Drawing on Foucault (1985), political struggle, such as green consumerism, can be conceived of as a political ethic or as 'politics of ourselves' (Bernauer and Mahon, 1994).
In addition to resistance against different forms of domination and exploitation, a political struggle necessarily entails combat with the different forms of discursive power that constitute individuals as subjects. If it is acknowledged that our subjectivity is constituted by power and discourse, one important aspect of this combat is to 'refuse what we are' (Foucault, 1978, 1980). Another aspect is to 'invent, not discover, who we are' by inventing, developing, and promoting new forms of subjectivity that can be sources of effective resistance to disciplinary power (Foucault, 1983; ref. Bernauer and Mahon, 1994). This 'politics of ourselves' and the ethico-critical reflection it involves (Falzon, 1998) can be conceived of as ethics. A “moral” action according to Foucault (1985:28) is not reducible to an act, or a series of acts that conform to a rule, a law, or a value. Moral action also calls for the forming of oneself as a moral subject 1. For Foucault, therefore, ethics is essentially a mode of self-formation, or the way we fashion our freedom (Bernauer and Mahon, 1994:143).
Hence, when studying the ethical aspects of green consumerism the focus is not only on the moral codes of conduct referred to in the texts, but also on the forms of subjectivation through which green consumers are seen to constitute themselves as moral subjects of their own actions. Morals, therefore, include the effective behaviour of people,
the (moral) codes, and the relationship that people have with themselves, which has the following four major aspects (Foucault, 1984: 351-359; Foucault, 1985: 25-32):
1. The ethical substance, which refers to the material that is worked over by ethics.
(e.g., feelings, desire, intentions, acts)
2. The mode of subjection, which refers to the way in which the individual establishes his or her relation to the rule and recognises himself or herself as obliged to put it into practice. In other words, it is the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise moral obligations (e.g., divine law, natural law, a cosmological order, rational universal rule, spiritual tradition, group membership and custom, an attempt to give one’s existence the most beautiful form possible).
3. The self-forming activities or ascetics or practices of self, which refer to the techniques of self forming activity or asceticism by means of which people can change themselves and transform themselves into ethical subjects. They refer to the ways in which people work on the ethical substance (e.g., learning, monitoring, testing, self-reflecting on and deciphering one’s desires, renouncing pleasures).
4. The ‘telos’, the mode of being at which people aim in behaving ethically, or the kind of person people aspire to become when they behave in a moral way (e.g., pure, immortal, free, perfectly tranquil, masters of themselves).
As Darier (1999) has argued, green consumerism based on this type of self-formation and critical environmental resistance, which can be characterised as a green aesthetic of existence, can lead to radical questioning and requestioning of the broader conditions that result in consumers seeing the world as they see it. This sort of personal environmental ethics encourages green consumers to promote new forms of subjectivity through the rejection of the kind of individuality that has been imposed on citizens as 'consumers' in the history of Western market economies. Through reflective and constant hyper-criticism one can question the conditions which account for one’s subjectivity and start to imagine and build new kinds of subjectivities. In the following sections we aim to
elaborate on such practices of transgression of the given subjectivity of the consumer that a number of radical environmentalists who live in eco-communes engage in.
METHODOLOGY
We take a constructionist approach to consumer inquiry and, thus, assume that language does not merely mirror reality but operates performatively and constitutively and is thus used to construct reality (Davies and Harré, 1990; Gergen, 1997; Hall, 1997; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). We presume that the discourses that people call on and enter, in everyday life, provide them with a limited set of assumptions and interpretive procedures for making sense of the world, and hence constitute the conditions of possibility for subjectivity and agency. Therefore, the discourses of green consumerism that are available in society or in a specific social setting guide and constrain the ways in which 'green consumers' and 'green consumerism' can be acceptably and understandably represented in text, talk, and signifying practices.
In line with these constructionist assumptions, we also consign narrative to the domain of discourse (Gergen, 1994). We presume that narratives not only create conversational realities but are also constituents of ongoing and institutionalised patterns of societal conduct (Riessman, 1993). Narratives are thus inherently political. They are sites of representation where subjectivities are constructed, contested and transformed through the working of power and resistance (Foucault, 1978, 1980). Through establishing valued endpoints and through populating the narrative with certain actors and facts as opposed to others, for example, narrators engage in moral and political evaluation. Through narration they also reiterate and transform culturally shared meanings, ideas, norms and values.
Our research is based on two sets of data. The first set of data consists of 84 written accounts of green consumerism, generated using the method of non-active role-playing, in the context of a course on consumer behaviour in February 2000 (Moisander, 2001). It was presumed that when describing green consumers, students would be using the dominant discourses or systems of representation, negotiating, contesting, and reproducing the culturally shared meanings associated with green consumerism. Two different orientations were used. The wordings of the orientations were the following.
1. Imagine that you are an environment friendly green consumer. What do you value, what do you pursue, what is important for you in your own life, society, and the world? Describe your values, beliefs, and feelings as thoroughly as possible.
2. Imagine that you are an environment friendly green consumer. What is it that you do not value, what do you not pursue, what is not important for you in your own life, society, and the world? Describe your values, beliefs, and feelings as thoroughly as possible.
The data so obtained consist of 44 descriptions, based on orientation 1, 24of which are written by female and 20 by male students, and 40 descriptions based on orientation 2, 26of which produced by female and 14 by male students. The length of the texts varies from one to three pages. Overall, the accounts tend to reflect the various disciplinary techniques and strategies through which radically green or environmentalist ‘consumers’
are marginalised in society.
The second set of data consists of the life stories of 12 inhabitants of four Finnish
‘eco-communes’ 2, nine of which were women. The interviews of these eco-communards were obtained by visiting the communes for three days over weekends during the winter of 1999 to 2000. Besides the more or less explicit ecological commitment, three of the communes had no official or explicitly shared political, religious or other philosophical or ideological commitment or orientation. One of them, the oldest and largest commune, was explicitly theosophically orientated. In all of the four eco-communes, women clearly outnumbered men. A short description of the eco-communes is given in Appendix 13.
When carrying out the interviews of the eco-communards the aim was to let people choose their own ways of telling their stories and decide upon the most important themes and events in their lives. However, we view these narratives as socially constructed in the interview situations (Czarniawska, 2001). We tend to share the views of Riessman (1993, 11), who has pointed out that a “story is being told to particular people; it might have taken a different form if someone else were the listener”. Hence, telling about their life experiences, people are also creating a ‘self’; they present themselves as the sort of people that they wish to be known as by others.
Overall, these ‘eco-communards’ represent themselves as having abandoned the consumption and career orientated way of life, and as aiming to organise their lives so that they can be sufficient and live ‘in harmony with nature'. Characteristic of their self-narratives is an account of their change of life style as some sort of a spiritual reorientation.
They claim to have rejected the values of material well-being and social status to be able to pursue the values that they see as connected with attaining mental harmony. It is our interpretation that for them being a green consumer means to pursue a 'green aesthetics of existence' (Darier, 1999) of some sort.