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, Sad 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DRAFT DO NOT QUOTE.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 areas 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 historians intuition that its
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
Id 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 peoples 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, objectcentred 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 nonhumans 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-Cetinas
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 peoples 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 peoples associations with nonhuman 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

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 Boyles
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 sociomaterial 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 theorys 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
households 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 Webs No Impact Man, has been joined by the Guardians Green Guy, and the
BBCs 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,

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, 2008
6

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 ones 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

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 pros and cons
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.utilities
10 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.html
14 http://www.nigelsecostore.com/blog/2007/06/19/108/
15 http://www.hedgerley.net/greening/index.php?paged=2
16 "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.stm
17 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 sociomaterial 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 objectcentred 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 selfimprovement, 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 objectcentred 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 technonormative 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 actornetwork 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 peoples 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 vinegar23) to
fixation problems (I know there is anecdotal evidence across the web that people
who have meters installed [..] becom[e] obsessive about it24), 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.html
http://thegreenguy.typepad.com/thegreenguy/2007/08/eco-kettle-thre.html
23 http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/2008/02/smarter-than-your-average-meter.html
24 http://suitablydespairing.blogspot.com/2008/02/smarter-than-your-average-meter.html
25 http://greenasathistle.com/2007/09/30/green-recap-september/
22

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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