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

The late 18th century was a turbulent period on both sides of the Atlantic. During the years of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, there was no shortage of proposals for a new social order, the rules of which were to be defined by reason, rather than by God or a monarch. One of the most well-known of such proposals is Jeremy Bentham’s design for the perfect prison – the panopticon. The description of the circular building, with several floors of well-lit cells positioned around a darkened inspection tower, first appeared in a series of letters in 1787 and was amended in 1790 and 1791 (Božovič, 1995). As Bentham had explained in minute detail, the disciplinary effect of his panoptic – literally all-seeing – architecture was supposed to lie in the rendering of all cells and their inmates visible while keeping the inspector invisible, thereby generating a sense of continuous surveillance (Bentham, 1995 [1787]).

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Bentham tried to acquire political support for the construction of several panoptic structures in England. Initially, the British government was enthusiastic, but after several rounds of negotiation the relevant ministry abandoned the project (Schofield, 2009). Nevertheless, the panopticon became a central trope in politics and political thought, most notably in Foucault’s (1977) analysis of modern, disciplinary societies. What fascinated Foucault in Bentham’s design was not so much the panopticon as an actual building, but the panopticon as a diagram, that is, a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form, ready to be deployed in almost any setting (Deleuze, 1986). Indeed, as Bentham had claimed, the panopticon was envisioned as a prison, but it could have just as well been used for ‘guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education’ (Bentham, 1995 [1787]: 34).

According to Foucault, the development of panoptic structures across various domains in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe and North America constituted the dark side of ‘the explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative régime’ (Foucault, 1977: 222). Disciplines operated as a ‘counter-law’; identifying and tracing them required a shift of social scientific attention from the usual sites and institutions of politics to seemingly apolitical processes and practices (Barry et al., 1996), including the regular workings of experimental science. Accordingly, in the 1970s and 1980s, several STS scholars provided rich ethnographic accounts of the ways in which laboratories operate like quasi-panopticons, rendering all kinds of cells and their inmates visible (Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour and Woolgar, 1986 [1979]; Law, 1994; Lynch, 1993) while keeping scientists invisible, maintaining their status as ‘modest witnesses’ (Haraway, 1997; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985).

While Foucault’s argument has been very productive in STS and a number of related fields, it has also drawn attention away from parliamentary, representative regimes, even though they were being organized at the very same time as panoptic structures, and often through the very same means. In fact, while continually revising his design for the panopticon, Bentham was also busy working on a blueprint for the perfect parliament. He saw the rupture caused by the outbreak of the French Revolution as an excellent opportunity to put his theory of a well-ordered society into practice, and in 1789 he began to outline a new rule of orders for the revolutionary assembly (Palonen, 2012; Schofield, 2006). Similar to the ideal prison, in his drafts the ideal legislature was envisioned as a circular building, except that this time it was the centre that had to be rendered fully visible while everything around it had to remain invisible (Bentham, 1999 [1791]). In this sense, the parliament was conceived as the exact inverse of the panopticon, in which a relatively small number of elected representatives were to be kept under continuous surveillance by the multitude of citizens. Accordingly, Bentham specified not only the manner in which members of parliament (MPs) were supposed to dress, debate and decide on a variety of topics, but also how parliamentary events were supposed to organize democratic politics into a spectacle (Ezrahi, 2012) – with the active involvement of administrators, stenographers and newspaper reporters, among other actors.

The French Revolution took a different turn than Bentham had imagined; his concepts of a well-ordered society were sidelined and his blueprint for the revolutionary assembly was almost forgotten. However, in the early 19th century his rule of orders was translated into English and used as an important reference during the British parliamentary reform of 1832 and the establishment of the new Palace of Westminster (Schofield, 2006). To this day, Bentham’s take on ‘good politics’ continues to shape parliamentary practices, not only through the written and unwritten customs of the House of Lords and the House of Commons (Crewe, 2005, 2015), but also through the use of various technologies of publicity in the Assemblée Nationale (Gardey, 2015), the symbolic expression of transparency in the renovated Reichstag (Foster, 2000), and the everyday lives of elected representatives in the US Congress and the European Parliament (Wodak, 2009). Similar to panopticism, Bentham’s ideas associated with parliamentarism cannot be confined to particular buildings or governments; they live as much in architectures and infrastructures as in speeches and legal documents. Rather than constituting the ‘the bright side’ of disciplines, they suggest a particular economy of darkness and brightness, and so deserve social scientists’ renewed attention.

In STS, parliaments first entered the list of interesting sites as a metaphor, in Latour’s discussion of the ‘Parliament of Things’ (Latour, 1993, 2004; see also Harman, 2014), and then as containers of diverse political practices, put on display in the impressive Making Things Public exhibition (Latour and Weibel, 2005). In the spirit of laboratory studies, the latter systematically explored the material conditions of political representation, from buildings through sociotechnical apparatuses to various political bodies (human and nonhuman alike). The exhibition also initiated a particular research agenda for STS. As Latour (2005) explains in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the main aim of this agenda was to shift focus from the subjects to the objects of democratic politics, that is, to the issues, problems, matters of concern that parliaments and other political institutions grapple with, with varying degrees of success.

The research agenda briefly introduced in Making Things Public was further elaborated in a special issue of Social Studies of Science, published in 2007. Combining insights from American pragmatism and political theories on agenda-setting, Marres (2007) argues that attending to the formation of specific issues and their publics was central to the understanding of the modern democracies. Based on a Dutch case study, de Vries (2007) outlines how such an object-oriented perspective relates to other strands of research on politics in STS, most notably to studies of expertise in democratic settings (Collins and Evans, 2002) and the extension of participation in scientific decision-making (Jasanoff, 2003; Wynne, 2003; for an overview, see Brown, 2015). 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).

This special section takes inspiration from Marres, de Vries and Latour’s object-oriented approach, but also diverts from it. It concentrates neither exclusively on practices contained by parliamentary structures nor on particular issues that merely pass through legislatures, but on the parliament as a diagram that connects the insides and outsides of parliamentary politics in interesting and often surprising ways. In their contribution, Asdal and Hobæk (2020) revisit Weber’s work on parliamentary procedures in order to show that legislatures are more than dull apparatuses that receive and process already formed issues. Explored through of the case of whaling in Norway, they demonstrate how legislatures actively shape issues and do issue-politics, often over decades. Asdal and Hobæk’s analysis thus also complicates the temporality associated with a singular life-cycle and examines what ‘issue-pasts’ are being made present during the legislative process, and how.

An additional temporal logic associated with the parliament as a diagram is the legislative cycle, punctuated by regularly held elections. In their multi-sited ethnography Laube et al. (2020) compare parliamentary settings in Austria and Germany in order to foreground not particular issues but the development of various ‘positions’ on them. Although issue-specific positions tend to be linked to individual MPs, they are typically the products of a lengthy, text-oriented negotiation within party factions – a process that takes place inside the legislative machinery but remains almost entirely invisible to the general public. Laube and his colleagues mobilize Star and Strauss’ study on invisible work to argue that the invisibility of position-making is constitutive: It helps not only to solidify issues, but also to legitimize positions by attributing them to MPs while concealing the expert work of assistants and staff advisers.

Rendering distributed issue-processing practices in Parliament invisible explains why we, as spectators of plenary sessions, often feel that MPs are the main political actors. However, according to Brichzin (2020) it is equally important to realize that participation in public debates is only one among several work modes within the legislature. Others take place in various committees and include skilful ways of connecting some issues to others, sending them higher or lower on the political scale, delaying them or speeding them up, settling them or making them more conflictual – in other words, engaging with them as matters of concern. This sense of matter and materiality is defined not in opposition to ideas, but as the ‘stuff’ of politics (Braun and Whatmore, 2010) that depends on law, science and popular narratives as resources.

Indeed, parliaments as diagrams are very good at imposing themselves onto other domains and regions. After being challenged by colonial empires in the 19th century and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, it is tempting to see parliamentary structures as constituting a common ground across the globe: a set of shared values that favour public deliberation, well-defined procedures, a standardized way of handling issues and an equal treatment of all votes and opinions. However, as Dányi and Spencer (2020) point out, even the most benign and well-intended claims of commonness imply violence, making it difficult to account for – not to mention learn from – practices and cosmologies that do not fit a Western, universalist scheme of democratic politics. Based on their fieldwork in Germany and the Northern Territory in Australia, Dányi and Spencer examine parliamentary sites and situations where the problem of un/commonality plays a central role, including a traditional Yoŋlu ceremony, and argue that if parliaments want to avoid reproducing the injustices associated with colonialism and totalitarianism, they need find good/better ways of recognizing and incorporating lack of commonality.

Why is it important to revisit parliamentary practices now, more than a decade after the introduction of the object turn in STS-informed research on politics? The answer, as Barry (2020) points out in his afterword, is closely related to the turbulent period we are witnessing, again on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas the 1970s and 1980s were about the identification of the ‘dark sides’ of modernity and 1990s and early 2000s were about the promotion of democratization and increased participation, the 2010s have raised several questions about the strength and adequacy of democratic politics itself vis-à-vis such complex problems as climate change, growing inequality and mass migration. It might be tempting to propose entirely new schemes for our collective life, but as Manow (2010) reminds us, the ruins of previous social orders are unlikely to disappear; through their discursive-material presence they continue to shape our political practices in subtle yet persistent ways. As the contributions to this special section argue, the task for social scientists in general, and STS scholars in particular, is neither to simply renew faith in what is happening inside parliaments, nor to look for alternatives outside them. 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.