Materializations through political work

Abstract

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.

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

“…‘Work’ is a key term. Weber’s analysis of politics is firmly placed at the level of practice, as a form of activity rather than a sphere of its own, belonging to ‘the political’ (Brown, 2015; Palonen, 2006, 2007; see also, in this issue Brichzin, 2020; Laube et al, 2020). Political work is singled out as a particular competence that requires training and experience: [Political training] can only be acquired through unremitting, strenuous work within a parliamentary career.…”

Un/common grounds: Tracing politics across worlds

“…The famous glass-and-steel cupola in the middle of the renovated Reichstag surrounds a large funnel, which seemingly allows all possible issues and concerns to be drawn from the outside and into the German Parliament (see Brichzin, 2020). Walking the length of the spiral pathway around the inside of the cupola, we reached the roof terrace where we were able at once to look down towards the floor of the parliament, as well as out over the monuments and museums we had passed on the way to get here.…”

Afterword: ‘I will play my part!’, or parliamentary politics in action

“…Issues struggle to find time and space and compete for the attention of parliamentarians who, as Brichzin observes in this volume, are constantly in motion. Issues co-exist in parallel in parliaments, blocking, colliding and combining with each other (Brichzin, 2020). On the day on which Bercow denounced the Government's claim that the prorogation of Parliament was normal, a range of other matters were also addressed, however briefly, including the quality of apprenticeships (House of Commons, 2019b: 480), the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc.)…”

“…Or should parliamentarians follow the principle of representation embodied in parliamentary democracy? The act of representation, as Brichzin (2020) explains, is a quite peculiar phenomenon in terms of action: ‘Democratic representation operates by establishing connections between the represented and the representative; it refers to the form of acting, “on behalf of”.’…”