Class 3: Environmental subjects
Christos Zografos, PhD
JUH-UPF Public Policy Centre, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University,
Barcelona, Spain
christos.zografos@upf.edu
Masters in Environmental Studies
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
November 2018
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Introduction
•Answers to question
•Subjects approach
•Premises on other theories
•Classroom activities
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FORMAT IN PPT = I HAVE UPLOADED ONE FOR THEM TO USE

Today’s reading
The reading
• Anything you learned?
Class question
• “According to Robbins and his study, lawn managers who are more aware of the environmental
impacts of chemicals, and are more socially involved and concerned about their communities, are
those who apply more intensively chemicals on their lawns
• “How do Robbins’ middle-class lawn mainteners (“lawn people”) end up using chemicals which they
know that are harmful not only for the environment but also to their own health?
• “Why do they do this to themselves and the environment?”
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Why do they do it?
Three reasons:
1.Hectic lives: no free time
2.Economic/ instrumental logics
3.The good citizen: moral responsibility to the community

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Hectic lifestyles
•“When I first moved here I was traveling a lot so I didn’t have time to do much in my yard. I
thought, my lawn must need something, so I was treating it . . . I think of yard work as a fun
activity . . . But I just don’t have the time anymore.”
•Residents stated, with some degree of pride, how busy they and their families are with careers,
hobbies, sports, and travel
•This often translated into a feeling that they did not have time to worry about lawn chemicals
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Economic/ instrumental logics
•Association of chemicals inputs with housing values suggests instrumental motivations
•
•Conserving well the lawn = relatively inexpensive investment for maintaining property values
–Note: this is a socio-ecological system where homeowners are rewarded for environmentally
detrimental behaviour!
•Still: instrumental thinking only a small part of lawn manager-home owner logic
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•Association of chemicals inputs with housing values…
–which reach the homeowner
–as well as neighborhood
•…suggests obvious instrumental motivations

Beyond instrumentalism: community
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•Despite risks, chemicals use = good character; social responsibility
•Ecological character of lawn: collective management
•Decisions to use chemicals: something  owed to neighbors
–“I wouldn’t insult my neighbors by not keeping my house up”
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Image result for lawn community usa suburbia

Despite risks, using chemicals
–Sign of a good character
–Sign of social responsibility
(Also, ecological character (materiality) of lawn: requires collective management otherwise plague
will stay in neighbourhood)
Most important driver for lawn chemical use:
–Sense there is a “neighborhood norm” (rule) of lawn management
Decisions about lawn chemical use in terms of something that they owed to their neighbors
–“I wouldn’t insult my neighbors by not keeping my house up”
NOTES:
Materiality: how material properties of nature may influence human politics (e.g. ways of
organising land management in a community, i.e. collective care); and history
• Consider: ecological character of lawn problems: if you eliminate plague it can move next door,
so next door needs to apply same level of care
Disregard for lawn care: free-riding and moral neglect
Participation in maintenance is a practice of civic good. Disregard for lawn care is, by
implication, a form of free-riding, civic neg- lect, and moral weakness. This is further reinforced
by the ecological character of lawn problems, including mobile, invasive, and adaptive species such
as grubs, dandelions, and ground ivy. These pests, if eliminated in one yard, can easily be
harbored in another, only to return later, crossing property lines, blowing on the wind, and
burrowing underground. Intensive care by one party merely moves problems around; only coordinated
action can control “outbreaks” and achieve uniformity. In this sense, lawn care differs from other
kinds of individual invest- ment in community, such as Christmas lights, painting, or other
efforts. It is a far greater problem, requiring coordinated collective action, at least where green
monocultural results are desired.

The good citizen: moral responsibility
–
–…imperative to mow in time for high school prom. Limousines came to the cul-de-sac to pick up
several high school students, pictures were taken on front lawns, and everyone wanted their yards
to look perfect
–Suzanne: why she continued lawn chemical treatments even though her dog’s paws were bleeding, she
replied: I guess we didn’t want the yard to look bad when everybody else’s looked so nice . . . You
try to make it look as nice as you can, without offending other people
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•Lawn chemical use as something they felt they had to do to meet the expectations of their
neighbours
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•Reveals: ways in which neighborhood forces (without physical coercion) certain kinds of lawn
management onto individuals
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Disciplining
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•When weeds grow prominent:
–“I would feel really out of place. It’s not only how the yard looks to me, but how it looks to the
neighbors. If it’s not in keeping with the neighborhood [then I’d have to spray more]”
–“[in his mom’s neighbourhood] if you don’t cut twice a week you are a communist!
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•System of monitoring (when to “improve” lawn) that relies heavily on the view of one’s lawn by
neighbors
•Neighbour’s gaze
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System of monitoring (when to “improve” lawn) that relies heavily on the view of one’s lawn by
neighbors

The argument
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‒The maintenance of lawn yard landscapes through environmentally harmful lawn chemicals is an
internalized environmental practice rooted on a socially enforced environmental aesthetic that
associates good citizenship with environmentally harmful activities (use of chemicals)
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•Cos. benefit, but not force anyone
vPower enacted internally through producing a certain kind of “subject”
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The argument (Robbins’):
Maintenance of lawn yard landscapes through environmentally harmful lawn chemicals: internalized
environmental practice…
•…which is:
–Rooted on socially enforced environmental aesthetic
–That associates good citizenship with environmentally harmful activities (use of chemicals)
• Such behaviors benefit the corporate entities that produce, package, and market the goods and
services that maintain such an aesthetic
• But it cannot be said that these companies forced anyone, in any simple way, to act as they do
• Rather, the exercise of power is enacted internally
• Through production of a certain kind of “subject,” whose identity as a good citizen is associated
with a set of specific [harmful/ polluting] environmental activities

Power shaping subjects
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²
² subject to someone else by control and dependence
² tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge
•
•Subject (Foucault, 1982): two meanings of word "subject":
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•Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to
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•Q: Who is this subject?
• “turfgrass subjects” (p.115)
• Subject = Lawn People!
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Making subjects: self-disciplining
•Central problem of modern govt. (Foucault): “the conduct of conduct or else the power to act on
the actions of others”
–Modern governments develop technologies of power to achieve
•Panopticon: what is it?
–Prisoner feels he’s been watched and has to behave at all times in case guard is watching (Sharpe,
2009)
–By feeling he’s been watched all the time he internalises the rule of discipline (behave as he is
required)
–Guard doesn’t even need be there!
Presidio Modelo prison, Cuba (Source: Friman, 2005)
Question: What’s this??
Source: /thefunambulist.net//thefunambulist.net/
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BACKGROUND TO THE APPROACH
•Subjects and subject-making
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Foucault, power and liberalism
•Foucault’s interest:
•How power operates
•Emergence of ‘technologies of power’ in modern (roughly 17th century onwards) period (Europe)
•An interest on liberalism: key, modern political doctrine and practice of government
•Liberalism (Britannica)
•Protecting and enhancing freedom of the individual = the central problem of politics
•Government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others
•But government itself can pose a threat to liberty
•Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their
coercive power may also be turned against him
•Problem: how to avoid (as much as possible) coercion/ authority abusing power but also secure
individual liberty (do as one wants – more or less)?
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Britannica:
•Political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the
central problem of politics.
•Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed
by others,
•but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.
•As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776),
government is at best “a necessary evil.”
•Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their
coercive power may also be turned against him.
•Problem: how to avoid (as much as possible) coercion/ authority abusing power but also secure
individual liberty (do as one wants – more or less)?

Central problem of modern government
•Iverson and Painter, 2005:
• Foucault identified the ‘conduct of conduct’ as the central problem of modern government
• A way to deal with the central paradox of liberal government:
‒liberalism asserts sovereignty of free individual,
‒yet government requires that individual behaviour be regulated
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Iverson and Painter in https://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/key-term-conduct-of-conduct/
Conduct of conduct = conducting (leading, driving, controlling) the behaviour (conduct) of citizens
(subjects)

Foucault: exercising power
•Power can be exercised in more subtle ways than outright oppression + coercion
•i.e. by establishing normalised and ‘deviant’: behaviours (homosexuality), processes (democracy is
inefficient), actions (stealing = crime), persons (lepers=unhealthy), places (Africa is dangerous,
e.g. disease, crime, jungle), etc.
•People integrate these as personal principles that guide their behaviour -> (as – liberal –
government) you no more need to punish or compensate
•They become subjects: individuals subjected (to the will/ desires of authority) through ties to
own identity by self-knowledge (e.g. who you think you are)
lIn this way governments (those ‘in power’) discipline behaviour, people (in general) or certain
groups, etc. without coercion
•Source: http://www.michel-foucault.com
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The conduct of conduct = central problem of modern government
The concept of “man”: fundamental point of ref for human science inquiry. The double essence of
“man”
oMan as an object
oMan as a subject
oHistorical review: the impossibility of “man”
But why taken for granted for so long?
oA conceptual prerequisite for productive citizens (17-18^th cent. Europe)
•Body and soul can be manipulated and reformed
oInstitutions of discipline: Panopticon (surveillance cameras)
Seeking the “deviant”: pathological populations
oBiopolitics of reformers: principles of welfare state
o“Power-knowledge”
oSubjectivation: classify and shape individual human beings into “subjects” of various kinds – e.g.
heroic-ordinary, normal-deviant)

Governmentality
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•Governing that includes the active consent and willingness of individuals to participate in their
own governance
•Or else: the governing of people’s conduct through positive means
‒Not sovereign power: abide by laws and regulations of centralised power (e.g. royal power)
‒Not disciplinarian power: learn what to do and not to do; through punishment and reward
(institutions that exercise authority)
‒Yes: the willing participation of the governed (consent and self-regulation)
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•Governing that includes the active consent and willingness of individuals to participate in their
own governance
•Or else: emphasizes the governing of people’s conduct through positive means rather than the
sovereign power to formulate the law. In contrast to a disciplinarian form of power,
governmentality is generally associated with the willing participation of the governed
•Not sovereign power: abide by laws and regulations of centralised power
•Not disciplinarian power
•Characteristic of modern period where power exercised through disciplinary means in a variety of
institutions (e.g. penitiary system, schools)
•Power exercised by those who represent authority
•Teaches you through reward and punishment the rules you must follow in your life as a citizen
(power-and-knowledge)
•What is more: knowledge created in institutions is then used to control populations (e.g.
university, demography, anthropology for governing populations through controlling them, e.g. in
colonies; surveillance systems, etc.)
•Yes: the willing participation of the governed
Three Minute Thought: What Is Governmentality?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvWsIR5_bOs

Individual responsibility
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•Self-responsibility and self-improvement (Hamann, 2009):
•Just as illness and disease are more often addressed in the mainstream media as a problem of
revenue loss for business [and hospitals or government revenue] than as an effect of poor
environmental or worker safety regulations, corporations have stepped up the practice of promoting
full worker responsibility for their own health and welfare, offering incentives to employees for
their participation in fitness training, lifestyle management and diet programs. We can also find a
sustained expansion of ”self-help” and ”personal power” technologies such as new techniques
promising greater control in the self-management of everything from time to anger.
•These and many other examples demonstrate the extent to which so much that was once understood as
social and political has been re-positioned within the domain of self-governance, often through
techniques imposed by private institutions such as schools and businesses.
•
•Seeking to reshape people’s subjectivities into individuals who are responsible for themselves and
must seek self-improvement
•
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Image result for self improvement

Governmentality
• Way in which governments try to produce citizens (subjects) best suited to the ends and
objectives of governments
–A style of exercising power
• Organised practices through which subjects are governed (Mayhew, 2004)
–Mentalities, rationalities, techniques
–E.g think back on ‘Lawn People’ (subjects)
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Source: https://adrianblau.files.wordpress.com

Used to mean several things, such as:
•The “how” of governing (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009)
–Calculated means of directing how we behave and act
•But also: Way in which governments try to produce citizens (subjects) best suited to the ends and
objectives of governments
–A style of exercising power
•And: Organised practices through which subjects are governed (Mayhew, 2004)
–Mentalities, rationalities, techniques

Activity: watch-n-discuss
•
•Vox: Game of Thrones is secretly all about climate change
•“…stopping it requires the world’s biggest nations – like China, India, and the US – to sacrifice
a little in the short term and put away their political competition with each other.
• A collective action story… story Northern Wall and forces it holds at bay “is about the mistaken
belief that industrial civilisation can stand against the changing forces of nature
•…but if our zombies are climate change, and we are not doing nearly enough to prevent catastrophic
global warming, who should you really be annoyed with?”
q QUESTION: Who should you be annoyed with? How change?
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•
•Halsey, 2004 (and ‘Man’ by Steve Cutts)
•But I want to suggest that structural economic power relies for its efficacy not simply on the
relations between government, law, and the economy, so much as on the flows of pleasure which
invest the population at any one time.
•Not only is it profitable to be environmentally destructive (in the sense of mining, manufacturing
cars, clearfelling forests) it feels good too (in the sense of purchasing a gold necklace, driving
on the open road, looking at a table, chair, or house constructed from redwood, mahogany, mountain
ash or the like).
•QUESTION: Who should you be annoyed with? How change?
•
•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xppoy2veSP0
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•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
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Question: How to change all this? With what processes/ practices? Who should be targeted to achieve
change, e.g. avoid climate change/ environmental disaster?
Is it a matter of convincing someone? And if yes, how (practices/ processes)?
•Game of Thrones is secretly all about climate change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xppoy2veSP0
…stopping it requires the world’s biggest nations – like China, India, and the US – to sacrifice a
little in the short term and put away their political competition with each other.
A collective action story… story Northern Wall and forces it holds at bay “is about the mistaken
belief that industrial civilisation can stand against the changing forces of nature
…but if our zombies are climate change, and we are not doing nearly enough to prevent catastrophic
global warming, who should you really be annoyed with?
• Man (by Steve Cutts):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
Halsey, 2004 (and ‘Man’ by Steve Cutts)
…the vast bulk of environmental damage stems from privileging ‘the economic sphere over other
social structures and issues’.
 But I want to suggest that structural economic power relies for its efficacy not simply on the
relations between government, law, and the economy, so much as on the flows of pleasure which
invest the population at any one time.
 Not only is it profitable to be environmentally destructive (in the sense of mining, manufacturing
cars, clearfelling forests) it feels good too (in the sense of purchasing a gold necklace, driving
on the open road, looking at a table, chair, or house constructed from redwood, mahogany, mountain
ash or the like).
 Environmental damage is in short as much a corporeal (bodily/ subjective) event as it is a
corporate/ state practice

Take away points
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•Green governance: governmentality
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•Internalised power: Power can also be exercised internally
‒through construction of subjects who by understanding themselves in particular ways (e.g. “good
citizens”) voluntarily (without coercion) serve state projects – e.g. produce nature in ways
desired by state, corporations
‒E.g. turfgrass subjects or Lawn People
2.
•Copyright: David Hayward (source: geotimes.co.id)
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The way power is exercised within – rather than over – individuals, communities and societies. As
people come to understand themselves, regulate their activities, and help oversee the actions of
others, they are not merely the objects of external force, but are themselves embodied power.
Foucault observes, “individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application” (Foucault
1980: 98) and further suggests that government (or sovereign) power depends upon the extension of
the state itself
through internalization and acceptance of individuals as state subjects, a condition he refers to
as “governmentality” (Foucault 1991).
More on internalised power:
2.Internalised power: power also expressed on how individuals come to obey + take for granted
“property” laws
•Internalising control & authority as normal/natural
•Hence, neither questioning nor resisting it
Foucault: governmentality
Government power depends upon extending the state through internalisation and acceptance of
individuals as state subjects
Way power exercised within individuals
Also: communities and societies

Course overview: What stuck with you
•Pick a partner and respond in a piece of paper:
1.An “Aha” moment
§“Now I realise why…”
§A pleasant surprise
§Something you thought was particularly interesting
§Something you didn’t expect
§A solution
2.Something that you had to struggle with to understand
3.Something you don’t agree with
4.Something that you agree with strongly
5.Something you want to know more about
6.A question that you have
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Course core arguments
•Capitalism and environmental degradation
•Capital accumulation and the quest for value surplus produce environmental degradation; but also,
environmental degradation is itself a condition for capital accumulation (surplus value)
•Environmental justice (racialised natures)
•Racism produces environmental degradation, because it disproportionally offloads environmental
‘bads’ to non-white communities, depriving them of resources and reducing their capacities to
maintain a healthy environment
•Environmental justice is about the fair: distribution of environmental goods and bads,
participation in environmental decision-making, and representation of people’s diverse ways of
connecting to the environment no matter their race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or class
or income levels. Both nat’l and int'l dimensions of environmental justice are important
•Othering helps forge an ideology for environmental discrimination and injustice (i.e. helps
justify these). Discrimination naturalised through othering permits resource dispossession
•Environmental subjects (internalised and diffuse power)
•Power can also be exercised internally, through the construction of subjects who by understanding
themselves in particular ways (e.g. “good citizens”) voluntarily (without coercion) serve state
projects – e.g. produce nature in ways desired by state or corporations – even at the harm of
themselves
•
•
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