Materializations through political work

Politics and disappointment

Many would agree that politics is important, and that political action can be necessary to work on common problems, but doing politics usually appears to be a dirty business one would rather not get involved in (Latour, 2003: 145). Similarly, the democratic importance of political engagement is usually embraced wholeheartedly, yet politics as a profession is held in rather low esteem (IfD Allensbach, 2013). More often than not, politicians are viewed as a self-centred, power-hungry, out-of-touch species that is at odds with ‘normal’ people (Mudde, 2004). Politics, however important, appears to be the epitome of a deficient social practice (Braun and Whatmore, 2010: ix).

Researchers concerned with politics are confronted by many such unfavourable images of politics. During my ethnographic research in German parliaments between 2012 and 2014, I encountered similar sentiments. One day, I came across the following paradigmatic commentary, which comes, somewhat surprisingly, from a newsletter distributed by a major German university’s personnel board. It was, apparently, not satisfied with some political decisions:

Politicians have a lot of time to sit around and drink coffee. If only they had the slightest inclination to work, [everybody] would give their best and … we would be certain to get good results in the end. But as it is, they enter the usual flurries of flashbulbs, smile and look forward to the next opportunity to publicly drink coffee. If the people worked like some of their elected representatives, we would all be in serious trouble. That cannot be called work. (author’s translation)

This commentary illustrates a popular way of conceptualizing what is wrong with politics: While most normal people work hard to earn a living, politicians enjoy lives of leisure, receiving lots of money for doing almost nothing. The same opposition between the industry of regular people and the sloth of politicians is perfectly represented in a 2014 municipal election poster from the German Pirate Party in which they claim to do ‘honest work’ instead of politics. In this article, I address this commonplace censure, this practice of contrasting the necessities of everyday life with political activity. Where does the opposition between politics and work stem from, and what does it tell us about how we think about politics? (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Photograph of an election poster representing the common opposition between politics (‘Politik’) and work (‘Arbeit’). It says (in German): ‘We do honest politics work’. Photograph by author.

In his paper ‘What if we talked politics a little?’, Latour (2003) struggles with a ‘fundamental disappointment’ (p. 145) similar to the one stated above. But it is not politics itself – with its flaws, troubles and crookedness – on which he focuses to explain this disappointment. To Latour, the reasons for pervasive political discontent are found in the inadequate ways in which politics is commonly perceived: ideally rational problem-solving, but never measuring up to that ideal. Politics, like science, ‘is always evaluated by other forms which do not understand it’ (Latour, 2003: 145). Thus, the common perception of politics, and not politics itself, appears fundamentally problematic. How he arrives at this conclusion lays the groundwork for this article’s line of argument.

For Latour (2003: 147, 2007: 813), politics, like science, is a form of engaging with the world by producing it, a business that deals with the construction of realities. This notion is at odds with common views on politics, according to which political action is only called for when a problem needs to be solved. This latter view sees politics as an intervention in a pre-established world, the purpose of which is to fix whatever is broken, and then disappear (Arendt, 1993: 36); for the common view, politics would be a janitor, not an architect. In Latour’s opinion, political thinking lacks the resources to conceive of politics as the productive activity it is. Or, political thinking lacks the concepts to understand politics as a form of work (Asdal and Hobæk, 2020).

In what follows, I first establish a notion of political work that can assess the work done in parliament in ways that go beyond common definitions of it as a rational operation. To accomplish this, I begin this article with a short summary of a similar shift in perception achieved by early laboratory studies. Before politics, laboratory studies demonstrated that the findings of scientific research are the result of active fabrication rather than rational deduction. Yet, however foundational to my approach such laboratory studies are, the analogy between science and politics has its limits, which is made evident when we consider that politics is held to the standard of democratic legitimacy in addition to the ideal of rationality. Following this discussion of legitimacy, I explain the design of my ethnographic study, which is followed by a presentation of my major findings. I conclude the article with a summary of my findings and a discussion of their implications for thinking about politics in general and democracy in particular.

The idea-matter divide as an obstacle to conceptualizing scientific and political work

Thinking of politics in terms of work is not necessarily self-evident. Two competing reasons why this may be the case were offered above. On the one hand, politics is often viewed as the opposite of work because it appears to be so different from what we expect a straightforward and rational professional practice to look like. On the other hand, according to Latour, it is exactly this commonplace concept of straightforward rationality that stands in the way of understanding politics as work in its more productive and elaborate sense. This understanding of politics as work may be further obscured by the prevalent idea that politics takes place in a non-material sphere of ideas (Braun and Whatmore, 2010: xi), while work is traditionally associated with a mundane sphere of matter, its outcomes visibly manifested on the surface of the Earth in the transformation of nature (Marx, 2011: 257). What stands between politics and work, simply put, is the divide between matter and idea.

In the 1970s, social studies of science were in a position not unlike the analyses of politics today. One of the major obstacles to a thorough understanding of the scientific process was the prevalent idealistic notion that science was a quest for knowledge driven by an inner logic of rationality that did not require further explanation. For this reason, research on science looked for external factors, such as material interests, to account for distortions of the scientific process (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). Laboratory studies challenged these idealistic notions of science in two ways. First, they acknowledged and retraced how substances, tools, technical devices and the like are an intrinsic part of knowledge production in the laboratory. Second, they demonstrated that scientific work is not a smooth and self-perpetuating operation of thought but is instead a time-consuming and exhaustive process of assembling and materializing scientific facts bit by bit (Livingstone, 2003; Lynch, 1985; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). As a result, science no longer appeared as a sphere of pure spirit and ideas: It is not a ‘world apart’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1979: 17).

For some years now, research on politics has been emulating approaches taken in science and technology studies (STS) (e.g. Barry 2013; Crewe, 2010; Passoth and Rowland, 2010; Scheffer, 2014; Wodak, 2009). These studies are striving to overcome what Marres (2012), in her work on ‘material participation’, ascribes to the longstanding idealistic tradition ‘from Aristotle to Arendt’ (p. 9) of thinking about politics. Instead of seeing the root cause for the difference between everyday social life and politics in an opposition between matter and idea, wherein the former is a mundane sphere of materiality and the latter is a purely conceptual sphere untouched by messy worldly affairs, Marres (2012) shows how matter may, on the contrary, instigate politics. By examining material practices like carbon counting, sustainable living experiments, and eco-show homes, she demonstrates that these practices reveal the ‘powers of engagement’ (Marres, 2012: 99) inherent in objects. Nothing calls for political action more persuasively than the concrete proof that something is already palpably here, amongst us, perhaps even threatening us. Some objects, as it turns out, are rather good at establishing their own political relevance by making an issue out of themselves.

Marres’ (2012) work is one convincing example for how ideas and matter intertwine to challenge what hitherto appeared to be unproblematic parts of reality. In fact, as Latour (2004, 2008: 39) argues, politics are not about the distinction between idea and matter, but rather the transitions between ‘matters of fact’, as he calls these unproblematic parts of reality, and ‘matters of concern’, which he sees as aspects of reality that have become ‘disputable’ and complex. Matters of concern cannot be resolved under the current state of affairs and therefore trigger agitation, worry, movement and contemplation. Remarkably, this implicates a distinct change in the notion of reality itself. Instead of designating clearly determinable things-in-themselves independent of human thought and ideas, Latour seems to view reality as a medium in which being is expressed differentially. The definite is no more real than the indeterminate. Against this epistemological background, politics is a practice that not only inevitably manifests itself in the world but also transforms reality. In this sense, politics is a world-producing endeavour (Latour, 2007: 813). Consequently, the distinction between idea and matter becomes secondary to the distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, if not entirely irrelevant.

As illuminating as studies on politics like those by Marres (2012) are, they face the paradoxical danger of perpetuating the matter-idea divide by emphasizing how matter matters politically. That is, they risk focussing on the idea of matter in the ontological sense, defining it as that part of reality which is tangible and palpable, in contrast to the intangible sphere of ideas. Taking infrastructures into account has been one of the innovations of STS. But I suggest that another innovation is even more important today for the analysis of politics, which is the understanding of how facts materialize throughout scientific processes. This innovation is attended by a distinct and specific notion of materiality wherein it is understood as a contingent property of reality (Latour and Woolgar, 1979: 106). That is, when work is undertaken in the materialization of facts, the term ‘materiality’ does not refer to a distinct ontic realm but to a different state within the same plane of reality. In this sense, materiality marks a section of reality that appears clear-cut, indisputable and self-evident; it is what happens to matters of concern when they transform into matters of fact. Materialization in turn may be achieved by countless means and is in no way restricted to a specific sphere. In this article, I propose that in studying politics we should not only focus on how objects and thought intertwine throughout political practice, we should also focus, and more strongly, on materiality in the latter sense. That is, we should pay attention to the political work that it takes to turn matters of concern into matters of fact.

What follows for the conception of political work? Laboratory studies (and many others) have amply shown that the concept of work has no privileged connection to matter in the ontological sense – it includes machinery, buildings and infrastructures, as well as issues, sudden inspirations and theories. But it can be argued that work does indeed have an important connection to matter as a contingent property of reality: Both scientific and political work are called for whenever matters of concern arise or matters of fact become dubious. Work is needed to shore up particular aspects of reality that appear uncertain or unknown. This work of (re-)materialization is required to resolve doubts and ambiguities, and to recast reality into a clear shape. With this in mind, we might say that political work, similar to scientific work, deals with the transitions between matters of concern and matters of fact by materializing and, in some cases, de-materializing, aspects of reality.

Working on representation: The issue of democratic legitimacy

Pointing out the conceptual connection between science and politics is neither new nor original. Laboratory studies took root with what is now a mantra in STS: ‘Science is politics by other means’ (Callon et al., 1986: 4; Laube et al., 2020). The reverse also holds true. But while the conceptual dichotomy between truth and power conceals the laborious processes of construction that underly both science (Knorr-Cetina, 1981) and politics (Barry, 2001), the analogy has its limits. That is, while idealism is predominant in political thinking, just as it was in the study of science prior to STS, political practice is expected to comply with more than just the idealistic standard of rationality. A second, equally idealistic but different, point of reference comes to bear on political practice, namely the standard of democratic legitimacy. Think of how people demand that politicians ‘stick to the facts’ while also ‘listen to the people’. People demand that politics be both truthful and democratically representative. Political thinking thus faces a significant double bind wherein both truth and the general will are used as standards by which to judge politics. How does this affect the conception of political work?

According to a conception of politics often invoked in public discourses, politics are only democratically legitimate to the extent that they are bound to the people. This understanding assumes the possibility of reaching a congruency between a general will and a political outcome. The crucial category invoked here is representation, not work. Democratic representation operates by establishing connections between the represented and the representative; it refers to the form of acting, ‘on behalf of’. In this context, Pitkin (1967) characterizes representation as a way of ‘making present in some sense of something which is not present literally or in fact’ (p. 8f.). In the case of politics, it is the general will that has to be made present. Connecting people across places is considered the main legitimate form of action in modern democracies which can be understood in terms of making a difference by giving others the chance to make a difference.

New performative political theories focus on representation as a specific form of action (Passoth and Rowland, 2010: 831, Urbinati and Warren, 2008). They call into question approaches that underestimate the productive and creative qualities of politics (Rosanvallon, 1998: 16). Disch (2011) asserts that in order to fully embrace representation theoretically as a productive activity, a conceptual shift is necessary. While the classic idea of representation is based on a spatial notion of the term, that is, something which is absent has to be made present locally again, Disch (2011) points out the necessity to approach representation from a temporal angle (cf. p. 109). Representation thus refers to the process of iteratively making present (in the temporal sense) something that does not already exist, something that only comes into (political) being by being addressed, pointed out, and handled. In this sense, representation is a performative action that spawns politically relevant matters of concern, interests, identities and the like by claiming them (Disch, 2011: 102).

While I have linked the rationality paradigm to a problematic matter-idea divide in common political thought, the specific constraints imposed by the notion of legitimacy might result from a common preference for spatial over temporal thinking. Using space as a conceptual template suggests clear-cut and fixed entities as a theoretical point of departure (Haag, 2003: 241). This is precisely what happens when the legitimacy of democratic action is based on the identity of a locatable and fixed group of the represented and their representative. Representation then becomes a rather straightforward operation of mirroring (if only the representatives stayed true to the represented). Performative theories of democracy, by contrast, call our attention to the inevitable precarity of legitimacy with respect to the dimension of time. Representation is an immanently problematic operation because public preferences are not constant but instead evolve, transform, and disappear over time, and this evolution is itself part of the political process. Thus, if we idealize democratic action as action that is in accordance with a general will, how can any form of political action be democratically legitimate since it is this action itself that creates the general will in the first place?

In line with the democratic theories described above, I see representation not as democratic action per se but as an achievement that is the result of action. In other words, like rationality, representation requires work. Representation, in this sense of the word, refers to the successful assembling of groups that thereby gain political power and legitimacy. The process of generating these ideas-as-representations is demanding and uncertain: ‘Either some means has been provided to trace a group into existence, and the talk has been truthful; or no group has been traced, and it is in vain that people have talked’ (Latour, 2003: 148).

I understand forceful ideas (Brichzin, 2016b: 381), as we might call them, as the specific products of political action. They are generated by the transformation of matters of concern in order to achieve materialization in the sense introduced above. Thus, forceful ideas are materialized ideas that have been concretized through processes that include the formation of groups. While forceful ideas may induce transitions between matters of concern and matters of fact, the actual outcome is always uncertain. There is no direct path leading from matters of concern to matters of fact and vice versa, and the political process never returns to its exact point of origin (Latour, 2003: 156). Successful political action always entails shifts in reality. Political work is a form of work that deals with transitions between matters of concern and matters of fact by materializing forceful ideas.

By emphasizing the crucial importance of forceful ideas, I do not wish to reintroduce the idealistic approach through the back-door. I would like to suggest that problematic idealistic approaches are not ‘idealistic’ because they put too much emphasis on the importance of political ideas. Indeed, because ideas are crucial manifestations of the political, trying to explain politics without them would be an equally futile undertaking. Rather, they may be called idealistic in a problematic sense because they use ideas as fixed premises. Instead of concerning themselves with how ideas-as-representations gain the astounding power to move people and change realities, they simply take them for granted. The starting question for my research on political practice will therefore be: How are forceful ideas, with their potential to form and mobilize groups, fabricated through political work?

To answer this question empirically, I used the ethnographic shadowing technique (Czarniawska, 2007) to accompany seven Members of Parliament from four parliamentary levels in Germany for one work week each. I shadowed the MPs between 2012 and 2014. On the whole, the ethnographic data comprise 88 observation protocols, 13 interviews, 13 conversation protocols, 59 process-produced documents. This methodological approach allowed me to witness the complex structure of everyday parliamentary activities that included plenary sessions, committee meetings, faction meetings, work groups, conferences with colleagues and staff, and talks with citizens, journalists, lobbyists, and party members. Ethnographic fieldwork sites spanned the range from large public events to small private meetings for local party groups. The characteristic daily interplay of big, mid-range and petty affairs became readily visible. Thus, the shadowing technique helped me to avoid the ‘big decision bias’ (Brichzin, 2016a), which is rather common in parliamentary research. Instead of focusing on publicly prominent parliamentary situations and issues, shadowing the MPs made the whole range of parliamentary work on ideas accessible.

There are two reasons for distributing ethnographic research across four different parliamentary levels. First, I wanted to avoid mistaking the peculiar workings of one specific parliament for the logic of all parliamentary proceedings. Second, I wanted to sidestep the ‘big arena bias’, which is common to many parliamentary studies, and which primarily directs the attention of researchers to the highest levels of parliament, such as the Bundestag, or the most visible arenas, such as the plenary sessions (Brichzin, 2016a). These two biases obscure the plethora of instances beyond what is publicly visible, including preparatory meetings, secondary actions and alternate events, which make the big arena of parliamentary politics so readily visible in the first place.

MPs in motion

Ideas are politically crafted in parliaments so as to move people and assemble groups. As discussed above, forceful ideas are created by transforming matters of concern, and parliaments are full to the brim with the latter. When spending time at parliament, it quickly becomes apparent that the political work of dealing with matters of concern has little resemblance with the lightweight and leisurely activity that still typifies many characterizations of parliamentary work. One need only shadow Mr Gunther (all names are pseudonyms) during a workday at the Bundestag for a short period of time to recognize this:

We meander through what appears to be the whole parliament district in Berlin – above ground as well as through vast underground corridors connecting the various parliament buildings (‘Now, we are crossing below the river Spree’). As appointments are set back to back, and even overlapping appointments are nothing out of the ordinary, the MP never waits, not even for his own members of staff. Thus, I’m rushing behind his large steps, but even at this pace Mr Gunther is already making a concession to me. This becomes obvious once he and I actually do have the same destination, namely his office, but I won’t be able to join him for his next appointment: Mr Gunther only mentions that he has to get something from the office, and he’s gone.

Inside parliaments, tense movement is everywhere. Contrary to public perception, MPs are almost incessantly in motion. Even during meetings, they seldom keep still. They get up to talk to colleagues in a whisper, they leave the room for a short period of time to make telephone calls or consult with their staff, or to get some coffee. All this results in a reversal of movement. While an entire socio-material constellation was required to get a specific matter of concern into parliament, it is this matter of concern that gets the parliamentarians moving inside parliament. Every matter of concern that is brought to parliament carries a particular momentum that drags, to greater or lesser degrees, MPs along with it. As the issue that an MP is dealing with changes, so too do the set of people, the local setting, and the infrastructure. Keeping up with the issues therefore demands activity; in parliament, matters of concern are the driving forces.

But in truth it does not suffice to say that matters of concern are the moving forces in parliaments. More specifically, it is the transition between different matters of concern that induces movement; a peculiar synchronization of matters of concern urges MPs to keep moving. The remarkable effects this has on parliamentary practice is overlooked when political research focuses on issues instead of on the politicians who serve as the nexus for the diverse matters of concern that enter parliament. This diversity is important to pay attention to. Inside parliaments, movement is dictated by the pulse of alternations between completely different matters of concern. Ms Eck describes this in an exemplary fashion:

My average work day looks like this: first, I visit a school, talk to the teachers. An hour later I find myself in a large consortium for Company X, or something like that. Afterwards, I visit a forest and have a look at the new path being built there. Then, I get to take a look at the new bypass road. Then, I meet Mr Jopp [a high-ranking government official], as he wants to talk to the women in our political party about how we can appeal to more women. You see? The issues, the difficult thing is the speed at which we have to switch to a completely different issue. That’s the great part, that is precisely why it’s so much fun. At the same time, it is exhausting to ‘switch myself’ from one instant to the next.

This depiction of a normal day in an MP’s life provides an impression of how their days are characterized by continuous switching between different issues. ‘Issue’ appears to be the default term the MPs use when referring to matters of concern whose status as a matter of concern has become self-evident. Ms Eck describes how she has to immerse herself into a particular matter of concern at one moment, emerge at the next, and then immerse herself again into another. She mentions the exhaustion as well as the satisfaction accompanying the necessity to continuously dive in and out of these matters of concern, never to stay with one for long. Switching from one issue to another does not only mean changing place and topic; it also means that she must ‘switch herself’.

Outside parliaments, matters of concern are usually treated in the singular. Or at least, involvement with them changes at a much slower rate, unlike the all-embracing effort that it takes to synchronize matters of concern inside parliament. Cramming matters of concern of the most diverse kinds onto parliamentary agendas affects the politicians as well as the matters of concern themselves. The matters of concern are not allowed to expand as they do outside parliament; instead, they are contained by the borders of neighbouring matters of concern with which they usually share no prior connection. Politicians move within this constellation, coming into contact with multiple matters of concern in rapid fashion; thus what, when, how and with whom one talks about geriatric care, for example, becomes relevant for the discussion of the next topic on the agenda, or, to take another example, a debate about the condition of a national memorial affects deliberations about how to preserve national economic interests. Proximity substantially influences the way in which a particular matter of concern is worked on; the order in which matters of concern are discussed establishes a massive framework for political work in parliament.

For this reason, parliamentary agendas are the single most important parliamentary ordering devices (Dányi, 2012: 113; Suchman, 2007: 187). It is on agendas that matters of concern – hitherto wholly unrelated – are organized in proximity to one another. The agendas enable the coordination of heterogeneous groups of parliamentary actors, including representatives, meeting rooms, documents, parliamentary staff and the like, determining who has to show up when and why, and what they must debate. Of all the agendas populating parliament, the plenary agenda may be viewed as the master agenda. MPs’ personal agendas, which are usually a derivative of the plenary agenda, organize the MPs’ movement through parliament and beyond. The next short episode, which took place in Mr Gunther’s office, provides insight into how these personal agendas come into being.

Mr Gunther’s assistant, Mr Wust, is explaining the art of assembling Mr Gunther’s agenda to his current intern, Ms Schierl. To that end, Mr Wust and Ms Schierl are both situated behind Mr Wust’s computer, the former seated, the latter standing. Both are concentrating on Mr Gunther’s schedule for the next week, displayed in full screen in a program for digital timetables. While switching from one particular view of the schedule to another, Mr Wust explains to Ms Schierl how to decide which appointments have to be included in the agenda, and how different types of appointments are categorized by adding them to differently coloured blocks, the colours being assigned according to a specific taxonomy. Mr Wust emphasizes that certain appointments take absolute precedence over others, but he also encourages Ms Schierl: you can do it! Scanning through the schedule’s current state time and again, he appears to be pleased with what he sees. He repeatedly adds that, with regards to the upcoming weeks, everything looked really good.

Ms Schierl had already worked in the office for some weeks and was not entirely unfamiliar with Mr Gunther’s agenda when this conversation took place, but explaining its setup still took nearly an hour. The schedule’s building blocks need to be assembled with great care, and some experience is necessary to do it well. The whole parliamentary work day is in danger of falling apart if there is a mistake. MPs are completely dependent on their agendas for both appearing at meetings and preparing for them. They check their agendas repeatedly via smartphone throughout the day. Without them, they would not know when to be where and what to do there; they would be lost. Thus, its paramount importance for the parliamentary work process explains why the agenda is granted constant and devoted attention by the staff. They affectionately strive to craft the agenda into a satisfactory shape.

The agenda, a piece of paper with a few lines written on it, makes the whole parliamentary world turn. While it took massive physical infrastructure to transform a matter of fact into a matter of concern, matters of concern are abstracted from these material origins in parliament. There are no whales, no pipelines and no hunger crises inside the sacred halls of democracy. It is precisely the absence of the objective instigators of concern inside parliaments that justifies questioning the constant movement there: How do issues retain the momentum they had gained by concern derived from material involvement when this involvement can no longer (or only superficially) be experienced? This question is, in part, based on the false premise that parliaments are devoid of objects when, in fact, parliaments are undoubtedly saturated with objects. However, the objects visible in parliaments are not the original instigating objects. These have been replaced with things easier to transport, easier to store, and, on the whole, easier to handle. We can get a glimpse of what these parliamentary objects are and how they are dealt with by watching Mr Fischer during his party meeting:

The party meeting takes place at its usual site, a medium-sized conference room reserved for the party’s particular use. Approximately 30 MPs are seated behind rows of desks that face a front row of desks. This front row is where the party leaders and, later, other main speakers take their places. Piles of paperwork are on the desks in front of each MP, some of these piles up to half a metre high. Mr Fischer, sitting in the back of the room, is no exception. As the session proceeds, Mr Fischer has his laptop on the desk in front of him and keeps typing most of the time. Many others do the same, or they frequently interact with their smartphones, which seldom leave their sides. Occasionally, Mr Fischer rises to unceremoniously throw a small portion of his paper pile into the large bin at the side of the room. Nevertheless, Mr Fischer appears to be able to follow the official agenda of the party meeting, as he pipes up every now and then to contribute to the general discussion – about an environmental campaign, undemocratic incidents, personnel questions or traffic issues.

Wherever MPs go in parliaments, they are surrounded by paper and digital devices; again, a commonality of work in the laboratory and work in parliament (Latour and Woolgar, 1979: 245). Whatever momentum an issue had prior to entering parliament, it has to be transferred to paper or file; it has to be saved in text form to be retained. It is no use criticizing the idealistic approach to political practice in parliaments if this means ignoring the enormous extent to which this practice is embedded in texts (Scheffer, 2014). Texts organize parliamentarians around them while adding materiality to matters of concern and maintaining (or even adding to) an issue’s momentum. If there is no report, no textual manifestation, the political process has to quickly come up with some document or other, or the momentum will be lost. This is why, in parliament, every issue is equipped with a multitude of documents, including official and unofficial documents, as well as party, committee and work-group texts, and personal notes. Thus, matters of concern in parliament have not been abstracted from objects. Rather, the objects embodying them have just been replaced. The momentum that keeps the MPs moving can be traced, at least in part, back to these objects. In a nutshell, this is what is to be gained from taking an approach that considers materiality in studies of the parliament: We stop taking movement for granted.

Balancing concern

Parliaments are overflowing with matters of concern that set parliamentary actors in motion. Agendas contain more matters of concern than can be processed. While matters of concern may be all-consuming to individuals outside parliaments, parliamentarians have to switch from one matter of concern to the next without great delay; they must get involved, but not overly so. In other words, it is indispensable to maintain a balance of concern.

This imperative is inscribed into the physical infrastructure of parliaments. There is an entire disciplinary machinery set up to balance involvement. Time measuring devices play an especially crucial role here. A photograph of a stopwatch, taken from the public gallery during a committee meeting, illustrates this fact (see Figure 2). The stopwatch is a huge black box that dangles over the heads of MPs (not only in this particular room), blocking parts of the parliamentary ranks from the audience’s view, and incorruptibly counting down the speaker’s time. Restricting time is the equivalent to restricting involvement, which is why clocks are to be found on every corner inside parliamentary buildings. In the Bundestag, there are even alarm clocks that emit an ear-piercing noise whenever roll call voting is announced. The alarms are less to help MPs to be present than they are to enable them to be absent so they can work on other issues.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Speaking time in a committee meeting is measured by a huge stopwatch. Photograph by author.

In addition to the physical infrastructure, the MP’s office plays a crucial role in the balancing of concern (Laube et al., 2020). The office, more than any other human or non-human actor, acts as the core unit of the parliamentary work process. As such, it is often referred to by the staff, whose members usually do not speak of ‘Pleinl MP’, but ‘the Pleinls’, not of ‘Mr Zip’s assistants’, but of ‘office Zip’ whenever common action is called for. Members of such a work unit are connected via the MP’s personal agenda at the heart of all its operations. This is partly why so much attention is placed on the agenda. In addition to mobilizing MPs by shaping their schedules, the office does much more, as another short excerpt suggests:

Mr Gunther meets with his staff to prepare the upcoming week. Myself included, six people now sit around the small couch table in the MP’s room. Mr Wohlfahrt, scientific assistant, takes the lead. He hands a well-stocked dispatch case over to Mr Gunther, which appears to be filled with various documents filed in chronological order. Mr Wohlfahrt, together with the second scientific assistant Ms Kammeter, manoeuvres Mr Gunther through the files: they discuss the different topics, patiently guiding the MP through the topics – ‘this is what you are holding in your hands just now’. Aspects are discussed briefly when a common ground needs to be established or the MP’s explicit assessment is required (‘We can wave this through’), while they call his attention to especially important topics – ‘here it is important that you closely follow this discussion’. The whole meeting has the air of a well-rehearsed procedure.

In this excerpt, the office acts like an organism, with some parts telling others what to see and when to listen. The office works together in directing the MP’s attention towards what is most important. The office exercises judgement about the limits of matters of concern, and when issues are to be ‘waved through’. In this manner, what is deemed to be relevant to the representative is ordered and her perception is aligned. Cognition can no longer be attributed to her alone. Directing the attention and concern of parliamentary actors is a collective process.

Let us take a short detour and ask how this conditional involvement is perceived by those who are not intimately connected with the political process in parliament. An initial answer can be given by taking a closer look at the few ‘normal citizens’ who appear in parliament every now and then, usually to attend one of the sessions that are open to the public. The answer is that conditional involvement with matters of concern can be perceived as disturbing. The following episode at a committee meeting illustrates this:

Having passed several agenda items, the MPs now come to the next section of the agenda in which petitions are discussed. A commotion breaks out, as a number of citizens enter the hall, part of the ministerial staff begins to leave. This causes a woman sitting next to me, obviously an interested outsider, to exclaim with a raised (evidently rather outraged) voice: ‘Why are they leaving?!’ As I explain to her that it is not the MPs but the staff that is leaving, she appears to be appeased.

While the citizen could be appeased in this instance, it might well have been some MPs leaving the room, as there is often a flow of various people during committee meetings. The issue was important enough for the person to interrupt her daily routine and attend a meeting, only to see it appear to be treated in a cavalier or haphazard fashion by parliamentarians. At the same time, however, visitors tend to leave the meeting directly after the discussion of their issue is concluded. Sometimes, people even become irritated if they have to wait a while until their issue is discussed, or when another issue is debated in greater detail than the one which brought them to parliament. Thus, while MPs have to be at least partially concerned about all the issues placed before them, the visitors’ spectrum of relevance differs enormously; they are usually concerned about very few of the issues brought up in parliament, and are much more interested in their own issues. Boredom, it appears, is a function of involvement, in that the more involved you are in a certain issue, the less bored you become. But while parliamentary visitors can afford to only become selectively involved, the MPs have to cultivate a generalized attitude of concern.

However, balancing concerns is not only a question of distributing attention and deciding when to be present. There are simply far too many matters of concern that reach parliament to be effectively worked on. When it comes to humans, at least, there are severe material limits to work capacity. As the MPs themselves put it: ‘You have to remain realistic: At best, you can work on two issues intensely. For the rest, you have to rely on colleagues’, and: ‘You just can’t afford to put in so much time for every [issue], there are limits’. But what is to be done with the excess issues? How are matters of concern dealt with when there are just too many of them? Let us have a look at two short ethnographic notes:

In a party meeting. There are several requests to speak for the next agenda item, when the chairwoman exclaims (her face contorted with visible pain): No, we cannot have six people speaking on behalf of this issue!

In a committee meeting. One of the MPs is reporting about a certain item on the agenda. Not only does she emphasize in the beginning that she will keep it short, she also closes with the expressed hope that she really had managed to keep it short.

Some matters of concern are considered to be too marginal to be dwelt upon for too long. Parliamentarians are unwilling to allow an excess of concern for such matters. They try to prevent matters of concern from expanding by actively working to shut off involvement. A look at the length of a typical plenary agenda, which, even at the city council level, often contains around a hundred items, reveals why most issues are handled in such a way that they can be resolved as quickly as possible. Indeed, one main goal of political work in parliaments is to contain concerns by settling as many of the matters of concern on the agenda as quickly as possible. The following account of a debate in the state committee on petitions shows how this is achieved:

The MPs are discussing a petition filed by Mr Yokovo. Mr Yokovo is a refugee currently residing in a small German town, and he is soon to be deported. He is trying to prevent his deportation and therefore appeals to the committee to help him. Being an artist and very actively involved in the town’s cultural life, he has brought with him many friends and supporters who are now following the proceedings. What do the MPs think about the case? This soon becomes clear, as the chairman recapitulates: ‘As I can see, the committee agrees on helping Mr Yokovo.’ The MPs now begin to freely accumulate possible ways to do so, suggestions fly in from all quarters: a transfer of Mr Yokovo’s case to the committee on hardship cases [Härtefallkommission], a renewed application for asylum, an extension of the deadline for deportation, communicating the case to the Bundestag, appeal to Mr Yokovo’s efforts of integration into the local community, the possibility of renewing the petition to the committee on petitions, and several others. The goal is to strategically and creatively organize the most promising possibilities in a way that is best suited to ensure that Mr Yokovo can stay in Germany. This is the path that is finally developed over the course of the debate:

In the above episode, MPs handle a matter of concern in which they did not invest much time for preparation; the suggestions to help Mr Yokovo have the unstudied air of spontaneity. In other words, the issue – of significant concern for the refugee and his supporters – is treated by the MPs as a marginal issue. At the same time, this example of a marginal issue’s treatment makes it easy to envision how the issue’s status of relevance is not an ontic status. That is, had the governing party opposed helping Mr Yokovo, the opposing parties would in all likelihood have made it an issue of high concern – a resonant issue. As it is, the MPs’ aim is to get the issue off the agenda quickly, but this does not and cannot mean that the MPs simply ignore the issue at hand. The fact that this matter of concern is on the agenda establishes it as a forceful imperative to deal with. And it also does not mean that the MPs do not care about the issue. Rather, it simply means that work on the issue has to be carried out quickly. To achieve this end, the concern surrounding the issue, the concern which had brought the matter to parliament in the first place, has to be contained. The options, views, fears that are at the heart of the matter have to be re-transformed into a clear-cut picture. Therefore, the MPs use and adapt resources such as ideas, arguments, and solutions that develop in the situation, aligning them according to the purpose, in order to give the issue a clear shape. This mode of political work, the settling of issues, is one of the crucial work modes in parliament. Ensuring that all of the items on the agenda are dealt with quickly reduces the levels of concern in order to make room for other matters of concern.

Transforming matters of concern by materializing political ideas

Until now, my empirical account has focused on the interweaving nature of spheres that have, in common approaches to politics, been conceptually separated into the ideal versus the material, each believed to follow an entirely different logic. By allowing the empirical data to lead the way, I have shown the impact exerted by matters of concern as they induce movement and set up infrastructures. Now, I turn to the concept of materiality in the second sense, namely materiality as a contingent property of reality, which marks a clear-cut, indisputable, self-evident part of that same reality. How, then, are matters of concern dealt with so as to increase their degree of materiality? How do ideas become forceful ideas? We will see that it is the ideas’ turn to be moved and transformed by parliamentary actors, a process that requires effort, as was demonstrated in the discussion of Mr Yokovo’s case. One moment in the beginning of the debate when a member of the ministry staff intervened was particularly important:

Hope for Mr Yokovo seems to be dashed by a member of the ministry staff who remarks that, for legal reasons, a transfer to the committee on hardship cases would not be possible. After all, Mr Yokovo had only been in Germany for one year, which excludes him from being considered a hardship case. This statement is immediately and explicitly rejected by the MPs: ‘This is still a political decision!’ They emphasize that Mr Yokovo is already well integrated – despite the short time he has been living in the country. They now proceed without further regard for the ministry official’s objection.

The specific exertion of political work in this case is directed to the effort of overcoming the resistance of prior ideas, of pre-installed realities anchored, for example, in the stable foundation of law. To overcome such resistance, the MPs show a formative and hands-on style of constructing political ideas. The available building blocks of thoughts, arguments, problems, solutions, etc. are first successively assembled, tried out and then adjusted and adapted until they fit. What begins as a somewhat amorphous material of political work is thus collected and sorted until a relatively clear-cut shape is obtained. This is what I meant when I suggested that materiality is a property of the political formation of ideas at the core of the parliamentary work process: When we stop taking political ideas for granted, we are able to perceive just how much effort it takes to produce political ideas through the transformation of matters of concern.

It takes tremendous effort to forge clear political ideas that can serve as the building blocks for the transformation of amorphous matters of concern back into self-evident matters of fact. That is, ideas have to undergo the process of ‘solidification’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1979: 106), or materialization. Several elements help solidify political ideas. Four of these elements are particularly important: association with the law, relation to the political opponent, references to scientific facts, and narrations of illustrative stories. Combining these elements helps to delineate the contours of an idea and stabilize it. Thus, citing a legal paragraph or drawing on scientific facts may help to anchor an idea in the realm of the barely questionable. Contrasting one’s position with that of a political opponent helps it become a Gegenstand, an object that stands out because it establishes a formative contrast to another object. And illustrative stories appear to be the glue that holds an idea together. This is seen in the following excerpt from a speech at the Bundestag on a law to protect whistle-blowers:

If it hadn’t been for the truck driver, who uncovered the rotten meat scandal by alerting the police, we would have probably suffered from food poisoning from the bad meat. If it hadn’t been for the geriatric nurse, who made public the poor conditions in a nursing home in Berlin, … this situation would not have been remedied. … If it hadn’t been for Edward Snowden, we wouldn’t be aware of the fact that we were spied on million-fold – and we wouldn’t know what to do to defend ourselves.

Drawing on the four elements listed above, political work makes use of both complementary stabilizing techniques described in early laboratory studies, namely agonistic, which achieved stabilization through contrast (Latour and Woolgar, 1979: 237), and analogy, which achieved stabilization through connection (Knorr-Cetina, 1981: 60). But in parliament, because there is more than one way to integrate these different elements of solidification, it is misleading to talk of the political work in parliament as if there were just one mode. Take almost any committee meeting as an example. Usually, there are rapid shifts in the working atmosphere from cheerful unanimity to tense confrontation, as the committee moves through different agenda items. These shifts in mood are indicative of a crucial principle: How work is done in parliament ‘depends, of course, on the issue’, and it changes ‘according to the issue’. A pattern underlies these changes. Implicitly, actors discriminate between marginal issues that generate only moderate or local concern, and resonant issues that attract attention on a large scale. While the settling of issues mode mentioned above is typically used to deal with marginal issues, there are two dominant modes for treating resonant issues, which I call the political game and political composition (Brichzin, 2016b). The former is predominantly associated with solidification through a contrast to the position of a political opponent; the latter achieves solidification through association with the law. The empirical part of this paper concludes with a brief look at the different logic of those two work modes.

The political game is probably the most familiar political work mode because it is on display in most public political debates. In what way is the political opponent’s ‘position’ (Laube et al., 2020) used to allow an idea to materialize? An excerpt from a plenary debate at the city level helps to illustrate this dynamic:

The agenda contains a motion proposed by Party A on a pressing issue: The state has been called on to buy a big corporation that has recently gone bankrupt. Party A and Party B argue about the pros and cons of this purchase. The first speaker, Mr Molke (Party A) bases his speech on the statement made at a press conference at a higher parliamentary level. This press conference has substantially changed the situation, claims Mr Molke: The state has essentially been permitted to legally purchase the corporation. Thereby, all announcements by the political opponent to the contrary were now unmasked as falsehoods. According to him, Party B was only trying to distract the people from the fact that it was not willing to take responsibility for the corporation’s employees. The only thing they had in mind was money. But, adds Mr Molke, taking care of the employees is of utmost importance, and that is what Party A wishes to achieve with the motion at hand. The next speaker is Ms Kurt (Party B). She immediately discredits the statements made by Party A as being a campaign manoeuvre void of any evidence. She completely negates the significance of the aforementioned press conference; legal possibilities had not even been mentioned there. The current situation is, therefore, still utterly unclear. By suggesting that there was nothing standing in the way of the purchase, Party A was doing precisely the opposite of what they claimed: They were upholding a very unstable situation for the employees by trying to enforce a legally tenuous undertaking. The verbal exchange continues.

This is a typical example of what can be witnessed in any parliamentary plenary session where there is opposition. Members of one party attack members of another party and vice versa, each expressing their own position using strong adversarial language. But what appears to the onlooker as a typical and rather tiring quarrel results from the intense work mode of the political game. It resembles the industrial process of production insofar as it is centred on a doubly constructive act, one that effectuates an idea’s positive form by contrasting it with a negative counterpart. It is the latter that moulds the hitherto amorphous material into a clear-cut shape, as ideas can neither be pulled out of thin air, nor can they hover unsupported in the vacuum of an idealistic mental space. It is the political opponent’s position that serves as the negative form for the production of one’s own position. In the example above, Party A depicts Party B’s position on the issue under discussion as a deception of the people, caused by greed, with which its own suggested motivation of taking care of the corporation’s employees is contrasted. Party B conversely makes Party A’s position appear as populist activism, which it then contrasts with its own realist political solutions. It becomes clear why it is necessary to speak of a doubly constructive act: The political position of the opponent serves as material for the construction of a negative form. The negative form is a result of transformative work. Without this difficult work, the idea would remain without a shape in its amorphous state. As such, it has no chance of having an impact on directing political attention and thus shaping reality.

By contrast, political composition draws strongly on legal regulations in general and the legal status quo in particular to provide support for an idea. Political composition is the mode that I came across the least often during my observations, at least in its pure form. This mode of work is dedicated not so much to effectuating alternate realities, like the political game, but rather to effectuating actual change in the composition of reality. The more urgent the grievances connected with an issue are, or the more distress became visible for those debating the issue, the more likely the parliamentary process was to turn to political composition. One last ethnographic episode demonstrates how this mode works.

The city district is building a new green corridor. As part of the plan, a bridge for the exclusive use of pedestrians and cyclists is to be built in a place where cars were once allowed to drive. This plan is met with explicit resistance. Two opposing groups appear on the scene. One is a group of citizens who would like to see all cars banned from the new green corridor to make it an undisturbed site for recreation. The other group consists of residents who live next to the green corridor and are afraid of being cut off from their surroundings should they not be able to reach them by car. At first, the situation appears as if it would require a difficult decision: either residents or recreation, the battle-lines are drawn. Over the course of several meetings, however, another solution has developed. According to a certain judicial decree, which is cited again and again, the bridge will have to be able to ‘bear the weight of most passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles’ in order to provide access for emergency vehicles. This decree enables the formation of a new idea: The people in charge are going to refrain from putting up traffic signs – neither ones that prohibit nor ones that permit traffic on the bridge (a rather unusual idea for German roads). Thus, those who do not know the place well will probably not dare to use the bridge, but residents may still take their accustomed route. That way, most transit traffic would be banned from the green corridor, and the residents would still be satisfied – the controversy is over.

The legal regulation – here the decree that demands the bridge be able to bear the weight of most vehicles – serves as the starting point for the construction of a new idea, which, in this case, helps to soften hardened fronts. But even if the result appears rather simple, the production process is time-consuming and exhausting, which is evidenced by the fact that it took several extra meetings to come to a resolution. And it certainly is not a process that can be described as straightforward. Rather, it is a long path of trying out paths of construction, discarding many, keeping some, elaborating on them and moulding them into what can only be called a forceful idea – an idea that is able to assemble groups and mobilizes them – after the political process is concluded.

Transformations of realities through political work

At this point, my journey through German parliaments on four different parliamentary levels comes to a temporary halt. Parliamentary life is too full of shifts and abrupt changes to result in a single smooth narrative. Telling the story of parliaments is thus never about telling one story but is about assembling and reconnecting the snippets that make up the parliamentary day. It is about navigating in, through and between all the diverse matters of concern that populate parliaments. But wherever one goes in parliaments, all the hustle and bustle is directed toward a particular end, namely to assemble groups and move people both inside and outside parliament.

As I have argued here, political work concerns itself with developing forceful ideas, and as such it is, to some degree, unexceptional. In order for the idea as the product of political work to take shape, resistance must be overcome, effort must be made, building blocks must be assembled, connections and contrasts must be established, all of which is typical to many kinds of work. We can see how political work resorts to four main resources to shape, stabilize and anchor an idea in the realm of reality. As discussed above, these four main ways that political work is accomplished is through associating with the law, contrasting one’s position to an opponent’s, referring to scientific facts, and including illustrative stories. Parliamentary actors do not follow a straightforward path. Different ways of producing ideas are tried out during the work week. Some are discarded at the very beginning, some are abandoned after a time, and some are painstakingly followed through until they end on a path that is wrought with discussions, appointments and texts. Since these are common outcomes of any work for which the result is not evident at the start, this yields a rather unexceptional, mundane impression of the work of politics.

The specificity of political work in parliaments flows from the radical synchronization of matters of concern necessitated by the plethora of issues on parliamentary agendas. Parliamentary actors deal with these matters in an interplay of very different work modes. What I have called the settling of issues, the political game and political composition are the most important parliamentary work modes, drawing to differing degrees on the resources mentioned above. Parliamentary actors usually switch between work modes several times throughout a single political situation, thereby reconfiguring the situation: Where there had been peaceful consensus (settling of issues), conflict suddenly takes over (political game); where there had been accurate intimacy with an issue (political composition), an ease in dealing with it becomes apparent (settling of issues). The interplay of these different work modes in parliamentary politics results in a rather complex method of composing reality.

Taking materiality – not only as an ontological category but as a contingent property of reality – into account when approaching political practice results in a much different perspective. Instead of taking political ideas and their potential to assemble groups and move people for granted, we increase our understanding of how political actors struggle (and at times succeed) to assemble ideas connected to the established realms of reality, thereby generating representations. In this way, the black box of the political figurations of reality is opened further.