No abstract

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).

In the social and economic upheaval during the first decade after the fall of state socialism in Hungary, the emergence of new neighborhoods of detached family houses outside of a former “socialist city” provoked ambivalent reactions. Were these homes the natural housing form for an emerging middle class in newly independent, free‐market Hungary, or a passing fad led by the nouveaux riches? This article argues that that the eventual triumph of this suburban housing form had little to do with an inevitable trajectory of capitalism modeled on that of the West. Instead, it was a unique material and aesthetic form that, in the Hungarian context, was aligned with the values of its rural precedents while at the same time distinguished from them as “middle class.” The materiality of the new family house has not only redefined the conditions for belonging to the ranks of a new middle class, but has been instrumental in constituting and legitimating this emerging class.

Although the trend of bringing the “natural” world indoors took off in many parts of the world with the end of the Cold War, this article focuses on the case of Hungary, where the shift to and then away from state‐socialist versions of modernist design was particularly politicized. From the 1960s to the present, Hungary witnessed a shift from the dreams of modernist utopia imbedded in “man‐made” miracle materials like plastic and concrete to the neoliberal social order imbedded in “natural” (in fact super‐natural) materials like organic wood flooring and high‐quality roofing tiles. I draw on scholarship working with a Peircean semiotics of materiality to elaborate an approach to aesthetic styles in material worlds that can track transformations in such styles over time and link them to wider political cosmologies. I argue that the “organicist” materialities that emerged to humanize socialist apartments in generic modern buildings were part of a critique of the modernist project and its “unnatural” attempt to dominate nature and engineer human souls. After the fall of state socialism, the continued affective appeal of this Organicist aesthetics worked to legitimate neoliberal ideologies even as people bemoaned the suffering and inequalities generated by the new order. The emerging middle classes embraced the powers of a “natural” order that included a free market as much as it included a natural lifecycle. In so doing, they are inscribed as moral persons, and as such deserving of material worlds in which nature is enhanced and controlled. The morally justified search for quality produces inequality. The article is thus an exploration of the constitutive relationships among things (like residential housing and furnishings), people (esp. people's embodied experience), and ideology (of the state, market or of a particular group).

This article looks at the fate of the kind of home furnishing in Hungary known as "bourgeois" (polgári lakáskultúra) as a way to investigate the middle classes that have emerged since the fall of state socialism. In the 1990s, political discourse was full of speculation about the revitalization of a historic bourgeoisie, and the media regularly featured the material culture of such a historic class. Such furnishings were indeed highly valued among an urban intelligentsia, and seemed to represent evidence of a long history of Hungarian bourgeois taste, civilized values and refinement starkly at odds with socialist material culture, tastes and manners. However, I argue that for many of the emerging middle classes in the 1990s and 2000s, this form of furnishing was no longer a suitable expression of the kind of class position to which they aspired, nor for how it was being newly legitimized. As I show through my anthropological fieldwork among the aspiring middle classes in the former "socialist" town of Dunaújváros, even families who owned such furnishings sold them or demoted them to less prominent places in their homes. Although the socialist state had attempted to devalue inherited, antique furnishings in its promotion of modern lifestyles in the 1960s and 70s, it was not until the end of socialism that such furnishings began to fail to represent middle class respectability. New ideals for such a class were based on entrepreneurial achievements in the present rather than on inherited status, and new home décor was an important way in which this new middle class subjectivity was being constituted.