Melancholy Democracy Politics beyond hope and despair Dr. Endre Dányi danyi@em.uni-frankfurt.de Cumulative Habilitation submitted to the Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main June 2022 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Introduction: Reclaiming Melancholy 6 1) Are Parliaments Still Privileged Sites for Studying Politics and Liberal Democracy? 28 2) Becoming stronger by becoming weaker: The hunger strike as a mode of doing politics (with Sebastian Abrahamsson) 41 3) Good Treason: Following Actor-Network Theory to the Realm of Drug Policy 62 4) Drug Places and Spaces of Problematisation: The Melancholy Case of a Hungarian Needle Exchange Programme (with Róbert Csák) 79 5) Asymmetries and Climate Futures: Working with Waters in an Indigenous Australian Settlement (with Michaela Spencer and Yasunori Hayashi) 96 6) Un/common grounds: Tracing politics across worlds (with Michaela Spencer) 124 7) Búskomor politics: Practising critique in the ruins of liberal democracy 147 Eidesstattliche Erklärungen zur vorgelegten Habilitationsschrift 164 -- 1 -- List of Figures Figure 1: Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Melencolia I’ (1514) 9 Figure 2: Milingimbi Gapu poster 103 Figure 3: Milingimbi water poster 104 Figure 4: Information Poster, displayed at Milingimbi airport 111 Figure 5: By the billabong Nilatjirriwa 114 Figure 6: Michael Mungula (Gupapuyngu clan) 116 Figure 7: Yasunori and Warrick (Milingimbi and Outstations Progress Resource Association manager) 117 -- 2 -- Acknowledgements It is almost exactly a decade ago that I signed my first contract with the Goethe University and started working as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in Thomas Scheffer’s ‘Interpretative Social Research’ working group. Over the years Frankfurt has transformed itself into a special configuration of places – Mousonturm, the Mal Seh’n Kino, Stalburg Theater, Mampf, Bistro Aida, Wir Komplizen, Größenwahn, Strandcafé, Feinstaub, the playground next to Aroma, to just mention a few in Nordend – that in my mind continue to reverberate with conversations I had with a heterogenous group of people. It is a beautiful obligation to acknowledge their impact on my Habilitation. Where to begin? I am deeply grateful to Thomas Scheffer and members of his working group, especially Martina Kolanoski, Stefan Laube, Markus Rudolfi, Jan Schank, Victor Toom and Ronja Trischler, for the shared commitment to practice as theory and to Thomas Lemke and past and current members of the ‘Biotechnologies, Nature and Society’ working group for their collective expertise in theory as practice. I am particularly thankful to Andreas Folkers and Peter Wehling for their thoughtful comments on various parts of my Habilitation, as well as to Paula Stiegler for all the help with the manuscript. In the past ten years, Frankfurt has become an important hub in Science and Technology Studies (STS) – a unique development at the Goethe University, at the intersection of sociology, cultural anthropology and human geography. I have greatly benefited from my exchanges with students and faculty associated with those departments, especially with Susanne Bauer, Birgit Blättel-Mink, Kira Kosnick, Thomas Lemke, Thomas Scheffer, Ferdinand Sutterlüty and Gerhard Wagner and their team members from sociology, Petra Ilyes, Martina Klausner, Gisela Welz and Meike Wolf and their team members from cultural anthropology, and Marc Boeckler, Peter Lindner and Lizzie Richardson and their team members from human geography. On several occasions, I was also lucky to be able to test half-baked ideas related to my research on Judith Blume, Astrid Erll, Martin Fotta, Bernd Herzogenrath, Kristina Lepold, Daniel Loick, Nadine Marquardt, Linda Monsees, Sebastian Schindler, Torsten Voigt, Bernd Werse and Tobias Wille, among others – thank you for all the inspiration. The core of my Habilitation consists of three case studies – all of them are outcomes of wonderful collaborations that lasted for several years. I wish to thank Sebastian Abrahamsson -- 3 -- and his former colleagues in the ‘Eating Bodies’ team in Amsterdam for the shared work on the hunger strike case, Róbert Csák and his former colleagues at the Kék Pont needle exchange programme in Budapest and the employees of Crescer in Lisbon for the shared work on the harm reduction case, and Michaela Spencer and her colleagues at The Northern Institute in Darwin (particularly Michael Christie, Yasunori Hayashi and Helen Verran) for the shared work on the cosmopolitics case. Rounds of ethnographic fieldwork were generously funded by the Charles Darwin University, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Goethe University – I am pleased to acknowledge the financial support of these institutions. Putting together the three case studies and elaborating on ‘melancholy democracy’ as the overall theme of the Habilitation partly coincided with a visiting professorship I held at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Bundeswehr University Munich. I greatly appreciate the insightful discussions there with Teresa Koloma Beck and her team, Rohullah Amin, Yannik Porsché and Katharina Wuropulos, as well as with Jenni Brichzin, Jan Busse, Sina Farzin, Anke Fischer-Kattner, Carmen Klement, Hedwig Richter and Stefan Stetter. I am also indebted to several ‘old’ friends, who have been listening to versions of my empirical stories and ramblings about melancholy democracy in the most generous way possible. During various visits, I have learned a great deal from Nida Alahmad, Nina Amelung, Kristin Asdal, Andrea Ballestero, Andrew Barry, Mario Blaser, Tanja Bogusz, Geof Bowker, Stephen Collier, Marisol de la Cadena, Emmanuel Didier, Rachel DouglasJones, Alejandro Esguerra, Ignacio Farías, Richard Freeman, Jennifer Gabrys, Christopher Gad, Elaine Gan, Stefan Helmreich, Antoine Hennion, Casper Bruun Jensen, Sonja JerakZuiderent, Chris Kelty, Hannah Knox, Kristine Krause, Bruno Latour, Ingmar Lippert, Amade M’charek, James Maguire, Michael Mair, Anna Mann, Noortje Marres, Gergely Mohácsi, Annemarie Mol, Tahani Nadim, Jörg Niewöhner, Andy Pickering, Jeannette Pols, Alain Pottage, Hugh Raffles, Richard Rottenburg, Fernando Rubio, Derek Sayer, Allen Shelton, Sergio Sismondo, Estrid Sørensen, Ann Stoler, András Szigeti, Sebastián Ureta, JanPeter Voß, Laura Watts, Brit Ross Winthereik, Steve Woolgar, Yoke-Sum Wong, Malte Ziewitz and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak. John Law and Lucy Suchman have provided unswerving intellectual guidance-at-a-distance – it is a pleasure to thank them, once again, for everything they have taught me. And a big group hug to the Mattering Press team – Uli Beisel, Joe Deville, Anna Dowrick, Nat Gill, Julien McHardy, Michaela Spencer and Paula Stiegler – for their sustained friendship and dedication to reconfiguring academic publishing. -- 4 -- Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my family, Janie Ondracek, Réka Dányi-Ondracek and Konrád Dányi-Ondracek, for being in my life (or entering it soon). Sleep deprivation has never felt so good. I dedicate my Habilitation to my mother, Gizella Sóvári, who is the very embodiment of what in the subtitle I call politics beyond hope and despair. -- 5 -- Introduction: Reclaiming Melancholy In May 2019, the British newspaper The Guardian – a common reference point for political journalists and decision makers all over the world – announced an important update to its style guide.1 Instead of ‘climate change’, which according to the editor-in-chief sounded rather passive and gentle, articles addressing the deterioration of the environment would be, from then on, referring to a ‘climate crisis’ – a term already used a few months earlier by the UN secretary general, the European Union and Pope Francis. In its statement, The Guardian explained that to call the current situation a crisis is to acknowledge its urgency and give less ground to those who question the scientific evidence that supports it. The shift from ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’ in public discourse (at least in international English) is significant and seems at first glance well-justified. At the same time, as Janet Roitman (2013) has pointed out, to call a situation a crisis is to focus on something extraordinary, something that deviates from the normal mode of operation. When it comes to environmental deterioration, this framing may be misleading because it is arguably modernity as a general condition (with its treatment of nature as an endless pool of resources, its unquestionable faith in technological development and its commitment to economic growth) that is responsible for the dramatic increase of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. If this is right, then what we are currently confronted with is not so much a ‘climate crisis’ as the latest episode of the overall breakdown of modernity and the notion of progress.2 The aim of this cumulative Habilitation is to explore the political-sociological implications of this assertion. In this introduction I will first review a small but highly significant literature on ‘the end of progress’. I will then associate key tropes of this literature with melancholy as the quintessential end-of-progress sentiment and suggest that attending to it is exceptionally useful for the re-examination of democratic politics in the era of environmental deterioration. For such re-examination to work, however, I argue that melancholy needs to be reclaimed as a collective, non-Eurocentric form of resistance. In the third part of the introduction, I offer a summary of the individual papers of the Habilitation and through a series of empirical cases spell out how a reclaimed version of melancholy may help us articulate political sensitivities 1 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-ituses-about-the-environment (last accessed on 17 June 2022). 2 The argument is similar to the one made by Zygmunt Bauman (1989) a few decades ago about the Holocaust: the unprecedented genocide during the Second World War was not an exception or a temporary suspension of modern processes; it was in fact modernity driven to its extremes. -- 6 -- that I collectively refer to as melancholy democracy. Finally, I briefly discuss how this ‘turn to melancholy’ resonates with ongoing discussions about affect and the status of critique in the social sciences. The end of progress How to make sense of climate change, not as a crisis (or a series of crises), but as the cumulative effect of modernity as a general condition? A handful of scholars associated with Science and Technology Studies (STS) have recently offered several partially connected diagnoses that address exactly this question. One of their starting points is the observation that what for many social scientists in the early 1990s seemed to be ‘the end of history’ (that is, the global hegemony of liberal democracy after the collapse of state socialism – see Fukuyama, 1992) in the early 2000s began to resemble ‘the end of the world’– at least the end of a world organised around humanist optimism and a universalist notion of progress (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). Some of these STS scholars, for instance Anna Tsing (2015), have focused their attention on capitalism as the main culprit of the systematic destruction of the lively environments of a wide range of humans and nonhumans. To be sure, wherever its extractive logic appeared in the past couple of centuries, especially but not exclusively in the former colonies of European states, capitalism generated ruins;3 the landscapes and seascapes left behind have been haunted ever since by the ghosts of multiple life-forms extinguished in the process of profit-generation (Tsing et al., 2017). If state socialism was ever a viable alternative in the 20th century, the global financial crises of the first two decades of the 21st century clearly showed that capitalism no longer had any limits – as Isabelle Stengers (2015) put it, not even ‘capitalists’ could keep it under control. This depiction, no doubt, captures well the everyday experience of those whose livelihood is threatened or was destroyed by big agricultural, extractive, pharmaceutical and other corporations. At the same time, other STS scholars have argued that to blame capitalism as a singular economic model might be counter-productive: it may actually help create/strengthen the monster that needs to be slayed (Haraway, 2016; Latour et al., 2018, see also Gibson- 3 For a spectacular sample of such ruins see Edward Burtynsky’s 2008 documentary, ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ – https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/films/manufactured-landscapes (last accessed on 18 June 2022). -- 7 -- Graham, 2006). Consequently, as for example Bruno Latour (2017) has proposed, it might be better to critically examine practices that enabled modernisation as a ruinous process in the first place (including the expansion of capitalist enterprise), namely the practices of modern science and technological innovation. In catastrophic times such as ours (Stengers, 2015), is it possible to develop different ways of knowing and making a common world? This question is highly political. As Donna Haraway (2016) contends, learning to recognise and nourish different ways of knowing and world-making is our best chance to avoid the double trap of blind hope in technofixes (that is, the firm belief that technological innovation will eventually solve climate change) and bitter cynicism. The task, therefore, is to articulate ‘alternative kinds of politics that lie “beyond” the temporality and politics of hope and progress’ (Latour et al., 2018: 600; Latour, 2018) on the one hand and complete despair on the other. In the spirit of STS, and more narrowly of Actor-Network Theory (ANT),4 this articulation needs to be done empirically, and – as I have argued elsewhere (Dányi, 2019; 2020a) – in close conversation with existing democratic processes and institutions. The empirical articulation of politics beyond hope and despair, within the context of liberal democratic processes and institutions, is precisely the task I take on in this Habilitation. But before turning to the case studies themselves, I want to better situate this STS/ANT-inspired approach within recent debates in sociology and social theory. Reclaiming melancholy Ruination, catastrophes and ‘the end of progress’ as key tropes in a diagnosis of the present are of course not new – they are, in fact, as old as modernity itself.5 In order to use them as guides toward ‘alternative kinds of politics’ I want to consider them not merely as metaphors but as components of a specific sentiment, which is perhaps most strongly expressed in Albrecht Dürer’s allegorical engraving of melancholy (Figure 1). Dürer’s famous image depicts an angelic figure surrounded by objects linked to modern science and technology (an hourglass, a compass, weighing scales, a polyhedron and other mathematical instruments). 4 Contrary to what its name suggests, ANT is not a singular, well-defined theory, but a radically empirical style of social inquiry with a strong focus on materiality, multiplicity and performativity (see Latour, 1999; Mol, 2010). Its recent variants are often referred to as material semiotics (Law, 2009) and relational materialism (Law, 1994, Lemke 2021). 5 This is not a place to perform a ‘proper’ genealogy of progress and its alleged end – for a detailed overview see, for example, Koselleck (2004 [1979]), Wagner (2016) and a recent special issue of The Sociological Review (Savransky and Lundy, 2022). -- 8 -- There is also a putto, busily scribing something in front of a ladder leaned against a building, and a sickly-looking sleeping dog. In the background, a comet lights up the sky and the sea in front of it; the rest of the scene is mostly dark. Figure 1: Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Melencolia I’ (1514) Photo taken at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main6 6 I wish to thank Martin Sonnabend, the Head of ‘Prints and Drawings before 1750’ at the Städel Museum, for the guided tour on 28 April 2022. -- 9 -- Lost in thought, resting her head on a clenched fist, the angelic figure is supposed to be the embodiment of melancholy (Böhme, 1989) – a temperament that had fascinated European artists and philosophers since the antiquity. Except that Dürer’s depiction differs from those popular in the Middle Ages, which typically identified melancholy with old age, greed and indifference. The visual divergence is deliberate: according to the dominant interpretation (Warburg, 1999 [1920]), the engraving’s main purpose is to mark a moment of rupture. In a renaissance fashion, it heralds the victory of geometry as the art of measurement over magic and celebrates the birth of the humanist subject. But others (Klibansky et al., 1979 [1964]; Koerner, 1993; Merback, 2018) have a different interpretation to offer. They emphasise that the image is full of contradictions: the objects associated with modern science and technology lie around unused, the ladder leads nowhere, and the angelic figure, whose dark face evinces a gloomy mood, looks like someone ‘whose thoughts have reached their limit’ (Klibansky et al., 1979 [1964]: 345). In his analysis of German tragic drama, Walter Benjamin (2003 [1928]) suggests that – foreshadowing a baroque sensitivity7 – the sad-sombre gaze of Melencolia can be attributed to the realisation that despite all scientific and technological advancement the world remains deeply noncoherent, inexplicable and impossible to master. It is inherently fragmented, and despite all efforts, the fragments ‘don’t add up’ (see Földényi, 2016). This latter reading strongly resonates with the STS works mentioned in the previous section. What makes Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s, Anna Tsing’s, Isabelle Stengers’, Bruno Latour’s and Donna Haraway’s analyses novel, however, is that they regard ‘the end of progress’ not a conclusion, but a starting point. They more or less explicitly imply that such an insight could be turned into something analytically and politically generative vis à vis rapid environmental degradation; an alternative to both false hope in technoscientific fixes and complete despair. But how? Does the lack of a bright collective future not render politics impossible? Not necessarily, but in order to see what melancholy democracy could look like, some respecification – or reclaiming – is necessary.8 7 On baroque sensitivities as sources of inspiration for contemporary social science see Law and Ruppert, 2016. My understanding of ‘reclaiming’ comes from Isabelle Stengers (2012), who uses it to denote both ‘taking back’ and ‘healing’ – see also Latour et al., 2018. 8 -- 10 -- 1) From individual disposition to collective sentiment Here I can only highlight what I consider three crucial steps toward reclaiming melancholy. The first is to counter the tendency to define melancholy as an individual disposition. This is certainly not easy: already in ancient Greece and then in medieval Europe, melancholy was seen as a personal illness attributed to an imbalance of the four bodily humours – more precisely a surplus of black bile (Burton, 2001 [1621], see also Flatley, 2008). In the 17th and 18th centuries, as a humoral paradigm was gradually replaced by a mechanistic paradigm of the human body, melancholy was seen less as a physical condition and more as a mental disorder (Foucault, 1972). In the 19th century, this disorder was eventually identified as depression (often coupled with the romantic image of the lonesome genius – see Clair, 2008). In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud’s analysis seemed to strengthen the image of melancholy as an abnormality of the individual mind. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud (2005 [1917]) associated it with the loss of an object (a loved person or an abstraction) that a subject was unable or unwilling to let go. Accordingly, he saw melancholy as a pathological form of mourning, which often resulted in a cessation of interest in the outside world, a lost capacity to love and lowered self-esteem. In Freud’s words, ‘in mourning it [was] the world which ha[d] become poor and empty; in melancholia it [was] the ego itself’ (Freud, 2005 [1917]: 246). A few years later, however, in his The Ego and the Id, Freud (1989 [1923]) significantly revised his thesis and claimed that melancholia was something quite central to modern subjectivity formation in general, which strongly depended on the internalisation of ‘difficult-to-mourn’ losses (see Flatley, 2008). It is Freud’s revised understanding of melancholy that Judith Butler uses in their work on the formation of gendered identities. In Gender Trouble (Butler, 1990) and ‘Melancholy Gender’ (Butler, 1995) they propose that in modern societies heterosexuality as a norm is produced not only through the prohibition of incest, but – prior to that – also through the prohibition of homosexuality, which forecloses forms of attachment (i.e. same-sex love) that a subject-in-formation is unable to mourn. Melancholy, in this sense, should be seen as a collective sentiment generated by subjectification processes that aim to create and maintain ‘normal’ ways of being in the world, rather than a disposition that originates in an individual body or mind. Butler’s argument also holds in the context of political subjectification. If in a liberal democratic setting the ‘normal’ political subject is the citizen (with well-defined rights and -- 11 -- obligations, unambiguous loyalty to the nation state, etc.), then attachments that do not fit the scheme of national sovereignty are foreclosed and become difficult or impossible to mourn, resulting in a widespread sense of political melancholy.9 Such attachments have become particularly relevant during the European refugee crisis, which has drawn attention not only to the precarious situation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East within the European Union, but also to the limits and inherent contradictions of political subjectivity defined exclusively in terms of citizenship. As several recent studies informed by ANT – including my own work on a refugees’ hunger strike that took place in Brussels – have argued, taking those attachments seriously would allow us to articulate ways of being political that disrupt the citizen/noncitizen dichotomy in liberal democracy (Abrahamsson and Dányi, 2019; Hennion and Thiéry, 2018; M’charek, 2018). 2) From inaction to resistance The second step of reclaiming is to free melancholy from the brand of apathy or inaction. It is true that melancholy has been widely associated with acedia, the cardinal sin of sloth, not only in the Middle Ages, but also in the 20th century. Most notably, Walter Benjamin (1974 [1931]) accused his contemporaries in the Weimar era of ‘left-wing melancholy’ – an attitude that according to him reduced ‘revolutionary opposition into objects of aesthetic appreciation’ (Pensky, 1993: 10). After the Cold War, Benjamin’s charge was used anew to describe the resignation among leftist intellectuals who felt they had failed to realise the utopian aspirations of socialist revolutions across the globe (Brown, 1999; Traverso, 2016). At the same time, it was Benjamin who in several other works identified melancholy as a specific form of resistance in the face of a looming catastrophe. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, for instance, he identified acedia with historicism, which engages with loss and past events in order to avoid contemporary obligations, in contrast with the revolutionary potential of historical materialism, which ‘brush[es] history against the grain’ in order to disrupt the conditions of the present – the ‘Jetztzeit’ (Benjamin 1968 [1940]: 248, 252-253; see also Wehling, 2021).10 All of this suggests that the central concern might be 9 See, for example, Ahmed (2010) on ‘melancholy migrants’, Gilroy (2005) on ‘postcolonial melancholia’ and Wilderson (2021) on afropessimism (see also Winters, 2016). 10 In his text, Benjamin famously associates Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as the angel of history, desperately caught up in the storm of progress. For a thoughtful discussion of Benjamin’s use of the Klee painting, and the extent to which Angelus Novus can be considered the contemporary version of Dürer’s Melencolia I, see Hanssen, 1999. -- 12 -- less that melancholy leads to inaction, and more that it generates forms of action that in progress-oriented settings are difficult to recognise as something political. In his overview of melancholy forms of resistance, Enzo Traverso uses the example of the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic and the movement that emerged in its wake in the mid-1980s to illustrate what ‘rethinking a revolutionary project in a nonrevolutionary time’ (2016: 20) might look like. Drawing on gay activist practices (see Crimp, 2004), he claims that the movement drew its strength from melancholy, generated by the unmournable death of the victims of AIDS, to organise a new network of associations, medical centres, and legal help. One of the most tangible outcomes of this organisation work were various ‘harm reduction’ initiatives in the US and Europe, which aimed to constrain the spread of HIV/AIDS among intravenous drug users (by providing sterile needles, distributing condoms, and generally creating a safer environment for people who inject drugs – see Rhodes and Hedrich, 2010). By doing so, they also advocated a unique approach toward problems that were unwilling to disappear: instead of focusing exclusively on solutions, harm reduction initiatives concentrated on the small but highly significant differences between better and worse ways of living with them (Zigon, 2019). This unique approach toward problems fits well with a series of ANT-minded works concerned with the politics of care in diverse domains, from medicine through farming and agriculture to environmental policy. In their empirical studies, Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, Jeannette Pols, Vicky Singleton and others have examined how concepts of good and bad lives are being negotiated, tinkered with, played out against each other in care practices, outlining a politics that is – in Benjamin’s terms – concerned with the possibilities of the Jetztzeit (see Gill et al., 2017; Mol, 2008; Mol et al., 2010). Inspired by these studies, in my own research on harm reduction programmes in Budapest and Lisbon I have argued that this politics may be considered melancholy in a double sense: it does not only engage with situations that appear hopeless or impossible to improve, but is also constantly threated by dominant understandings of ‘the political’, both in the social sciences and in institutional politics (Dányi, 2018; Dányi and Csák, 2021). 3) From tristesse to cosmopolitics The third step of reclaiming is related to melancholy’s own situatedness. As I mentioned earlier, its history as a concept in Europe goes all the way back to ancient Greece; in fact, the -- 13 -- history of Western civilisation (no matter how difficult it is to define) is impossible to tell without the analysis of various understandings of melancholy (Clair, 2008; Lepenies, 1992). Does this mean that melancholy is necessarily a Western or Eurocentric term? The answer, I think, depends on what version of anthropology we mobilise when we interrogate the complicated relationship between ‘the West’ and the rest of the world. One of the key figures who contested an essentialist distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Tristes Tropiques (2012 [1973]) was a powerful reflection on anthropology as ‘entropology’, that is, the study of disorganisation and decay as a result of ruinous modernisation.11 As he aptly put it, [o]ur great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind (Lévi-Strauss, (2012 [1973]: 38). The melancholy that permeates Tristes Tropiques is generated by a sense of loss, the anthropologist’s confrontation with the disappearance of Indigenous worlds, and the realisation that we, moderns, are condemned to live in what John Law (2015) calls a ‘oneworld world’: a singular reality that is gradually undermining its own conditions. LéviStrauss’ diagnosis is highly accurate (and anticipates many contemporary discussions about the Anthropocene). At the same time, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has pointed out, Indigenous worlds have not quite disappeared without a trace (Viveiros de Castro, 2017; see also Viveiros de Castro, 2014). Rather, they have outlived their own ends and began to interfere with dominant Western ways of knowing and world-making with generative effects (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2020). How to acknowledge such interferences in a democratic context? Isabelle Stengers (2005) and Bruno Latour (2004) have proposed the term cosmopolitics to describe a politics that 11 In her review of Tristes Tropiques, Susan Sontag (1994 [1963]) identified Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology as entropology as an apolitical stance. In light of Lévi-Strauss’ involvement in anti-racist initiatives at UNESCO and other international organisations, the accusation does not quite hold – see Stockowski, 2008. I am grateful to Frédéric Keck for drawing my attention to this. -- 14 -- takes place between, or across, different worlds. Unlike ‘politics-as-usual’, which is mainly concerned with different views of the same world (see de la Cadena, 2010), cosmopolitics does not assume the prior existence of a common ground. On the contrary, it takes the constitution of a common ground the main purpose of cosmopolitical encounters, which is supposed to happen gradually, with the involvement of all affected parties, humans and nonhumans alike.12 After centuries of violence committed against particular groups of humans and confronted with the accelerated extinction of a wide range of nonhuman species, Stengers’ and Latour’s cosmopolitical proposal is certainly appealing. However, as Mario Blaser has argued (2016), even the most inclusive cosmopolitical designs generate their own exclusions, making a common ground not only difficult to assume, but also impossible to attain. This insight is undoubtedly a melancholy one, but it also differs from Lévi-Strauss’ tristesse as it does not consider the ‘one-world world’ of modernity as a collective destiny. As I have shown in my collaborative research in the Northern Territory in Australia, it is an insight that allows us to see how diverse knowledge traditions are being put in conversation with each other (Spencer et al., 2019), what understandings of politics do those traditions carry with them (Dányi and Spencer, 2020), and how ANT-inspired scholars like ourselves may facilitate a cosmopolitics that is centred around uncommonality, dissensus and disagreement (Verran 2002; 2018; see also Rancière, 2004). Politics beyond hope and despair Let me briefly reiterate the argument so far. In the first section I have provided an overview of a small but growing body of literature that engages with climate change not as a crisis or a series of crises, but as the latest sign of the overall breakdown of modernity. I have highlighted a number of key tropes of this literature – the end of progress, ruination, catastrophes – and associated them with melancholy as a specific sentiment. With the help of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, I have identified this sentiment with the realisation that despite all technological and scientific advancement the world remains deeply noncoherent and impossible to master. 12 It is therefore markedly different from the humanist and highly Eurocentric vision of cosmopolitanism associated with Immanuel Kant and his treatise on perpetual peace. -- 15 -- What are the political-sociological implications of this realisation in the context of climate change? In the main part of the second section, I have argued that melancholy may be exceptionally helpful to articulate ‘alternative kinds of politics’ that are reducible neither to blind hope in technoscientific fixes nor to complete despair. I have suggested that in order to make this articulation work, however, some reclaiming is necessary. More concretely, I have suggested that 1) melancholy needs to be understood as a collective sentiment, rather than an individual disposition, 2) it needs to be recognised as a particular form of political action, rather than dismissed as inaction, and 3) it needs to be freed from its Eurocentric connotations. My overall claim is that from such a reclaimed melancholy position it becomes possible to identify and nourish political practices that engage with rapid environmental degradation without reinforcing modernist assumptions about who may count as a political being, what may count as political action, and how conflicting views of the same world need to be taken as the basis of democratic politics. In this section I want to reiterate my rather abstract claim with the help of three empirical case studies I conducted as a postdoctoral researcher at Interpretative Social Research working group and the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University. These case studies are based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place between 2012 and 2018 – more precisely in Brussels in 2013, in Budapest in 2014, in Lisbon in 2015, in Berlin, Frankfurt, Darwin and Milingimbi in 2016, and in Amsterdam in 2017. The outcomes of these research projects have been published across seven publications; taken together, they constitute the main body of my Habilitation.13 1) Are Parliaments Still Privileged Sites for Studying Politics and Liberal Democracy? The first publication (Dányi, 2019) locates the Habilitation within Science and Technology Studies, and more narrowly within Actor-Network Theory. It suggests that since its early formulations in the 1980s, ANT has been concerned with politics. It has mobilised its radically empirical strategy to follow actors (humans and nonhumans alike) in order to better understand how seemingly singular realities are being produced, and how they could be produced differently. Most works in ANT, however, left liberal democratic institutions (most notably parliaments) unexamined, which means that ANT’s innovative concepts developed 13 The publications reappear in my cumulative Habilitation unaltered – only some of the references and links to online documents have been updated. -- 16 -- in other domains (science, economy, art and design, and so on) could not interfere much with the actual practices of democratic politics. Foreshadowing my empirical works on the European refugee crisis, global drug policy and Indigenous initiatives concerned with climate change as the three case studies of the Habilitation, this chapter introduces ‘peoples’, ‘problems’ and ‘worlds’ as key terms around which an ANT-inspired analysis of democratic politics could be organised. 2) Becoming stronger by becoming weaker: The hunger strike as a mode of doing politics The second publication (Abrahamsson and Dányi, 2019) is the outcome of a collaboration with Sebastian Abrahamsson, and constitutes the first case study of the Habilitation. It combines Judith Butler’s work on performativity and political agency with ANT’s interest in bodies and embodied practices in order to analyse a hunger strike that took place in Brussels with the involvement of 23 refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. The refugees started their hunger strike to draw attention to their impossible situation in Belgium (and by extension in the European Union), and invited citizens to speak and act on their behalf. By doing so, they exposed not only the internal contradictions of dominant modes of doing politics within a liberal democracy, but also performed a distinct mode of doing politics themselves. In line with Butler’s understanding of melancholy, we argue that the hunger strike made visible alternative forms of political agency that operate through weakness, silences and failure. 3) Good Treason: Following Actor-Network Theory to the Realm of Drug Policy This publication (Dányi, 2018) is part of the second case study of the Habilitation. It uses key works in ANT to examine how drug use is established as a problem and what kinds of politics are being mobilised to tackle it. Based on fieldwork in Lisbon, the study looks at the ways in which numbers, statistics and epidemiological models are being used by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) to constitute drug use as a European problem. It then discusses how social scientists attending an international conference challenge this problematisation and propose alternative solutions to what they claim to be a social problem. Finally, the chapter looks at a harm reduction initiative in the outskirts of Lisbon and proposes that the strength of the latter approach lies not so much in -- 17 -- finding alternative solutions as in the ability to distinguish between better and worse ways of living with problems. 4) Drug Places and Spaces of Problematisation: The Melancholy Case of a Hungarian Needle Exchange Programme This publication (Dányi and Csák, 2021) is the continuation of the second case study of the Habilitation. It is based on joint fieldwork I conducted with Róbert Csák at a harm reduction initiative in Budapest. It partly reiterates the findings of the previous paper when it defines harm reduction as a practical way of telling better and worse ways of living with problems apart. Focusing on a needle exchange programme in a run-down part of the city, the empirical story shows how social workers develop the ability to navigate between different modes of problematisation. This is a melancholy undertaking in at least two senses. First, it requires constant engagement with situations that seem hopeless or impossible to improve: drug addiction among the clients of the needle exchange programme is unlikely to be ever resolved. Second, similar to care practices, harm reduction is under constant threat by dominant modes of problematisation. In Budapest, this took an extreme form in 2014, when – in line with the Hungarian government’s official drug policy – the local council decided to withdraw its support of the needle exchange programme, which in turn had to close down its operation. The paper ends with a reflection on our own position as ethnographers vis à vis disastrous developments in the field and evokes Walter Benjamin’s work on storytelling as a way of keeping marginalised knowledges alive. 5) Asymmetries and Climate Futures: Working with Waters in an Indigenous Australian Settlement This publication (Spencer et al. 2019) is part of the third case study of the Habilitation. Based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in Milingimbi, a small Yolngu Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory in Australia, the paper is centred around a water management workshop convened by the utility company Power & Water Corporation (P&WC). In the context of climate change, the aim of the workshop was to bring together Yolngu Elders and Western scientists (mostly hydrogeologists from Germany) to discuss how radically different knowledge traditions related to water could be put in conversation with each other. For the Yolngu, this interesting epistemological exercise was also thoroughly -- 18 -- political: they wanted to know whether the island community of Milingimbi could sustain new housing projects (mostly residential buildings, but also a new infirmary). But to their disappointment, the scientists kept insisting that the workshop’s focus was limited to knowledge related to water; political decisions had to be made elsewhere (in Darwin or Canberra). This made us as ethnographers realise that the exchange organised by P&WC was not simply an attempt to establish a symmetry between Yolngu knowledge and Western science, but also an event that inadvertently reinforced various asymmetries between distinct epistemo-political configurations. 6) Un/common grounds: Tracing politics across worlds What would it mean to acknowledge the multiplicity of epistemo-political configurations? And how could such an acknowledgement be inscribed into already existing democratic institutions? In this publication (Dányi and Spencer, 2020), which is the continuation of the third case study of the Habilitation, Michaela Spencer and I address these questions through a comparative study between German and Australian parliamentary settings. Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ and Bruno Latour’s work, we mobilise cosmopolitics as a form of politics that takes place between or across different worlds (which we use as a synonym for epistemopolitical configurations). Unlike Stengers and Latour, however, we do not consider the establishment of a ‘common ground’ as the only legitimate goal of cosmopolitical encounters. Rather, we empirically examine how un/commonality is established in parliamentary practices in Frankfurt, Berlin, Darwin and Milingimbi. In our last fieldsite, we encounter a video of a Yolngu parliamentary ritual, which for us exemplifies what a cosmopolitical approach based on uncommonality, dissensus and disagreement could look like. 7) Búskomor politics: Practicing critique in the ruins of liberal democracy The final publication of the Habilitation (Dányi, 2020b) connects the main themes of the Habilitation to the crisis of liberal democracy marked by the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the expansion of the illiberal regime of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to name just a few examples. Drawing on László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, and Béla Tarr’s film based on the middle chapter of the novel, it examines political possibilities amid the ruins of liberal democracy. The novel and the film recount an upheaval in a small town in Hungary, where -- 19 -- an unexpected event – the sudden appearance of a circus with a dead whale as the main spectacle – upsets the established sense of order. Readers/viewers learn about the arrival of the circus and a riot that follows through the interaction between two characters: a philosopher and the local postman, who could be seen as the embodiments of ‘hope’ and ‘despair’. Neither seem to be able to relate to the new sense of order that emerges once the circus is gone. How to reconceptualise democratic politics in ruinous times without falling into the double trap of blind hope and complete despair? The paper formulates an answer with the help of Béla Tarr’s exhibition titled ‘Till the End of the World’, hosted by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Within the exhibition space, Tarr reconstructs iconic scenes from his films to generate a sense of melancholy, which aims to sensitise visitors to ‘alternative kinds of politics’ when confronted with seemingly hopeless situations (most notably the European refugee crisis, social marginalisation and climate change). Instead of ‘citizens’, ‘solutions’ and ‘worldviews’, such alternative kinds of politics are organised round ‘peoples’, ‘problems’ and ‘worlds’ as central terms. In the end, the paper revisits the three case studies of the Habilitation, which taken together constitute the outlines of what I call melancholy democracy. Outlook How does this analysis of melancholy relate to current developments in ANT, STS and more broadly sociology? It is perhaps tempting to consider it as part of a recent ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences (Clough, 2007), which has drawn renewed attention to the importance of sentiments, atmospheres and embodied experiences in diverse fields of research. At the same time, as I hope to have demonstrated, it is crucial to realise that melancholy as a sentiment cannot be confined to various research objects; it is also concerned with the conditions and character of social scientific inquiry as such, which so far has not taken its own sentiments very seriously. According to Thomas Scheffer (2022), this is not an accident. He suggests that various strategies to distance themselves from their research objects has been part of sociologists’ ‘doing being scientific’, irrespective of what it is that they study and how. Paradoxically, however, such distancing strategies might actually hinder sociologists from doing their job properly: as members of society, the acknowledgement of being implicated in certain -- 20 -- situations should not be seen as a weakness, but actually the strength of their undertakings. It may help them contribute to the recognition of collective problems and avoid the modernist illusion of independence. Having said that, as the brief discussion of the ‘end of progress’ literature in the beginning of this introduction has shown, letting go of distancing strategies is not at all easy. What are the alternatives when confronted with unresolvable problems, such as climate change? One obvious candidate is anger, which is often regarded as a response to perceived injustice and therefore ‘the essential political emotion’ (Lyman quoted in Holmes, 2004). Indeed, several sociologists who consider themselves critical mobilise anger triggered by injustices they observe and/or experience to frame their works or give them a clear political direction. But by doing so, they tend to keep anger prior/external to their inquiries, taking for granted the conditions within which critique is supposed to take place. This is quite different with melancholy, which – following Amy Allen (2020) – should be considered as a specific understanding of critique focused on seemingly coherent conditions and their lost, forgotten, abandoned variants. The aim of such melancholy critique, which Allen associates with Theodor Adorno’s (1969) and Michel Foucault’s (1984) uses of the term, is to construct constellations from the fragments and particularities of modernity ‘against totalizing narratives of historical progress’ (Allen, 2020: 340-341). 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Kritische Theorie. In: M. Berek, K. Chmelar, O. Dimbath, H. Haag, M. Heinlein, N. Leonhard, V. and G. Sebald (Eds.) Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Wilderson, F.B. III. (2021). Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Winters, J.R. (2016): Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zigon, J. (2019). A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. -- 27 -- 1) Are parliaments still privileged sites for studying politics and liberal democracy? This chapter addresses the question in the title in three steps. In the first part, I present the key terms of the title – politics, parliaments and liberal democracy – more or less as they appear in the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) literature. In the second part, in order to highlight a number of current developments that pose major challenges for both political theory and ANT, I discuss a set of complementary terms – people, problems and worlds – through snippets from my recent empirical work. Finally, I offer a tentative answer to the title’s question, the aim of which – in the best of parliamentary fashions – is intended not to close down, but rather to generate further debate. Parliaments as sites and meta-sites Politics ANT has always been about politics (for a general overview, see Lezaun 2017; Michael 2016; for an explicit discussion on ANT and politics, see Harman 2014). From the outset, it has focused on how politics is being done ‘by other means’ – mostly by technical and scientific means that make it difficult to disagree, to resist or to develop alternatives. In such a short chapter as this one, it is not possible for me to provide a comprehensive overview, but here are a couple of vignettes that illustrate my opening statement. In his classic study of scallop farming, Michel Callon (1986) used an explicitly political vocabulary (problematisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation) to talk about technoscientific developments in France and Japan. In his historical analysis of the Portuguese colonisation of India, John Law (1986) examined how control-at-a-distance had been established through sailing vessels as miniature versions of a European model of governance. In his portrait of Louis Pasteur as a cunning stage manager, Bruno Latour (1988) described how laboratories participate in politics by connecting otherwise disparate places such as dairy farms and academies. And in a series of works on healthcare, Annemarie Mol (2002, 2008) has shown how multiple realities are being not only known but also done through material practices, opening up ontological politics as a new mode of engagement. -- 28 --