Download Dr Gavin Bridge

Heading ‘downstream’:
towards a cultural political economy of energy consumption
Gavin Bridge, University of Manchester
‘Intervention remarks’ prepared for Energy Subjects: cultural economies of energy consumption
Seminar 3 in the ESRC-funded ‘Geographies of Energy Transition’ series, Manchester October 15 2010
Introduction
This short ‘intervention’ advances a handful of claims about the opportunities for thinking imaginatively
about energy consumption via the tools of geographical cultural economy. It draws, in part, on
discussions associated with the previous two seminars in this series and from a critical reflection on my
own work which, in the main, has been at the ‘upstream’ end of carbon-intensive energy systems using
the tools of geographical political economy.1 My argument is that ‘demand’ within energy economies is
currently being re-worked in a number of significant ways (six are briefly identified) but that
understanding the significance of these changes poses a challenge for conventional political-economic
approaches to energy systems. I suggest that tools for a creative response to this challenge may be
found in geographical research on cultural economies. This work has developed distinctive ways (four
are discussed) of thinking about ‘subjects’ and ‘consumption’ but, so far, has largely ignored the energy
sector. The provocation – sketched in the briefest of ways here - is that, by mobilising these tools, one
might move towards a cultural political economy of energy that focusses on the linkages between
meanings, practice and institutional structures as they relate to energy consumption and that
“conjoin(s) a more thorough treatment of the semiotic to more established concepts of political
economy” (Hudson 2008; see also Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008).
Thinking through the ‘subject’: unpacking demand and de-stabilising the ‘consumer’
In both economics and political economy, demand for energy has traditionally been treated as an
exogenous variable and considered in narrowly economic terms. Oil, coal and electricity sectors, for
example, are described as classic commodity industries and ‘utilities’, producer-driven (rather than
buyer-driven) production networks in which there is little scope for product differentiation, competition
is based primarily on price, and strategic action is centred mostly (although not exclusively) on securing
access to resources. Although their engagement with demand is constrained and limiting, these
accounts nonetheless capture something of the form and design of modern, centralised energy
production and distribution systems, in which the consumer is located - dependent and largely passive at the end of the wire (or pipe). As Devine-Wright (2007) has observed for energy publics more
generally, the energy subject in conventional analyses “is overwhelmingly characterised by deficits: of
interest, knowledge, rationality and environmental and social responsibility.” To a significant degree,
then, thinking about energy via ‘the consuming subject’ provides a way to ‘reverse the telescope’ of a
political economy approach centred on the production of commodities and instead examine the
practices and spaces through which energy commodities are used.
1
See, for example, Bridge (2008).
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The need to re-focus analytical attention on energy demand comes not just from a shift in the
intellectual winds, however. Schematically one can identify six ‘external’ drivers for increased analytical
attention to energy demand and consumption that reflect significant on-going changes to the structure
of energy economies. First, a global shift in the centre of gravity of energy demand that finds
expression, for example, in the flattening of demand growth in OECD economies and its continuing
expansion in East Asia, raising questions about the possibilities for technological and policy leapfrogging
with regards to energy consumption (Bradshaw 2010); second, in the electricity sector, the adoption of
financial and pricing models that make managing (peak) demand a more attractive option for utilities
than supply augmentation, combined with an increased interest among utilities in smart grid
technologies that enable highly flexible (in time and space) modes of demand response; third,
municipal and national policy approaches that target the ‘domestic’ sphere (household, personal
consumption) as a key political constituency and geographical scale for achieving objectives like
increased energy efficiency and/or de-carbonisation, an approach which requires users to differentiate
among energy-consuming technologies/products and energy sources based on their perceived
environmental and social impacts; fourth, technological and institutional innovations (such as feed-in
tariffs) which upturn established notions of the ‘consumer’ (and the location of ‘power generation’) by
encouraging domestic production and export of electricity; fifth, identification of demand reduction as
a rare ‘win-win’ approach for tackling both energy security/resilience and decarbonisation, agendas
that are more often characterised by trade-offs than by convergence (e.g. UKERC 2009); and sixth,
institutionalisation of ‘the market’ as a social allocation mechanism for energy services, which has
opened up ‘demand’ as a terrain of consumer choice, decision-making and responsibility (while also
positioning the market-place as an alternative to democractic politics as a space for the exercise of
responsible, concerned action).
Four brief views of the ‘energy consuming subject’ from cultural economy
Recent work has begun to unpack energy ‘demand’ and consider consumption of energy as a social
practice that is culturally-embedded, mutable over time and space, and subject to complex feedback
processes. Given the limits of conventional political economy for understanding consumption, it is not
suprising that much of this work draws on alternative social science approaches, such as
behaviouralism, cultural studies of social practice and psychological accounts. There are, however,
some additional intellectual resources within geographical research on cultural economies that might
be brought to bear. Four are identified here.
1. Spaces of consumption: from the domestication of space…..
Over time, the growing availability of energy and its falling relative cost have transformed the
experience of energy consumption. Two geographical components to this transformation can be
identified. First, a dematerialisation of energy in the homespace (primarily via electrification and
gasification) as labour-intensive ‘energy gathering’ activities have been outsourced to centralised
systems. In many economies, on-site energy production and local power networks have been replaced
by massively-networked infrastructure (‘islands’ of electric power have given way to centralised grids,
local town gas to national-scale natural gas distribution). In the process, the experience of securing and
using energy in the domestic realm has been dramatically dematerialised over time (consider a metric
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like labour input, or the smell/dirt associated with energy-getting and use) as the responsibility for
securing energy has been displaced beyond the home. Second, the growing availability of energy within
the home has enabled an increasing variety of energy-intensive objects and materials to penetrate
domestic space, while allowing the domestic sphere itself (imagined as a ‘place of peace…free from
anxiety and terror’) to proliferate across space (Kaika 2005: 66). During the twentieth century, materials
characteristic of the ‘high energy society’ (Smil 2005) – such as steel, plastics and aluminium transformed space and the experience of space like never before. Incorporated into consumer
products – from aluminium foil and automobiles to pocket torches and silicon wafers – these materials
enabled the domestic sphere to replicate and extend across geographical space (Kaika 2005: 66;
Colomina 2004; Paterson 2007). National highway systems and the automobile, for example, extended
domestic space by making the distant and unknown familiar, while rural electrification – and the
consumer durables that followed in its wake - carried domesticity into the wilderness. Paradoxically,
then, the dematerialisation of domestic energy consumption over time (and the freeing of domestic
energy availability from labour constraints) enabled the material intensification of consumption as a
whole (via a profusion of new energy-intensive materials and labour-saving, consumer durables). As it
did so, the domestic relationship to energy became one that was mediated primarily by price.2 This
combination of domestic energy abundance, increasingly centralised provision, and material
intensification of consumption constituted the socio-material regime at the heart of the ‘Fordist’ period
of post-war growth.
2. …to the global invasion of the home: moral economies of energy consumption
This post-war domestic experience of energy consumption has begun to change, however, as a host of
‘extra-economic’ concerns now intrude on energy use decisions. An existential fear of climate change
now attaches to domestic lighting decisions, for example; and a grim sense of implication in social and
environmental horrors lurks on the filling station forecourt. Energy consumption activities have become
(re)embedded in social (and therefore moral) economies where domestic choices have implications for
distant others and where social norms come to intrude on sovereinty of the consumer: as Lovell et al.
(2009: 2361) point out, “ordinary practices – driving, flying, heating, homes and offices – (are made) the
subject of ethical consideration through the deployment of new narratives, or rationalities, about what
such practices should involve.” Importantly, however, these social norms are not settled so that
domestic energy consumption is currently a space of contention, confusion and possibility. Narratives
of energy security and climate change are striking in the way they puncture and collapse the post-war
notion of domestic space as something apart from and separate to the world. Carbon accounting - and
other devices that seek to ‘rematerialise’ energy within the home by ferrying into it the externalities of
energy production and consumption - “reveal the presence of the excluded ‘outside’ as a constitutive
part of the ‘inside’” (Kaika 2005). Such calculative devices and the narratives they enable achieve a
dramatic (albeit selective) folding inwards of global space into the home, a reworking of familiar
categories like private/public, domestic/global that Kaika terms “the uncanny” – “an exposure of the
2
There are some exceptions to this, such as the 1979 ‘winter of discontent’ in the UK and OPEC oil shocks (from where the
language of ‘energy crisis’ originates, see Bridge 2010). What is interesting about these moments is that they are interruptions
that highlight the normalisation of cheap, reliable, dematerialised supply into which the environmental and labour conditions
of energy production do not intrude.
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limits of domestic bliss and a revelation of its dependency on social relations of production.” From this
perspective, carbon accounting not only ‘lifts the veil’ on the social, economic and ecological relations
that underpin the experience of consumption, but also highlights the cultural and political processes
through which the ‘home’ became imagined as a space apart and the ‘consumer’ a passive recipient of
energy services.
3. The perfectly fetishised commodity
As the domestic experience of energy consumption has become dematerailised over time, so energy
has approached the perfect commodity form: a good produced for sale which bears no trace of its
social and environmental origins, which takes the form of a thing or service (kwh) rather than an
expression of social relations, whose meaning appears to be intrinsic rather a product of the way
society is organised, and whose value is encompassed by its price. By drawing on neo-Marxian critiques
of commoditiy fetishism, then, a case can be made for energy – and electricity in particular – as the
most perfectly fetishised of modern commodities. However, recent work on cultural economies
provides tools to go beyond this critique by examining the attachments that people make to objects
and the meanings that become loaded onto the ‘surface’ of commodities. By ‘getting with the fetish’
rather than seeking to expose it, this work rejects the economism that reduces meaning to price and
takes seriously the ways in which people use and value commodities once they cease to be exchanged
and become ‘stilled’ in use (Castree 2001, Gregson et al. 2007). The (de)materiality of domestic energy
services – and the laws of thermodynamics - present some challenges for thinking about energy
consumption as a circuit (commodification-decommodification-recommodification) rather than a
terminus, as consumption entails a conversion of physical states and a significant loss of order.
Nonetheless, recent work may be applied to thinking about the mutability and plurality of meanings
associated with energy commodities as they are put to work in practice: once in the home, energy
massively outstrips the commodity form and ‘leads its own life’ (Watts, 2009). Such a perspective can
help elaborate the different meanings that rich and poor attribute to the consumption (or
conservation) of energy, the inconsistencies in practice (and instability in the meaning of a standard
unit of energy, like a kwh) that see consumers invest in energy efficient light bulbs but not switch lights
off, or the ‘recalcitrant’ social attachments which people make with and through objects (incandescent
light bulbs, inefficient stoves etc) that make them resistant to the reach of policies aimed at retiring
inefficient domestic infrastructure.
4. Geographical subjectivities
A significant question with which recent work on energy consumption has begun to grapple is how
directing energy policy towards consumer behaviour - and scaling responsibility for carbon
management to the level of the household - underpin new forms of identity, agency and responsibility
(Paterson and Stripple 2010; Rutland and Aylett 2008). The concepts of ‘the subject’ and
‘subjectification’ are useful here, as they focus attention on the cultural identities and political
capacities – i.e. understandings of agency, responsibility and collectivity - that form around and through
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energy.3 Because they privilege consumer choice and private spaces of decision-making, devolve
responsibility for action to the individual or household, and ‘work’ by providing consumers with
feedback so that they become self-improving and entrepreneurial units, commentary has tended to
describe these subjectivities and the mode of governance of which they are a part as ‘neoliberal’
(Guthman 2008). Others, however, have recognised their irreducibly social character and how the
rationalities of carbon metrics and the like rely on various forms of social networking and peer
comparison (Paterson and Stripple 2010). Significantly, however, these new energy consuming
subjectivities are fundamentally about bodies in space – that is, about bodies in relation to other bodies
and to territory. They are, then, geographical subjectivities that hinge upon an understanding of
relational proximity (as opposed to conventional notions of proximity as ‘nearness’ in absolute space)
and which mobilise an ethic of care (Darling 2009, Dowling 2010). Work on the cultural economies of
fair trade, for example, has begun to capture this form of ‘politics beyond place’ that materialises
through consumption choices and which is expressly about affinity and connectivity (although this
connectivity also implies a series of separations). The subjectivities and imagined communities created
through calculative devices like carbon-footprints can disrupt established boundaries between the
private and public sphere in ways that produce, for example, new meanings of citizenship (Dobson
2003; Paterson and Stripple 2010). Not all narratives of the responsible energy consumer are so
disruptive, however: for example, rearguard action to defend Canadian tar sands development as a
form of ‘ethical oil’ (Levant 2010) – which mobilises an imaginary of oil-rich states hostile to ‘western’
interests (specifically those of the United States) against which Canada is positioned as a stable and
friendly regime - reproduces a spatial imaginary that is resolutely territorial and nationallybased/nationalist.
Towards a cultural political economy of energy transition
This very brief and highly selective review has suggested how geographical work on cultural economies
might contribute towards unpacking ‘energy demand’ and understanding the role and significance of
the energy consuming subject. The centrality of energy to structures of economic growth/accumulation
and to political power suggests that, by itself, a cultural account is insufficient for grasping the social
significance of energy or the structures that shape the reproduction of personal, corporate and national
energy economies. What these cultural economic accounts of energy illustrate very well, however, is
the ‘co-production’ of the economic and the cultural: the way, for example, that an apparently
‘economic’ category like demand for energy is constituted through cultural norms (of mobility and
abundance, for example); or the social significance of an ‘economic imaginary’ like continuous growth
(a particularly pervasive imaginary rooted in the experience of energy abundance and falling energy
costs associated with transition from coal to oil in the United States in the early 20th century: indeed,
the whole of “post-war Keynesian economics” writes Mitchell (2008) can be considered “a form of
‘petroknowledge’”). Recent developments in political economy have sought to pair such insights (about
the co-constitution of the cultural and the economic) with the sense of structural coherence provided
by conventional political economic accounts of capitalism (Hudson 2008; Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008;
3
The notion of ‘energy subjects’ need not be restricted to consumption: one can use the term to think about the cultural
attachments and political capacities associated with different aspects of energy production – see, for example, Patrick DevineWright’s work (e.g. 2007) on ‘energy publics’. My focus here, however, is on the ‘energy consuming subject’.
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Paterson 2007). The resulting ‘cultural political economy’ strives to provide an account that recognises
the emergent and evolutionary character of growth and regulation in particular spaces, the culturally
narrated character of economic processes, and how “state regulation….(can) play an important role in
developing, promoting and implementing these economic imaginaries” (van Heur 2010: 431).
The provocation of this short intervention is that just such an approach might shed some light on the
linkages between meanings, practice and institutional structures as they relate to energy consumption.
A ‘cultural political economy of energy’ would go further too, and place the current moment in an
historical perspective by reference to the dynamics of capitalism (van Heur 2010). It might argue, for
example, that we are experiencing a moment of ‘crisis’ in which the social institutions and cultural
practices that have governed the structure and functionning of energy economies is called into
question. The consumer rationalities, institutions and scales of regulating energy systems that have
developed historically to govern the provision of energy in industrial societies – and which were largely
successful at ensuring abundant, reliable and low-cost supply - are increasingly unable to contain the
contradictions and tensions of the current model of energy production and consumption. Premised on
supply-side augmentation, lowest cost supply and consumer ‘deficits’ (of knowledge, interest, and
environmental and social responsibility),4 this model has proven itself to be insufficient for the task of
addressing energy security and climate change concerns. Heading ‘downstream’ to consider
consumption and demand, then, is not just about addressing an aspect of the political economy of
energy that has often been overlooked: it is a recognition that energy ‘demand’ is now a focus of
semiotic and strategic innovation, and that it is through this process of experimentation directed at
spaces of consumption that the institutions, rationalities and scales of governance for energy transition
will emerge.
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4
See Devine-Wright (2007), cited earlier
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