A sense of urgency in relation to change is increasingly becoming part of everyday life for people all around the world who take part in political action or just witness it. This sense of urgency, which refers to both the seriousness of irreversible climatic transformations and to the necessity of immediate economic and social changes to stop the overproduction and overconsumption of goods and transport services globally, is what now connects the once distinct realms of nature, society, economy, and politics into one particular ontology. This shift suggests an emergent understanding of the fact that by radically transforming one element, such as the economy, it would be possible to influence the others. As the political commentator Naomi Klein (2014) argues, global warming can be regarded as a direct consequence of implementing and following, for over a century, a capitalist economic model focused on indefinite growth, which we now have the chance to change by opting for and developing alternative models, such as economic degrowth (D’Alisa et al. 2015). The consensus over the fact that climate change is actually happening introduces what Knox describes as a particular ontology of climate as systemic interconnection that establishes an imperative for people to acknowledge their agency, “albeit at the moment at which the possibility of that agency making a political difference seems about to disappear” (2015: 105). The urgency of change, therefore, articulates new considerations of human agency as well as of time.
In the last two decades, vitalist (Latour 2005; Massumi 2002; Thrift 2008) and posthumanist (Haraway 1991) approaches in social sciences—related to what Boyer (2014) calls the “anti-anthropocentric” turn in human sciences—aimed to de-centre the human subject, insisting instead on the agency of objects and materials and on the vitality of a world made of indeterminate relations that are autonomous of their subjects. These theoretical advances, however, came with a tendency to disregard the role of human creativity in making relationships and meanings, as Moore (2011) argues, while also dismissing any form of inquiry into human reason and agency “as though that inquiry were itself somehow part of the problem rather than a complementary project of truth-finding, or, better still, part of the solution to our contemporary challenges” (Boyer 2014: 319). However, calls for a reconceptualization of human agency have recently started to emerge (Gershon 2011; Moore 2011), some even from social theorists who were at the forefront of its denouncement (Latour 2014). It is only through human action that the politico-economic change Klein calls for could emerge. And one of the most effective ways for scholars in the social sciences to contribute to making this change possible is by creating a conceptual space where human agency is acknowledged while being defined in much more ways than one.
With the dismissal of human agency in the last two decades, time itself has lost an important dimension: the “near future” (Guyer 2007), a temporal frame that allows shaping—the idea that human beings can modify the future through their significant social and political engagements. We are left instead with only two temporal modalities, which Guyer calls fantasy futurism and enforced presentism. The latter can be regarded as emerging in relation to a narrative of acceleration characterized by “time-space compression” (Harvey 1990), instantaneous time and increased mobility (Urry 2000), and a network society of “timeless time” (Castells 1996) where new information technologies ask for simultaneity (Eriksen 2001) and where the markets of global finance function at very high speeds (Virilio 2012). 1 According to this frame, the present is fast and encompassing in a way that does not leave room for people to think about tomorrow or about what they would like to change in their lives or in the world. The increasing pace of everyday life acts as an anaesthetic for human agency: one’s capacities for social critique are put to sleep in the face of a constant preoccupation with immediate survival. Fantasy futurism, then, emerges as a way of telling oneself that things will turn out fine, that the world will take care of itself: future technological innovation will solve all the problems related to the depletion of Earth’s natural resources, and financial markets will surely find their way back to a stable course if left to their own devices.
The possibility of re-inhabiting and re-appropriating the near future is, therefore, related to finding ways for reconsidering and for reconceptualizing human agency in scholarship as well as in the world. Such an attempt is proposed here through the development of an analytical framework for looking at everyday actions of sustainability, as well as at everydayness more generally, by acknowledging their contribution to social change. The “ordinary agency” of everyday life—related to tacit, non-intentional, and unconscious acts of creating meaning such as imagination and taking action on impulse—will be described in correspondence with a set of temporal modalities enacted in domestic settings: spontaneity, anticipation, and “family time.” Theoretical support from Foucault’s (1990, 2000) work on ethical practices, as well as from recent anthropological re-readings and advancements of this work (Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014; Moore 2011), will be sought in an endeavour to propose an “ethical turn” in the study of sustainability and ethical consumption.
Energy, Sustainability, and Social Sciences
More than other forms of social inquiry on topics related to sustainability, contemporary energy research places a special emphasis on the relationship between energy, power, and politics. This is because the arena of global energy choices is currently being configured remotely from the experience of everyday life as well as from the opinions and beliefs of laypeople on this matter. Growing one’s own food organically in a garden or allotment or cycling to work instead of driving are decisions that anybody could make, more or less, any time. However, allowing or banning fracking for shale gas near and under National Parks and other protected areas in the UK, for example, is a decision that is solely in the hands of the national government. 2
Recent advancements in energy scholarship have examined various ways to theoretically articulate the actual relationships between energy infrastructures and institutions of political power. Following Foucault’s concept of biopower, Boyer (2014) introduces “energopower” as a conceptual frame for an analytical method of understanding modern power. From a slightly different theoretical perspective, bringing together the entropy law of thermodynamics and Marxist and ecological economics, Hornborg (2013) proposes a radical reinterpretation of technology as the displacement of slavery by showing that, in substituting organic for inorganic energy, the industrial revolution created the illusion that the labour of oil and of other natural resources need not be remunerated at the same costs that the human labour necessary to accomplish a similar job would be. The rethinking of modern power in relation to energy infrastructures that Boyer and Hornborg, among others, 3 intelligently propose could lead to a realization of the fact that, at present, global energy choices need to be regarded as the ultimate terrain for political contestation and activism. In Stirling’s (2014) view, there are two radically contrasting paths emerging from this terrain. The first path is a “progressive” transformation focused on renewable energy resources and technologies and on addressing wider sustainability benefits while eliminating carbon emissions. The second path follows a “business as usual” scenario, in which there is no effort to reduce carbon levels. This scenario proposes a “conservative” transformation focused on climate geoengineering interventions, such as carbon capture and storage, aimed “solely at assuming human ‘control’ over the planetary climate” (Stirling 2014: 85) and leaving energy needs unaddressed.
In this context, looking at the everydayness of energy and the ways in which laypeople use energy-consuming devices in their homes—which is what my research did—is an ambivalent endeavour. First, it is, of course, tremendously important to know more about the ways in which people understand, use, and value energy as a cultural artefact (Strauss et al. 2013) or as what Wilhite (2005) calls a quintessential social good. Secondly, there is an immense asymmetry of power between, for example, the situation of choosing an energy-saving light bulb over a traditional one and the situation of authorizing a tar sands oil-extraction project over a solar power plant. 4 During my fieldwork, the people who took part in my research, as well as myself, were aware of this asymmetry of power, and they brought it up in one-to-one encounters and in more public meetings, such as during a feedback event that marked the end of the project, which will be discussed in Chap. 4.
Sustainability, as a wider context for energy research, has been a topic of long and sustained interest in the social sciences (Milton 1996). One could argue that some of the main questions in this field, such as how to move towards a pro-environmental society, cannot be disentangled from the issue of responsibility: Who should be responsible for proposing, organizing, and producing this move? Hargreaves (2012) shows that early research on pro-environmental behaviour, following environmental psychology approaches, framed the problem as a result of faulty human decision making and thought the resolution resided solely in providing more information on the topic. Directed towards individual citizens, this approach was widely adopted in policymaking by providing environmental education through information campaigns with the purpose of changing behaviours. This top-down process of placing all responsibility on individuals has been criticized from the vantage points of other social sciences paradigms, such as theories of governmentality and biopolitics and social practice theory, for trying to impose a vision of the “green citizen” (Hobson 2013) as a “carbon-calculating individual” (Slocum 2004) while positioning governments “as enablers whose role is to induce people to make pro-environmental decisions for themselves and deter them from opting for other, less desired, courses of action” (Shove 2010a: 1280). Moreover, the influence of behaviour-change approaches on the overall sustainability research agenda and their relationships with policy-making, have been denounced as problematic because they support existing political interests by promoting a simplistic model of social change (Shove 2010b). To surpass the limitations of a behaviour change model while also not losing sight of a sought-after pro-environmental transformation, other forms of social theory have been called for. Social practice approaches to consumption, as some of the most vocal responses to the dominance of behaviour change paradigms in the UK, move the focus from the individual to the ways in which energy-consuming practices, such as cleaning (Shove 2003), come into being and are shaped and normalized in relation to specific socio-economic and technological conditions. Social change towards sustainability, therefore, is not a matter of changing individual behaviour but of changing the socio-material conditions—values as much as infrastructures—that frame practices. While behaviour change approaches regard people as “autonomous agents of choice and change” (Shove 2010a: 1279), social theories of practice regard people as carriers of practice.
The ethos conveyed by social practice theorists was inspiring for my work when I entered this debate. However, while the socio-material conditions of energy-consumption pra...