Hawkins, Gay

University of Queensland eSpace

Discussion: Interrogating the Household as a
Field of Sustainability
Gay Hawkins
These chapters offer rich insights into the cultoral and political complexities of
the household as a site of analysis. They provide fascinating accounts of how
'sustainability' acquires political and practical meanings in places as diverse as a
rapidly developing Asian city: Phnom Penh; a major regional centre: Wollongong
south of Sydney; and on the national scale: Australia. They also pose a range
of conceptoal, methodological and political questions about how to critically
evaluate the role of households in progressive environmental change. In seeking
to comment on their central themes and concerns three issues emerge: firstly, the
framing category of the household and the possibilities and limitations it presents
as a mode of analysis; secondly, how to investigate 'household cultores' and the
ways in which cultore is materialised; and, finally, the politics of households: how
do they engage with political processes and how do these engagements mediate
the larger political dynaroics ofgovernmentality or activism? I shall consider each
ofthese in torn.
There is no question that 'the household' is a central focus in euvironmental
policy and a key site of governmental intervention. But, as these three chapters
reveal, 'the household' is a tricky category to pin down. For Aidan Davison the
idea of the household is deeply connected to the history and ideologies of home
ownership and home-centredness in Australia. This challenges the tendency to
define households using abstract quantifiable measures. While statistics about
households might be central to the representation of census data or economic
growth, this technique does not captore the complex cultores of domesticity and
identity that senses ofhome generate. In a similar vein Chris Gibson and colleagues
refer to 'household cultores' to emphasise the ways in which bodies, ideologies,
technologies and materials all work to constitote a space called 'home'. Both
these chapters show that the household invoked in environmental policy is highly
normalised and constitoted through specific empirical processes. In contrast to
this, 'home' emerges as a complex spatial and temporal field where everyday life
unfolds. For those able to inhabit a home, and this is by no means assured for very
poor residents living in Phnom Penh, for example, a sense of ontological security
is often produced from the connection between being and dwelling.
The value of this focus on the household as central to the meaning ofeveryday
life is that it foregrounds the ways in which home is often experienced as a space of
containment and security. Aidan Davison refers to research on Australians' recent
70 Material Geograph;es ofHousehold Sustainability
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N
obsession with renovation to show how changing and modifYing domestic space
generates asense ofcontrol and order in an increasingly chaotic and uncertain world.
Chris Gibson and colleagues explore the ways in which normative expectations of
sustainable domestic practices from government or the media are negotiated in the
material circumstances of situated households, with their very specific habits and
expectations about ways to live. Willem Paling and Tim Winter show how pre-
modern vernacular urban design practices in Phnom Penh produce relatively cool
homes in a very hot climate through the use of simple and sustainable technologies
from gaps in the floor to high ceilings. In each of these examples household
practices serve to secure well-being. However this ontology is always contingent
and unstable because homes are not contained; they are not isolated enclaves. They
are nodes in complex and multiple networks of infrastructure, flows of money and
commodities, people, media, matter and more.
Households are contained and networked at the same time, and managing the
tensions between this forcefield of internal and external relations is at the heart of
sustainability. If a sense of ontological security comes from controlling domestic
space as the one site where people feel relatively free to 'do their own thing', how
then is the impact of wider social and environmental change, or governmental
policy shifts negotiated? Each of these chapters examines the dynamics of change
in households and raises the fundamental question of how ways of living are
transformed. Too often policy targets the household as an easy option, as a zone
where changes in everyday life are possible and relatively straightforward. This
strategy often ignores the complexities ofhousehold practices and the ways in which
the dynamics of urban assemblages and governance reverberate on homes, actively
inhibiting progressive change. For example, not wanting to drive in the interests of
reducing one's carbon footprint is totally dependent on having a home that is well
connected to public transport. On the other hand, changes in the infrastructure
servicing and connecting homes can prompt sudden and effective transformations
in everyday life and household practices. The reduction of waste removal services
and introduction ofcompulsory household sorting and recycling in most Australian
homes over the last thirty years has transformed how people relate to their rubbish.
While some householders complained of state coercion when these policies were
introduced, outraged that they were no longer free to make as much waste as they
liked, most accepted this structural shift by reducing what they threw out and
how they actually did it. In this way many householders felt connected to wider
environmental issues beyond the home both ethically and practically. In putting out
the garbage properly they were doing their bit for the planet.
Households, then, are interfaces. Altering the ways in which they are connected
to wider urban assemblages inevitably shifts habits and domestic cultures in
complex ways. Each ofthese chapters offers excellent insights into how to analyse
these interactive processes and how to think about the household not as a set of
abstract quantifiable measures or as the outcome of wider structural logics but as
a field of negotiation where everyday life is practised. The challenge is to assess
how it is being constituted in different settings and in different relational networks.
Discussion: Interrogating the Household as a Field ofSt/stainability 71
These chapters rise to this challenge with their close focus on the ways in which
technologies, consumption practices, habits, vernacular design and more generate
a sense of home always in relation to the wider field of economic, cultural and
political connections that households are caught up in.
The second theme that emerges is the materialisation of culture. All these
chapters show how the dynamics ofculture are realised through endlessly variable
relations with the non-human. Culture, rather than being an expression ofdiverse
human belief systems or values, emerges as a set ofpractices that involve multiple
relations with this realm. This non-human stuff, from eco-shopping bags to air-
conditioning to street rubbish, is not passive or inert in these relations. Itparticipates
in the constitution of cultural practices and meaning systems in ways that involve
constant negotiations with material presences. In other words materiality matters
and what Davison, Gibson and colleagues, and Paling and Winter show is how the
non-human can be generative: inviting or suggesting different cultural practices.
The other significant point that is developed is the way in which materiality is
implicated in social change. Paling and Winter's account of recent transformations
in the urban form of Phnom Penh is an incisive investigation of how different
material forms participate in economic development. Their argument is not simply
that sealed roads and shopping malls express rapid change but rather, that these
material forms are helping to create a different or 'modern' ontological reality that
interferes with other, more traditional and sustainable realities.
Finally these chapters invite us to extend ourunderstanding ofpolitics andpolitical
process. All suggest different ways of thinking about households as always open to
the emergence of the political. Gibson and colleagues explore the ways in which
ethieo-politieal frameworks inform consumption practices. Rather than morality or
enviromnental responsibility being seen as imposed from above and prompting guilt
or grudging obedience, ethics are realised in practices - in the choices people make
and the ways in which these choices are interrogated and justified.
Central to this approach is an implicit recognition of the generative tension
between the political and politics. For Andrew Barry (2001) 'politics' are highly
codified forms of contestation that rely on conventional devices and institutions
such as government policies, environmental education campaigns and media
debate, for example. In contrast, 'the political' is the unpredictable process
of opening up new sites of dissent and contestation that mayor may not adopt
the logics of existing politics (2001: 207). This distinction between mainstream
politics and the political resonates with Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and
Yaunick Barthe's account of 'hybrid forums'. These are fields of dissent that
emerge out of public interrogation and contestation of markets, commodities and
their 'overflowings' or negative impacts. Michel Callon and colleagues argue that
overflowings can generate political processes and innovative configurations with
a range of actors, making clear distinctions between the institutions of markets,
techno-sciences and publics difficult to ascertain. The issues and questions that
proliferate in these configurations, and the reflexive activity they prompt, constitute
spaces for the political (Callon, Lascoumcs and Barthc 2009). This account of
72 Material Geof::,rraphies o.fHousehold Susfainability
hybrid forums acknowledges the role of technical devices and procedures in
enabling 'measured action' in response to dissent and interrogation ofmarkets and
commodities. However, they argue that these technical devices and procedures
need to be dialogic, not just delegative, if they are to avoid limiting the spaces and
possibilities for contestation and change, or what Barry calls the 'anti-political'
effects of politics. Reactive opposition and adversarial techniques are often the
least effective way to establish lasting and democratic collaboration. As Calion,
Lascoumes and Barthe say:
By trial and error and progressive reconfigurations of problems and identities,
socio-technical controversies tend to bring about a common world that is not
just habitable but also livable and living. not closed on itself but open to new
explorations and learning processes. What is at stake ... is not only reacting but
constructing. (Callon et aI. 2009: 35).
This focus on the political as a process driven by generative and exploratory
techniques, not just critique and opposition, is significant. It shows how markets,
publics and matter can become caught up in relations of interrogation and dialogue,
and how commodities are iterative processes, subject to continual qualification and
re-qualification through household practices. It also shows how households can be
crucial sites for experimentation with what kind of 'common world' we wish to
create and inhabit. All these chapters foreground household cultures as spaces of
possibility, connected and constrained and always susceptible to the emergence of
the political.
References
Barry, A. 2001. Political Machines. London: Athlone.
Calion, M., Lascoumes, P. and Barthe, Y. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An
Essay on Technical Democracy. Massachusetts: MIT.


Discussion: Interrogating the household as a field of sustainability

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