Dematerialising Earth: Sustaining the society-nature dichotomy as social technology

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Abstract:

Bringing into play concepts of Bourdieu and Actor-network theory, this paper addresses a specific hegemonic social technology which reproduces the dichotomy between the natural and the social, i.e., ecological modernisation. The latter refers to those predominant Western practices and discourses which conceptualise and shape society-nature relations since the early 1980s. By drawing on ethnographic research in one of ecological modernisation’s most significant sectors, corporate environmental management, I discuss how we can gain from conceptualising the practices of the agents in the field in their hybrid character. The empirical basis of the ethnography lies in fieldwork carried out for six months in the head quarters of one of the largest financial services providers (having more than 150.000 employees and serving more than 50.000.000 customers). In this paper, I focus on humans and non-humans who enacted multiple relations within the multinational's environmental management system, and by that co-constructed climate change. Environmental managers are influenced, or even formed, by a social technology of conceptualising society-nature relationships in a specific way and materialising these conceptualisations in both material and non-material devices as well as in nature itself.
Western societies and dominant forms of capitalisms rely on this social technology to work: its ideology suggests that nature can be measured by science, that nature’s, i.e. environmental, problems can be addressed by (social) engineering solutions and that the latter can be objectively managed. In that respect environmental management emerges as a significant social technology sustaining the foundations of our society: the dichotomy of society and nature as well as the moral ground for exploiting nature.
I will instantiate the heterogeneity of this social technology through sketching the hybrid habitus spread among human agents of ecological modernisation – the environmental managers – as well as material and informational devices at the local level of my field site. We can find as well how these local instances of the social technology render the hegemonic and global society-nature relationship unsustainable. In that sense, then, I am discussing a social technology which stabilises a specific collective which is, in the every-day, taken-for-granted to be a totality: the capitalist spaceship earth.
I aim to understand how the social technology is so inert in its trajectory although it is a fragile endeavour of putting humans and nature at their respective places. Thus, this paper questions and re-conceptualises a social technology, prominent in contemporary culture and economy, which includes non-human devices and argues that through this re-conceptualisation we can better grasp it and its human actors – as well as corresponding room for manoeuvre.