Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

7. Front-staging Nonhumans: Publicity as a Constraint on the Political Activity of Things

177 Front-staging Nonhumans: Publicity as a Constraint on the Political Activity of Things noortje marres 7 Over the last years, a sizeable publicity machine has been set up by governments, energy companies, and environmental organizations to promote reductions in domestic energy consumption as a way for people to help “combat global warming.”1 These initiatives have been criticized on various grounds, not in the least because of the lack of credibility of their hyperbolic claims such as the assurance that fixing energy-efficient lightbulbs or routinely unplugging one’s mobile telephone charger “helps repair the planet”2 —claims that for a while were endlessly repeated on billboards, in the press, and so on, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Perhaps most important, social critics have charged these media campaigns with trivializing the ideals of citizenship and public participation. Thus it has been pointed out that because of their focus on basic household interventions, as a way of making it “feasible” to do one’s share for the climate, these environmental campaigns in effect redefine civic involvement as an atomized, isolated, and individualistic activity. They are then seen as “privatizing” citizenship to the point that effective intervention on the part of the public actually becomes less rather than more feasible (for a discussion, see Clarke et al. 2007). Interestingly, however, publicity campaigns seeking to “green” the home are equally vulnerable to almost the opposite criticism, namely, to the charge that they promote the invasion of private places by 178 NOORTJE MARRES public authorities and thus amount to a “de-privatization” of the home. There is certainly no lack of concrete examples to support such a claim, such as the “DIY Repairs” communications initiative of the mayor of London, launched in June 2007, which offers free house visits by a “green homes concierge service” to provide practical advice on how to make your home more energy-efficient, and yes, to help “save the planet.”3 Around the same time, the department store M&S announced that its textiles will soon carry a new label: “Think Climate—Wash 30 C.”4 Considering the ubiquity of such attempts to insert environmental considerations into the fabric of everyday life, it certainly seems important to be able to draw on critical repertoires that allow us to question the intrusion of public authorities into intimate places. However, it seems equally important that such campaigns can be seen to problematize the understanding of citizenship and the distinction between the public and the private domain on which such critical repertoires tend to rely. Projects that define the home as a site where people can do their bit for the climate can be said to challenge certain classic assumptions regarding the proper locations and formats for public involvement in politics. As Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (2005) have pointed out, contemporary practices of environmental citizenship invite consideration of the special affordances of practices that are traditionally defined as private for engagement with public affairs. Thus they make it clear that one of the defining features of environmentalism is that the sphere of “the reproduction of everyday life” here comes to the fore as an important setting for citizenly action. For this reason, environmental practices can seem to scramble the neat geometry that provided the scaffolding for classic republican conceptions of citizenship, as in the work of Aristotle and Rousseau. The republican tradition firmly anchored civic action on one side of the divides between the public and the private domain, between matters of general concern and mere particularities, and between the lofty questions of the common good to which the leisurely classes dedicate themselves and the mundane troubles and worries that keep working men and women busy. These distinctions can easily start shifting around when considering environmental practices, and more specifically, the connections that climate change campaigns Front-staging Nonhumans 179 establish between this global issue and domestic energy practices. Moreover, such campaigns could be said to actively contribute to the production of confusion regarding the distinction between the public and the private realms. Thus it is possible to understand green-the-home campaigns like that of the mayor of London as an attempt to actively transform the intimate sphere of the household into a very public place indeed, and this not only in the sense that the home in these campaigns becomes subject to extensive attention from public entities like governments, news media, and their audiences. As mentioned...