Endre Dányi

Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”

This article shows how various meanings of a new communication technology are born or get transformed when placed in a different political context via a case study of a program organized by the Soros Foundation in 1984 to promote democratic values (the idea of an “open society”) in Hungary. This program, called the Xerox project, helped hundreds of public institutions acquire photocopy machines. Under the suppressive Hungarian regime of the 1980s the appearance of photocopy machines as a new means of copying texts had serious political consequences. By means of historical research and expert interviews, this article analyzes the nature of these consequences and examines how certain meanings and uses of photocopy machines evolved in the latter half of the 1980s.

The Parliament as a High-Political Programm

The central object of this chapter is the Hungarian parliament building, a neo-Gothic palace in the centre of Budapest, on the east bank of the Danube. Despite the fact that at the time of its opening, in 1902, this was the largest (and arguably the most impressive) parliament building in the world, for most political scientists it has been a largely invisible object. For them, parliamentary democracy in Hungary effectively began much later, after the collapse of communism in 1989 (Agh and Kurtan 1995; Kaldor and Vejvoda 2002; Olson and Norton 1996). Consequently, what they are interested in are abstract procedures and institutions associated with parliamentary democracy, not the specific site of the legislature. The latter is most often analysed and discussed by architectural historians, who tend to be fascinated by the shape and size of the building, its external ornaments and internal decoration, but have little if anything to say about the current state of parliamentary democracy in Hungary and beyond (Bakos, Sisa, and Tihanyi 2001; Egry and Markovics 1980; Sudjic and Jones 2001). In this chapter, my aim is to disturb this neat division of labour by outlining what we can learn about parliamentary democracy if we examine it through the Hungarian parliament building.

The Things of the Parliament

Over the past few decades, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has become a popular approach in the social sciences. Instead of providing a general overview, this chapter shows how ANT might be put to use when it comes to the empirical study of democratic politics. More precisely, drawing on historical and ethnographic research conducted on the Hungarian Parliament between 2006 and 2010, the chapter demonstrates how an ANT-inspired reading of representative democracy may open up new spaces of political engagement within a seemingly coherent political reality. Following ANT’s early insights, the first section examines how paying close attention to the materiality of parliamentary politics may help us better understand this political reality as a historically specific development. The second section argues that this political reality consists of multiple ‘modes of doing’, which suggest that there is politics going on not only within, but also between different organising logics associated with representative democracy. Finally, the third section invokes the concept of performativity in order to explore in how we, as researcher-citizens, are implicated in this political reality, and how we may interfere with it.

How do words count

It would be possible to start this review by situating Economy of Words in wider sets of books. It would be possible to say, for instance, that it is the third part of Douglas Holmes’s ethnographic trilogy, which began with the publication of Cultural Disenchantments (1989) and continued with that of Integral Europe (2000). It would also be possible to say that it belongs to a particular subset of cultural anthropology – similar to the works of Stephen Collier, Paul Rabinow, Annalise Riles, Janet Roitman, Ann Stoler and others – that is often referred to as an anthropology of the contemporary. It would be equally possible to claim that this book is an important contribution to Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially to ongoing discussions about economisation, centred around the works of Michel Callon, Donald MacKenzie, Karin Knorr-Cetina and many of their colleagues. No doubt, there are other possibilities of situating this book, too, but here I wish to proceed by situating the reviewer. I read Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. From my office I could see the brutalist building of the German Bundesbank and from one of the department’s seminar rooms I had a great view on the new glass-and-steel headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB). While reading, I had the feeling that Holmes’s book made me better understand what has been going on in these and other central banks across the globe – places that in the past few years seem to have gained a new sense of political importance. It made me understand, for example, that while anthropologists and sociologists have largely ignored central banks as potential field sites, central banks have taken a great interest in anthropology and sociology. In fact, the core argument of the book is that central banking has gone through a major transformation characterised by a growing significance of ethnographic ways of knowing. (Elsewhere Douglas Holmes and George Marcus have referred to such phenomena as para-ethnography – see, for example, Holmes & Marcus 2005, 2006.) To put it differently, words – thoroughly informed but not determined by numbers – have become the main means of doing monetary policy. How do such economies of words work in practice? This is the question Holmes addresses in 10 interconnected chapters. The ethnographic research the book is based upon is very impressive: it took place in five cities, six central banks and lasted for more