

monitoring that smart meters may or may not enable in the future. In this regard,

these media stories themselves could be said to do their part in terms of keeping the

attention focused on “little things” in the household. However, at the same time these

reports highlight connections spreading well beyond the home, as they make

references to the issue of global climate change and the transition to a “low-carbon

economy,” as well as to organisations involved in debates about smart electricity

metering, from NGOs to energy companies and politicians.11 In this respect,

electricity meters, especially in combination with the green blogs on which they

feature, do not only help to render domestic life legible, measurable and monitorable.

These devices are then also deployed to thematize wider socio-material relations,

involving energy, environment and power, in which people are implicated by way of

their wired homes, and the practices and routines that homes enable.

Accounts of life with smart meters often deploy the trope of the game as a

particularly effective, if not increasingly indispensable format for engaging easily

distracted, choosing subjects (Barry, 2001). Thus, another account of what a smart

electricity meter enables you to do explicitly presents the meter as a prop in a game:

9 Vaughan, Adam, “Smart meters turn up the heat on those with money to burn,” June 14, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/14/energy.utilities10 http://www.nigelsecostore.com/blog/2007/06/19/108/11 The blog, “The greening of Hedgerley Wood” is a notable early example, but green living now presents a blogosphere in its own right. In some sense, green blogs fit the established formula of linking domestic culture and global nature, tying together of the oikos of the home and of ecology, which is a familiar feature of environmental awareness campaigns (Hinchliffe, Hawkins), and of the grammar of environmentalism (Ingold). Here I want to emphasise that green living experiments dissagregate these linkages to an extent.

"Seek and destroy standby power. Stand in each room in your house and listen for the

tell-tale hum of money and energy being steadily burnt up."12 However, in playing up

this ludic aspect of smart metering, and thus the forms of engagement they enable,

some accounts of living with smart meters also come to ascribe powers of

engagement to domestic energy. As one commentator puts it: “my son in Germany

says that one of his greatest pleasures is to see the electricity meter turning

backwards as Dachs feeds into the grid."13 A similar conferral of the capacity to

involve onto smart meters, and indeed onto domestic settings, occurs in the quote

above that smart meters “drive home the realisation that [..] our homes are full of

nasty little things that use electricity without telling us.”14 Accounts of living with

electricity meters, on blogs and in newspapers, ascribe to these devices the ability,

not just to “inform” people about domestic energy use, but to turn a familiar domestic

setting into an interesting place, so that the material arrangement of the home can do

the work of engaging people. That is also to say, several of these accounts can be seen

to fuse the categories of empirical observation, moral and/or public involvement, and

material entanglement. Certainly, some reports on domestic smart meters provide a

relatively straightforward empiricist account of the awareness raising abilities of such

devices, placing the main emphasis on observation as leading to insight and potential

change in behaviour (Shove, 2007). “The display will show kW being used, cost or the

amount of carbon being produced. It provides a really vivid way of seeing the effect of

turning on an extra electric fire or leaving too many lights on.”15 However, such

claims also ascribe powers to engage to “live” energy measurement, and energy flows

in the home made visible.16 Such accounts can then be seen to confuse different

modes of being involved: engagement by observation, by playing at home, and

implication in CO2 emissions resulting from energy use. That is also to say, in green

living experiments, the enactment of involvement and of socio-material

entanglement in energy and environmental issues can be seen to cross over into one

another, and perhaps indeed, to be deliberately confused.17 This circumstance raises

12 Dave Reay, author of Climate Change Begins at Home (quoted by thegreenguy.typepad.com/thegreenguy/your_ethical_tips/ ). 13 http://timesonline.typepad.com/eco_worrier/2006/08/energy_for_all.html14 http://www.nigelsecostore.com/blog/2007/06/19/108/15 http://www.hedgerley.net/greening/index.php?paged=216 "When people can see how much energy and money they are saving when they switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby, they immediately become more engaged in the whole issue of energy efficiency." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4754109.stm17 This may also open up further questions about the appeal to the environment as an “external authority” in these practices, and the consequences for the type of consumer-citizen being performed here. Where the postliberal citizen-consumer has been described as self-regulating, self-validating and consequently rather self-absorbed, green living experiments present us with an implicated subject, tied into the physical, economic and environmental assemblages of energy use.

a question about the relations between entanglement and involvement as they have

been conceived in object-centred approaches in sociology.

As I mentioned, sociologists of science and technology who have drawn

attention to the entanglement of humans and non-humans as a relevant dimension of

social and political life, have tended to characterize it as something that largely plays

itself out outside the limelight, and also, as requiring sociological description if it is to

get noticed. In this regard, green living experiments are remarkable insofar as they

can be said to turn “socio-material entanglement” into an object of public

performance. The publicity format of the green home experiment can seem explicitly

designed to articulate relations of dependence between people and things in their

habitat and the wider environment, and to present them as a plane on which

“involvement” can take place. In this regard, these experiments can arguably be said

to involve the attempt to reformat public involvement as an enactment of socio-

material entanglement. That is also to say that the assumption that entanglement is

something that largely happens outside the limelight, as object-centred approaches in

social theory have suggested, seems to be partly suspended here. The same may apply

to the related idea that “material entanglement” happens at a different level than that

where formal procedures of public participation come into play. Certainly, this

cannot be taken to mean that green living experiments perform the task that object-

centred sociologies used to see as their own, that of articulating socio-material

entanglements. As the above makes clear I think, green living experiments tend to

enact a very particular set of entanglements and not others, focusing on

“unnecessary” power consumption and changeable domestic routines, and not on

rather more “constraining” or inescapable entanglements, as for instance with energy

infrastructures and landlords. In this sense, these enactments of material

entanglement may indeed have to be interpreted as dramatizations of “self-

improvement,” in a way similar to other mediatized home experiments. That is also

to say, as green living experiments turn entanglement into a focal point of publicity,

they raise questions about its status as a theoretical concept, and about the normative

promises that can or should be ascribed to this type of relationality.

The shifting registers of the object turn

Such an analysis of green living experiments, as involving attempts to turn object-

centred practices in the home into sites of public involvement, can be taken to

suggest something about the status of “the object turn.” In the first section, I

described object-centred approaches in STS and sociology as a set of theoretical

perspectives that developed internal to these fields. Now my account of green living

experiments might suggest that the object turn is happening “in practice” too. But

this suggestion is really a misplaced one, I think. For one, work that adopts or

reflects on object-oriented perspectives on social life, in STS, sociology and

elsewhere, often also involves empirical claims about the changing cultural, social

and political roles of objects, in technological societies. Thus, in fields like cultural

history, much has been written about the intense multiplication and proliferation of

objects in the 19th and 20th century in Western societies (Brown, 2003; Trentmann,

2006). These authors have also considered historical changes in the role of objects as

mediators of social, political and indeed public relations: Bill Brown (2003), for

instance, documents the invention of “object-oriented citizens,” with the emergence

of the middle class home, in early 20th Century America, as a site for the

construction of political identity. In this regard, to ask whether object-centred

enactments of public involvement, in the case of green living experiments, could be

understood as somehow “materializing” object-centred perspectives, developed in the

social sciences, would be to get the temporal framework all wrong. Besides, the

object-centred perspectives developed in STS derive much of their significance from

debates going on in this area of study: it should be seen against the background of the

“forgetting” of mundane things in the sociology and philosophy of science in previous

times. However, green living experiments do raise further questions about “where”

we should locate the object turn: on the level of sociological theory, that of empirical

description of the role of objects in enactments of citizenship in the 20th century, on

both these levels, or somewhere else yet.

To partly reiterate, there are at least three levels on which the object turn can

be situated. Firstly there is the theoretical, where the turn to objects involves a shift

in certain basic assumptions of social theory, and arguably philosophy, namely the

commitment to take non-human entities seriously as constitutive components of

social, epistemic and other practices (Schatzki et al., 2001). (I am inclined to call this

register of the object turn metaphysical, because it seems principally a matter of

decisions that are made, either purposefully or inadvertently, about which elements

are favoured in accounting for the constitution of the phenomena under scrutiny

(Duhem, 1928).18) A second register I referred to above, namely that of empirical

accounts of historical change, especially during the late 19th and early 20th century,

when the intense proliferation of industrially produced objects involved the invention

of new kinds of object-oriented social, cultural and political practices. Thirdly and

lastly, some authors have suggested that the object turn should also be understood in

18 Annemarie Mol (2002) seems to locate the ontological turn principally on this level?

terms of what may be called a “techno-normative project.” This register is quite close

to the previous one, in that it too directs attention to the changing socio-historical

role of objects in social and political life. However, those who foreground this techno-

normative dimension are not only concerned with socio-historical changes in the

mode and intensity of the circulation of objects across society, and its eventual

implications for practices. They also highlight the ways in which “capacities to

engage” are today deliberately designed into objects, in places where product design

meets marketing and publicity campaigning. Thus, Thrift (2008) and Lury and Lash

(2007) argue that objects are increasingly deployed as devices of enrolment, as

“thing-media” that are designed to involve/entangle users with a service, brand,

product, political party, leader, and so on. In some respects, green living experiments

also direct attention to this third register of the object turn, as the assemblage of

home-smart meter-blog (and so on) here seems to be quite purposefully deployed to

enact involvement. But these experiments can also be taken to complicate this

question of registers further.

Green living experiments can be taken as an invitation to add a further

constructive point to object-centred perspectives on involvement. In this respect, it

should be noted that many material perspectives developed in STS tend to enact the

object turn in multiple registers. Thus, work that goes under the name of actor-

network theory (ANT) both includes proposals for a shift in theoretical perspective,

among others in relation to the recognition of non-humans as social actants, as well

as empirico-historical claims, as for instance about the proliferation of hybrid objects

in modernity, and the increasing entanglement of social and natural entities in this

period (Latour, 1992). Indeed, ANT might be said to involve an “ontological turn”

precisely to the extent that it operates in both these registers, or refuses to choose

between them. ANT, then, does not only provide conceptual recognition of a range of

material and physical entities that had not been granted much importance in

previous accounts of knowledge practices. A second, related point is the notion that

knowledge production intervenes and changes the world in socio-materially ways,

rather than only representing it – something that John Law refers to as ontological

politics (Law, 2004). However, actor-network theorists have tended to describe the

ontic part of this equation in terms of an inadvertent, largely unnoticed spread of

socio-material entanglements across society. On this point, the case of green living

experiments may be taken to raise a further question. In these public experiments,

namely, the performance of entanglement can be seen to involve constructive labour

of its own: the use of particular devices, like smart electricity meters, and the

circulation of publicity formats, like that of the green blog, here enable the

articulation of people’s entanglements with things.19 Rather than viewing

entanglement as something that proliferates beyond social and public forms, it here

not only becomes the object of articulation, but it involves the deployment of

dedicated publicity formats. Thus, green living experiments perform technical

demonstrations in the intimate setting of the home, combining the experimental

tradition of factual reporting with the modern (literary?) tradition of using intimacy

to engage publics. In this respect, we can ask whether green living experiments

extend to things the modern publicity format of “being intimate in public” (Berlant,

1997), enacting intimacy with material entities and thereby pulling us in?

Such a constructive or reflexive reading of the role of experiments as a format

for public involvement raises further potentially “difficult” questions, as reflexive

readings often do. Among others, to suggest that green living experiments turn

“material entanglement” into an object of public performance may be a way of

robbing this category of its relative innocence, which was precisely what sociologists

seemed to like about it. Especially in relation to the environment, material practices

in the home, such as composting and reusing things, have been praised as enabling

an alternative to mainstream, information-based forms of involvement, in which

affective engagement with material things provide a way of relating “differently” to

things (Verbeek, 2005; Hawkins, 2006). Significant about green living experiments,

in this respect, is the emphasis they place on the difficulties, and practical limits,

encountered in performing engagement by physical and material means. Green blogs

attribute to everyday objects and practices certain powers of engagement, the ability

to implicate people in environmental issues, but they also note certain problems with

this mode of involvement. Thus, many green blogs provide lists of the endless

number of things that make domestic subjects complicit in environmentally

damaging wastefulness: water tanks that heat water even when you take a cold

shower,20 things like aluminium wrappings that push up the carbon footprint of

19 Certainly, actor-network theorists have described the material conditions that had to be put in place in society for the proliferation of techno-scientific hybrids to be possible – which Latour has refered to as the extension of the laboratory to society. As I already suggested above, this emphasis on the material re-organisation of social practices as a crucial enabling condition for scientific knowledges to “obtain” is as one of the central tenets of the ontological turn, as proposed in STS. And indeed, the insertion in domestic practices of smart electricity meters, and the proliferation of green blogs may perhaps be understood in similar terms, as they prepare the social ground by material means, for the extension of a particular techno-scientific network, that of energy monitoring. However, what such an account does not consider, and what I am concerned with here, is the extent to which entanglement is something performed, i.e. a construct in itself, whose articulation depends on the deployment of devices and formats of publicity.20 http://greenasathistle.com/2007/10/08/water-heater-meter-made-better-day-222/

chocolate Easter eggs,21 and “our crap tea-making skills [that] are emitting a lot of

pointless carbon.”22

Not only is the list of environmentally dubious routines and practices

practically endless, pointing at a problem of “uncontainability,” these blogs also point

at the costs involved in engaging with environmental issues by material means. Thus,

some of them enumerate the pathologies they started suffering from after embarking

on green living exercises, from weirdness (“your house smells of vinegar”23) to

fixation problems (“I know there is anecdotal evidence across the web that people

who have meters installed [..] becom[e] obsessive about it”24), and perhaps most

importantly, the problem of getting lost in triviality (“there have been plenty of silly

little changes this month — like altering the margins on my Word documents, eating

ice cream in a cone rather than a cup and shaving in the sink.”25) Possibly, these lists

of pathologies can be interpreted as an indication that green living exercises

destabilize social frames, or relatedly, that they rob people of their sense of

proportion, unable to differentiate between the more or less important (Strathern,

2004 (1994)). These possibilities I can only flag here, but it does seem that as green

living experiments turn involvement into an enactment of material entanglement,

they turn it into a problem. As green blogs extensively document the trivialities,

deviance and deceptions involved in practical attempts to engage with the

environment, they make it seem practically undoable to perform involvement by

material means -- thereby turning the tables on the “promise” of entanglement as an

alternative mode of involvement?

Conclusion

Green living experiments, then, invite us to reconsider one of the promises associated

with the object turn in the sociology of science and technology. They complicate the

suggestion that object-oriented practices, in as far as they enact entanglements of

humans and non-humans, provide a way of doing “involvement” differently, opening

up alternative forms of sociability and civic engagement. It is certainly possible to

make sense of these public experiments in “object-centred” terms, as enabling the

proliferation of techno-scientific entities across social life. However, as they

dramatize the ways in which everyday routines and arrangements materially

implicate people in issues of the environment and the energy economy, these

21 http://21stcenturymummy.blogspot.com/2008/03/easter-eggs-unwrapped.html22 http://thegreenguy.typepad.com/thegreenguy/2007/08/eco-kettle-thre.html23 http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/2008/02/smarter-than-your-average-meter.html24 http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/2008/02/smarter-than-your-average-meter.html25 http://greenasathistle.com/2007/09/30/green-recap-september/

experiments also turn material entanglement into an object of publicity. Certainly,

these public experiments thematize entanglement in reductive ways, focusing mostly

on the “unnecessary” consumption of energy in the opaque material settings of the

home. But, in thematizing the ways in which everyday routines implicate people in

wider socio-material entanglements, these experiments do unsettle the idea that

entanglement presents as “alternative” mode of relationality. Thus, accounts of life

with smart meters suggests that the approximation of the categories of public

involvement and material entanglement may itself take the form of socio-technical

enterprise, involving the insertion of networked monitoring devices in households,

and the proliferation of a particular publicity format. Also important in the context of

this paper, though, are the ways in which green living experiments assist in

articulating material entanglement as a problematic mode of involvement.

Ontological approaches developed in STS have presented “entanglement” as a

mode of involvement that is free of some of the costs and demands associated with

more established, procedural and/or deliberative forms of public participation.

Whereas the latter are prescriptive and require detachment, object-oriented practices

offer the possibility of more experimental and “attached” modes of engagement.

However, green living experiments suggest that questions about the viability and

doability of “involvement” remain very much on the table, when considering

enactments of socio-material entanglement. These enactments bring with them costs

and risks of engagement of their own: the risk of futility, obsessiveness, and so on.

Enactments of issue involvement by socio-material means, as in green living

experiments, may then have to be approached, not as ways of resolving problems of

“involvement”, but rather as articulations of such problems in practice. This does not

help to simplify matters, as it strengthens rather than weakens the sense of

ambivalence in relation to engagement, and the merits of public experiments in this

respect. However, at least it does address, to indulge in one last generalization, a

broad tendency of object-centred perspectives in STS, to dissolve problems of social

and political theory rather than re-articulate them. Entanglement, rather than

offering the respite of an alternative plane on which we are already connected in

interesting ways, then poses the tricky question of how to thematize relations of

entanglement in an adequate way.

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