Molar and molecular entanglements: Parenting,care and making home in the context of energy capitalism

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism. Our work draws on sensual energy ethnographies with 13 families in regional New South Wales, Australia. We extend Deleuze and Guattarri’s related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight into energy geographies to draw attention to the socio-material, subjective and affective dimensions of being and becoming a parent, providing care and making home. In doing so, we open up questions around how families use energy and how this relates to the politics of care. We consider the possibilities for lines of flight to bring about social change to escape energy capitalism and help care for humans, more-than-humans and the planet.

Keywords

Assemblage parenting care molar molecular lines of flight capitalism social change

The Australian context of energy capitalism

This paper aims to answer the research question: how do Australian families negotiate energy use, parenting, care and making home? We draw upon assemblage thinking and a sensory ethnography with Australian families in regional New South Wales to better understand how they negotiate these challenges in a context of energy capitalism. Market logic structures domestic energy use in Australia. State-owned energy utilities were privatised during the 1990s, and the national energy market features multiple distributors, retailers and tariffs in each state and territory. Energy supply operates according to neoliberal capitalist logic with consumerism, competition, efficiencies and shareholder value at the fore, under a political economy we term energy capitalism (Chester, 2014). Rising prices and fuel poverty are an outcome of this market logic (Chester, 2015). Australia also faces significant ecological disasters, such as the 2019–2020 bushfire crisis, and there are public protests and ongoing political conflicts around the need for affirmative responses to climate change (Hudson, 2019).

Yet, government energy policies are legitimised through frames of productivity, efficiency and energy security (Council of Australian Governments, 2015). Promoting ‘energy productivity’ through domestic energy efficiency is a key pillar of intervention, placing the responsibility for tackling the effects of climate change with environmental citizens while the Commonwealth Government fails to outline a clear climate change policy (Hudson, 2019). Here, energy capitalism operates through an economy of desire as understood through individualistic rationalities and responsibilities, normative expectations and market competition. This serves to discipline, order and shape family energy use. A focus on corporate efficiencies and profit-generation overlooks how energy use is related to care. This creates challenges for Australian families to provide care and make home given rising energy prices and the demands, complexities and messiness of family life (Chester, 2013; OECD Library, 2017).

Our work draws on assemblage thinking to make three conceptual contributions to energy geographies. First, we extend Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight to enable us to interpret energy use in everyday family life. We argue this approach helps us consider how familial-energy arrangements are territorialised in the context of energy use, parenting, care and making home under energy capitalism. Our approach provides opportunities to think about social life as a multiplicity of micro-becomings.

Here, family energy practices are thought about in ways that are not homogeneous but offer possibilities for slippage and mutation. This is important for thinking about how spaces might open up ‘from which to imagine, act, and live things differently’ (Katz, 2017: 597). Like Merriman (2019: 69), we ‘try and break away from the cycle of simplistically categorising binary approaches’. We give attention to the way that entities such as bodies, families, structures and scales are affecting and affected (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). We add to scholarship that values pluralism, non-representational theory and learning from other theoretical and methodological approaches (Rosenman et al., 2019) to consider the possibilities for social change.

Second, we foreground how energy use in the family home is a complex phenomenon that is shaped by parenting, making home and the politics of care (Boyer, 2018; Strengers et al., 2016). In this context, family energy use is related to care not only for people, the self, children, pets and others but also in how we think about care for the planet. We draw upon feminist work which positions care as both a performative practice (Luzia, 2010) and an emergent force (Power, 2019). Therefore, the politics of care and how it relates to energy use become important. Energy-related care must be considered in terms of both equity (the ability to afford energy to uphold a reasonable quality of life) and energy efficiency (the need to reduce per capita energy consumption to reduce environmental impacts).

Third, we argue there are opportunities to advance ideas on socio-materiality (Gordon et al., 2018; Strengers et al., 2016) and to learn from feminist scholarship on everyday family life (Boyer and Spinney, 2016) to help explore the politics in energy geographies (Calvert, 2016). Socio-materiality is not yet well established within energy geographies research (Spinney et al., 2012) though we argue it can offer a useful way to think about family energy consumption in everyday life. Our work draws upon ideas that illustrate how energy use is not simply based on rational decisions but is informed by spatialities, subjectivities, relationalities and emotional and embodied arrangements (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012; Strengers et al., 2016). In doing so, we seek to understand how families navigate the politics of everyday energy consumption.

Our paper is structured as follows. First, we offer our concept of the familial energy arrangement to understand how people use energy for parenting, care and making home. We then focus on how territorial changes in familial-energy arrangements can be understood through the concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight and consider their utility in helping geographers to interpret socio-material arrangements. In doing so, we build on the energy use, parenting, care and making home literature as an arrangement in which an array of human and more-than-human entities are enrolled. Next, we present our research context and methods, followed by an analysis of familial energy arrangements. We conclude by outlining how our research advances scholarship in geography and consider policy and practice implications.

Familial energy arrangements

In helping to understand everyday family socio-material arrangements, researchers point to how materials (Boyer and Spinney, 2016), the socio-technical networks of family energy consumption (Strengers et al., 2016) and the role of affect and emotions in assemblages of parenting and care (Longhurst, 2013) are all entities that possess forces of desire; that is, they have a capacity to act. Strengers et al. (2016) also draw attention to how family energy use practices are shaped more by ideas of what it means to be a good parent and the desire to care, rather than energy efficiency, climate change or sustainability.

We argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ideas of ‘arrangement’ offer a helpful conceptual entry point to think through how energy is used for parenting, care and making home in family life. Deleuze defines an arrangement as:

a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes, and reigns – different natures. Thus, the arrangements’ only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007: 69)

An arrangement is an intersection of forms of content (events, bodies, spaces, objects) and forms of expression (language, ideas, affects) to achieve a specific ordering (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The arrangement’s connections, external relations and affective qualities are important. The arrangement follows a process of intra-active becoming in which desire, flow and intensity matter as much as entity and extension. We argue that socio-material arrangements that work for parenting, care and making home influence family energy use (Atkinson et al., 2011; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Boyer, 2018; Strengers et al., 2016). Here, there is no privileging of human agency – all entities, whether humans, animals, objects, discourses or affects, have the capacity to act (Kullman, 2014). Furthermore, although they are subject to forces of change, working arrangements constitute an economy of desire; all entities in an arrangement have a productive force, which works to perpetuate their stability and constancy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). For example, the familial home working arrangement may be constituted through practices of care to help configure parenting and making home. Here, desire becomes a productive force that is relational, affective and embodied – and distinct from the dominant framings of energy capitalism in which economic rationality, individual responsibility, market mediation, productivity and efficiency are to the fore.

We offer the concept of ‘familial energy arrangements’ as a way to think about how a range of human and more-than-human entities come together to shape how energy is used for parenting, care and making home. These entities may include bodies, norms and expectations around family life, thermal comfort, energy infrastructure, energy markets, the emergence of affect and the materiality of houses and appliances. Critically, we conceive that familial energy arrangements comprise forces, intensities and capacities of matter – not only forms.

Within the context of familial-energy arrangements, we argue that care can be understood as both a performative practice and an emergent force (Luzia, 2010; Power, 2019). Therefore, care can be something that is provisioned but also brings together material and social elements, for example while driving (Waitt and Harada, 2016), or relational and affective forces that make and sustain places as public (Warner et al., 2013). Care is also associated with family and parenting discourses and works to make and remake places as home (Dyck et al., 2005; Luzia, 2010). Care can be emplaced, discursive, material, embodied, social and emotional (Conradson, 2003). So, while care can be a routine (Milligan, 2001), it is also gendered (Dunkley, 2009), and an ‘event’ (Massey, 2005: 130). There are also politics of care; in the context of familial energy arrangements under energy capitalism, if and how care can be and is enacted are just as important as who cares, when and where.

Our framing implies that family life, parenting, care and making home do not emerge between ‘things’ envisaged as pre-constituted objects; instead, they are conceived as emergent capacities to affect and be affected by the arrangements, atmospheres and subjectivities that sustain them (Anderson, 2009; Kullman, 2014; Price-Robertson and Duff, 2019). To help understand how familial energy arrangements work, it is important to trace the types of changes within them (Nail, 2017). We next consider how territorial changes in familial-energy arrangements can be understood and how molar and molecular lines and lines of flight can help interpret these changes.

The territory of familial energy arrangements

The first expression of an arrangement is a territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Territories are not conceived as bounded and absolute but instead are always enmeshed in the ongoing processes of territorialisation, holding social and material entities together to function in alliance. Territorialisation produces order; it operates as a mechanism of what is possible and impossible in an arrangement. Without territories, the material and social world would remain in a chaotic setting.

Deterritorialisation is the way in which a component’s alteration or abstraction may disrupt the arrangement’s order. It is a coming apart or drifting from the habitual. For example, the familial energy arrangement may be deterritorialised due to the cold experienced in winter, making householders feel uncomfortable. After coming adrift, the arrangement is restored through reterritorialisation processes so that a spatial ordering may again be achieved (Buchanan, 2017). For example, a place to call home may be stabilised by the comfort and joy of snuggling up to a heater in winter while watching television. Here, the familial energy arrangement gives rise to affects which can pass between human and more-than-human entities.

Interpreting territorial changes through molar and molecular lines and lines of flight

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of molar and molecular lines, and lines of flight can help understand the forces within an arrangement. Although considerable attention has been paid to socio-material arrangements and their territorialisation in the geography literature (e.g. McFarlane, 2011; Müller, 2015; Price-Robertson and Duff, 2019), there is less focus on molar and molecular lines, and lines of flight that act as productive forces of desire that can help interpret such changes. While showing an intermittent interest in the Deleuzian concepts of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ (Katz, 1996), Merriman (2019: 66) points out that ‘geographers have only recently been paying attention to the distinction between the molar and molecular’.

Molar and molecular are not binary opposites, but are overlapping tendencies that co-exist and can become entangled (Merriman, 2019). Molar lines are representative of being. They consist of prescriptive and rigid segmentarities – shared sets of ideas and doings, clear cut and calculated categories, gestures, practices and discourses – that help establish and fix a territory’s boundaries through their performative quality and repetition (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Merriman, 2019). As such, molar lines organise a territory, causing it to be structured according to particular ideas or principles. Molar lines stratify and relay dispersive flows of desire into managed regimes and patterns. In this research, molarity can be conceptualised as referring to energy capitalism, the energy market, being an energy consumer, energy policy, being energy efficient and sustainable, making home and living the ‘good’ life, being a good parent and having the ‘perfect’ family. These molar lines work to contain ambiguity and difference.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 229) argue that on the molar, ‘everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another’. Therefore, molar lines work towards stable subjectivities; for example, as a thrifty, environmental citizen or as a ‘good’ parent. In turn, molar lines delimit a range of acceptable performances. Hence, a person, through the act of turning on/off domestic appliances may derive a certain kind of subjective legitimacy. Conversely, these rigid segments may work to constrain the possibilities of home and familial subjectivities from becoming something else.

Molecular lines, on the other hand, acknowledge the possibility for slippage, mutation and ambiguity. They create forces and flows of desire with no fixed origin, logic or destination (Windsor, 2015). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 98) explain that molecular lines are ‘mutating and not overcoding, marking their mutations at each threshold and each combination’. Molecular lines are ruptures that occur at the level of intensities: a word, a look, a movement, a practice that creates ambiguities pushing us outside the molar lines. In our study context, becoming molecular can be conceptualised as the moments of emotional and affective intensity that give clues as to how individuals constantly negotiate molar classifications to cope with the increased energy costs associated with maintaining the familial home. Sometimes these molecular forces become entangled with the molar. They serve to carry out the molar’s work. For example, how people might choose to provide for their family by using appliances entails greater reliance on the energy market.

At other times, molecular lines may offer the potential to cause rupture. For example, becoming a parent may be tempered by rising energy costs that cultivate affective intensities, such as worry or anxiety. Energy anxieties might be understood as molecular lines; that is, material and social expressions of becoming something other than the parental subjectivities framed by narratives of responsibility, provisioning, freshness, cleanliness, comfort and eating well. These molecular forces may cause people to rely less upon the energy market or to use energy in creative ways that provide insights into ways of momentarily evading molar lines.

Molecularity can also generate absolute deterritorialisation towards a new arrangement through a line of flight. Lines of flight are conceived as disruptive lines of creative invention and subversion away from rigidness and fixity (McCormack, 2007). They are shifting, fluid and multiple and move away from binaries and segmentarities towards different possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In our context, we can conceptualise lines of flight as comprising protests against the privatisation of energy utilities (Hall et al., 2005) or going off-grid (Vannini and Taggart, 2013). Total deterritorialisation through a line of flight may offer a way of escaping the molar and bringing about social change that brings different ways to care for humans, more-than-humans and the planet. We argue that it is important to consider how lines of flight may unfold in ways that may be productive or destructive. For example, how easy or difficult will it be to achieve social change that enables households to find alternative ways to care for self and family, while also caring for the environment?

Our research builds upon Merriman’s (2019) work, who introduces molar and molecular lines to geography scholarship. We posit that familial energy arrangements can be interpreted through molar and molecular lines that frame how energy use, parenting, care and making home play out (see Figure 1). It is through this arrangement that we can see molar and molecular entanglements, but which also leaves us to question whether lines of flight towards a new arrangement are possible.

Figure 1.

Familial energy arrangements.

Sensual energy ethnographies

Our sensual energy ethnographies focused on providing in-depth insights into how, when and why people employed energy in the familial arrangement. We adopted a short-term sensory ethnographic approach (Pink and Morgan, 2013), encompassing three project stages. Stage 1 involved a narrative interview where participants talked about their household energy practices. Themes investigated included participants’ life histories, families and homes; energy practices, knowledge of energy efficiency, star ratings and building sustainability codes; and how energy related to family life, care and making home. Stage 2 featured home-video insights. Following Pink and Leder Mackley (2012), participants were asked to guide the researcher through their home to show how they used energy in the domestic context while being video-recorded.

Video methods offer possibilities for researchers to pay attention to the mundane practices of everyday life (Lorimer, 2010). Video provided access to the set of affective intensities that sustain and circulated through the home, triggered by audio, smell, touch and sights. For instance, the pleasure of using dishwashers, heaters and air conditioners; the shame of piles of laundry and the anxieties of clutter. For stage 3, field notes written about each home video-insight provided the basis for a follow-up participant interview. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.

A purposive snowball sampling approach was used to recruit 13 low-to-middle income families in regional New South Wales. Participants were initially recruited through the researchers’ networks. Further families were then recruited through snowballing. Families were differentiated by household composition: nine were married couples and four were single-parent households. All but two of the participants were employed, and all had school-age children living at home. Two participants were of Asian ancestry and the remainder were of Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Ages ranged from early-30s to early-50s. Nine lived in their own homes, four in private rental properties. Table 1 outlines participants’ socio-demographic characteristics. Informed consent included the choice to remain anonymous. Ethical approval was provided by the university’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Table 1.

Participant characteristics.

	Participant name (pseudonym)	Household characteristics	Sex	Age	Occupation
1	Lillian	Married, 3 children: 8 months, 3, 5 years	Female	34	Employed part time in health care
2	Jacob	Married, 2 children: 8, 10 years	Male	43	Stay-at-home father/former engineer
3	Anthony	Single parent, 2 children: 12, 15 years	Male	41	Police officer
4	Kelly and Conor	Married, 4 children: 4, 6, 8, 10 years	Female and male	40 44	Police officers
5	Sally	Single parent, 2 children: 12, 16 years	Female	43	Employed part time in a coffee shop
6	Ida	Married, 2 children: 2, 4 years	Female	31	Housewife
7	Caitlyn	Single parent, 3 children: 7, 11, 15 years	Female	32	Nursing/seasonal events work
8	Holly	Married, 2 children: 8, 11 years	Female	36	Part-time administration
9	Chris and Karen	Married, 3 children: 8, 11, 13 years	Male and Female	40, 44	Both full-time teachers
10	Helen	Married, 3 children: 6, 9, 10 years	Female	35	Part-time florist
11	Rose	Single parent, 1 child: 15 years	Female	52	Full-time government agency
12	Jasmine	Married, 2 children: 11, 6 years	Female	36	Part-time food preparation
13	Sumalee	Married, 2 children: 10, 9 years	Female	40	Educator

Our analysis followed a mapping approach that considered the interconnected socio-material and affective dimensions of arrangements (Waitt and Welland, 2017). This is the outcome of a collaborative process between ourselves as researchers and our participants, our colleagues and the materiality of our research practice. Here, knowledge production follows a co-construction process (Pink and Morgan, 2013). Analysis becomes a highly reflexive process of teasing out the connections and disconnections evident in the empirical materials. This was strengthened by encouraging participants to review video clips and acknowledging our different positionalities. Our analysis presents how we harness the concepts of molar and molecular lines entangle to better understand energy consumption through the socio-material elements that comprise family homes. We offer insights into how specific familial energy arrangements mediate the tensions of being and becoming a parent, providing care and making/unmaking home within the context of energy capitalism.

Mapping familial energy consumption

Conceptualising changes in familial energy arrangements through molar and molecular lines encourages us to better understand the socio-material conditions in which domestic appliances become included or excluded in the territorialisation of a house as a familial home. Thirty-three-year-old Lillian, married with three young children under four years old, demonstrated how capacity to act is imbricated in the familial energy arrangement. Appliances helped to control the ‘mess’ of her young family. She often used the washing machine and dryer up to four times a day and positioned the dishwasher and her ‘go-go vac’ as her ‘best friends’. As demonstrated in our video footage (see https://youtu.be/AVUe-boJpWg), the level of chaos at Lillian’s house was palpable and was something that she constantly apologised for due to molar intensities on how the family home should be organised.

The ironing board stood in the entryway, children’s toys covered the floor, the sink was piled high with dishes, kitchen benchtops were hidden beneath an assortment of objects and piles of clean washing lined the hallway. Lillian was constantly moving between appliances to load and unload the dishwasher, put wet washing into the dryer, vacuum and iron, to process, cook and store food. Working three days a week meant that maintaining the household was an ongoing battle. Molar forces of energy supply and norms of parenting worked towards a stable arrangement of the comfortable home. In this familial energy arrangement, objects became indispensable for being able to care for Lillian, her husband and her children:

Probably, to be honest, it’s [energy efficiency] an ideal that I think it would be good to have, but I tend to get caught up being too busy with everything else. With the kids, I don’t leave the lights on, I leave the TVs on, and that type of thing. The air conditioner, though, I will have that on around the clock if it’s hot. So, for certain things. But I suppose comfort-wise, sometimes I put that above … Sometimes with the kids, I’m putting … an oil heater down the hallway and turn that on early. Just to warm up their bedrooms and that, ‘cause it gets cold in here as well, so I suppose, yeah, I put the comforts of the kids above conserving energy’.

The familial energy arrangement works as an ordering where the house is maintained as a home, and the molar forces of the energy market enlist appliances, bodies and energy to reinforce the increasing dependence on energy supply and use. Despite the dominant discourses of the organised and energy-efficient family home, appliances are also enlisted for bodily comfort, nurturing, caring and convenience. Energy and appliances enable Lillian to become molecular, to afford comfort for human bodies and provide relief from mundane labour-intensive tasks rather than being thrifty. At the same time, however, there was an ever-increasing dependency where more appliances use more energy and parents must work longer hours to pay for more energy, which in turn demands a greater level of organisation and convenience. As Lillian explains:

I would say that, in this day and age, there are simple things that you need to do to provide your kids, like the warmth or the cooling or cooking, storing, washing. It has to take a lot of energy, I guess, for them to be comfortable for today’s standards, I should say. Yeah, it does take up a large portion of your pay package, I guess.

The molar forces of what constitutes a good parent and a comfortable home were entangled with the molecular – albeit the possibilities for becoming molecular are constrained along a particular trajectory. Which appliances families purchased and how often they used them largely determined how much they needed to work. Lillian’s familial energy arrangement offered few avenues for creative uses of energy or lines of flight towards a new arrangement. It often seemed impossible for parents like Lillian to separate energy consumption from the parental care that is fundamental to the coherence of the house-as-home.

In some familial energy arrangements, the molar lines that confirm taken-for-granted understandings of being a parent and reterritorialise the house-as-home may operate simultaneously as molecular lines that offer slippages to these cultural norms. Take for example Anthony, a single Dad with two sons, who spoke of reducing the anxiety generated by his electricity bill by not purchasing a clothes dryer, never turning on the dishwasher and only switching on the heater on the coldest nights when the family gathered together in one room. For Anthony, care becomes felt as an emergent force through how he uses energy. In this household, Anthony and his two sons have six showers between them per day. The affective intensities of the shower felt through the body play a key role in caring for self and others, becoming molecular and territorialising the home. As Anthony explains:

They [his sons] have played footy, like they have a shower in the morning and if they have played footy or soccer … they come home with grubby knees, so they are going to need another shower. But I always have two showers. I like it, it’s my luxury, or whatever you want to call it. It’s just the feeling of cleanliness, I like that. Well I guess I do my stretches as well in the shower, and it keeps me limber, it relaxes my muscles. So, my muscle stretches would probably be about a minute and a half. Touch my toes and I hang with the hot water running down my back and down my legs. And that keeps my back in really good nick.

The corporeal experience of showering evokes affective resonances, which operate through molecular lines, where Anthony chooses how to utilise energy to care for himself and his family. Although molar lines dictate his reliance on the energy market, his performance as a single father is enabled through showering. The anticipated affective resonances circulated through the touch of shower water enables his body to anticipate, fold through and into the physical sensation of the shower that Anthony names as relaxation. The choice to forego other energy practices means that, within the familial arrangement, the embodied sensations of relaxation when interpreted as a molecular line serves a temporary disruption, despite the molar forces that structure normative family arrangements.

In other familial energy arrangements, the molecular lines that coincide with the molar lines may reterritorialise the house-as-home and confirm conventional understandings of parenting through the enrolment of energy for providing care as a performative practice. Take Kelly and Connor, who are married, 40-something, both working full-time, and live with their four young children in a free-standing dwelling. Four air conditioners, fridges, washing machine, clothes dryer, televisions, computers and numerous other electrical appliances help to maintain their domestic life. Consider how the washing machine and dryer are enrolled to maintain the working order of their domestic life. Using the washing machine and clothes dryer for the third time on a damp day, Kelly explained that she could have waited and hung the laundry out later, but:

It has been raining on and off today… we use it just because it is all dry and done and away rather than have a pile of things waiting to go back out when it is sunny. So, it is about organisation and running the household – everything is put away at the end of the day.

Here, Kelly becomes molecular as, rather than being a ‘good’ environmental citizen by hanging up the laundry, she uses the dryer. The clothes dryer’s energy consumption when conceived as part of the familial arrangement not only brings order to the household but a sense of being a ‘good’ working mother. Yet, her decisions in using energy to keep the household organised facilitate molar lines in the form of middle-class social norms of a clean, neat and tidy home. The molar lines of the familial energy arrangement that help fix the subjectivity of being a working mother and reterritorialise the house-as-home, work towards ensuring that energy provision and energy use remain unquestioned.

For Kelly and Connor, the air conditioners were non-negotiable. While they displayed some ambivalence and acknowledged the tensions produced by the high running costs over the summer months, the discomfort of being hot was considered impossible. Sweaty children’s bodies may be conceived as generating a force that deterritorialises the familial energy arrangement. The priority is children’s thermal comfort rather than financial cost. In Kelly’s words:

I’m not going to go, ‘I’m not going to turn the air conditioning on because I’m worried about the bill’. I just know that I’m working to pay for the damn things. And, if it is hot, I am going to use them.

Thinking through the familial energy arrangement alerts us that thermal comfort cannot be solely attributable to an air conditioner, a temperature setting or ideas of parenting and the idyll of home but relies upon bodies to circulate the affective intensities of the physical sensation of air quality. Such thinking reinforces the notion of care as an emergent force. In this familial energy arrangement, the anticipated affective intensities of how the touch of cool air folds in and through the social and material dimension of the engineered domestic rooms was positioned as a molecular force that is essential to reterritorialise the house-as-home.

Kelly also explains that rather than turn off the air conditioners in summer they would become molecular by choosing to: ‘make adjustments in the budget, do overtime or something like that’ and positioned themselves as fortunate by having ‘good jobs’. However, following these molecular lines leads to continued high energy consumption that works to reinforce the molar forces of the Australian energy market and locks them into patterns of high energy consumption. They expressed a sense of entitlement to consume energy to maintain an appropriate level of thermal comfort because it reinforced their ideals of good parenting and experiences of house-as-home.

Likewise, Caitlyn, who is a single mother with three children, offers insight into the ongoing process of making the house-as-home. Clothes were always line-dried. Appliances and lights were turned off when not in use. Heating and cooling appliances were time-limited, yet Caitlyn spent a significant amount of money on a large, low-energy-star-rated double-door refrigerator which dispensed ice and chilled water. She also maintained a temperature-controlled vivarium for two pet lizards in the lounge room (see Figure 2). Caitlyn explained why the refrigerator ‘fitted’ into the kitchen of her home: ‘I bought the model with the ice and water dispenser because I wanted the kids to drink less sugary drinks and to drink more water. It is better for their health’. Similarly, she justified the lizards as an important educational and developmental tool for her children. These performative practices as a responsible parent illustrate the multiplicities of care. Care is constrained by high energy prices, yet energy can be enlisted in practices outside of the molar lines of thermal comfort, instead prioritising health and well-being.

Figure 2.

Video still, pet lizard tank in Caitlyn’s home.

When conceived through a familial energy arrangement, how molecular lines may entangle with the molar helps understand why this ordering of domestic appliances is legitimated. In this familial energy arrangement, molar lines of the energy market operate to configure the responsible, energy-efficient consumer, resulting in predictable, low bills. At the same time, molar lines configure the responsible mother as able to manage household budgets. Caitlyn illustrates becoming a responsible, thrifty mother through restricting heating, turning off lights and line-drying clothes. Becoming thrifty does not escape the molar lines of the energy market but, as a molecular line, disrupts the profits of energy corporations.

Moreover, Caitlyn’s account included purchases and practices, including her choice of refrigerator and vivarium that do not fit this characterisation of either the energy-efficient consumer or thrifty mother. The use of the refrigerator and vivarium may be conceived as molar lines within familial energy arrangements. Provision of cold drinks and heated tank for lizards is more than a practice of care – the corporeal experiences associated with these items evoke molecular affective resonances that serve the molar lines of being a good mother that dictate her reliance on the energy market. The pleasurable intensities from these items illustrate the power of molecular lines to fill the home with joy and challenge the dominant spatial practice of compulsory thrift and energy efficiency.

In certain familial energy arrangements, molecular lines can rupture conventional understandings of parenting and the home–energy nexus configured by care as both a practice and an emergent force. Take, for example, Sally, who is a single mother, employed part time at a coffee shop with two teenage daughters. The bringing together of energy and parenting through care is fundamental to her coherence of the house-as-home but produces tensions that must constantly be attended to:

I’ve been a single parent for just over 10 years, maybe 11 years. I guess I was only working part-time, and you've got no money. I always felt like: ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to do this?’ I tried the best way I could to reduce costs.

Thinking through Sally’s familial energy arrangement brings to the fore how ambiguities and tensions emerge when people cannot enlist the anticipated affective resonances of comfort through the social and material elements that enable domestic heating, washing clothes or bodies. The molar forces of the familial energy arrangement mean that Sally ensures that lights and appliances are always switched off when not in use, regularly cooks dinner in the oven during the winter months to warm the house and restricts the use of a heater to one family room for 2 hours each winter day. Her frugal practices conform to the norms of being energy efficient and fiscally responsible. However, it is the molecular forces that allow for slippage, contradicting the norms of frugality. On occasion, Sally chooses to use the clothes dryer as an expression of care, not only for her daughters but for herself – freeing herself from laboriously hanging up socks (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Video Still – Socks hanging on the washing line in Sally’s home, Keiraville.

At the same time, the experience of the clothes dryer involved an active performative dimension of care, of engaged activity and gestures of loading and unloading clothes from the dryer that are part of the regimes of convenience and motherhood. She could have chosen to utilise the heater to reterritorialise the house-as-home but instead used the clothes dryer – despite the high energy cost. The ways the affective intensities of the clothes dryer become folded through her body are mutually supportive; they leave her feeling empowered and help her achieve house-as-home. For Sally, the desirable intensities brought about through energy being enrolled in the labour of drying clothes is offset by molecular lines of affective intensities expressed as guilt at being ‘lazy’. Cracks occur in her understanding of herself regarding her actions as a mother through her enrolment of the dryer:

I don’t know whether it’s bad organisation or sometimes laziness, where it is so cold, or it’s been raining, I don’t want to be outside, I’ve got things in the oven. I’m putting stuff in my dryer for an hour because I can’t be bothered hanging up four thousand socks, because the kids use so many socks every day. It’s a lot of individual pegging of socks and undies, especially with females. That’s a laziness thing, if there's a lot of socks and undies.

Sally expresses the affective intensities as guilt from using the clothes dryer rather than hanging up the laundry, as she constantly juggles competing demands of caring for children and self, paid work and energy bills. Guilt wells up from Sally’s transgression of the social norms about how ‘good’ mothers should be organised and be thrifty by hanging up the laundry outside to dry.

Another example is Rose, a single mum who shares care of her 16-year-old son. She lives in a two-bedroom unit and articulated the tension generated between increasing energy costs, the molar lines of being a parent, climate change and energy efficiency and reterritorialising the home through how energy is used. As Rose explains, these forces deterritorialise the familial energy arrangement:

I’ll be mindful of consumption, of not using unnecessary electricity. For example, I always turn the power off. I'm always turning off something, and that’s more about energy consumption than me having a cheaper bill, that's more about the environment, yeah.

Despite her commitment to the environment, Rose admitted she feels anxious when it comes to heating the home:

I am pretty ikey. To be honest though what does worry me is the consumption of my current heating, so I don’t know what it is going to be like…on the bill…even though I am a bit more laid back, it still worries me what is going to happen if I get a 500-dollar bill. I will just have to pay for it.

Rose alerts us to how accounts of comfort primarily focus on the sensation of the room temperature engineered by domestic appliances. Thinking through the familial energy arrangement, comfort may be conceived as an anticipated affective resonance; as a sensibility that circulates through and between bodies and things, rather than as an objective temperature measure. Rose illustrates through the affective lexicon of worry the tensions opened up by the sensations of the heater in winter. Concerns of increased fuel costs temper the anticipatory sense of comfort through heating.

Rose went on to explain how the heater is only used when her son is present. When at home alone, Rose wears extra clothing and uses a blanket in winter rather than using her electric heater. Her actions around her son can be understood in terms of molar lines which facilitate being a ‘good mother’, and where the body can reterritorialise the house-as-home through being folded into and through a physically engineered environment sensed as comfortable. Underneath, molecular lines operate to disrupt this desirable, comfortable sensibility. For example, she complained of her ‘cold house’ and becoming sick. Rose illustrates that underneath there are many micro-becomings that push her outside of the conventional understanding of the comfortable home that relies on domestic heating appliances.

Discussion and conclusions

From molar and molecular towards lines of flight

Our work extends existing literature on molarity and molecularity, care and socio-material arrangements. First, building on Merriman (2019), we draw attention to how molar and molecular lines offer a non-binary and fluid way of thinking through human and more-than-human arrangements. Using this conceptual framework helps us to think through how molar and molecular forces entangle, and what possibilities may exist for lines of flight towards alternative arrangements. We extend existing theorisations in the geography literature by explicating how molar lines can be conceptualised through energy capitalism, the Australian energy market, efficiency and sustainability, being a good parent and living the good life. These coincide, overlap and flow through familial-energy arrangements alongside molecular lines such as practices of thrift and frugality, using specific appliances as an expression of care or working overtime to pay for the air conditioner in summer.

Molecularities as singularities were shown as temporary disruptions to the molar energy order but did not foundationally alter it. We illustrate how at times molecular lines can deterritorialise working arrangements in the face of molar forces that reterritorialise working arrangements; for example, thrift that leads to creative energy-saving care practices (see Waitt et al., 2016). These practices free up the space for micro indulgences such as long, relaxing showers, through which the affective intensity of comfort may facilitate opportunities to relax and daydream, reimagining what it means to be a ‘good’ parent.

On the other hand, molecular lines entangle with the molar. For example, the affective intensity of anxiety may create a vicious cycle in which participants follow molecular lines by working overtime to pay for more energy to enrol appliances to help perform expected standards of familial domestic care. But, in doing so, this serves molar forces by entangling them further within the energy market and conforming to normative discourses about being good parents and providers.

Such tensions can create an affective intensity that may be experienced as anxiety. These anxieties include the expense of energy bills, working longer hours away from the family and the desire to live a ‘good life’ in the face of normative pressures. What this illustrates is that there are not always options for utilising the molecular forces to escape the molar for families. Sharing practical knowledge and tips may empower some families to better navigate the energy market; for example, informing consumers to better understand energy retailers’ rates, plans and costs. However, we cannot merely rely on providing advice about energy-saving practices; rather, we need to reconsider our ideas of the energy market and consider whether new arrangements are possible.

We are interested in the potential for truly transformative change that can provoke an escape from the capitalist machine. The molar and molecular entanglements emerging in our research help illustrate how in familial-energy arrangements an economy of desire flows through bodies, affects and emotions and ideas on care, parenting and making home. This contrasts with the individualism, rationality, productivity and efficiency transmitted the policies, institutions and practices of energy capitalism. We argue that a shift in discourse is required that moves away from molar ideas of the rational, empowered, responsible and informed consumer who lives the perfect family lifestyle and can make the ‘right’ energy choices to care for the environment. Such molar discourses often dominate policy, programmes and social marketing depictions of family energy use. We argue that policy, programmes and social marketing programmes should acknowledge the complexity, messiness and subjectivities embedded in family energy use (Gordon et al., 2018). Practically, this may include governments sponsoring programmes that support low-income families or energy retailers providing special family energy tariffs. It may also involve depicting chaos, mess and anxieties around heating, cooling and caring practices in marketing campaigns concerning family energy use.

However, for transformational change to occur, we must consider the possibilities for lines of flight to alter familial energy arrangements in truly disruptive ways. The policy implications for low-income families are that with rising energy costs, the choice to forego certain energy practices could impact on their health and well-being. Families could be encouraged to consider alternative energy supplies and go off-grid. Changes to market structures that are invoked by energy policy and regulation are another possibility. In the United Kingdom, energy suppliers must now inform customers of the cheapest tariff available (Ofgem, 2015), and such ideas could be transferred into the Australian context. Moreover, there is growing public support for the re-nationalisation of energy utilities in both countries (Quiggin, 2017; YouGuv, 2013). A dissolution of the market logic for energy through re-nationalisation would signify a roll-back from energy capitalism and potentially lead to reductions in energy prices that would ameliorate some tensions and anxieties for lower income families.

Care as a performative practice and an emergent force

Second, our analysis points to the importance of understanding care in energy geographies. Butler et al. (2016) identify that there is little attention paid to care in energy research. Our research foregrounds how care in familial energy arrangements may exist as a performative practice and an emergent force. Emergent forces may incorporate the physiological, affective and emotional registers associated with care. This has implication for how we understand energy use and the familial home. Familial energy arrangements can serve to enhance or impede performative practices of care for children, self and others. However, arrangements can also shape how care operates as an emergent force that works across social, discursive, material and relational realms. Our examples illustrate the politics of care, with people prepared to forego self-care, give up comforts to generate affective intensities and change the capacities of bodies or at other times to alter spaces of care by engaging in micro-indulgences. Accordingly, we argue for an increased focus on care as a force of desire that structures energy use – especially for families (Butler et al., 2016).

Framing energy geographies through socio-material arrangements

Third, our research builds upon existing socio-technical work describing how heterogeneous human and more-than-human relationships make up energy arrangements (Strengers et al., 2016). Our concept of familial energy arrangements brings together forms of content and expression that shape energy use, family life, parenting, care and making home (Munro and Madigan, 2006; Price-Robertson and Duff, 2019). By attending to how molar and molecular lines shape such arrangements, we add to the growing body of energy research that seeks to offer alternatives to the dominant scientific, economic and psychology-based discourses that frame energy research (Strengers et al., 2016). We argue that we must pay attention to how socio-material dimensions are always emergent, relational and contingent on human and more-than-human capacity (Boyer and Spinney, 2016).

We also draw attention to the politics of everyday energy consumption. We question the normative conceptualisation of energy as a market resource underpinned by consumer competition. We need to reimagine energy as something that serves basic human needs and enables people to navigate everyday life, be comfortable, become parents, make home and care for people and the planet. Consequently, energy efficiency and climate change imperatives should be not ignored but work together with policies that enable people to maintain a reasonable quality of life.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our family participants for their contributions to the project.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded by a Macquarie University Enterprise Partnership Scheme Grant EPS 3656 co-funded by Energy Australia.

Ross Gordon is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He is an interdisciplinary social change researcher with degree qualifications in social change marketing, public policy and politics and history. His work focuses on social issues and social change, through a critical, reflexive and multi-perspective lens. He works across various social change topic areas including energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, alcohol, gambling, tobacco control, mental health and workplace bullying. He is also interested in critiques of neoliberalism and related social activism.

Theresa Harada is a research fellow and holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Wollongong. Theresa’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change knowledge and household behaviours. Her interest is in how novel participatory and mobile methodologies can engage participants in collaborative and creative explorations of meaning and connection to place has drawn on, performative, affect-based, non-representational geographies.

Gordon Waitt is a Professor and head of the department of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong, Australia. Inequality is the connecting thread of Gordon’s research. To do so, he draws on a range of qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, home-insights, sound diaries and video methods. His current work develops this interest in inequality through three strands. Each strand addresses urgent sustainability challenges around the topics of household sustainability, fuel poverty and urban revitalisation. Key questions informing his current research include: How can low income households reduce their energy bills, and at the same time improve their quality of life? Who is doing the work of household sustainability? How can we make regional city centres more lively places?

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