Publications

This article investigates the international genre of “retro” and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation’s modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an “Iron Curtain” from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East andWest that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro “matters” the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed.

[materiality, economic or commercial nationalism, consumer citizenship, branding, popular culture, collections, state socialism, nostalgia, kitsch, heritage, digital, Hungary, East Europe] PDF

Although the trend of bringing the “natural” world indoors took off in many parts of the world with the end of the Cold War, this article focuses on the case of Hungary, where the shift to and then away from state-socialist versions of modernist design was particularly politicized. From the 1960s to the present, Hungary witnessed a shift from the dreams of modernist utopia imbedded in “man-made” miracle materials like plastic and concrete to the neoliberal social order imbedded in “natural” (in fact super-natural) materials like organic wood flooring and high-quality roofing tiles. I draw on scholarship working with a Peircean semiotics of materiality to elaborate an approach to aesthetic styles in material worlds that can track transformations in such styles over time and link them to wider political cosmologies. I argue that the “organicist” materialities that emerged to humanize socialist apartments in generic modern buildings were part of a critique of the modernist project and its “unnatural” attempt to dominate nature and engineer human souls. After the fall of state socialism, the continued affective appeal of this Organicist aesthetics worked to legitimate neoliberal ideologies even as people bemoaned the suffering and inequalities generated by the new order. The emerging middle classes embraced the powers of a “natural” order that included a free market as much as it included a natural lifecycle. In so doing, they are inscribed as moral persons, and as such deserving of material worlds in which nature is enhanced and controlled. The morally justified search for quality produces inequality. The article is thus an exploration of the constitutive relationships among things (like residential housing and furnishings), people (esp. people’s embodied experience), and ideology (of the state, market or of a particular group). [cultural analysis, aesthetics, domestic space, modernism, design, socialism–postsocialism, materiality, semiotics, political ideology] PDF

Narratives implying that state socialism collapsed because of its failure to satisfy consumer citizens rely on impoverished understandings of the role of material culture in social and political life. The relationship of consumption to citizenship, this paper argues, took on a particularly visceral form during the state socialist era in eastern Europe. Focusing on the case of Hungary, but incorporating ethnographic evidence from elsewhere in the region, I refute characterizations of state socialist material worlds based on notions of “shortage” and focus instead on the robust materiality of the era, from Soviet cameras and Hungarian brand-name sodas to concrete panel apartment buildings. Drawing on theoretical approaches to the role of material culture in social life based on a Peircian semiotics, as well as approaches to consumption developed for market contexts, I argue that political subjectivities were materialized in day-to-day encounters with commercial spheres, consumer goods and built environments explicitly produced under state control. The state as an abstract, impersonal and authoritarian entity was indexed not only by the framing of goods but by the flawed properties of goods themselves – many of them presented as evidence of the moral and economic superiority of the socialist system. Moreover, the logic linking material worlds to political systems was extended to the select western goods that appeared in the region, projecting their qualities as evidence of a more humane political and economic system. Such illusions were, of course, shattered after 1989, but the unique configuration of state socialist material culture which gave rise to them continued to shape the emergent postsocialist political economy.

In the social and economic upheaval during the first decade after the fall of state socialism in Hungary, the emergence of new neighborhoods of detached family houses outside of a former “socialist city” provoked ambivalent reactions. Were these homes the natural housing form for an emerging middle class in newly independent, free-market Hungary, or a passing fad led by the nouveaux riches? This article argues that that the eventual triumph of this suburban housing form had little to do with an inevitable trajectory of capitalism modeled on that of the West. Instead, it was a unique material and aesthetic form that, in the Hungarian context, was aligned with the values of its rural precedents while at the same time distinguished from them as “middle class.” The materiality of the new family house has not only redefined the conditions for belonging to the ranks of a new middle class, but has been instrumental in constituting and legitimating this emerging class.

Overcoming competition from Hollywood blockbusters, a 1996 Hungarian musical comedy called Csinibaba (Pretty Baby) became a tremendous commercial success domestically. This gently ironic depiction of coming-of-age in the post-Stalinist 1960s carefully avoids references to the political repression and malaise so forcefully depicted in another film of the period (Time Stands still, 1982). Instead, it draws on widely-shared Communist-era caricatures, songs and slogans to depict a world where the figures of authority are harmless buffoons and fashionable youth hang out in cafes, dreaming of coca-cola and Niagara Falls. Csinibaba’s focus on consumption in the sixties could be analyzed as plausible historical revisionism or as a commercialization of socialist nostalgia. This paper, however, will analyze the film as a cultural artifact of the post-socialist era, one which reveals the salience of consumption in contemporary Hungarian experience and, in providing an alternative history, reconstructs that experience. Through MTV-style cinematic techniques, Csinibaba inscribes the state-socialist past as a lost age of innocence. For its characters, social distinctions provided by objects are easy to decode, Western goods like Chesterfield cigarettes have the ability to serve as magical icons of a distant land, and the West is regarded with the same innocent expectation with which children regard the promises of adulthood. This cinematic representation of the past, however, is only conceivable from the perspective of the post-socialist present–where western consumer goods and indeed the West itself have been disenchanted and are now part of the banal and often bitter experience of the open market economy.

In the mid-1990s in Hungary, astrology publications and horoscopes – along with porn and evangelical literature – were among the Western cultural forms once restricted or banned by the socialist state that were enjoying enormous popular interest. Rather than examine astrology as a religious belief or superstitious practice, I approach it as a particular genre of self-transformation, often regarded as harmless and entertaining but nonetheless having efficacious potential. Drawing on numerous examples from print publications, interviews with professional practitioners, and informal discussions, this article makes two observations: first, that readers of horoscopes looked to the divinatory capacity of horoscopes to assist them in making decisions and navigating the uncertain context of the 1990s; second, that as a genre able to shape and constrain subjectivity, horoscopes were instrumental in affecting transformations of normative character, moral codes and worldview from a localist, state-socialist cosmology to one more in accord with the demands (and enticements) of a global, neoliberal capitalist order.

Throughout the post-Soviet bloc in the 1990s, people regularly described as ‘normal’ high-quality commodities and living environments otherwise considered extraordinary in their local context. In Hungary, this discourse of the normal indicated that middle-class aspirants, claiming ‘European’ status, now evaluated their own standards of living by comparison to imagined western ones. Looking to the socialist period, I argue that the construction of a socialist modern consumer led to the equation of western standards of living with self-value and dignity. Western material worlds were perceived to be conducive to a form of family life and personhood impossible under the ‘abnormal’ conditions of state-socialism. As this new standard has come to dictate middle-class fashioning, it has become instrumental in the ongoing social, economic and material transformation of the country.