Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series: Zsuzsa Gille "Politics and Materiality: European Capitalism with a Human Face?" Response by Ned Prutzer
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
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by Roman Friedman
[On February 22, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted the latest installment in its 2015-2016 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, "Politics and Materiality: European Capitalism with a Human Face?" The speaker was Zsuzsa Gille, Associate Professor of Sociology. Below Ned Prutzer's (Institute of Communications Research) response to the lecture.]
In his response, Emanuel Rota applauded Gille’s book. He went as far as to call it “fantastic” multiple times
while recognizing his divergent views on the EU. He details his points of disagreement in depth
within his own Kritik blog post.
The Q&A portion of the talk picked up on these remarks in large part,
particularly about how the East-West narrative in Gille’s research pertained more to
how it was co-opted by the right, rather than being used as a totalizing
narrative. To this end, there was also some commentary on the image of the EU (see above) and how it reveals that the EU can be considered to
have an “off-the-ground” perspective, a vision not necessarily sufficiently
attuned to local, material circumstances that comprise it and often come into conflict
with it.
Similarly, in Gille’s estimation, the nation-state is still a pertinent unit of analysis. Historically, for ethnographers, the nation-state has been the most important unit by which the population airs its grievances. The important distinction within Gille’s research, however, is between the dissolution of the modern nation-state (something that the EU shows in its macro-scale, united vision) and the domination and subsumption of the modern nation-state within such a vision.
On the Politics of Materiality
Written by Ned Prutzer (Institute of Communications Research)
The recent Unit for Criticism Distinguished Faculty Lecture on February
22 featured Professor Zsuzsa Gille from the Department of Sociology. Gille’s
work responds to the lack of attention toward materiality in the social
sciences. As she explained at the beginning of her talk, drawn from her
upcoming book, careful attention to materiality highlights how the physical
object-world is organized and spatially constituted.
Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi began his introduction of Gille’s
work by describing how he, Gille, and Professor Emanuel Rota, the respondent
for the talk, first met around their shared knowledge of Marx. He credited her
expertise in thinking relationally across scales to her early engagement with
Marxism. He noted that her multi-scalar approach is evident in her first co-authored book, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (which argues that “global institutions could only become comprehensible
through a thick description of local contexts”), and in her focus on waste in
her second book, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Gille
began her talk by acknowledging the Unit for Criticism as a co-author of her
latest monograph since many Unit events over the years had inspired and
informed her work. Without these events she said she would never have written
the kind of book she did.
She began her analysis with a series of images that brought out the
differences in perspective between the European Union and Hungary in their respective
visions of the EU. While most images of the EU produced by the EU were grand
depictions of unity and idealism, images of the EU emerging from Hungary emphasized
frictions and tensions. The Hungarian images effectively capture the internal debates
surrounding EU policy within the country. To illustrate, Gille examined the frictions evident
in three case studies from Hungary involving the regulation of food and waste products.
To her, each case revolves around “unique materials heavy with national
symbolism.”
A
grand, ethereal image of EU unity discussed in Gille’s lecture
The first case study dealt with a 2004 Hungary government ban on the sale and use of paprika due to the presence of aflatoxin, a carcinogenic fungus, in the spice. The ban
on paprika, a staple of Hungarian cuisine and an important cultural symbol, created a
furor in the country. The government attributed the contamination to the illegal mixing of
higher-grade Hungarian paprika with imported paprika from the tropics (Brazil and Spain), since aflatoxin cannot survive in Hungarian conditions. Despite
notoriously strict EU regulations on food, the contamination occurred because Brazilian and Spanish peppers became cheaper in the EU economic system. The Hungarian government suspended imports, but the EU refused Hungary’s request to test imported peppers
as a potential solution to the problem.
The second controversy, also related to food, was a German and Austrian boycott targeting foie gras that extended broadly to include all poultry from Hungary, resulting in the suspension of production and a significant loss of income for Hungarians.
The third case study was the red mud disaster,
involving a wave of red mud flooding three villages in Hungary, when the wall of
the reservoir where it was held breached. The disaster resulted in 10 casualties from
drowning and burn wounds. Red mud is a by-product of aluminum processing that is highly alkaline. Under state socialism, before the EU, it was
considered hazardous waste in Hungary, but since Western European red mud, which was used as the benchmark, has a
significantly lower pH level, red mud was not deemed a hazardous material under
EU regulations. As in the paprika case, the EU rejected the Hungarian
government's requests to classify red mud as hazardous.
Gille read these three case studies, not as a condemnation of the
EU’s ability to ensure security, or as a critique of deregulation in general.
Rather, she sees them as raising questions about who gets regulated, who makes regulatory
decisions, and how. The EU’s denial of locally-based regulations makes higher-level
regulations necessary. Thus, transformations in the material production of
goods occur through the imposition of standards that may not have been arrived at by the local
community or the laborers being impacted by the decision.
In framing her research through Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Gille
argued that these issues come down to a question of which scale’s
socio-material assemblage wins out in these local contestations. Actor-network
theorists, for instance, would contend this research conveys how the nonhuman
is mobilized by the human in pursuit of a human goal and then asserts its own
politics. But ANT, according to Gille, only gets at the micro-scale, and given
the amount of friction between scales that Gille’s research reveals, she
distances her work from this theoretical perspective. ANT's flat topology, to Gille,
is a research agenda designed to continually prove its own modus operandi.
In contrast, Gille contends that social research needs to situate
big dynamics and global flows while avoiding a reduction of their specificity.
The alternative perspective that Gille proposes is, in her own words, to
“politicize the material!” This means making issues surrounding materiality
explicitly political and advocating for transparency and accountability from the
global actors involved in these issues. Gille remarks that it is not best to
continue seeing the game as rigged, as many Hungarians do, but rather to rework
it as a means of better attending to these concerns.
Similarly, in Gille’s estimation, the nation-state is still a pertinent unit of analysis. Historically, for ethnographers, the nation-state has been the most important unit by which the population airs its grievances. The important distinction within Gille’s research, however, is between the dissolution of the modern nation-state (something that the EU shows in its macro-scale, united vision) and the domination and subsumption of the modern nation-state within such a vision.
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