Abstract
The resurgence of materialism is one of the most notable theoretical trends across the human sciences. While materialism has been a central concern within Marxist political thought, theorists of radical democracy say little about the significance of materials in political life. This concern is one of the central themes in Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline and is used to create a dialogue between radical democratic and materialist approaches to politics. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s radical democratic theories of agonism, Andrew Barry extends their human-centric understanding of politics by highlighting the central role that materials and objects play in public knowledge controversies. Focusing on a series of disputes over the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, Barry bridges the worlds of human subjects and nonhuman objects in political theory by arguing that ‘just as we are beginning to attend to the activity of materials in political life, the existence of materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information’ (p. 2).
The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book investigates how the BTC pipeline was politicized by analysing the links between specific controversies and broader events. The first two chapters provide a historical analysis of the pipeline’s political importance and the politics of oil, while Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the centrality of transparency and corporate responsibility practices in contemporary politics and the governance of oil. Mouffe’s theory of agonism underpins a number of key ideas in the first part of Material Politics. A key question for Barry is: why do particular events, materials, and sites become controversial when oil companies implement transparency and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices? He responds by claiming that transparency exercises helped ignite debates over what was made public and what was kept confidential about the pipeline project. The publication of information about the pipeline did not resolve differences between the disputants, but led ‘to a sense of the impossibility of their resolution’ (p. 54). For instance, as BP and other international organizations made information about the project publicly available, NGOs continued to challenge the oil industry’s claims by conducting their own research and publishing counter-claims. According to Barry, rather than being ‘a series of agonistic disputes over matters of fact and the interpretation of international guidelines and agreements’, the issue of transparency helped intensify antagonism and generate new controversies (pp. 54–5).
Having established that objects matter politically, the second part of the book focuses on ‘a series of very specific disputes that emerged around the pipeline’s development, construction and operation’ (p. 29). Chapters 5 and 6 expand radical democratic theories of anti-essentialism to the world of material things by arguing that the identities of social groups and the pipeline were formed relationally. The pipeline was not simply a material artefact (a steel pipe): it was bound up ‘with an extraordinary apparatus of information production, leading to the generation of a public archive of commentary, monitoring, auditing and public criticism’ (p. 186). However, the pipeline project involved not only regulating materials and things, but also interpellating or assembling publics in relation to it. Barry argues that affected communities, stakeholders, and publics were not pre-existing collectivities, but ‘social groups defined by their relation to an evolving object, not by reference to their membership of a state’ (p. 99). Because the pipeline’s corridor was 1760 km long, the oil company was faced with the problem of identifying and consulting publics that were spread over a large geographical area. In this sense, publics were ‘increasingly called upon to address, and themselves mobilise in relation to, problems, issues or objects that transcend national or regional boundaries’ (p. 97). As Barry explains, ‘the identity of an “affected community” is determined by its distance from the future route of the pipeline itself, as well as worker’s camps and pipe yards, the presence of which was expected to be particularly disruptive for those living in their vicinity’ (p. 102).
Moreover, the practices of public-making generated a large amount of information about the pipeline, which rendered its impact publicly visible. In the final two chapters, Barry ‘probes how the materiality of the pipeline itself acquired transnational significance’ and interrogates how the transparency of the BTC pipeline’s archive helped transform certain objects as either visible and significant or invisible and insignificant (p. 30). In contrast to human-centred accounts of political controversies, Barry focuses on how the pipeline’s coating material became politically significant in a dispute between the UK government and BP. He argues that ‘if political action often involves the staging of a particular issue as a matter of collective importance…then non-human materials rather than human subjects were, in this instance, placed firmly centre stage’ (p. 138). The failure of the pipeline’s coating material and the possibility of an oil leak or environmental degradation ‘provided the basis for a wider argument about the activities of the ECGD [Export Credits Guarantee Department]…its failure to act according to its principles…[and] inferences about the wider forms of complicity between corporate business and government’ (p. 147).
In the final chapter, Barry explores how the transparency of the archive or documentation made publicly available by BP ‘transformed the objects and processes that it described’ (p. 30). The enactment of transparency, in other words, was how powerful groups, such as BP, articulated their concerns publicly in an attempt to establish hegemonic dominance in the disputes over the pipeline project. Issues surrounding compensation, community investment, and ‘affected populations’ were included in the public archive, which helped reduce antagonism by anticipating potential criticisms from NGOs and community opposition. Similarly, disputes over compensation to local villagers and the conditions and pay of the construction workers were not made public, which obscured the significance of these issues and limited contestation. Barry concludes that ‘to understand the disputes that emerged along the route of the pipeline we have to attend to the shifting, contested and uncertain boundaries of, as well as the complex interplay between, what was rendered transparent and what was not’ (p. 176).
Barry’s interdisciplinary approach helps render visible important issues that might be overlooked within radical democratic theories. His analysis of ‘material politics’ in Chapter 7, however, did not seem to support his claim that ‘objects should not be thought of as incidental to politics’ (p. 7). For instance, Barry details how problems with the pipeline’s coating were used by NGOs in the UK House of Commons to reveal complicity between corporations and government. The dynamics of this dispute are examined to demonstrate how materials can be placed in the centre of political controversies. Ultimately, however, the pipeline’s coating was only incidental to the controversy as the parliamentarians were only in a position to judge the behaviour of government and whether the problems with the coating had been identified and addressed. That is, the select committee were unconvinced that the pipeline’s coating was a sign of complicity between the British government and corporate business. For me, Barry’s analysis seemed to reveal the difficulties involved in the process of articulation rather than the political importance of materials. In spite of all the talk of nonhuman agency in recent theories of materialist politics, Material Politics reveals that the political salience of materials is dependent on contingent and context-specific discursive configurations.
Barry provides convincing arguments about the intertwining of materials with the production of information and the practices of transparency and corporate responsibility within the oil industry. He has managed to rethink radical democracy’s relationship to material politics in order to investigate the anti-political consequences of consensus and the possibilities of agonistic pluralism in technological societies. On the whole, Material Politics contributes to the renewal of materialism in the human sciences while eschewing the problematic idea that nonhumans have political agency in themselves.