Búskomor politics: Practising critique in the ruins of liberal democracy

Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber’s accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work – on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS’s accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about ‘opening up’ an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber’s work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion.

Section: Parliamentary Politics As a Particular Form Of Procedural Womentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Becoming Issue Experts By Working Oneself Into the Material:mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: Moving Issues To the Inside Of Ordinary Sites mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The modified issue: Turning around parliaments, politics as usual and how to extend issue-politics with a little help from Max Weber

Asdal

Hobæk

2020

“…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.…”

Section: Mps In Motionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materializations through political work

Brichzin

2019

This article investigates the opposition between politics and work in common political understandings by engaging with the materiality of politics in parliaments. It demonstrates the need for current research on politics to deal with problems similar to those faced by early laboratory studies investigating scientific practice. At the same time, the paper highlights a crucial difference between research on science and research on politics: The common understanding of politics appears to face an influential double bind, with truthful rationality on one side and democratic legitimacy on the other. In an effort to overcome this double bind, political work is introduced as a form of work that deals with transitions between matters of fact and matters of concern by materializing forceful ideas. Ethnographic research on four parliamentary levels in Germany retraces how political actors struggle to produce these forceful ideas, which have the ability to assemble groups and move people. By dealing with the plethora of vastly diverse matters of concern populating parliaments, parliamentary actors resort to rapid shifts between different work modes, namely the political game, the settling of issues, and political composition. Each of these modes engages differently with the main resources – the law, the positions of political opponents, scientific facts and narrations – to materialize political ideas and thus aims to shift the composition of reality.

“…Finally, in his reflection on de Vries’ paper, Latour (2007) outlines a methodological strategy to follow the life-cycle or trajectory of various issues through distinct stages of ‘the political’: the formation of new associations, the development of relevant publics, the integration of those publics into the machinery of government, deliberation and bureaucratic implementation. Parliaments are undoubtedly part of the trajectory, but according to this scheme they account for only one political stage among others – presumably the least interesting one, since important decisions are assumed to be made elsewhere, outside the usual theatres of democratic politics (see Asdal and Hobæk, 2016; Dányi, 2012).…”

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confidence: 99%

The insides and outsides of parliamentary politics: Introduction to a special section of Social Studies of Science on parliamentary practices

Dányi

2020

Self Cite

This introduction to a special section on parliaments identifies a tendency in STS to look for politics either inside or outside mainstream democratic institutions. Summarizing the insights of the contributions to the special section, the introduction argues that – in light of current challenges to dominant modes of doing politics across the globe – the task for STS scholars is neither to renew faith in what is happening in various legislatures, nor to look for alternatives elsewhere. Rather it is to carefully explore how their multiple insides and outsides are being connected, and what possibilities those connections offer as we continue to navigate spaces defined by the panopticon and the parliament as the twin diagrams of modernity.