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Abstract
This paper seeks to contribute to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are currently put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to ‘materialize’ public participation. It argues that the materialization of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not refer just to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be ‘made easy’ (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of ‘co-articulation’ (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to ‘co-articulate’ participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, the spaces of participation organized with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of ‘multi-valent’ action. Different carbon-accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the ‘materialization’ of environmental participation. In some cases, materialization entails the minimization of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.
Notes
1. From a devices perspective, material forms of participation should not be understood in strict opposition to ‘epistemic’ framings of it, as in the classic concept of the ‘scientific citizen’ (Schutz, Citation1964). Devices like the DIY Planet Repairs survey visualization do not involve stripping participation of its informational, linguistic or discursive components. They rather provide a particular addition to, or modification of, the more usual codification of engagement in terms of levels of knowledge or awareness.
2. This formulation draws on the vocabulary of ethnomethodology. There are some notable connections between this methodology of social science research and contemporary environmental accounting: both are concerned with deployments of everyday settings in order to produce accounts of social life as part of social life (Garfinkel, 1984 [1967]; Lynch, 2003). For more on this connection, see Marres (Citationforthcoming).
3. There we argue that materiality has often figured as an under-articulated, under-formatted undercurrent in the performance of public participation, participation that does not involve much explicit reference to its material constitution.
4. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform that can be used to translate sensor inputs into visual outputs.
5. Device-centred perspectives can be said to ‘de-naturalize’ participation: to stress the role of equipment in the enactment of citizenship is to deviate from a focus on philosophical anthropology in classic democratic theory: a focus on the nature of man and whether belief in this nature is justified, i.e. in human capacities to develop citizenly abilities. This question was still central to early twentieth-century debates about democracy in a technological society, as for instance among the American pragmatists (Stears, Citation2010).
6. The Green Orb relies on information from realtimecarbon.org.uk, which provides carbon intensity data for the national UK energy supply, including whether it is above or below a given threshold. As such, this device arguably addresses a criticism that is frequently made of smart electricity meters (and carbon accounting more generally): that these devices rely on purely conventional measures of CO2 emissions. Carbon calculations are generally based on equations to extrapolate what amount of emissions are associated with energy use, and for that reason fail to account for empirical variation. However, to the extent that the Green Orb itself constitutes a ‘thought experiment’, it too is limited by its speculative aspects.
7. Haraway spoke of ‘the culture of no culture’ in reference to scientific culture and its ability to erases its own particularity.
8. Adams (Citation2009), blog post, 24 April.
9. ‘Doability’ was introduced into the repertoire of the social studies of science and technology by Joan Fuijmara (Citation1987), who describes knowledge production and, more specifically, the organization of cancer research in terms of the formulation of ‘do-able’ research problems.
10. Classic feminist studies of domestic technology have also documented effects of ‘co-articulation’. They showed how the framing of technology (in terms of ‘labour-saving’) had implications for the place of the household, and the housewife, in the wider political economy. But these accounts did not really consider the performative constitution of domestic subjects or action as at once technological, political and economic in nature.
11. The intersection of different activities has been described as a constitutive feature of mundane settings: they provide a space in which multiple, conflicting concerns, activities and values must be juggled or somehow brought into alignment (Murphy, Citation2006; see also Michael, Citation2006).
12. These two arguments can be combined in forceful ways, as in the claim that locating environmental engagement in the private sphere is a way of externalizing costs: the costs of environmental change are taken off the balance sheets of public and corporate organizations and displaced into the informal economy of the domestic sphere.
13. This feature of normative ambiguity or ambivalence is also ascribed to discourses of ‘sustainability’ (Anderson & Braun, Citation2008).
14. A project like the RSA's online personal carbon trading platform fits Michel Callon's (2009) definition of an ‘experimental market’: it combines a market experiment with a stakeholder dialogue designed to enable ‘learning’ about the experiment. Over the two years that the online trading platform was active, Carbon Unlimited published a range of reports, debates and studies on the associated debate forum, identifying a range of emergent problems linked to carbon accounting. But a more general dynamic also requires consideration: accounting initiatives result in the proliferation of further accounts. This raises questions about the ways in which accounting practices (and not just market practices) may translate into the public performance of controversy.
15. ‘Days 7 and 8 – groundworks finished’, The Greening of Hedgerley Wood, 15 August 2005.
16. The pragmatists, indeed, made an even stronger argument: Dewey claimed that the actual effort people make provides a more adequate expression of their engagement with public affairs than ‘what they say about it’ (Dewey, Citation1939).
17. The proliferation of devices for carbon accounting in everyday life may be understood as part of wider efforts to implement infrastructures for the generation of ‘transactional› data (Ruppert, 2009). The device-centred account offered here suggests that it may be important to extend a performative perspective to this project itself: we should consider the investment in this mode of data-capture as innovative, ‘cutting-edge’ and so on, as a performance which itself depends on a specific demonstrational dispositif.
18. Carbon rationing initiatives then blur the public and the private in another way: they can be seen to actively confuse everyday and professional modalities of engagement. Engagement is here not only codified as work, rather than leisure, it is specified in relation to work, as in the case of the gardener mentioned above. More generally speaking, indeed, exercises in carbon-based living tend to be performed by people who are also professionally active in environmental communities: many though certainly not all participants have more or less ‘relevant’ professional roles, as employees of environmental NGOs, building engineers, journalists, civil servants and so on. Indeed, this confusion of roles, in which those professionally involved with the environment adopt the role of everyday subjects, suggests that the notion of everyday life, too, may have to be understood as an experimental construct in these cases, one that has special affordances for intervening in this issue area. The confusion of roles between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, between those that are professionally entangled and those that may speak in the name of the public, has long been characterized as an important aspect of public controversies (Lippmann, Citation2002 [1927]).
19. Arguments about the ‘hidden costs’ of personal carbon accounting were taken up by DEFRA in support of their decision against any significant investment in it.
20. Islington-Hackney CRAG meeting, Monday 5 January 2009.
21. Group email, 30 June 2009.
22. Islington-Hackney CRAG meeting, Monday 17 June 2009.