Culture and Sustainability in the Web of Everyday Life
p. 107-117
Texte intégral
1Modern age, with its ways of life consuming resources and ruining the climate, has had great difficulties so far in coping with the problem of ecological sustainability.1 For far too long, it has carelessly exploited nature and, in doing so, neglected the problem of sustainability this raised, which had existed all the time.2 The re-“discovery” of sustainability dates from the energy crisis in the early 1970s. That crisis became history because it violently shook the cultural foundations of modern times. Awareness of the finite nature of resources, as a kind of bad conscience, has since become part of a culture wasting energy here and there. However, the normative principle of sustainability taken literally means much more, in fact, initiates a profound cultural change occasionally even referred to as a cultural revolution. It not only raises uncertainty about many things we are taking for granted, it not only causes doubt and concern. It demands cuts: It fundamentally attacks our ideas of a good life, demanding from us new different techniques of survival and patterns of life.
2However, our ingrained ways of life cannot be changed that easily. Most of us guess, or know, what is not sustainable, indeed damaging, about our way of life. But a lifestyle based on sacrifice stands little chance with most members of our present societies. This makes many people impatiently call for the state and its tools, be they political regulations and laws or economic incentives and burdens (such as ecotaxes, subsidies, “scrapping” bonuses). However, seen from a distance, the results so far of these interventions have been rather disappointing, especially so when measured against the great hopes and promises. So, more and more doubt is being expressed about the ability of politics to contribute in such a comprehensive way to the protection of the environment and climate.
3It is for this reason that I am going to plead for a change of perspective in the sustainability debate. Instead of staring at climate summits and climate pacts and complaining about their missed opportunities, instead of propagating new political, economic, or technical goals, which remain unattainable, I will start with the influence of culture on everyday life, which is to, or can, become sustainable. It is the practice of our everyday life, it is the culturally ingrained habits and the smoothly working social practices which offer excellent starting points for changing our behaviour also towards sustainability. From this vantage point, I think, bottom-up processes can be started or initiated to an extent not so far considered sufficiently in sociological studies. A helpful corollary is the principle of sustainability’s recent influential ally: the discussion of “global climate change”, which considerably intensifies and dramatizes the pressure on sustainable action. It is especially this greater pressure which gives us a much clearer view of the scope and the possibilities of, and also the hurdles on the way, to change, which open or block the way to sustainability in everyday life.
4To advance the question of the opportunities and obstacles of ecologically sustainable action, I would like to assume a practical perspective below, finding everyday people in their different areas of life. On this level, even the most gradual changes away from indifferently damaging to carefully resource protecting actions must be taken seriously and analyzed carefully. In this effort, one line of theory is helpful which attracted more and more attention in sociology in the past decade: the “theories of social practice” (cf. Hörning 2001, pp. 157-243; Reckwitz 2003). That bundle of theories, however different its individual strands,3 starts from basic assumptions:
- Firstly: Most things we do in everyday life are not the result of well-thought-out intentional decisions, but are based on knowledge arising from practical experience and ability in interpretation, which we practiced in frequently repeated trains of action, and which allows us to do many things, if not most things, without prolonged pondering.
- Secondly: It is only in the context of situations in practical life that existing knowledge becomes relevant and effective, finding its use and its modification. Only when we face, and are upset by, major problems, when we look for concrete solutions and have to, or want to, change our practices, all these large inventories of knowledge become subject-related which we, as members of a knowledge society, can use, but which mostly rest within us passively. In this way, knowledge follows practice and not, as is usually assumed, practice follows knowledge.4 From this point of view the question, impatiently raised again and again, why all this knowledge about climate change does not result in appropriate action, is posed the wrong way or is due to a biased discourse among intellectuals with not too much confidence in everyday “people”.
5The centre of this theoretical approach is constituted by “social practices”. They are continuous, they are well trained; as everyday trains of action and customs, they are mainly influenced socially and culturally. They are generated in life with others, in the family, at school, in education, at work, during sports, in everyday life. This is where they are trained, become taken for granted, and yet carry a wealth of important cultural significances and values without our communicating about them. In this way, a multitude of social practices unfold in modern differentiated societies. I would like to select below practices of living, nutrition, consumption, communication, and time. We participate in them, we engage in them, and we play them mostly by implicit “rules of the game”.5 Unlike individual intentional actions, they do not have to be started by a player by whatever motivating force. From the outset, a practice is embedded interactively in situations of life and cultural contexts, in which also material things, technologies, artefacts play an important role. As a rule, social practices are practices with and in things, with technologies in buildings, with cars in cities. In this way, artefacts are seen as integral components of social practices, influencing these, characterizing them together with other features, becoming “players” without determining them.6
6These concrete examples can show how social and cultural changes may occur in a sustainable sense, but also the profound obstacles in their way. The cultural aspect of it, the aspect we call “culture”, from a point of view of the theory of practice is expressed only in actual practice. This is where the cultural web of patterns of purpose and interpretation develops its effect. Our action then turns it into something important and valuable for us and our co-players. Theories about practice emphasize culture in a specific use: “Culture as practice” – “doing culture” (cf. Hörning 2004a; Hörning/Reuter 2004). In this usage, the concept of practice in a way acts as the link between the cultural schemes of interpretation and knowledge, cultural coding on the one hand, and jointly acting subjects on the other hand. In continuing practices, the cultural schemes act less as external norms and interpretations, but more as cultural presumptions and knowledge in store, which become the unspecific substrates to the actions of the players, suggesting to them specific trains of action as being obvious and excluding others as unsuitable, in this way stabilizing collective patterns of action and habits. For this to occur, specific interpretive competences of the players are required which unfold existing pools of cultural knowledge and interpretation in practice by making them part of their knowledge for action.
7When seen from this perspective, the stability of cultural forms lies less in the continuity of cultural systems or schemes and more so in specific conditions of development under which people grow up in social and cultural worlds and, in this process, are able to acquire and train their abilities, skills, and also cultural competences. Just think of the potentials for learning and training, the far-ranging changes in working and communication practice as a result of computers, mobile phones, and the Internet. Using the new technical equipment not only provides us with new skills and experience, but also changes our ideas and our judgment of what we have to think of them, and also provides us with new cultural competences about how to best fit them into our life.
8However, the starting conditions for the strict, demanding principle of sustainability are much more difficult than those associated with the spread of new communication technologies, which opened far ranging spaces of possibility often forcing cultural traditions and conventions to capitulate very quickly. I would like to demonstrate this problem of sustainability in two large practical areas. On the one hand, the social practices associated with dwelling and, on the other hand, the social practices of nutrition. Both are not only key practices in everyday life, but also play a particularly dangerous role in climate.
9Dwelling is a central part of our routine practice of life: If we want to change it so as to achieve more sustainability, especially by clearly reducing energy consumption, we hit upon a complex of particularly compact trains of action which cross-link large areas of social life and cannot be changed easily without fundamentally reshaping collectively established conventions and cultural presumptions of what is the good life. The apartment, the house is the place where we preferably stay, cultivate our habits, and are familiar with everything in such a way that we can feel “at home”. In his “Poetry of Space”, Gaston Bachelard says that a large share of our memories and imaginations are associated with the house (cf. Bachelard 2003, pp. 30-59). This is the place, above all, where many things occur with a certain continuity, such as sleeping, reading, cooking, working, relaxing, talking, establishing privacy.
10Small wonder, then, that energy consumption in private households is not easily changed in view of the many significant roles. This change is even more unlikely to be achieved by merely technical systems, such as the electronically networked “smart home” or the fully insulated “low-energy house” (also referred to “zero-emission house” or “passive house”) with its strict heat control and sophisticated ventilation technology. These houses are still closely associated with the Bauhaus idea of a rationalistically perfect building. The Bauhaus claimed for its products a maximum of objectivity achieved by sober aesthetics and strict functionalism. Its original opposite was seen to be the ornament, but what was at stake from the beginning was a new logic of dwelling, expressed in buildings, room layouts, furniture, and objects of daily use, supported by explanations and theories and, above all, by drill, rules, and alphabets which had to be learned by the students (cf. Galison 1990; Wünsche 1989).
11Eighty to ninety years later, these maxims still have a strong impact on today’s architects. However, ecologically sensitized architects now increasingly translate the Bauhaus principle of “form follows function” into “form follows sustainability” or “form follows energy”. Yet, everything is still subordinated to one single principle. But: There is no longer just one logic of dwelling. From the point of view of the inhabitants, there are a great many criteria and yardsticks to apply to a building, a house, an apartment. Several studies of the low-energy house, for instance, show that its extremely low acceptance is in no way only due to the lack of knowledge or the “wrong” preferences of the inhabitants, but mainly to the difficult integration of the sophisticated technology into the established practices of living. Inhabitants have major problems especially with the disturbing noises produced by the ventilation systems, the new windows to be kept closed at all times (“living like in a thermos”), and the heat generated inside which should be sufficient, if possible, to do without additional space heating (see also the excellent empirical study by Rohracher 2006).
12The problem lies in the absence of solutions fit for everyday use. The architects and all the other experts involved must say goodbye to the either-or approach and adopt a both-and patchwork geared more towards finding flexible, open solutions and taking into account different cultural local customs. Success then is more likely to be achieved by mixes of new and conventional elements which not only strive for absolutely new solutions but also pick the new features out of established ones. In my view, the gist of ecological building and living lies in common social learning processes, in which all participating players, the inhabitants first of all, the design engineers, architects, ventilation companies, craftsmen and all the others, establish permanent feedback. The outcome could be a comprehensive design including the inhabitant not as a willing or unwilling end user but as a player learning and strengthened through participation. It is only in these exchange processes that experts realize what ideas of adequate dwelling practice underlie decisions by users, and how much room is available for sustainable changes. After all, objects, rooms, apartments, buildings do not exist as independent entities, but are profoundly involved in everyday practice. They find their specific places in the practice of a “form of living,” as Wittgenstein emphasizes in his “Gebrauchstheorie der Bedeutung” on the basis of language philosophy: “Allow meaning to be taught you by use” (Wittgenstein 1988, p. 550). Martin Heidegger puts it even more fundamentally: “Dwelling is the essence of being. Only when we are able to dwell, we are able to build.” For this reason, we “must build out of dwelling and think for dwelling” (Heidegger 2004, pp. 155f.).
13As long as there are no participative exchange processes in which the boundaries between experts and users become transparent, we have to do with “imagined lay persons”, i. e. concepts, images of lay persons underlying the actions of experts mostly unrelated to any specific topic and with previous awareness,7 which are continuously reinforced by a onesided flow of communication in which experts again and again try to remedy the alleged knowledge deficit of users by supplying even more information, pamphlets, and advice. They still cling to onesided transmitter-receiver model and reject the cycle model with its continuous flow of communication with no beginning and no end. In that flow, many are involved in knowledge generation, advancing the ecologically important processes of joint will formation and decision-making by their reference to specific problems.
14This becomes relevant in particular when considering that it is not so much a matter of what is called “new building”, which is so dear to the hearts of architects, but rather the ecological rehabilitation of a vast number of energy-devouring old buildings. However, progress in this respect is very slow for many reasons. Actually, people in the upwardly mobile middle classes, who are so fond of moving into apartments in old buildings in large cities, would have to advance rehabilitation (cf., e. g., Dangschat 2002). Although most of them are associated with the ecological idea and represent it verbally, their everyday actions are hardly conducive to saving energy. Saving energy is not really part of the urban way of living, given its lavish use of energy, light, and movement. People in small and medium-sized cities are more advanced in these respects. This is evident from the success of the municipal movement called “100 Percent Renewable”. Many municipalities, cities, and regions in Germany have switched their energy supplies completely to renewables for electricity and heat.8 Obviously, the “scale effect” plays an important role in overcoming the associated acceptance problems. The fact that we are fraught with a global problem seems to make the conclusion obvious
“that we can solve that problem only globally. […] However, it could be just the other way around. Large problems require small solutions, complex problems require simple solutions. For example, smaller groups (are) very much more effective than large ones in finding and implementing solutions […]” (Welzer 2009, p. 107).
15Transparent municipal contexts are helpful, more inclusive, and they are not easily bypassed. They create specific common units for co-operation and, on top of this, socially shared yardsticks and interpretations. Taking into account public interests in our everyday affairs, i. e. acting as responsible citizens willing to contribute to resource conservation, is easier when we can be confident that others will act in a similar way. To strengthen that confidence, especially citizen initiatives and neighbourhood initiatives as well as other social networks can be very helpful. There is much to say in favour of “municipalization on a small scale” and the buildup of We-groups (as Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer state concisely) in which the “yardsticks for good or bad actions, for shame, success, pride and the like […] develop and remain in place” (Leggewie/Welzer 2009, p. 233). At any rate, ecological shifts of this type involve a lot of social learning and experiencing potential, but also much communication and many processes of mutual understanding on a local level which, for example, could be able to override the otherwise powerful interests of house owners. What we refer to as civil society develops mainly on the local and regional levels of action. This is where public space assumes new contours.
16And now for the practice of nutrition. Also nutrition is a key social practice, any change in which, as in dwelling, profoundly goes against collectively established habits and cultural presumptions of a good life. And yet, we have recently been able to observe a fast ecological change in nutritional habits. There are many explanations for this development, as complex processes of this kind cannot be reduced to one single reason.
17If established routines are to be given up in order to achieve sustainable action, a lot of irritating, provocative events must accumulate to make us inspect, reflect, and search. In low-cost situations, we are very ready to shift to organic products; we do not have to considerably change our routine consumption practices. However, if it is a matter of switching from a nutritional practice firmly established since childhood, this takes a lot of knowledge about health and disease and a number of scandals associated with animals and meat and the resultant public discourse. On the other hand, there must be an urban middle class movement able to make the increase in time and cost required for ecological nutrition plausible by investing a lot into social communication. In this connection, we should not misunderstand the concept of “movement”. It does not refer to associations, groups or organizations expecting similar action from their members, but draws attention to large open associations of individuals acting in a similar way on their own and finding it reasonable to consume organic food. In addition, they communicate, permanently balance their actions against those of others, try to make their actions clear to others, and find social connection and recognition from what they do. In this respect, they continuously refer to patterns of argumentation found in public and media discourses.
18Why does the switch to ecological practice in nutrition proceed so quickly? In terms of cultural sociology, I attribute this to a specific subject model which propagated fast over the past few decades. It is based on the cultural revolutionary movements of the 1960s in Western Europe and North America directed against rationalist modern times and against the bourgeois standards of normality, which established a counterculture of boundless, playful searching for intense, authentic experiences of their selves. They propagated a subject culture with specific aesthetic-expressive characteristics closely coupled to new forms of music, art, sexuality, and consumption (cf. Reckwitz 2006, pp. 441-630). However, the subject model as a generalized lifestyle became more widespread only after the 1980s. It quickly penetrated into urban centres and became a
“model of a subject self-fashioning himself or herself experimentally via objects and services of consumption, finding satisfaction there [and] transforming this into physical experience” (Reckwitz 2006, p. 555).
19From that point on, the guiding semantics of experience stepped into the foreground not only in the meaning of event consumption, but mainly by upgrading the body as the place of manifold experiences and practices (cf., empirically, Schulze 1992). It is interesting to see how consumption for purposes of self-fashioning is guided more and more by immaterial objects and events, by information, advice and communication, entertainment and experience, shopping and, above all, body care and health care.
20Against this cultural background, my question can be answered more easily. The ecological switch in nutritional practice is so successful because it is not counteracted by cultural coding; on the contrary, organic is fun, supporting the increasing care for the body and for health, thus becoming the element of subjective self-fashioning. It also furnishes the matching framework of cultural justification. After all, organic nutritional practice is associated not only with health and wellness, but it also furnishes arguments against the ecologically disastrous agricultural industry: Ecologically oriented consumer decisions can influence food production.9 This success is also due to the fact that the new practice of nutrition is linked to many traditional cooking and eating habits handed down by the grandparent generation, i. e. it is in no way a practice to be started from scratch. This lowers cultural barriers.
21The two examples of dwelling and nutrition show very well the close interrelations of culturally and ecologically sustainable change. In this process, sustainability loses its character of an abstract principle, emerging instead as an open process of searching, learning, and experience, which does not necessarily intend to achieve completely new results but can also link to old models. In that case, it is more important to investigate scope, find solutions for our convictions which are practicable and achievable, and which allow us and all those coming after us to enjoy a good life also tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Only in this way can we ward off subjective overstraining by the august imperative of sustainability. How else could I, as an addressee of that imperative, succeed in extrapolating the consequences of my action to the ecology of the world society at any moment in time, as is demanded by many environmental ethicists. Only in this way can we turn an abstract topic, like the present “climate change,” which will quickly turn out to be a killer argument when used against individuals, into a cultural subject, something that affects us, something which can also be handled socially. It is then no longer a matter of “committing individuals,” as is often said, or accusing them of denying reality in the absence of appropriate action. Instead, we must not demand too little in social and cultural terms and thus overlook the great opportunities inherent in processes of social and cultural change.
22“Climate change” undoubtedly is a big cultural challenge showing the main deficits in sustainability in a particularly drastic and dramatic way. In this role, it can enlighten us about our bad habits and negative value orientations, but can also provoke us by drawing attention to, and scandalizing, our careless social and cultural practices, and may play the role of a conflict generator making us argue, with “sustainability” as the yardstick, about what is so damaging about our everyday practices, what needs to be better, what has to be avoided at all cost, and also what has to happen at all cost, and what can be assigned second priority (cf. Hulme 2009, pp. 326-365). This broadens the horizon, allows us to handle criteria and norms and make judgments about bad, wrong, energy-wasting habits, clearly differentiating them from desirable, right, sustainable practices.
23In this way, a normative concept of culture takes priority which is directed against the seeming equivalence of all forms of life and culture by emphasizing the better practices, worth studying, of common survival, and by establishing a distance relative to the other squandering, ecologically “uncultivated” habits. Not everything is right, not everything is permitted. This normative nature of culture develops within the concrete action process; it is not applied externally. Although, in a crisis (the present “climate change”),10 it establishes a close network of relations with external norms and principles, our findings of what is fitting or not fitting in a specific case, good or bad, advantageous or detrimental, is due to practical knowledge and judgment based on cultural criteria and normative frameworks, but undergoes specific shaping and change in the continuation of the respective practices.
24This reveals a new freedom of modern man not only to shed something – for instance outdated traditions – or fight for his right for something – for instance equal treatment –, but also a new freedom for something (for this distinction, cf. Berlin 2002). So far, we have understood this modern freedom for something mainly as a freedom to educate ourselves, inform ourselves, consume, achieve self-realization and participate in the world’s progress and prosperity. From now on, we will have to learn and practice new freedoms in addition: the freedom to restrict ourselves, address waste, avoid damaging patterns of behaviour, encourage ourselves and others to improve, handle objects with more care, save energy, drive smaller cars, decelerate things, practice new ways of time management.11 Above all, this refers to the freedom to change one’s lifestyle, be more relaxed and circumspect or, in a more general sense or most importantly, the freedom to interpret prosperity in a new and different cultural sense. None of this will be completely new, because we never start from scratch. Social practice of life is always both things: repetition and change, iteration and innovation, persistence and new development.
25[This article has already been published in German in Parodi, O.; Banse, G.; Schaffer, A. (eds.): Wechselspiele: Kultur und Nachhaltigkeit. Annäherungen an ein Spannungsfeld. Berlin: edition sigma 2010, pp. 333-345.]
Bibliographie
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References
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Notes de bas de page
1 This essay is based on lectures the author gave at the Evangelische Akademie Loccum, the University of Klagenfurt, and the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2008 and 2009.
2 Ulrich Grober, in his cultural history of the sustainability concept, finds the question of the right of man to exploit nature raised first in an allegorical narrative of the Saxonian humanist Paulus Niavis in 1429 (cf. Grober 2010).
3 In sociology, this relation to practice is evident especially in the work by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, who are influenced by the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the ethnomethodology, all of whom directly or indirectly learned from pragmatism (see Reckwitz 2000, especially pp. 542-643).
4 This is based on the fundamental assumption of the primacy of practice elaborated particularly clearly in the pragmatism of John Dewey and others in their anti-Cartesian action model; for transfer into the debate about the theory of practice, see Hörning 2004b.
5 “Practices” are built up in analogy with what Wittgenstein circumscribes as “language games”: “The essential feature of a language game is a practical method (a kind of action)“, a practice in accordance with open, though not random, rules (cf. Wittgenstein 1988, pp. 241-345).
6 The influence of artifacts is a subject of debate. To Bruno Latour, the non-human “players” are constitutive of the social side of things, prerequisites of social action routines, stabilizing social orders (“technology as a society designed for permanence“; cf. Latour 1991, 2001).
7 “Imagined lay persons” as referred to by science sociologists, such as Helga Nowotny and others, mean implicit models of addressees, users, who are supposed by the experts to have specific capabilities and take specific actions. The expert imagines something which he/she does not know precisely, or which he/she imagines or wishes in the light of his/her perspective (cf. Nowotny 2004).
8 Thus, the “100 Percent Renewable” municipal movement reported in early 2010 that Neckarsulm was building a solar district, Föhrensbach had restored a decommissioned hydroelectric plant, Husum, Emden, and others successfully operated wind power plants, and the town of Prenzlau, Uckermark, produced more electricity from renewable energies than it consumed, thanks to a sophisticated storage of biogas (cf. www.kommunal-erneuerbar.de [14.01.2010]).
9 For the “food chain” (production – trade – consumption) and the possibilities and difficulties of action by those participating in the food chain and the players relevant to sustainable consumption, cf. the research findings in Brand 2006; Brunner/Schönberger 2005; Eberle et al. 2006.
10 About the historical dimension of societal crises and their perception, cf. Scholten 2007; for the sociological analysis of such crises, cf. Friedrichs 2007.
11 The “player juggling with time” is a good example showing how this new style of time management could be organized. We, i. e. my colleagues from Aachen and I, conducted an empirical study of ways of time management when using new communication technologies, in this way emphasizing this type in great detail (cf. Hörning et al. 1997).
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Einblicke in die Kultur und Ideengeschichte des Rinascimento
Michael Schmidt et Michael Wendland (dir.)
2011
In Search of Meaning
Ludwig Wittgenstein on Ethics, Mysticism and Religion
Ulrich Arnswald (dir.)
2009
Denkräume und Denkbewegungen
Untersuchungen zum metaphorischen Gebrauch der Sprache der Räumlichkeit
Christian Hoffstadt
2009