Sustaining Waste – Sociological Perspectives on Recycling a Hybrid Object - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 297

22.4 Discussion: Limits to Manageability in a Hybrid Field
Bourdieu (1981, p. 307) urges us to disclose how powerful agents conceal the
struggles within their field. As alluded to above, such a stance implies breaking
with sticky notions of the everyday and questioning how we could construct our
object usefully. Let us take a closer look at whether or not the suggested epistemo-
logical break can be used for analysing glass recycling. To do this, let us return to
Figure 22.1 . If we look at it we find the central item 'glass waste'. While Bourdieu
does not emphasise the role of material items, Actor-network theory renders them
as potentially decisive actants. For our theory to be actually useful for conceptual-
ising environmental management it is doubtless relevant to discuss how a
Bourdieusian approach can account for technology and materials which influence
social action.
Sterne (2003) focuses on this very issue. He suggests that technology is part of
the habitus, i.e., part of the way we move, a socially organised form of movement.
Reading Sterne implies a move towards conceptualising technology relationally.
What does this mean? In the relational logic things exist relative to each other
rather than having absolute characteristics. Schinkel (2003, pp. 78-79) sees this
logic as having critical potential: Bourdieu's “analyses are unmasking and demy-
thologizing . This is a direct consequence of his anti-essentialism” 37 . If one takes
this anti-substantialist, non-naturalising stance one contradicts those who believe
in the essence of things and their natural meanings. The non-naturalising stance
assumes that one deconstructs these meanings as ideology/ignorance. Using such a
relationalist approach Sterne suggests:
“Technologies are socially shaped along with their meanings, functions, and domains
and use. Thus, they cannot come into existence simply to fill a pre-existing role, since
the role itself is co-created with the technology by its makers and users. More impor-
tantly, this role is not a static function but something that can change over time for
groups of people.” (2003, p. 373)
This moves Sterne to view technologies as points at which practices crystallise .
“They are structured by human practices so that they may in turn structure human prac-
tices. They embody in physical form particular dispositions and tendencies - particular
ways of doing things.” (ibid., p. 377)
Thus, using Bourdieu, one can construe technology as ontologically non-special.
Therefore I suggest conceptualising our habitat as hybrid . It is both given and so-
cially constructed, technologically and textually. Sterne (2003, p. 386) brings out
“technologies (as) just particularly visible sets of crystallised subsets of practices,
positions and dispositions in the habitus. They are merely one sort of 'sedimented
history'.”
This hybridisation take on Bourdieu and how to use his work for analysing
technologies, provides the ground on which to revisit Julian's construction of a re-
cycling network. By considering technology as part of habitus, rather than some-
37 I read essentialism as a synonym of substantialism.