TALLINNA ÜLIKOOL SOTSIAALTEADUSTE DISSERTATSIOONID

TALLINN UNIVERSITY

DISSERTATIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCES

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PEETER SELG

AN OUTLINE FOR A THEORY OF POLITICAL SEMIOTICS

Abstract

Tallinn 2011

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TALLINNA ÜLIKOOL SOTSIAALTEADUSTE DISSERTATSIOONID TALLINN UNIVERSITY DISSERTATIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCES 49 Peeter Selg AN OUTLINE FOR A THEORY OF POLITICAL SEMIOTICS Abstract Institute of Political Science and Governance, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia The dissertation is accepted for the commencement of the degree of Doctor Philosophiae in Government and Politics by the Doctoral Committee of Social Sciences of Tallinn University on June 20, 2011 Supervisors Rein Ruutsoo, PhD, Professor at the Institute of Political Science and

Governance of Tallinn University Risto Kalevi Heiskala, PhD, Professor at the Institute for Advanced

Social Research of University of Tampere Opponents Pertti Ahonen, PhD, Professor at the Department of Political and

Economic Studies of University of Helsinki Daniele Monticelli, PhD, Associate Professor at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Languages and Cultures of Tallinn University

The academic disputation on the dissertation will be held on August 30, 2011 at 11 o’clock, at Tallinn University lecture hall M-213, Uus-Sadama 5, Tallinn Copyright: Peeter Selg, 2011 Copyright: Tallinn University, 2011 ISSN 1736-3675 (abstract, online, PDF) ISBN 978-9949-463-26-8 (abstract, online, PDF) ISSN 1736-3632 (printed publication) ISBN 978-9949-463-96-1 (printed publication) Tallinn University Narva mnt 25 10120 Tallinn www.tlu.ee

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CONTENTS

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS ..................................................................................................... 5 Other related publications ................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 6

1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 7 1.1. The problem of political semiotics ............................................................................... 9 1.2. What is political in political semiotics? ..................................................................... 11 1.3. What is semiotic in political semiotics? ..................................................................... 13 1.4. Structuralism and its relation to semiotics ................................................................. 18

2. AN OUTLINE FOR A THEORY OF POLITICAL SEMIOTICS .................................... 25 2.1. General overview of the synthesis of Laclauian and Lotmanian perspectives ........... 25 2.2. The problem of psychoanalysis.................................................................................. 26 2.3. The problem of communication ................................................................................. 29 2.4. A model of democratic communication ..................................................................... 30 2.5. The problems related to the metonymy/metaphor distinction .................................... 33 2.6. The problem of abduction .......................................................................................... 36

3. RESEARCH AGENDA FOR POLITICAL SEMIOTICS ................................................ 39 3.1. An outline for a Jakobsonian conceptualization of power ......................................... 41 3.2. Political semiotics and political communication ........................................................ 46 3.3. Political semiotics and the study of democracy ......................................................... 48

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS ............................................................................................ 50 VISAND POLIITILISE SEMIOOTIKA TEOORIALE Kokkuvõte ..................................... 53 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 56

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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

I. SELG, P., Ventsel, A. 2008. Towards a semiotic theory of hegemony: naming as hegemonic operation in Lotman and Laclau. Sign Systems Studies, 36.1: 167 – 183.

II. SELG, P., Ventsel, A. 2010. An outline for a semiotic theory of hegemony. Semiotica, 182–1/4: 443–474.

III. SELG, P. 2010. Toward a Semiotic Model of Democracy. Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée, 10 (25).1

IV. SELG, P. (forthcoming). Justice and Liberal Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Reading of Rawls. Social Theory and Practice.

OTHER RELATED PUBLICATIONS SELG, P., VENTSEL, A. 2007. Towards a semiotic theory of hegemony: Naming as hegemonic operation in Lotman and Laclau. Paper presented at the conference “Naming in Text, Naming in Culture.” University of Tartu, 14th-15th of December 2007.

SELG, P., VENTSEL, A. 2008a. Towards a semiotic theory of hegemony: Lotman and Laclau in a dialogue. Paper presented at the “World Conference: Ideology and Discourse Analysis (IDA).” Roskilde Universitet, 8th –10th of September 2008.

SELG, P., VENTSEL, A. 2008b. Towards a Semiotic Model of Hegemony. Paper presented at the conference “Integration und Explosion. Perspektiven auf die Kultursemiotik Jurij Lotmans”. Univeversität Konstanz, 23rd –25th of October 2008.

SELG, P., VENTSEL, A. 2008c. Semiootilise hegemooniateooria suunas [Towards semiotic theory of hegemony]. Paper presented at the conference “Kohane ja kohatu semiootika.” University of Tartu, 28th – 30th of November 2008.

SELG, P., VENTSEL, A. 2009. Semiootilise hegemooniateooria suunas: Laclau ja Lotman dialoogis [Towards semiotics theory of hegemony: Lotman and Laclau in a dialogue]. – Acta Semiotica Estica, 6, 120 – 132.

SELG, P. 2009. Vaevaline tee pronksmemuaristikast ühiskonnaanalüüsini [A draggy journey from bronze-memorabilia towards social analysis]. – Acta Politica, 3, 99 – 131.

SELG, P. 2010a. Towards a Semiotic Theory of Democracy. Paper presented at the 42nd annual conference of the Finnish political science association. University of Helsinki, Tal-linn University. 11th - 12th of March 2010.

SELG, P. 2010b. Current Politics of 'Theory' and the Constitution of Meaning. Paper presented at “Power & Knowledge. The 2nd International Conference”. Tampere. 6th -8th of September 2010.

1The journal Applied Semiotics is an online journal that publishes papers in the HTML format. Therefore all the references to Paper III in the text are based on the pagination of the pdf file saved from the page http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ASSA-No25/Article2en.html on October the 6th 2010 at 2:15:10 PM.

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SELG, P 2010c. Sattumuslikkus, hegemoonia ning õiglus: John Rawls ja radikaalne demo-kraatia [Contingency, hegemony and justice: John Rawls and radical democracy]. – Studia Philosophica Estonica, 3 (1), 39-72.

SELG, P., Ventsel, A. 2011 [forthcoming]. On a Semiotic Theory of Hegemony: Conceptual Foundations and a brief sketch for future research. – Frank, S.; Ruhe, C.; Schmitz, A. (eds.). Lotman’s Cultural Theory Revisited. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 133-147.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing of the current thesis was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation grants ETF8804 “Semiotic perspectives on the analysis of power relations and political communication” and ETF7988 “The Power of the Nomination in the Society and in the Culture”.

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1. INTRODUCTION

“That semiotics – most especially the structuralist semiotics which has dominated the modern period – is political seems, to its detractors, to be a fatuously counterintuitive claim,” writes Charles Lemert (1993: 31), an American sociologist discussing already in the 1970s the potential of Saussurean notion of meaning for sociology – including the positivist measurement-oriented version of it (see Lemert 1979). “Yet it is a claim with more than sufficient plausibility,” he adds (Lemert 1993: 31). The current thesis aims to move towards one possible argument for this “plausibility”, although the route taken has only very general affinities with that of Lemert, mostly through its organic relation to what has become known as “post-structuralism”.

If one were to capture this thesis’ character with the most general intradisciplinary labels, probably a suitable characterization would be “a mixture of political theory and methodology”. The four papers forming this thesis have at least one recurrent theme: “hegemony”. Since, as argued in section 1.2, that concept is crucial for understanding “the political” within the framework developed here, we could say initially that all the papers are on the subject of “the political”. Though “hegemony” is at the heart of all the papers its centrality is not always so obvious. In Papers I and II, of course, it is explicitly stated through and through. In Papers III and IV, however, it seems to occupy the role of supporting topic for themes of “democracy” and “communication”. Yet I would argue, and hopefully it is discernable from the papers as well, that these latter two key concepts are inherently related to hegemony. In fact, the inextricable conceptual link between “hegemony” and “democracy” in Laclau and Mouffe’s conception (the fundamental theoretical basis of this thesis), is stated most clearly in paper IV – the paper that would at first glance seem to be somewhat out of place in view of the general subject of this thesis.2 It is argued there, among other things, that the Gramscian notion of hegemony is not a neutral and purely analytical category in the works of Laclau and Mouffe, but its specification in terms of contingent articulation is inherently related to an underlying normative understanding of democracy that sets what in Paper IV is called “the ethos of contingency” at the heart of conceiving social relations. In line with this ethos “each participant in a social order should view both that order as a whole and everybody’s position within it as contingent and not natural or fixed” (Paper IV, 2). I will further specify the conceptual relation between democracy and hegemony in sections 2.4 and 2.5 below. But now, how are “hegemony” and “communication” related? The most simple answer is: through “discourse” in the Laclauian sense. “Discourse” is not a mysterious fancy term, but basically a synonym for “system of meaning”. How these “systems” are formed is a bit complex issue and this is the stuff that “discourse theory” is engaged with. But at

2 Though the most original insights of this paper are related to the interpretation of John Rawls, not the general topic of the thesis, the paper still contributes to it through clarifying in more detail the notion of radical democracy (discussed also in paper III) and its relation to hegemony.

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this very general level of discussion we should point out that in the Laclauian vocabulary the term “discourse” does not refer to “written” or “spoken” language, but to process of communication of meaning more generally (see section 2.3 for more details). Highlighting the relation between hegemony and communication is probably the most important aspect of this thesis, since it ties our discussion to the second most central theme of the papers: political semiotics. Since it is put forward in section 1.4, that semiotics should be considered first and foremost a study of contingent articulation of meaning in communication, I should emphasize from the beginning that if I talk about “political semiotics” then the problematic this label tries to capture is, put very roughly, the constitution of hegemony through communication. Hence, as it is argued in the same section, it is important for this thesis to distance from the specter of structuralism that haunts the social sciences and their post-structuralist critics in the guise of semiotics. This straw-man basically reduces semiotics to an activity of collecting crystallized signs as tokens of crystallized meaning, an activity that ignores the process of constitution of meaning in social relations and communication altogether.

Now, the three inherently related key concepts – hegemony, democracy, communication – are at the same time the three most important points of departure for future research that this thesis can only briefly outline. Nevertheless, after introducing the problem of political semiotics and its relation to several other disciplines endeavoring to clarify the relations between those three key concepts (section 1) and giving an overview of the general results and problems related to the papers (section 2), I turn in the final section (3) to a brief sketch for future research.

Several remarks before I proceed to the problem of political semiotics. First, papers I and II were co-written with Andreas Ventsel, who by now is a doctor of semiotics. Since I am not a semiotician, the main emphases in this introduction are related to the social sciences in the more traditional sense. Those who are interested in a more semiotically oriented research agenda stemming from the conception partly based on the same results (papers I and II were included in Ventsel’s thesis as well), should consult Ventsel (2009a) for details. As for the relationship between his and my trajectories from this general overlapping framework I should point out that he has been engaged more with different empirical analyses (especially visual semiotics [see Ventsel 2010] and totalitarian rhetoric [2009b]]) that highlight the hegemonic relations in the signifying processes; my interests are more methodologically or theoretically oriented on the one hand and related more to this framework’s implications for social sciences on the other. Nevertheless the general conception, based on the synthesis of Laclau and Lotman is crucial for both of us and has remained thus ever since we first proposed it in 2007 (Selg and Ventsel 2007; see also Selg and Ventsel 2008; 2009; 2011[forthcoming]).

Second remark concerns the structure and aims of this introduction. The latter is not chronological but analytical. This means that the purpose is to put the results as well as the shortcomings of the papers into a more general context of discussion that is intertwined with issues that were sometimes only tacitly present in the papers and

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sometimes completely absent from them. I try to do my best in indicating what was in the papers and what constitutes a complementation I would make now. The conception these papers try to develop is, of course, a work in progress, and hence this introduction tries to give sense of its developments thus far as well as point out to important future trajectories. Thus, for instance, section 2 of this introduction is not a reader’s digest version of the papers and an ideal reader of my thesis should consult the relevant four articles as well.

1.1. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL SEMIOTICS

In 1985 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, a book that is considered to be the most influential work on the so-called “discourse theoretical” approach to politics. Not only does it provide us with theoretical tools for conceptualizing politics in terms of “hegemony”, but it also paves the way for making sense of a normativee political project stemming directly from this Gramscian category – radical democracy. Looking at the book’s theoretical edifice – comprising around 30 different concepts that in the course of the subsequent elaborations of both authors are reduced to around 5-6 – one cannot help but to think that this is a work on semiotic approach to society and politics. All sorts of theoretical tools indicate that an essentially semiotic move is made for conceptualizing politics: the Saussurean view that each meaning system is a system of differences, the view that this system has to be created through constructing “nodal points” (“empty signifiers” in Laclau’s later vocabulary) that articulate them by making the differences at least partly equivalent to each other; we have “logic of difference” operating in the process of signification that corresponds to Saussurean syntagmatic pole of language, and logic of equivalence that is located to the Saussurean paradigmatic pole; and so on. Thus the most eminent theorist of power among those who explicitly view Laclau and Mouffe as their direct influence, Stewart Clegg, characterizes the type of analysis stemming from this work as “a semiotics of power” (Clegg 1997 [1989]: 183). As he explains, for Laclau and Mouffe “[p]ower is neither ethical [Lukes] nor micropolitical [Foucault]: above all it is textual, semiotic, and inherent in the very possibility of textuality, meaning and signification in the social world” (Ibid, 184). For Clegg, it seems to be such an elementary conclusion from Laclau and Mouffe’s work that he does not even feel the need to elaborate this “semiotics of power” or even comment the curious fact that there is no mention of semiotics whatsoever in Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and that instead we have largely recourse to post-structuralism. Yet I would argue (with affinities to Clegg) that there is in fact semiotics all over the place in their work – but this semiotics is left untheorized. In fact one of the central terms associated with

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Laclau – the “empty signifier” – was coined by a leading figure of semiotics, Ro-land Barthes already in 19573.

Why is there such an ignoring of semiotics in Laclau and Mouffe’s work? For the sake of provocation I will entertain the argument that this ignoring is not a result of ignorance, but, rather, it is a strategic move. What I have in mind is inspired by recent developments in the sociology of ideas that draw substantial parallels between social movements and scientific/intellectual movements. For instance, Frickel and Gross (2005) argue that among other things it is on the one hand crucial for a new intellectual movement aimed at questioning the status quo of the field to frame their radical ideas in terms intelligible to the mainstream of that field. In other words you cannot avoid the dialogue with the mainstream. On the other hand, it is equally important for them to frame their ideas so that they position themselves vis-a-vis competitor intellectual movements (whose aims are the same – questioning the status quo). The latter framing might take the polemical form (Ibid, 224), but alternatively “competitor movements can be discussed in a sophisticated fashion that signals a movement’s association with high-status thinkers and makes its critique of the status quo appear particularly serious” (Ibid). I would suggest that towards semiotics, the polemical strategy is taken by Laclau and Mouffe that results in a virtual silence or very sporadic mentioning of semiotics usually in order to dismiss it (see Laclau 2004: 320). Towards post-structuralism, the “sophisticated discussion” strategy is taken.

These moves proved to be fruitful. By the early 1980s post-structuralism had become the most vociferous new intellectual movement among those questioning the status quo of the social sciences and the humanities. Thirty years later we can say that this movement has succeeded at least in the sense that there is virtually no way of ignoring post-structuralism in any comprehensive overview of current trends in political analysis4. And this is the case with Laclau and Mouffe as well despite the diagnosis by Ahonen eighteen years ago that their work “remains a topic of debate in a few residual pockets of academic Marxism in the 1990s” (Ahonen 1993: 4). Semiotics on the other hand had been the most eminent intellectual movement questioning the same status quo a couple of decades earlier and by the 1980s it was generally considered to be a failure (cf Culler 2001: xv-xix) or a satellite of structuralism at best. And despite the fact that literally all the ideas Laclau and Mouffe draw from post-structuralism were in fact developed in semiotics already at least a decade earlier, it was post-structuralism that did the trick in the early 1980s. 3Barthes (1987 [1957]: 127, 133). To be sure, he uses the term only in passing and does not fully develop the underlying concept. As a way of suggesting a twisted analogy with Laclau and Mouffe’s work, we could say that in Barthes’s Mythologies there is politics all over the place – especially in his discussions of myth as “depolitizised speech” (Ibid, 142-145) -, but this politics is left untheorized (though one can certainly decipher Barthes’ affinities with the radical demo-cratic ideal outlined by Laclau and Mouffe [1985: ch 4]). 4I will use the term “political analysis” in a wide sense as referring to all the social scientific subdisciplines that see the problem of the study of power relations as their core concern (cf Hay 2002 for similar usage).

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Thirty years later semiotics is largely “outflanked” (Mann 1986: 8; Clegg 1997: 218-222) from the field of political analysis.

Of course this train of thought, as indicated, is a provocation rather than an explanation, since we do not know the motives of Laclau and Mouffe. Nevertheless, what it suggests is that we should not take their dismissing of semiotics at face-value, but see it as a strategy for securing self-identity of an intellectual movement. Therefore, this thesis is not about doing justice to semiotics. It is about the usefulness of semiotics for conceptualizing the political. Basically it is argued in all the papers that in many respects semiotics is a fruitful complementation to the theory of hegemony. The Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics with which I engage in this thesis shares, and always has shared the ontological commitments of post-structuralism: that meaning structures are articulations not fixed codes, that there is a contingency and tension involved in each meaning system and that this tendency is largely resolved through excluding some elements from that system and establishing other elements as the centre of that system; and so on. However, it is argued, that what this semiotics might contribute to the theory of hegemony is means for empirical studies of hegemonic formations based on their understanding of culture as organically related to communication. However, the main contribution of the discourse theory to cultural semiotics could be seen in explicating the aspect of power (hegemony) in the constitution of meaning and hence politisizing the semiotic field – a move not taken up by cultural semiotics (at least not explicitly).

Hence, the central aims of this thesis could be summarized as follows:

1. To bring the cultural semiotics of the Tartu-Moscow school into a fruitful dialogue with the discourse theory of hegemony of the Essex school.

2. To discuss the possibilities of expanding the unified model of discourse theory and cultural semiotics with the semiotic model of communication offered by Roman Jakobson in order to develop a theory of democratic political communication.

3. To move towards developing a theory of political semiotics that is both informed by the insights of semiotic theories of the constitution of meaning and at the same time informed by the developments of conceptualizing power and democracy found in political sociology, political science, political theory and other related disciplines.

I shall now sketch out the more general background for the problem of this thesis.

1.2. WHAT IS POLITICAL IN POLITICAL SEMIOTICS?

According to Leftwich, the most important factor influencing how theorists conceive politics is “whether they define it primarily in terms of a process, or whether they define it in terms of the place or places where it happens, that is in terms of an arena or institutional forum” (2004: 13). The latter strategy of defining

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the political is exemplified by different currents of Marxist and liberalist political theory as well as biheiviorist political science and the classical paradigm of political sociology. This thesis mostly (but not exclusively, see below) adopts the former strategy, since our view of the political is strictly speaking Laclauian (or Gramscian for that matter). When Laclau and Mouffe speak of political struggles, they specify that they “do not do so in the restricted sense of demands which are situated at the level of parties and of the State. What we are referring to is a type of action whose objective is the transformation of a social relation which constructs a subject in a relationship of subordination” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 153; see also Laclau 1990: 172; Laclau and Zac 1994: 4; Marchart 2007: ch 2; Lefort 1988: 11). Of course the most eminent non-topographical or non-arena definition of the political comes from Carl Schmitt for whom the political concerns conflict and antagonism and the distinction between friend and enemy – which can occur in any site of the social (Schmitt 1996: 26-7). As it is argued in paper IV the Schmittian point of departure informs the theorization of the political for Chantal Mouffe who distinguishes between “politics” in the form of hegemonic articulation of social order (Paper IV, 12-13) and “the political” referring to “dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations” (Mouffe 2000: 101, italics added; Paper IV, 12). For her, both “the political” and “politics” mutually presume each other: there cannot be hegemonic articulation (politics) without the presence of some antagonism (the political); and contrary to classical Marxist position, no antagonism is “naturally” given but is always partly constructed by some hegemonic force.

In the most general sense “the political” and “politics” in the following discussion are addressed in terms of articulation of meanings (the details of which are mostly discussed in Papers I and II and in section 2 of this introduction) and hence it is not meant as a topographical or an arena-related category. The most direct background informing Laclau/Mouffe’s meaning-centered and process-oriented understanding of “the political” comes from their Gramscian roots. There tends to be a general agreement that for Gramsci (1971) hegemony is not a regional category at least in the sense that the basis of the consensus that is required for its operation derives from shared meanings (see Fontanta 1993; 2006). And this, as argued by Haugaard, is the insight developed in Laclau and Mouffe’s more conflict-oriented and discourse-theoretical notion of hegemony:

The consensus, which Gramsci observes is central to hegemony, is a consensus upon meaning. The exclusions which Laclau and Mouffe write about are the excluded meanings that have the potential to destabilize a particular set of relations of domination. Since meaning is essentially arbitrary it is possible to construct reality, hence relations of domination, differently. (Haugaard 2006: 54)

Thus, the underlying notion of “the political” for this study is a non-topographical and related to meaning-articulations. We should, however, add a qualification here. Namely, the “arena” aspect cannot be dismissed completely from the definition of the political, but rather we should speak of primacy of the process over arena. The

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problem with a completely non-arena definitions of the political is that they tend to be pretty idiosyncratic and ignore the fact that words do not have meanings in isolation, but in a system or language game. As to that language game, I take my lead from one of the most influential historians of political thought who points out that “the words “public,” “common,” and “general” have a long tradition of usage which has made them synonyms for what is political” (Wolin 2004: 10). Thus “[f]rom its very beginnings in Greece, the Western political tradition has looked upon the political order as a common order created to deal with those concerns in which all of the members of society have some interest” (Ibid). Especially pertinent member of the “political language game” for the current thesis is the “public”. As Wolin points out: “one of the essential qualities of what is political, and one that has powerfully shaped the view of political theorists about their subject-matter, is its relationship to what is “public” (Wolin 2004: 4). And the notion of “public” has several “arena”-related connotations, and hence some remnants of “arena” in the definition of “the political” are unavoidable even from the post-structuralist point of view. This is exemplified for instance by Glynos and Howarth (the direct students of Laclau) who, adopting a generally process-oriented view of the political, nevertheless add that “[t]he concept of public is helpful – perhaps essential – in enabling us to distinguish between social and political practices, in which the latter are defined as having a distinctively public import” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 115). Similarly in paper III it is pointed out that with respect to the model of democratic public communication developed there “[t]he stress on public communication should not be overlooked” (Paper III, 6), since otherwise we could end up with absurd results like, for instance, that phatic communication is characteristic to authoritarian people per se. Rather, the point is that if the public communication consists overwhelmingly of appeals to stereotypes and commonplaces (characteristic to phatic communication) then we could characterize it as “authoritarian populism” (see below).5 Generally, of course this “publicity” does not have to be related to state apparatuses. Having clarified “the political”, we now turn to the problem of semiotic in political semiotics.

1.3. WHAT IS SEMIOTIC IN POLITICAL SEMIOTICS?

Crucial for the view developed here is that it is based on cultural semiotics. This is an approach that sees culture not as an “object” of study among many. Rather, culture is in a sense a core category for semiotic studies in general according to this approach for which, in addition, “there is an organic link between culture and communication” (Lotman 2001: 20, italics added). At the beginning of Paper II we characterize the Lotmanian view of cultural semiotics as follows

According to Lotman, semiotics of culture or cultural semiotics is a discipline that explores the mutual effect of differently built semiotic

5Similarly, the communication between lovers is mostly phatic. This does not entail that lovers are authoritarian.

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systems, the internal heterogeneity of semiotic spaces and the inevitable heterogeneity of cultural and semiotic polyglotism ... Therefore, one of the fundamental problems for this discipline is the formulation of the question of equivalence of structures, texts, functions... In other words, a cultural semiotician tries to chart the ways in which heterogeneous elements (texts, structures etc) are translated into being equivalent to each other, into being a part of the same system, despite the fact that every exact translation between those elements is strictly speaking an impossibility. (Paper II, 450)

How does this relate to political analysis? We can now point out that in political analysis there is the similar arena/process dilemma concerning the notion of culture. We should highlight it in order to clarify the specificity of cultural semiotic approach. The most immediate source for an arena definition of culture in political analysis is the paradigm of “political culture”. In its most classical formulation, “political culture” refers to “the political system as internalized in the cognitions, feelings, and evaluations of its population” (Almond and Verba 1963: 13). In this definition culture is about something. It is internalized feelings, cognitions etc about political system, or as Almond and Verba specify immediately: “the political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of patterns of orientation toward political objects among the members of the nation” (Ibid, italics added). This ontological “aboutness” (cf Marcus 19936) at the heart of the very definition of culture is an important feature of the whole “political culture” paradigm in its most influential form. And it is inherently related to the underlying arena definition of the political stating pretty simply that political objects (like parliaments or parties) are out there and one might have different feelings and attitudes – that are, ontologically speaking, objects themselves – toward them. And the sum total or the “pattern of orientations to political objects among the members of the nation” (Ibid, 15) forms the content of “political culture.” In addition, the biheiviorist methodological values – notably simplicity and rigor – that shaped the emergence of this paradigm in the 1960s have probably contributed to the development resulting in the simple formula “culture=values” as another classic formulations illustrates: “we may regard the political culture as a shorthand expression to denote the set of values within which a political system operates” (Kavanagh 1983:49). Explicitly or tacitly, this formula informs the mainstream of the “political culture” paradigm (see for instance the essays collected in Harrison and Huntington [2000]). And the influence is expanded to other political research traditions that only recently have felt the need to bring in “political culture” as a possible explanatory factor.

6Marcus uses this “aboutness” metaphor to characterize classical models of communication ac-cording to which communication is always about something. I find this metaphor useful, though I would disagree with Marcus’ inclusion of Jakobson’s model of communication among those of the “aboutness” camp (Marcus 1993: 271). Interpreted in view of Lotmanian semiotics and dis-course theory I do not see any problems in relating Jakobson to the Marcus’ “inventionist” camp that sees communication as constructing (not only transmitting) meaning.

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“Culture as a unit of analysis has not received much attention in communication research,” Stevenson (2004: 373) diagnoses the field of “political communication” and maintains: “Even within the relatively small field of international communication, the opportunity to introduce culture as an explanatory is ignored and often deliberately avoided” (Ibid, 381). At the same time his as well as many other “political communication” researchers’ underlying notion of “political culture” is almost exclusively framed in the roughly Almond-Verba like manner comprising the ontological “aboutness” metaphor (see Swanson 2004: 46; Kleinsteuber 2004: 74; Pfetsch 2001: 47; Swanson and Mancini 1996: 260-1), the methodological “culture=values” formula (see Pfetsch and Esser 2004: 7; Esser and Pfetsch 2004: 390) or both (Holtz-Bacha 2004: 224; Gurevitch and Blumler 2004: 335; Amin 2002: 127-128; Pfetsch 2004: 348). One of the effects of these parsimonious formulae is that basically “culture” is left untheorized, being merely “operationalized” for concrete studies in terms of values (cf. Inglehart 1977). This holds not only to “political culture” or “political communication”, but for instance, to “political theory” (Scott 2003: 111), “political science” (Wedeen 2002; 2004) or “political sociology” (Nash 2010: ch 1).

On the other hand we have a range of disciplines that set the conceptualization of culture in terms of “meaning practices”, “discourses”, “communication” etc at the heart of their theoretical interest. The influence of those disciplines (anthropology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis), might explain the so-called “cultural turn” in different strands of contemporary political analysis. David Scott, seeing the Geertzian anthropology (see Geertz 2001[1973]; 1983) as the primary influence spurring this “turn” in the social sciences of the United States, characterizes the development as “at once a turn to “culture” in a range of disciplines outside of anthropology… that hitherto did not think of culture as their object-domain, and a turn in the concept itself (both inside and outside of anthropology) and in its place in the understanding of human life” (Scott 2003: 106). Similarly, according to Nash, whereas classical political sociology “has been seen as concerned, above all, with relations between state and society (Nash 2010: 3) or “the social circumstances of politics” (Orum, 1983: 1, cited in Nash 2010: 3), contemporary political sociology is increasingly engaged with what she calls “cultural politics, understood in the broadest possible sense as the contestation and transformation of social identities and structures” (Nash 2010: 4). The “cultural turn” in this discipline and in sociology more generally (see Nash 2001) has taken two forms that could be labeled “historical” and “epistemological”. The former refers to “the claim that in contemporary society culture plays an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities” (Nash 2001: 78). This view has affinities with the “aboutness” metaphor described above, since it claims basically that “the historical importance of culture has been determined by changes in social structure” (Nash 2010: 31). Thus culture, important as it may be, reflects other, more fundamental bases or is in a way culture about those bases. In other words: culture is one arena among others. The second – epistemological – version of “cultural turn” subverts this metaphor, since at the core of it is the “idea that culture is universally

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constitutive of social relations and identities” (Nash 2001: 78, italics added) and “it is not reflective or expressive of other social practices” (Nash 2010: 30). Besides pointing to a great influence of Foucault’s work, Nash sees this version of “cultural turn” in the works of for instance Giddens (1984) and of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) despite the fact neither of them uses the term “culture” very often. What is important is that both Giddens’ structuration theory and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory are “readily understood in more general terms as an argument for seeing culture as universally constitutive” (Nash 2001: 78). An important conceptual movement in this epistemological version of the “turn” is that culture gets theorized as a mechanism, process or dynamic system rather than objectified as a matrix of objects (values, attitudes, preferences etc). This is evident, of course in the field of cultural studies where culture is “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored” (Williams 1981: 13). Moreover, in the increasingly influential “cultural sociology”, “culture” is viewed as “not a thing but a dimension, not an object to be studied as a dependent variable but a thread that runs through, one that can be teased out of, every conceivable social form” (Ale-xander 2003: 7). The most eminent representative of this new discipline, Jeffrey Alexander points out that thus far culture “has been reduced to ideology or to values, and its contents have largely been read off the architecture of other structures, as a reflection or an inverted mirror” (Alexander 2005: 22). With his “cultural sociology” Alexander tries “to open up this black box” (Ibid) through “incorporating and reinterpreting certain central aspects of the late Durkheim, phenomenology and micro-sociology, symbolic anthropology, structuralist semiotics, narratology, post-structuralism and deconstruction” (Ibid). From the viewpoint of this thesis, it is immensely important that for Alexander to understand politics “we need [among other things] to employ semiotic theories of binary codes, literary models of rhetoric and narrative, and anthropological concepts of performance and myth” (Alexander 2006: 48; see also Alexander 2004). In fact similar ethos has informed, Lisa Wedeen, one of the few contemporary political scientists that systematically points to the need of conceptualizing “culture” for political science in “semiotic” terms. Her view of “culture as semiotic practices” stipulates that those “practices” refer to “what language and symbols do—how they are inscribed in concrete actions and how they operate to produce observable political effects” (Wedeen 2002: 714; cf 2004: 284). “Semiotic practices approach” she advocates could, in her view be useful in many ways for political science, especially since it “avoids the ahistorical, empirically untenable formulation of culture currently invoked by political culture and some rational choice theorists” (Ibid, 726).

Thus it might seem that “semiotic” approaches are indeed being recognized and ready to be developed for political analysis. Yet here lies a certain catch that could be introduced by a diagnosis put forward a bit more than a decade ago: “American sociology, even today, has not made a semiotic turn” (Seidman 1997: 43). One of the keys for explaining the accuracy of this judgment – apt not only for

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characterizing (American) sociology, but for political analysis as well – can be found in the general tendency to equate semiotics with structuralism. As a guide to critical theory tells us: “Just as structural anthropology applies structuralist insights to the comparative study of human cultures, semiotics applies structuralist insights to the study of what it calls sign systems” (Tyson 2006: 216). The formula “semiotics=structuralism” has been prevalent in text-books of highest ranks (see for example Jasper 2005) as well as in its treatments within more professional social scientific circles (see Mukerji and Schudson 1986: 59; Fiol 1989: 278; Lemert 1979). If this equation holds then dismissing semiotics from the social sciences is understandable, since not only is it a sort of idealist world-view that treats the world as language, but even more absurdly it treats language as an abstract and static structure and therefore cannot account for structural change and agency – the most crucial questions for social sciences.

Returning to Wedeen and Alexander, we can say that their work provides us with almost a paradigm of this view of semiotics. What is curious about Wedeen’s works is that we do not find any attempt to engage with a dialogue with the eminent representatives of semiotics (if we do not count a mentioning of Saussure in very general terms [Wedeen 2002: 722]). And this despite the fact that the talk of different “semiotic” units is ubiquitous in them: we have for instance, “semiotic circumstances” (Wedeen 2008: 56) “semiotic contexts” (Ibid, 112; see also 184; Wedeen 1999: 50); “semiotic worlds” (Wedeen 2008: 183), “semiotic universes” (Ibid, 218) and “common semiotic lexicon” (Wedeen 1999: 46). She uses the word “semiotic” largely as a synonym for “meaning-related” (she does, to be sure develop her own theory of meaning and politics using for instance speech act theory [Wedeen 2008: 212-17]). In the very few cases where she purports to explicate her understanding of semiotics or the nature of semiotic studies one can decipher that she has a quasi-structuralist understanding in mind as the following excerpt illustrates:

A semiotic reading of state- and nation-building, however, is unsatisfactory in explaining how symbols and rhetoric actually operate to produce power and generate community, especially because such an analysis does not elaborate the actual effects of symbolic displays, i.e., the ways in which systems of signification are consumed, upheld, contested, and subverted” (Wedeen 1999: 18).

What follows immediately is a recourse to Foucault who for her forms the basis on the recent literature that “focuses on the disciplinary effects of spectacles and language” (Ibid) – the core problematic of her book. In fact, almost identical tendencies characterize Alexander’s output in which, to be sure, attempts at a dialogue with the classics of semiotics are certainly present. For him “even at its most socially embedded, semiotics can never be enough” since “by definition it abstracts from the social world, taking organized symbolic sets as psychologically unmotivated and as socially uncaused” (Alexander 1998: 31, italics added). Thus “for the purposes of cultural sociology, semiotic codes must be tied into both social

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and psychological environments and into action itself” (Ibid). And finally like Wedeen, he turns to Foucault: “I will term the result of this specification discourses, in appreciation of, though not identification with, the phenomena conceptualized by Foucault” (Alexander 1998: 31). This recourse to Foucault after critical invoking of the “semiotics=structuralism” formula in those two American examples is symptomatic in two respects. First, the above mentioned “epistemological” version of the “cultural turn” “has been very much influenced by Foucault’s theory of discourse” (Nash 2010: 30). Second, Foucault himself rejected semiotics/semiology7 and other “analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures” (Foucault 1980: 114). The reason for this is that “history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning” (Ibid). In other words, conflict should be at the focus of our attention and “‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue” (Foucault 1980: 115).8

Foucault is not the only preeminent social theorist who sets the problem of meaning at the core of his theorizing and at the same time dismisses semiotics equated with structuralism/idealism. Likewise for Bourdieu semiotics is an “intellectualist philosophy which treats language as an object of contemplation rather than as an instrument of action and power” (1991: 37; see also Bourdieu 1998: 52-53). However, it is instructive to point to Geertz who recalls how in the 1970s “the identification of semiotics, in the general sense of the science of signs, with structuralism seemed to me important to resist” (Geertz 1983: 12). Similarly in developing his structuration theory Giddens points to the “extraordinary advances in semiotics which have been pioneered in recent decades” but warns us immediately that “we have to guard against the association of semiotics with structuralism and with the shortcomings of the latter in respect of the analysis of human agency” (1984: 31) Thus we should clarify the relation between (cultural) semiotics and structuralism.

1.4. STRUCTURALISM AND ITS RELATION TO SEMIOTICS

When semiotics is equated with structuralism it is (tacitly or explicitly) viewed as a static (synchronic) analysis that purports to reveal what the world “tells us” through mechanical collecting of signs in order to reveal the abstract underlying system

7 The latter term was used by Saussure for the general study of signs; the origins of the former term are usually associated with Peirce. Nowadays they are often used interchangeably. 8Interestingly, for Casanovas it seems to be quite obvious that despite his inconsistencies Foucault was throughout his theoretical and practical activities engaged with “political semiotics” (Casa-novas 1993: 140-144). We should, again, be reminded about the “strategic” nature of the claims like that put forth by Foucault above.

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(structure) that governs those collections.9 As we argue in paper II (p. 455-56) Lotman’s central notion of translation draws a clear distinction between the cultural semiotic approach and the classical structuralism that conceived language as a system [langue] as more primary compared to speech [parole]. For Lotman (most unambiguously in his works since the late 1970s) such a fundamental distinction was impossible: one cannot conceive language and speech separately. Generation of meaning is not an automatic realization of language resources (code, structure) from one language into another, but an approximate, contingent or rhetoric translation in the conditions of (partial) untranslatability. Hence the centrality of rhetorical translation as meaning generating mechanism in Lotman’s view of culture, text and semiosphere. Thus, from the Lotmanian perspective that is adopted in papers I-III, it is clear that semiotics should not be equated with structuralism despite the fact that it tends to be a common place that Lotman’s initial point of departure in the 1960s was structuralist10.

9In more technical terms the central tenets that structuralism has inculcated to humani-ties are according to Heiskala (2003: 191-195) the claims that structures 1) are closed codes (Greimas 1983); 2) unconscious (Lacan 1977; Levi-Strauss 1963); 3) universal (Levi-Strauss 1963); 4) form more or less crystallized paradigms with finite number of elements (Barthes 1994) entailing, in turn that 5) the syntagms realized in speech/discourse are basically determined by the structures (viewed as paradigms) and excluded from the constitution of the latter (Barthes 1994); 6) finally, structures organ-ize elements through binary oppositions (Greimas and Rastier 1968; Levi-Strauss 1963). 10To be sure, a certain ambivalence is related to even this common place. Thus for Eco, on the one hand, Lotman “is a critic who started from a structuralist approach to the phenomenon of signification and communication, and indeed retains much of this me-thod but who does not remain bound by it” (Eco 2001: ix). Eco goes on to identify two crucial problems for structuralists that Lotman over the years tried to overcome: 1) that “certain systems, through communication processes (which are historical processes, that is processes which take place in time) changed” (ibid); 2) “given that a semiotic system was seen as code, or rather as a system of rules, how could there be communication processes in which it was difficult to identify codes or where there seemed to be a con-flict between different codes?” (Ibid). Yet Eco points out that the non-structuralist in-sights were present in Lotman’s work already in the 1960s: on the one hand Lotman remained faithful to Saussure’s opposition of langue and parole and Jakobsonian dis-tinction between code and message (ibid); on the other hand he was already then aware “that no historical period has a sole cultural code… and that in any culture there exist simultaneously various codes” (ibid, x). This way, Eco maintains, “Lotman is moving beyond structuralist dogmatism and offering a more complex and articulated approach” (Ibid). From a slightly different perspective, Grishakova has argued recently that “[w]hat makes Lotman’s practical, applied-semiotic works (even of his early structural-ist period) flexible enough is the fact that his scholarly “double vision”, though system-oriented, always included a human agency or conscious authorship of every “systemic” act” (Grishakova 2009: 182).

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If semiotics is not structuralism then why is it the case that it is frequently conflated with it in the social sciences (as the examples provided above indicate)? A reason could be that at least one of the founding works of semiotics is usually thought to be the founding work of structuralism as well. I have in mind Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1983 [1916]). Lotman is clear that despite the intensive developments of semiotics in the second half of the 20th century it is the “legacy of Saussure whose works, even after Jakobson had criticized them and contrasted them with the ideas of C. S. Peirce, remain in force as the foundation stones of semiotics” (Lotman 2001: 5). As Eco points out in his overview of Lotman’s contribution:

it must be remembered that semiotics and structuralism form a highly complex pair of terms. Semiotics aims to study the entire range of sign systems (of which the verbal language is the most important) and the various processes of communication to which these systems give rise. /---/ Structuralism is a method which has been shown to be extremely useful in the explanation of linguistic systems, in the work of Saussure and, later, of Hjelmslev and Jakobson. (Eco 2001: ix, italics added)

Eco’s reference to the “processes of communication” is crucial for our purposes. We will highlight this aspect in detail soon, but a good starting point for paving the way for its introduction to our discussion comes from Heiskala for whom structuralism, “is just one possible research program built on Course [in General Linguistics], but by no means the only one” (Heiskala 2003: 149). Heiskala has been developing what he calls “neostructuralism”, an approach that sets out to introduce semiotic tradition to social sciences and at the same time avoids the extremes of structuralist as well as post-structuralist interpretations of that tradition. Especially useful, in my view, is that he reconstructs Saussure as providing a research program for the social sciences that is as methodologically rigorous as structuralist code theory on the one hand but at the same time avoids objectification of structures “without the objectification itself being objectified” (Heiskala 2003: 149, referring to Bourdieu’s [1990] expression). The presumed target audience for the current thesis is the community of the social scientists. As we have seen through the examples of Foucault, Bourdieu and others above, dismissal of semiotic tradition as “structuralist” is a common place for this community. We could add that during the process of this dismissal hardly anyone take issue with anyone else of the semiotic tradition than its “founding fathers”. Therefore, in my view, there might be a better chance at communicating the point to the social scientists that semiotics is not a satellite of structuralism if we question even the inevitability of structuralism at the very origins of semiotics, not only at its recent developments (such as the works of Lotman). And it is here that Heiskala’s reading of Saussure is, in my view, of special relevance – even if it contradicts the bulk of text-books and authoritative views on the same subject. In what follows I will elaborate, via Heiskala, three fundamental ideas for semiotics originating from Saussure and put forward a working definition of semiotics for this thesis (which does not preclude other possible definitions for other research tasks).

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1. Semiotics is primary the study of institutions/social facts related to the arbitrariness of the meaning of signs. According to Saussure “a sign is the combination of a concept [signified] and a sound pattern [signifier]” (Saussure 1983: 67). For him the primary object of study for semiology is “the class of systems based upon the arbitrary nature of the sign” (Ibid, 68). This means that semiology is deemed to be a social science, since as Heiskala puts it the “arbitrariness is related to the existence of social facts” (Heiskala 2003: 168). This is among other things evident from the fundamentally relational view of meaning informing the whole Saussurean tradition (poststructuralists included). The relational view holds that signs do not have meaning in themselves but only within a system of signs, i. e. in relation to other signs belonging to the system. This is why Saussurean conception boils down to the view that the meaning of each sign is conceivable only as a relative value. In a well-known analogy to chess (Saussure 1983: 88-89) where the pieces have no value in themselves but only through their relative position in the system of chess as a whole, the signs in general do not just receive their meaning only through “the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs” (Saussure 1983: 112). Such “isolational” view “would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together” (Ibid). This would be the logical positivist view of meaning influential in the analytic philosophy of the first half of the 20th century. For Saussure “the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements” (Ibid). However, if we take into account the fact that by its nature, signs are arbitrary in the sense that no relation between the signifier and the signified is necessary, then it becomes clear why social relations are fundamental for fixing the relative values of signs:

the arbitrary nature of the sign enables us to understand more easily why it needs social activity to create a linguistic system. A community is necessary to establish values. Values have no other rationale than usage and general agreement. An individual, acting alone, is incapable of establishing a value. (Saussure 1983: 111-112)

According to Heisakala “[s]uch a perspective brings institutions in the center of semiology” (Heiskala 2003: 168). And by “institutions” we could via Heiskala have in mind the roughly Durkheimian sense as “all the beliefs and all the modes of conduct instituted by collectivity” (Durkheim 1938: lvi), since “[t]he second name by which Durkheim calls these institutions is social facts” (Heiskala 2003: 183).11 11Drawing important parallels between Durkheim and Saussure is relatively established practice within social theory. For instance, Smith and Alexander see semiotics as “re-configuring… in linguistic manner Durkheim’s later sociological ideas” (Smith and Alexander 2005: 9-10) and for Collins Saussure “drew on Durkheim in formulating the distinction between parole and langue as a separation between individual practice and language as a system of collective representations” (Collins 2005: 131). Yet we should

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And this brings us to the second fundamental idea for semiotics that has to do with the methodological guidelines for conceptualizing those institutions/social facts and meaning in general.

2. Linguistics is the model for semiotic methodology. The reason why “linguistics can serve as a model for the semiological study of other meaning systems” (Heiskala 2003: 168) is that linguistic signs according to Saussure are “entirely arbitrary” and hence “convey better than others the ideal semiological process” (Saussure 1983: 68).12 “In this sense, linguistics serves as a model for the whole of semiology, even though languages represent only one type of semiological system” (Ibid, italics added). This provides the general methodological guideline for Saussurean semiotics as summarized by Heiskala: “the arbitrariness of the sign, the structure as a form and not a substance, the determination of the identity of a sign as a relational value, and the syntagmatic and associative relations, for example, are relevant not only in linguistics but in semiology as well” (Heiskala 2003: 169). This leads us to the third fundamental idea of semiotics.

3. Semiotics is the study of communication as contingent articulation of meaning. As Saussure points out, semiology “would form part of social psychology, and hence general psychology” and “it is for the psychologist to determine the exact place of semiology” (Saussure 1983: 16). On the whole Saussure “saw that natural spoken language is a form of communication where the communicative faculty is based on an ability to carry meaning by sound. Secondly, for him the principal task of linguistics was precisely to concentrate on the study of language as a form which makes communication possible” (Heiskala 2003: 149). Therefore, semiotics is first and foremost the study of communication. But it is important that the latter is not viewed in terms of mechanistic encoding-decoding terms usually associated with Saussure (cf. Harris 1987). At the heart of this mechanistic-static depicting of Saussure’s notion of communication is the view that for him the sender and the

follow several qualiffications provided by Heiskala concerning conflation of these two thinkers.When Durkheim speaks of symbols, his usage of this concept is not equivalent to signs in Saussurean sense. Durkheimian signs are “such signifiers which stand for community, solidarity (Durkheim) and/or ‘Hinterwelt’ (Weber)” (Heiskala 2003: 190). Hence “it is symbols, a specific class of signs and not signs in general, that Durkheim was talking about in his analysis of totemic cosmologies” (Ibid). Therefore “theories of these two scholars had different subjects” (Ibid): On the one hand “Saussure studied language as a system of forms enabling communication and outlined a notion of a more general semiological study of culture, which was to emerge following the model of linguistics” (Ibid). For Durkheim the core concern was related to “social facts as moral institutions on which collective order and social solidarity are based. Particularly in Durkheim’s later work, collective consciousness appears as a ritually maintained reality, the existence of which is tied to the division between the sacred and the profane and which is unthinkable without signs that bear strong emotional charge” (Ibid). 12This latter specification was completely missed by the above criticisms of Foucault and Bour-dieu who basically attributed to Saussure a sort of Platonic view of language.

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receiver use identical code. Heiskala points out that Saussure in fact “did not say that the codes used by different people are identical, but that they are ‘for all practical purposes the same as the next person’s’” (Heiskala 2003: 173, citing Saussure 1983: 13). This indicates that the identical-code interpretation of Saussurean model of communication “does not present it as the only alternative” (Heiskala 2003: 173). In addition Saussure remarks that 1) “the language is never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity” (Saussure 1983: 13) and 2) that the “linguistic structure might be described as the domain of articulations” and that “every linguistic sign is a part or member, an articulus, where an idea is fixed in a sound, and a sound becomes the sign of an idea” (Ibid, 111). These remarks pave the way for Heiskala to interpret Saussure in a manner that “allows us to benefit from the structuralist analysis of language and other cultural structures and yet to maintain a dynamic view on language” (Heiskala 2003: 176-177). A key here is that “for Saussure, the articulation of signs in a linguistic structure seems to be, first of all, both a psychological process and a social one and, secondly, both an ontological description of how a language works and a methodological position which reflects a certain linguistic approach to language. (Heiskala 2003: 174). Hence, it is possible for Heiskala to distinguish between “langue as cultural structures such as they actually exist in the social process and langue as codes or discursive representations given to these cultural structures” (Heiskala 2003: 176). “Langue as cultural structures” is nothing other than a “‘social fact’ or a ‘linguistic institution’” (Heiskala 2003: 177). Interpreting the latter through Samuel Weber’s (1987) concept of ‘instituting process’ Heiskala maintains that “linguistic institution and all other cultural structures can be understood as a process, where the articulation and rearticulation of sign relations takes place continuously” (Heiskala 2003: 177). Through this notion we can delimit different degrees of stability of cultural structures: “Within this institution there are sign relations which are highly stabile, such as are less stabile and such as are in a state of constant rearticulation” (Ibid)13. This way we can reinterpret the langue/parole relation as “one of mutual dependence” (ibid). Thus each “act of parole would only be able to signify on the basis of the articulations of langue. At the same time, every act of parole would also be an act of reproduction and transformation of langue.” (ibid).

Having thus distanced from the identical-code interpretation of Saussurean view of communication, it is important to point out that methodologically speaking: “To make solid codes hold in the study of language, one is forced to stop the flow of time. This is the only way to halt the play of differences for study. Hence the [Saussurean] absolute distinction between diachronic and synchronic perspectives” (Heiskala 2003: 178). Yet, contrary to a usual interpretation of this distinction: “It is a proposition which presents itself to the researcher of language, a guiding principle in his work when he goes about his business of preparing coded representations of

13The deconstructionists would choose only the last option and extrapolate it to structures as such (see Derrida (2007).

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cultural structures. It is not an ontological postulate” (Ibid). Especially important for the discussion below is that such interpretation of Saussure which considers structures as social facts but at the same time rejects the assumption of their identity highlights “contingency as a central aspect of communication” (Ibid):

If it is considered that the condition of success for an event of communication is that meanings which are identical ‘for all practical purposes’ are transferred between the sender and the receiver, then the success of communication is left dependent on whether the receiver and the sender have sufficiently similar articulations at their disposal. (Ibid)

Now that we have considered the three fundamental ideas for semiotics, let us entertain a working definition of the latter for the purposes of this thesis. Of course I share the insight of Ahonen that “[s]emiotics can make its best contribution if it is not an exclusive club but a breeding ground, and this holds as to political semiotics no less than other branches or foci of semiotics” (Ahonen 1993: 15). The “breeding ground” is best upheld when the definition of semiotics is left open (Ibid). But nevertheless, based on the three fundamental ideas just discussed I put forward the following working definition of semiotics for this study: semiotics is a research based on linguistic methodology that studies institutions/social facts related to the arbitrariness of the meanings of signs that are contingently articulated in communication. It is important to highlight here again that the primary aim of bringing in the more detailed discussion of Heiskala’s interpretation of Saussure was to bring to the fore the possibility that structuralism is only one possible and in many ways contingent development based on the Saussurean outlook. Of course, my point is not that Saussure had it all or that we should not go beyond Saussure. For instance, though I highlighted articulation and contingency and questioned the identical-code view of communication usually associated with Saussure, I would not deny that his model of communication is very abstract and needs further development – a subject taken up in the papers as well as the following sections of this introduction. Highlighting these aspects as well as relating Saussure’s enterprise with social facts is important for translating the tradition of semiotics into the vocabulary of social sciences – for which the question of social change and agency (usually related to the contingency of structures) are of crucial importance.

Now that we have clarified the wider background concerning the notions of “the political” and “the semiotic” we can move to a more concrete level of discussion by concentrating on several results as well as problems related to the papers that form this thesis.

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2. AN OUTLINE FOR A THEORY OF POLITICAL SEMIOTICS

The theoretical synthesis of the Tartu school of semiotics and the Essex school of discourse theory is the central concern of papers I and II, and forms the general background for the elaborations of paper III. It is argued that despite different labels the categories of the Essex school (discourse, logic of difference and equivalence; empty signifiers, articulation) and those of the Tartu school (text/semiosphere, discrete and continuous coding, rhetorical translation) play exactly the same functional role in both theories, enabling a mutual complementation of each other (Paper III, 4; cf Paper I, 169; Paper II, 445). However, “despite their resemblances, the two theoretical schools have important differences that make mutual combination between them a fruitful undertaking” (Paper I, 169) and might contribute “to the development of social and political analysis that cannot be carried out using the analytical resources of either one or the other of those approaches” (Paper II, 445).

2.1. GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE SYNTHESIS OF LACLAUIAN AND LOTMANIAN PERSPECTIVES

These general conclusions (the details of which are untangled in the papers I and II) about the congeniality between the two schools could be summarized as follows. Lotman’s theory highlights three important aspects in the constitution of meaning. First, each system of meaning (text, semiosphere, culture) is inevitably heterogeneous in the sense that the meanings included in the system are always only partly mutually translatable and there is always a moment of untranslatability (Lotman 2001: 125), creating an “inherent tension or antagonism in every meaningful system” (Paper II, 454). Lotman speaks here of the tension between discrete and continuous coding that is resolved through the mechanism of rhetorical translation. Second, each system of meaning is also asymmetrical in the sense that some meanings form the system’s centre and other meanings are relegated to the periphery of the system (Lotman 2001: 124-127). Third, each system of meaning is based on binary distinction between its inner and the outer space, which means that in order to be able to provide boundaries for the system – which is unavoidable, since boundary is “one of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation” (Lotman 2001: 131) – each system of meaning has to exclude some meanings from it in order to constitute itself as a system. Thus one could say that exclusion is as important for the constitution of meaning as is inclusion (Paper II, 452-454). Consequently we have a theory of meaning that highlights the 1) the inherent and insurmountable tension (heterogeneity) 2) the dominance of centre over periphery (asymmetry) and the 3) the necessarily exclusionary operation (binarism) involved in the constitution of each system of meaning.

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Laclau reached basically the same conclusions concerning the system of meaning. In his vocabulary every system of meaning or “discourse” is (a) heterogeneous in the sense that there is always an insurmountable tension between the logic of equivalence and the logic of difference in each discourse. In other words: the elements which belong to the system are simultaneously different from each other and equivalent to each other due to their belonging to this very system. (b) Next, there is, in each discourse, always a mechanism of rhetorical translation in the Lotmanian sense that is labeled “empty signifier” by Laclau (Paper II, 460). The latter represents/signifies the discourse as a whole and this way provides a closure or systematicity for the discourse. (c) And finally, there is always the antagonistically excluded “other” that is necessary for the constitution of the limits or closure for each discourse.

From these congenialities we can move to important differences. For Laclau the starting point for theorizing meaning was the need to conceptualize power in terms of hegemony. We should now bring to our attention the fact that the status of the “empty signifier” (mechanism of rhetorical translation in Lotman’s sense) is none other than the status of the “hegemonic representative” of that system. The “empty signifier” is not some element outside the discourse, but it is, according to Laclau, one of the elements of the discourse itself. Thus in each discourse conceived as a bounded (or closed) system of elements, there is always an element that is both one element among others and at the same time functions as the representative of the whole system. This element is simultaneously a particular and a hegemonic universal. Thus, Laclau can summarize the general logic as follows: “This operation of taking up, by a particularity, of incommensurable universal signification is what I have called hegemony” (Laclau 2005: 70). Relating the logic of meaning making directly to the problem of the establishment of hegemony is the main contribution from Laclau’s side.

Moving to the Lotmanian side, we argue in papers I and II that for Lotman the tendency towards discreteness or continuity forms the basis for typology of cultures which combined with Laclau’s insights concerning hegemony and democracy could be developed into a model for different types of democratic hegemony. Steps towards the latter are the main concern of Paper III. However there are several intermediate issues that need to be clarified before.

2.2. THE PROBLEM OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

These are, first, related to the problem of why the “empty signifiers” function as hegemonic mechanisms. Laclau’s answer concerning the “forces” behind “empty signifiers” have to do with Lacanian psychoanalytic categories that we prefer to dismiss mostly because we deem them to be obscuring rather than revealing in developing an empirical framework for political analysis (Paper I, 176; Paper II 461). To be sure, we do not develop a full-fledged argument for this dismissal and I do not think that there can be any final “refutation” of psychoanalysis (or of any

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general ontological stance, for that matter). I can only indicate a couple of additional points (not discussed in the papers) in favor of discharging psychoanalysis from Laclau’s framework. First is that Laclau’s recourse to psychoanalysis tends to be utterly unnecessary – he did not need the Lacanian logics of affect, desire and objet petit a for conceptualizing hegemonic relations. In fact, paradoxically, he could be read as admitting it himself when he reaches the conclusion “that logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are simply identical!” (Laclau 2005: 116, italics added). Since those logics are identical we can manage with either of them and remove the psychoanalytic basis without doing any conceptual damage to Laclau’s research program concerning the logic of discourse. Grounding a general ontology of hegemony with another identical general ontology (Lacanian psychoanalysis) does not add any extra quality to his model. What it can do, however, is present this second identical ontology in the guise of explanation, since it might seem to be possible to explain everything with recourse to unconscious and unobservable desires, affects and drives14. What interests us is a theoretical model that could provide tools for empirical research and at the same time does not, in its reconstructions of hegemonic logics, postulate a realm which is by definition empirically unobservable as an explanatory factor. The latter remark does not indicate that it is a certain semiotic biheiviorism we are looking for – we are far from equating “observation” with “measurement”. We just want to clarify the question of how hegemonic formations are constituted in more detail without closing their scrutiny with resorting to all-explaining answers to the question of why they are constituted.15 And a key to the expansion of this how-question could be found in Lotman’s cultural semiotics. If we replace the Lacanian vocabulary in Laclau’s framework with Lotman’s theory at the core of which is the notion of communication understood in terms of translation we could develop a useful tool for conceptualizing different political communications and hegemonies.

Second and deeper reason for dismissing psychoanalysis stems from the fact that in his later writings when Laclau tends increasingly to ground his view on hegemony with psychoanalysis, it leads him to conceive politics proper as fundamentally “fetishistic” activity. A recent intervention by Kaplan summarizes Laclau’s latter position concerning the “empty signifiers” as follows:

In psychoanalytic terms, the emergence of such an empty signifier corresponds to an affective “radical investment” that confers on it “the dignity of the Thing”—that is, of an object which, in standing in for the

14This is in fact the strategy taken by the most comprehensive study on the social-scientific poten-tial of posts-structuralist political analysis: Glynos and Howarth (2007: 107-8) point out explicit-ly that the Lacanian “phantasmatic” logics provide for them the answer to the question, why cer-tain discourses are upheld. 15Of course, one can point out here that the why/how distinction cannot be absolute, but only relative: one system’s why is another system’s how. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis tends to post-ulate a primordial why answer.

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constitutively missing “true” object of desire, comes to function directly as that object… Politically, this description is meant to account for the identity-forming power of hegemonic signifiers. (Kaplan 2010: 260)

But as Kaplan points out: “[i]n classical Marxian terms, empty signifiers are fetishes that derive their efficacy from collective belief in their reality and that consequently confront the believers as apparently objective and independent powers” (Ibid, italics added). This “fetishism” at the core of Laclau’s notion of hegemony creates several difficulties for conceptualization of the relation between hegemony and democratic pluralism which was of central importance for the project of “radical democracy” outlined in Laclau and Mouffe (1985: ch 4) and is a theme partly taken up in Paper II and developed in paper III and most extensively in paper IV. Since as Kaplan continues: “whereas Marx wishes to abolish fetishism by exposing its origins in material processes, for Laclau this fetishistic mediation is constitutive of the social as such—there is neither society nor materiality without some ungrounded investment in a fetishized signifier” (Ibid, italics added). In fact this “fetishism of the category of totality” (Wenman 2003: 590, 601) which presumes the hegemonic construction of a universal (“empty signifier”) that dominates over the particularities and subverts their identity and this way creates a discourse as a totality, has been considered a major shortcoming of Laclau’s work concerning the possibilities for conceptualizing democratic pluralism (Ibid). The impasse seems to be the following: hegemony with its clear monistic characteristics in Laclau’s conceptualization seems to be undemocratic or antithetic to pluralism by definition. This tension between hegemony and democracy is recognized already in Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 189): “no hegemonic project can be based exclusively on a democratic [pluralist] logic, but must also consist of a set of proposals for the positive organization of the social.” In other words: each hegemonic project attempts to close the discourse through exclusion and dominance and this is antithetical to democratic pluralism. There is, however, a way out of this impasse. Put very simply: the tendencies towards pluralism or closedness (discreteness/difference or continuity/equivalence) in the translation strategies of forming a discourse should be taken for what they are – tendencies. As already pointed out, every discourse is bilingual and there is an inherent tension in the formation of meaning between these two tendencies. The question of the relation between democracy and hegemony boils down to the question of how this tension is resolved. And this “fetishistic” or “mythological” resolution that Laclau in his later works seems to be viewing as a defining feature of politics as such16 should in fact be located within the framework of what in Paper II and in Paper III is identified as “authoritarian” or even “totalitarian” form of hegemony/political communication

16In Paper I we followed the Laclauan “fetishistic” attitude, postulating that in the political dis-course the mythological coding prevails, aiming to translate discrete elements into a non-discrete whole (p. 178).

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associated with phatic and emotive communication.17 This brings us to the general problem of the role of communication in the model of this thesis.

2.3. THE PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION

The problem of differentiating types of hegemony/political communication was explicitly announced as an immediate further research task at the final paragraph of Paper I (p. 181) and was reintroduced in section 4 of Paper II where Laclau and Mouffe’s distinction between “authoritarian” and “democratic” practices of hegemony is brought in for the first time. It is argued in paper II that a discourse could be characterized as democratic to the degree in which there is a predomination of discrete translation strategy (logic of difference in Laclau’s sense) implying that “the more continuous… a political discourse, the less democratic it is” (Paper II, 463-464). The logic implied here serves as a general binary distinction between the tendencies inherent in the formation of every democratic discourse. Its relation to the Essex school’s theorizing of democratic hegemony is not expanded but only discussed briefly in Paper II (p. 463). This elaboration and its further development into a six-fold model of the types of democratic political communication via Roman Jakobson’s functions of language is the overall theme of Paper III. But in paper II the general need of this elaboration is clearly indicated by stating that our aim is “to provide some tools for assessment of different types of political communication in terms of their discreteness or continuity” (464). In the final section (5) of this paper the possible future tasks are outlined in relation to Lotman’s “subtypes of translation strategies for both discrete and continuous types of coding” that “could, in our view, be adapted for political analysis from the semiotic point of view” (Ibid). It is important to note that the sketch of an analysis of the discourse of “the Singing Revolution” provided in section 5 of paper II serves mainly the purpose of illustrating possible future directions for theoretical development of a model of political analysis based on Lotman’s (1977) typologies of “external recoding” (468) and “internal recoding” (469) – a development that has not thus far elaborated further18. There is no ambition to “reveal the truth” about “Singing Revolution” despite the fact that several statements here and there do have more suggestive undertone than this brief sketch could possibly warrant, and the fact that the very short concluding section 6 contains disproportionally large amount of discussion of this sketch rather than our theoretical contribution – a noteworthy compositional shortcoming indeed. However, these compositional errors should not distract our attention from the main theoretical implications of paper II which form the direct basis for paper III – a keyword for this is “communication”.

In Paper II there is an indication that a crucial notion for Lotman’s cultural semiotics, language, is defined as “every system whose end is to establish 17One can, of course wonder why appeal to phatic communication is better than appeal to Laca-nian affect. Put very crudely: the primary reason is that it is observable. 18 Though see Ventsel 2010 for several initial steps.

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communication between two or more individuals” (Lotman 1977: 7; Paper II, 456) and that “his conception does not limit language to merely natural languages” but applies “also to customs, rituals, commerce, art, religious concepts” and other secondary modeling systems (Paper II, 456) which “are constructed on the model of language’ (Lotman 1977: 9)19. Thus, language is an inclusive category for Lotman, encompassing all the range of communicative processes not only those related to speech or writing. In fact, the same holds for Laclau’s notion of discourse – a point that was somewhat underemphasized in the papers, though hinted to in references to this notion’s “practice-laden nature” (Paper II, 447) akin to Wittgenstein’s idea of “language game” (Paper I, 173; Paper II, 447). As Laclau summarizes his stance in his mature work:

Since Wittgenstein, we know that language games comprise both linguistic exchanges and actions in which they are embedded, and speech-act theory has put on a new footing the study of the discursive sequences constituting social institutionalized life. It is in that sense that Chantal Mouffe and I have defined discourses as structured totalities articulating both linguistic and non-linguistic elements. (Laclau 2005: 13)

This wide concept of discourse encompassing syntactic and semantic as well as pragmatic aspects of meaning systems is a useful starting point for bringing in the problem of political communication and its relation to hegemony. A conceptual passage point from Paper II to III is the following: in the latter the inherent relation between democracy and discretely coded discourse indicated above is taken into a more systematic and general level through synthesizing 1) Jakobson’s distinction between metonymic/syntagmatic and metaphoric/paradigmatic poles of language; 2) Lotman’s distinction between discrete and continuous coding as functionally equivalent to Laclau’s notions of logic of difference and equivalence and 3) Laclau’s distinction between Jacobinian/totalitarian and pluralist/democratic discourses. In paper III six types of public political communication are outlined based on Jakobson’s language functions and there is an attempt to locate them in terms of their discrete/metonymic and continuous/metaphoric form. I will give a brief overview of the semiotic model of democracy proposed in Paper III and in the subsequent subsections deal with certain problems related to it.

2.4. A MODEL OF DEMOCRATIC COMMUNICATION

The idea behind Paper III is simple: we have on the one hand Jakobsonian model of communication that differentiates six aspects of each communicative act (highlighted with the capital letters in Jakobson’s [1960] as well as in the following exposition) that form the basis of six functions/orientations of communication; on the other hand we have a set of theoretical as well as empirical generalizations in

19 Which, of course, “does not imply that they reproduce all aspect of natural language” (Paper II, 456).

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the manifold field of political analysis about different logics operating in different variations of democratic discourse ranging from totalitarianism to radical democracy. The aim of the paper is to bring those two “separate tables” together into a unified model of democratic public communication that differentiates six ideal-typical moments in the democratic discourse and explains their overall logic and provides guidelines for their application. Of course each of those steps taken in Paper III require at least a separate article if not a monograph and the paper should be taken as its title indicates – it tries to set the stage for moving toward semiotic theory of democracy. Nevertheless, we can summarize in a very condensed form the model proposed there as follows.

1. “Authoritarian populism” is associated with the prevalence of phatic function in the public communication. The phatic function is a “set for CONTACT” that “may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas” (Jakobson 1960: 355) ranging from small talk (“Well, here we are, aren’t we?”) appeals to common places (“We all know that… don’t we?”) or stereotypes (“welfare queens”). Through different theoretical syntheses, it is argued that this form of public communication is best conceived as intrinsic to what has usually been associated with authoritarianism in the politico-analytical literature (Paper III, 7-10, 16).

2. “Democratic populism” is associated with the prevalence of poetic function in the public communication. The poetic function, “promoting the palpability of signs”, is a) an orientation “toward the MESSAGE as such” (Jakobson 1960: 356); b) the primary verbal means for building metaphoric chains of equivalences between disparate linguistic elements and this way it is in a diametrical opposition to metalingual function (ibid, 358)20. It is argued that this form of public communication is best conceived as intrinsic to what has usually been associated with populism within the formally liberal-democratic regimes (for instance during elections) in the politico-analytical literature (Paper III, 10-11) – hence the label “democratic populism”.

3. “Clientelist democracy” is associated with the prevalence of conative function in the public communication. The conative function “the orientation toward ADRESSEE… finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative [“Hey you there!”] and imperative [“Do it!”]” (Jakobson 1960: 355). Basically the prevalence of this function in the public communication is argued to be characteristic to political regimes or cultures where the active political actor is the political elite acting as a patron that “interpellates” (in the Althusserian sense) public as a passive client (Paper III, 11-12).

4. “Deliberative democracy” is associated with the prevalence of referential function in the public communication. The referential function is „an orientation

20 It should be emphasized that this relation of poetic to metalingual function was not highlighted in Paper III (which is certainly a deficiency), but, as we will see below, it is a crucial aspect for arguing for the difference between those two functions in terms of metonymy and metaphor – a theme related to certain missteps taken in Paper III (as discussed in the next subsection).

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toward the CONTEXT” (Jakobson 1960: 353), exemplified most clearly in different statements or claims. In Paper III (pp. 12-14) it is argued that the ideal of deliberative democracy inaugurated by the Habermasian school could, in a simplified and generalized mode be conceptualized in terms of the prevalence of referential function in the public communication– which does not preclude bringing in the complexities related to other speech acts (as discussed by the Habermasians) in the course of concrete empirical analysis. Also the tension between referential and metalingual communication is discussed and argued that there is certainly some space for the latter in the “deliberative” ideal type, but that its locus par excellence should be associated with the “ideal type” discussed in the next paragraph.

5. “Radical democracy” is associated with the prevalence of metalingual function in the public communication. The metalingual function, orientation toward the CODE (Jakobson 1960: 356), is exemplified most clearly in definitions or problematizations of the language/code being used like in “Mare is the female of horse” [definition] (Ibid, 358) answered to a metalingual problematization: “What do you mean by mare?” Possibility for legitimately challenging, questioning and problematizing the political code (not only context) is deemed to be central for democracy by the so-called radical democrats – most notably Laclau and Mouffe themselves (1985: ch 4): “Radical democracy does not take any political identity as given and aims always to leave their constitution open for revisions and contestations” (Paper III, 14). Hence the radical democratic ethos (Ibid, 13) or (“ethos of contingency” whose delineation and role in Laclau and Mouffe’s as well as John Rawls’ normative model of social order is the subject matter of the whole Paper IV) provides grounds for associating the form of public communication corresponding to it with the prevalence of metalingual function in it.

6. It is argued in Paper III (pp. 14-15) that the radical democratic questioning of political code might entail either “deliberative” form of discussion about the fundamental political questions in the public communication, or – a more frequent scenario, historically speaking – it can lead to a total breakdown of political code. And this is where a possibility of “totalitarian populism” resides. The latter is associated with the prevalence of emotive function in the public communication. The emotive function, an orientation toward the ADDRESSER is discernable in the “direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about” (Ja-kobson 1960: 354). In paper III several grounds are provided (from the literature on totalitarianism) for seeing this form of populism in terms of emotive communication and differentiating it from phatically oriented authoritarian populism.

In view of these conceptualizations it is important to stress that according to Jakob-son the “verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function” (Jakobson 1960: 353, italics added). We could point to a good summary by Andrews – not cited in the papers – of the general logic underlying Jakobson’s model of communication First, “Jakobsonian model requires that all six factors and functions be present in any speech act. The variability lies in the inherent hierarchy of the factors and functions in relation to themselves” (Andrews 1999: 3, italics

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added). Second, “any two speech acts where the dominants are the same, the subsequent hierarchy of factors and functions may be drastically different. (Ibid, italics added). These remarks have to be taken, of course, into account in the empirical analysis of democratic communication that utilizes the model proposed in Paper III and summarized in the figure at page 17.

There are two aspect’s in this figure that are not discussed yet: 1) what do the labels “metaphoric” and “metonymic refer” to inside the figure? 2) Why is it circular and discontinuous rather than linear and continuous. We will discuss these issues in turn. The first aspect points to the general logic of democratic discourse outlined in terms of a theoretical synthesis of Jakobson’s language functions, his distinction between metonymic and metaphoric poles of language, Lotman’s distinction between discrete and continuous coding and interpreted in light of Laclau’s distinction between totalitarian and pluralist tension in democratic discourse. And it is this aspect that needs to be dealt with carefully, since, in the course of this synthesis, there are certain missteps taken in Paper III that need to be cleared.

2.5. THE PROBLEMS RELATED TO THE METONYMY/METAPHOR DISTINCTION

We will start with why this synthesis is important in the first place by pointing to the political side of the story as outlined by Laclau (2001: 250) according to whom there is a difference in how hegemony is established. He provides a theoretical-historical polarity for conceptualizing the two extremes of democratic hegemony. There is first “democracy as the attempt to construct the people as ‘one’, a homogeneous social actor opposed either to “power” or to an external enemy – or to a combination of both. This is the Jacobin conception of democracy, with its concomitant ideal of a transparent community unified – if necessary – by terror” (ibid). “The discourses around which this democratic ideal is constructed,” Laclau specifies, “are, obviously, predominantly metaphoric” (Ibid). Second extreme: “democracy as respect of difference, as shown, for instance, in multiculturalism or in the new pluralism associated with contemporary social movements. Here we have discourses that are predominantly metonymic” (Ibid). The task stemming from this distinction is clear: “Within this basic polarity there are, obviously, all kinds of possible intermediate combinations that we can start exploring through the variety of tropoi to be found in classical rhetoric” (Ibid). Instead of the “tropoi” Laclau is indicating, in Paper III those “intermediate combinations” as well as the extremes of the “basic polarity” are conceptualized in terms of Jakobson’s language functions. However, the problem with this conceptualization is that in fact Jakobson has never explicitly discussed the relationship between 1) his influential equation of

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syntagmatic=metonymic and paradigmatic=metaphoric poles of language (utilized by Laclau)21 and 2) his equally influential six-fold array of language functions.

One of the few places where he discusses “language functions” and “poles of language” in the same work is Jakobson’s “Two aspects of Language” (1956). Yet in this paper – and this is extremely important! – he does not (yet) distinguish six functions of language, but is discussing only one of them, the “metalinguistic”22 function and its link to metaphoric/metonymic poles of language. And the mistake made in Paper III is directly related to this link. Namely I interpret Jakobson (1956) as locating metalinguistic operations to the metonymic pole of language (p. 5), when, in fact, he in this paper locates them to the metaphoric pole. But I want to argue here that Jakobson’s locating metalinguistic operation to the metaphoric pole of language in 1956 makes little sense in view of his discussion of metalingual function of language in 1960 when he did differentiate between six functions of language. Initially I could point out that the reason for the exegetical missteps to enter my discussion in Paper III is that I had read Jakobson’s 1956 piece through the lenses of his 1960 piece and presumed consistency between the two works where in fact there wasn’t any. Consequently a theory that unites these two aspects of Jakobson’s thought – poles of language and functions of language – cannot be deduced directly from Jakobson, but must at least partly be created. In this section, however, I want to argue for the statement made above: that it makes little sense to locate metalingual function of language to the metaphoric pole of language (as in Jakobson 1956) in view of his discussions from 1960.

Crucial for this argument is the distinction made in Jakobson’s 1960 paper between metalingual and poetic function. Outlining this distinction, Jakobson brings in his poles of selection (= metaphoric in Jakobson [1956]) and combination (= metonymic in Jakobson [1956]) as follows: “The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of a sequence is based on contiguity” (Jakobson 1960: 358). Deriving from this distinction he defines the poetic function as follows: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. (Jakobson 1960: 358, italics his). He is, however, quick to forestall a possible objection to this specification:

21 In fact Laclau has only relatively recently came to admit explicitly that he has exactly this Jakobsonian distinction in mind as the following excerpt (not used in Paper III) indicates: “The great merit of Jakobson’s analysis is to have brought rhetorical categories to their specific loca-tion within linguistic structure, that is, to have shown that it is the latter that is at the root of all figural movements. Metaphor and metonymy, in that sense, are not just some figures among many, but the two fundamental matrices around which all other figures and tropes should be ordered.” (Laclau 2008: 67) 22Note that in Jakobson (1960), instead of „metalinguistic“ the term „metalingual“ is used, as indicated above.

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It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentence: A = A (“Mare is the female of the horse”). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametrical opposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. (Jakobson 1960: 358)

In light of this “diametrical opposition” from Jakobson (1960) and the remarks that located metalinguistic operation to the metaphoric pole in Jakobson (1956) the following conundrum emerges: On the one hand: 1) the utterance “Mare is the female of the horse” a) is not poetic, but metalingual operation, since b) the sequence is used to build an equation; but c) it is metaphoric in the sense of Jakob-son (1956). On the other hand: 2) the utterance “Mare is a fair share for mayor” is a) not metalingual, but poetic operation, since b) equation – based on the similarity of pronunciation – is used to build a sequence; but c) it is metonymic in the sense of Jakobson (1956), since poetic and metalingual operations are in diametrical opposition according to Jakobson (1960). The only way out of this impasse is to replace 1c with 2c and vice versa – which would of course mean contradicting Ja-kobson (1956). But I want to argue that it would make sense.

What is expanded in the metalingual sentence “Mare is the female of the horse” is the syntagmatic-metonymic sequence of contiguous elements, whereas in the poetic equation (“Mare is a fair share for mayor”) the same holds for paradigmatic equivalences based on similarity in pronounciation. In the former sentence the substitutability of “Mare” decreases (the effect of metonymic moves), in the latter it increases (characteristic of metaphoric moves). Thus, it could be interpreted that in his later conception (1960) Jakobson reserved the metonymic pole of language for metalinguistic function, departing from his earlier view (1956). This is further corroborated by the changes entering his views on the relation between “object language” and “metalanguage”. In 1956, referring to Alfred Tarski, he sees them in terms of substitution: “Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted” (1956: 81). Yet in an intermediate paper from 1959, referring to Niels Bohr, he sees the relation between object language and metalanguage as complementary:

a “metalinguistic” operation permits revision and redefinition of the vocabulary used. The complementarity of both levels - object-language and metalanguage - was brought out by Niels Bohr: all well-defined experimental evidence must be expressed in ordinary language, “in which the practical use of every word stands in complementary relation to attempts of its strict definition” (Jakobson 2004 [1959]: 140).

Thus metalanguage is not in a relation of substitution, but rather in a relation of contiguity with the object-language in Jakobson later view. In light of those remarks and taking into account that there cannot be “pure” manifestations of those

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functions we could say that metalingual operation is the most metonymically oriented among the language functions as it was indicated in Paper III.

2.6. THE PROBLEM OF ABDUCTION

I move now to the second aspect of the figure (Paper III, p. 17). As it is argued in the concluding remarks of paper III, the circular and partly open scheme tries to capture a certain theoretical logic that is implied by the model. Central to it is that democracy is viewed as a dynamic process: the types offered there do not form any deductive-inductive order but an abductive/retroductive typological framework. We need to add some considerations that were somewhat undeveloped in paper III concerning the abductive logic.

The logic of abduction is outlined by Charles Peirce who also calls it retroduction. And as is well known, Peirce (with Saussure) is considered to be one of the founders of semiotics. This is not a coincidence, since it is first and foremost the tradition of semiotics that has in one way or another been at the roots of this understanding of modeling or explanation. What is at stake in abduction and how it differs from the other traditional logics? To put it very generally, “abduction is a reasoning process invoked to explain a puzzling observation. A typical example is a practical competence like medical diagnosis. When a doctor observes a symptom in a patient, she hypothesizes about its possible causes, based on her knowledge of the causal relations between diseases and symptoms” (Aliseda 2006: 28). To call this kind of reasoning “logic” is not an arbitrary expansion of the term, since Peirce has argued, that like the other known forms of logic (inductive, deductive), it has a general formula: “The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true” (CP, 5.189). Comparing it with induction, the reasoning that is usually conflated with abduction, Peirce states that the latter “makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view, though it is motived by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts” (CP 7.218). For Peirce, the main difference from induction stems from the following: “[a]bduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts” (Peirce: CP 7.218). As Glynos and Howart explain via Peirce, strictly speaking neither from deductive nor inductive reasoning stems any new theory when faced with data. “From the inductive view, this is because theories are simply summarized projections of these data, while from the deductive perspective they are derived from a law or an axiom. Retroduction by contrast moves from data to hypothesis to laws” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 26). What is at stake here, is that though “deductive reasoning purports to prove what is the case, and inductive reasoning purports to approximate what is the case, retroductive reasoning conjectures what is the case” (Ibid). Nevertheless, despite the “merely” conjectural nature of this reasoning, it is worthwhile to use the traditional term “logic” for it, since according to Peirce “abduction, although it is very little hampered by logical rules, nevertheless is logical inference, asserting its conclusion only problematically or conjecturally, it is true, but nevertheless having a perfectly

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definite logical form” (CP 5.188). Aliseda, points out that the “notion of a ‘best abductive explanation’ necessarily involves contextual aspects, varying from application to application” (2006: 33). This context-orientedness is captured, again by Glynos and Howarth, two direct students of Laclau and the authors of the most comprehensive monograph (2007) on poststructuralist social-scientific methodology:

the process of ‘applying’ theoretical categories … to concrete objects does not come off without a remainder. In a manner analogous to Wittgenstein’s analysis of ‘applying a rule’, an application should not be seen in terms of subsuming instances under general rule. Instead, in our terms… such an application ought to be understood as part of a general practice of articulation, in which the sense and meaning of explanatory categories grow organically and contingently in the very process of their application. (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 47)

Hence, “even a basic concept … can acquire new determinations in the process of its application” (Ibid). Therefore if we apply concepts like “democratic populism” or “clientelist democracy” (as outlined in Paper III) this does not mean subsuming empirical phenomena under the category which itself is determined a priori. And this is true from the Jakobsonian side of the story as well, for he did not reduce different empirical phenomena under the notion of, say, phatic communication or presented the latter as an empirical generalization based on data. He left the determination of phaticity pretty open. And in fact, an utterance that functions as phatic in one situation, might function as referential in another situation etc23. The determination of prevailing language functions in a communicative act is an empirical matter that cannot be resolved a priori. It is articulated abductively in a dialogue between theoretical model and empirical data and the application of Jakobsonian functions of language do “not come off without a remainder.”

Abduction is a processual movement from puzzling empirical phenomenon to theoretical premises making it intelligible and then back to the phenomenon through which both the identity of the phenomenon as well as the corresponding theoretical premises can change and the process is never completely final, since the “final” result itself is a part of the process. This is exactly the most distinguished

23 Let us look at an example given by Paul Fry (available at his video lectures on literary theory at Yale University: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxnqHukr-Oc). The same utterance “it is raining” can, in practice, exemplify a dominance of all the six categories outlined by Jakobson. This is contingent upon the communicative situation. Thus, it can be 1) emotive: if it is said, for instance, to express anger; 2) phatic: if it is said as part of small talk; 3) poetic: if there is an ap-peal to rhythm (it-is/rai-ning); 4) contaive: if said by a parent to a child implying that the latter should take an umbrella with her; 5) referential: when uttered by a meteorologist stating a fact; 6) even metalingual when – in a slightly idiosyncratic manner – „it“ is defined by the following formula „it = raining“. In fact this example indicates that based on the utterance itself one cannot determine in a purely structuralist manner which Jakobsonian function is predominant and in order to do it one has, at least partially, to appeal to communicative intentions.

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semiotically oriented social scientist of our time makes a point of: “Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole that motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another” (Geertz 1983: 69). As for “theory” in this “hopping” or processual orientation we could say with Alexander (2008: 166), reconstructing Geertz’s understanding of “theory”: “theory is culture too.” In a similar vein discussing their specific view on explanation in the social sciences Glynos and Howarth summarize it as follows:

Explanation in this domain involves the furnishing of a putative explanans, whose justification is related to an ability to make intelligible the explanandum under investigation. In this model, the explanandum consists of problematized social phenomena that are always to some degree mediated by existing theoretical structures and by the discursive practices investigated” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 47).

Besides poststructuralist discourse theory, the abductive theoretical logic could be seen informing (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) not only semiotics but also various approaches that see their central problem in terms of the constitution of “meaning”, “culture” or “discourse”: for instance the so-called “grounded theory” (Glaser and Strauss 1967) that has fruitfully enriched the methodology of different strands of “critical discourse analysis” (see Wodak et al 2001; Dijk 1998; Fairclough 2001). As Glynos and Howarth themselves point out their poststructuralist methodology has affinities also with hermeneutic, critical realist and neopositivist approaches as far as the choice between inductive, deductive or abductive theoretical logic is concerned (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 212).

Now that I have given a general overview of the theoretical synthesis involved in this thesis, I move to a brief outline of a possible agenda for future research.

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3. RESEARCH AGENDA FOR POLITICAL SEMIOTICS

What the abductive theoretical logic implies is related to more general problems of social theory and methodology that we must now turn to. Questions concerning the relation between structure and agency, diachrony and synchrony, empirical and theoretical and contingency and determinedness must at least in the future perspective be addressed from the viewpoint of political semiotics developed here. In what follows, only very brief outline is provided for one possible route of research agenda. We should point out that hegemony as it is theorized in Gramsci and Laclau and Mouffe is dialectical at various levels. Most generally it is a form of power. But it is neither purely consensual nor purely conflictual power, since hegemonic relations presume a tension between consensual social order and the antagonistically (conflictually) excluded elements. It is neither purely structural nor purely agential, since hegemony presupposes both the contingency of social structures and their partial fixedness. In our vocabulary this might be conceptualized as either the dialectic of 1) difference/equivalence (Laclau); 2) metonymy/metaphor (Jakobson); or 3) in Lotman’s sense the dialectic of translatability/untranslatabilty between discrete and continuous languages. Laclau puts forward a general post-structuralist formula of power conceived in terms of hegemony: “power is the trace of contingency within the structure” (Laclau 2007: 546, italics added). In fact, this latter formula points to another dialectical aspect of hegemony: hegemonic relations are neither purely diachronically nor purely synchronically analyzable. Namely, this “trace of contingency” is not discernable only through scrutinizing the structural configuration itself but is partly derivable through genealogical or counterfactual analysis. Neither is it of course discernable in purely diachronic analysis without any recourse to synchronic configurations.

This all-pervasive dialectics in the notion of hegemony should lead us to the conclusion that all the perennial dichotomies in political analysis – structure/agency, micro/macro, diachrony/synchrony etc – should be conceptualized only as analytic and not as ontological distinctions. What I have in mind could best be captured in view of the problem of structure and agency and the several attempts at overcoming this dualism in social theory. The most fruitful of those seems to be the so-called “strategic relational approach” developed by Bob Jessop (1996; see also Jessop 2007: 34-36; 1990: 262-296) and Colin Hay (2002: 126-134; see also Hay and Wincott 1998 for similar arguments related to historical institutionalism). With affinities to Giddens’ (1984) well-known structuration theory this approach also sets out to overcome the artificial structure/agency dualism. It differentiates itself fundamentally from Giddens’ and other mainstream approaches (like that of, for instance, Bourdieu (1989: 14; 1998: ch 1) and the critical realists like Archer [1995] and Bhaskar [2008]) in that it conceives the distinction between structure and agency as only analytical and not resolvable in ontological terms. Put very simply this entails that neither agents nor structures are “real”, since neither of them has any existence independent of one another. Their existence is relational in the sense that both structure and agency are mutually constitutive. Yet, their existence

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is also dialectical – their interaction is not reducible to the interplay of structural and agential factors which are separately conceivable. Thus, structure and agency form a duality (cf Giddens 1984: 25-28). But, according to Jessop “a genuine duality can be created by dialectically relativizing (as opposed to mechanically relating) both analytical categories” (Jessop 1996: 124). Jessop’s work puts forward a theoretical exercise that could be summarized roughly as follows (cf Hay 2002: 128-129). We should concentrate on several second and third level concepts in which both structure and agency are implied. On the first level, however, we should start with structure and agency that seems to imply conceptual dualism. We should bring agency into structure which would entail “structured context”. Then we should bring structure to agency which gives “contextualized actor” or “situated agent”. Now, by bringing the “situated agent” back into “structured context” we get “strategic agent”. And “bringing structured” context back to “situated agent”, we get “strategically selective context”. Consequently: we have a conceptual pair in which the dualism of structure and agency is completely dissolved: strategic agent that/who is in the strategically selective context:

In this context social structure can be studied in ‘strategic-relational’ terms as involving structurally inscribed strategic selectivity; and action can likewise be analyzed in terms of its performance by agents with strategically calculating structural orientation. The former term signifies that structural constraints always operate selectively; they are not absolute and unconditional but are always temporally, spatially, agency- and strategy-specific. The latter term implies that agents are reflexive and able to engage in strategic calculation about their current situation (Jessop 1996: 124)

Contrary to other approaches to structure/agency this view “does not posit abstract, atemporal and unlocated structures or wholly routinized activities performed by ‘cultural dupes’. Structures are irredeemably concrete, temporalized and spatialized; and they have no meaning outside the context of specific agents pursuing specific strategies” (Jessop 1996: 126). And hence, since the distinction is purely analytical, it entails that structure and agency are present in any situation. Metaphorically speaking, structure and agency should not be conceived as two sides of the same coin (a la Giddens), but as two metals of which the coin is made. The metals do not exist in themselves, but only through their interaction. Though structure and agency might be distinguishable analytically, they are completely intertwined in practice. From the strategic relational approach, immediate changes of research orientations follow. This approach takes into account that the agents both internalize their perceptions of context as well as orient themselves consciously in relation to that context by choosing between different patterns of action. Jessop’s point that the strategic context (in which the agent’s action takes place) is strategically selective means that the context gives advantages to certain strategies over others in realizing certain intentions or preferences. Of course, in a way it is a very elementary insight. But an important addition to it is that we will have to acknowledge the fact that

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although ultimately the social and political outcomes may be contingent on strategic choices made, the context itself is what establishes an unevenly articulated field, where certain strategies are countenanced and others excluded or countered. In the course of time, such strategic selectivity produces a whole set of systematically structured outcomes.

Thus having in mind that the distinction between structure and agency is purely analytical, we should only point out that the same methodological attitude should be reserved towards other perennial dichotomies of the social sciences. For instance, in relation to the micro/macro distinction it is clear from the Lotmanian point of view that there is a certain isomorphism presumed between those levels. As we argue in Paper I: “According to Lotman it is characteristic to all thinking mechanisms — starting from the structure of the brain to the organization of culture in all its levels — that they are heterogeneously structured” (p. 176). Hence, the Lotmanian discrete and continuous coding which we demonstrated to be functionally equivalent to Laclau’s logics of difference and equivalence are operative at all levels of meaning-generation. Similarly we could deliver this point from the Laclauian vantage point: the elements that are articulated into a discourse can themselves be in turn discourses and vice versa. In principle the distinction between elements and discourses as well as texts or semiospheres is an analytical distinction depending always on the concrete research problem at hand.

We will move now from these general considerations to more concrete tasks for political semiotics. Our point of departure stems from the three keywords with which we started our discussion: hegemony, communication and democracy.

3.1. AN OUTLINE FOR A JAKOBSONIAN CONCEPTUALIZATION OF POWER

In most general terms the semiotic conception of hegemony put forth in this thesis allies with the family of contemporary power theorists for whom “the primary emphasis will be on the creation of power through the recreation of social order when the king’s sword is firmly in the scabbard” (Haugaard 2003: 88). We could safely say that what these theorists have in mind is in one way or another related to hegemony. We positioned our view in relation to the relevant mainstream approaches found in contemporary political analysis. A starting point is (as it is argued in Paper I, 172-173) that a semiotic view of power should distance itself from the most prevalent family of theories power, the liberal-Marxist or juristic-economic family. The central tenets of these views could be summarized as follows (cf Borch 2005: 158): 1) Power is ontologically a substance that can be possessed, exchanged or distributed; 2) power has a central location (monarch or the state apparatus) from which it flows down to the rest of society; 3) Power is a means of repression (power over) and it manifests itself through prohibitions and sanctions (entailing among other thing the loss of freedom of those upon whom it is exercised). This is the so-called negative-hierarchical notion of power that has been

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criticized most famously by Foucault (1980) and in fact already earlier by Luhmann (1969). As is evident and explicitly stated in Papers I and II and in the discussion of the arena/process dilemma in defining the political (section 1.2) my approach distances from such views of power and sees the latter in terms of articulation of discourse. However, what needs to be added here and what was not specified in the papers is that this distancing is only in the sense that I do not see these conceptions as theories of power as such. In fact, these views on the nature of power originating from the state-centered understanding of “the political” do have a legitimate conceptual grasp in a specific semiotic context. If we take the three features mentioned above as being certain articulations of meaning in a given communicative situation we could characterize it (see below) as conative power. And this brings us directly to the approach proposed here.

Due to its inherently dialectical nature, hegemony could be interpreted as the general terrain for different perspectives of power which function as moments of a general discourse of hegemony – the latter being conceptualized in terms of a synthesis of Laclau, Lotman and Jakobson. More concretely I propose that different conceptions of power can on the one hand be articulated in terms of Jakobson’s language functions. On the other hand they could be used for conceptualizing the Jakobsonian categories for more specific tasks of power analysis. The underlying assumption here is that power is a “family resemblance concept, which entails that there is no single ‘best’ definition of power” and that “theorists can no longer claim to have found the essence of power” (Haugaard 2010: 420); but on the other hand “this does not entail that their work does not tell us something significant about an important ‘family’ member” (Ibid; see also Haugaard 1997: 2-3; 2002:1-4; 2006: 9). A good starting point would be Haugaard’s distinction (partly derived from Giddens) between structuring, confirm-structuring and destructuring. The first term is understood in the sense Giddens associates with it: structuration is “[t]he structuring of social relations across time and space, in virtue of the duality of structure” (Giddens 1984: 376). However, Haugaard points out that “structuration is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reproduction of social structure” (2003: 94): “While it is true that the reproduction of structure presupposes structuration by an actor A, it also presupposes the recognition of that action as ordered, or meaningful, by an actor B” (Ibid). And the latter aspect of reproduction of structure is what he calls “confirm-structuration”. In addition he adds the notion of “destructuration”, starting from the fact that “[s]tructural constraint is a process whereby actors who threaten systemic stability by new and innovative structuration practices are met by the non-collaboration of others in the reproduction of these new structures” (Ibid). This is what “destructuration” is all about according to Haugaard. I, in turn, interpret the latter category as an important resource for not only power over for the establishment aiming at “disempowering” of “those who wish to raise new issue” (Ibid, 95), but for empowerment (power to) as well: destructuring dominant structures might be considered an important resource of power to for the dominated agents. Moving now to the more concrete

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conceptualization of power in Jakobsonian terms I put forward very rough guidelines for distinguishing six different families of power.

Phatic power. The founding arguments for what I conceptualize as phatic power could be found already in Weber’s notion of traditional domination (Weber 1978: 216) Marx’s notion of fetishism (Marx 1982: 163-177) developed into a more general framework by Lukacs’ notion of “reification” (Lukacs 1971: 83-110). Contemporary members of this phatic family include the theorists who relate power with the reproduction of tacit social knowledge. For instance power operations related to Bourdieu’s habitus (1998: 7-8; 1989: 18-19), Giddens’ “practical consciousness knowledge” (1984: 41-45), Foucault’s episteme (2002) (applied not only to scientific but everyday discourses as well) and disciplinary power (1978; 1979), Barnes’ paradigm (1988), Lukes’ “false consciousness” (2005), Bachrach and Baratz’s “mobilization of bias” (1962: 949-952)24 or Clegg’s (1997: 207) and Haugaard’s reification (2006: 60) in the form of “appeal to nature” (Ibid) could be conceptualized in terms of Jakobson’s phatic communication. However, in line with the discussion of abductive reasoning above, this does not entail that these different notions of power are reduced to this function. Rather, they are interpreted as articulating a certain family of mechanisms of power that could be applied for studying phatic public communication as “confirm-structuring” through mere “purport of prolonging communication” (Jakobson 1960: 355) resulting in “the denial of the arbitrariness of the sign” (Haugaard 2006: 59). In the triple vocabulary developed above we could say that this form of power in its pure form could be conceptualized as power of confirm-structuring without structuring or destructuring. In its ideal-typical fashion, this is the fetishistic power that could be presumed operative in the authoritarian populist hegemonic formation as outlined in paper III. Another good formula for this power is provided by Schöpflin who argues for an important role of ritual in the maintenance of power: “Ritual, ... establishes solidarity without consensus and does this by relying on an unchanged and unchangeable set of words, even when the non-verbal dimension of ritual functions as a recognisable text in its own right” (Schöpflin 2010: 43, italics added) Ritual is an important instrument of power since “the monology of ritual cannot be challenged or if it is, then that challenge is seen as meaningless” (Schöpflin 2010: 43). All the mentioned power perspectives could be used to highlight different nuances within this overall phatic family. For instance, the “reification” corner of

24It is a commonplace to treat Bachrach and Bartatz as behaviourists who, criticizing Dahl (whom we locate within the conative family) nevertheless retained the overall framework of the latter. This is true only in the sense that they did see this “bias” as a result of purposive action by agents. But, leaving aside the “agential” origins part of the discussion, their view of the “second face” of power has many affinities with, say, Lukes’ view of power related to “false consciousness”. For instance, in order to distinguish between important and unimportant issues that enter the formal decision-making, what is needed, is a study of “‘mobilization of bias’ in the community; of the dominant values and the political myths, rituals, and institutions which tend to favor the vested interests of one or more groups, relative to others” (Ibid, 950).

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the family would probably highlight the more monologic sphere of this type of power than, for instance, Barnes’ view based on Kuhnian notion of “paradigm”.

Poetic power. Moving to the poetic family of power, we should recall that since the poetic function of language is associated with the creation of equivalences, it is first and foremost the power to structure (contrary to pure confirm-structuration of phatic power). Here several insights from Bourdieu and Giddens are relevant. As the latter states:

To be an agent is to be able to deploy (chronically, in the flow of daily life) a range of causal powers, including that of influencing those deployed by others. Action depends upon the capability of the individual to ‘make a difference’ to a pre-existing state of affairs or course of events. An agent ceases to be such if he or she loses the capability to ‘make a difference’, that is to exercise some sort of power”. (Giddens 1984: 14)

As Clegg summarizes Giddens’ position: “Power is defined as a transformative capacity in outcome terms. … Power is exercised through the medium of resources. These resources appear to be structurally derived but the appearance is sundered from any objective conception of structure by virtue of the ontological supremacy of the ‘instantiation principle’” (Clegg 1997: 145). Analogously to Giddens’ “instantiation principle” Bourdieu points out that “there are always, in any society, conflicts between symbolic powers that aim at imposing the vision of legitimate divisions, that is, at constructing groups. Symbolic power, in this sense, is a power of “world-making” (Bourdieu 1989: 22, italics added). Referring to Nelson Goodman (1978) he specifies that this “‘world-making’ consists ‘in separating and reuniting, often in the same operation,’ in carrying out a decomposition, an analysis, and a composition, a synthesis, often by the use of labels” (Ibid). In the Haugaardin-Giddensian vocabulary we could characterize the poetic power as agents’ capacity to construct novel social relations or more simply, as power “to structure”.

Conative power. The conative family of power relates to probably the most traditional view of power of the six discussed here and its roots lead back to at least Hobbes’ Leviathan. From more contemporary times, it is again Weber who lies behind this view when he distinguishes “two diametrically contrasting types of domination, viz., domination by virtue of a constellation of interests (in particular: by virtue of a position of monopoly), and domination by virtue of authority, i.e. power to command and duty to obey” (Weber 1978: 943). The former, (“based upon influence derived exclusively from the possession of goods or marketable skills guaranteed in some way and acting upon the conduct of those dominated, who remain, however, formally free and are motivated simply by the pursuit of their own interests” [Ibid]) could be conceptualized as a pure form of conative power. But as we already indicated above the family members include both the liberal and Marxist views of power (in the sense of power related to decision-making rather than the reification indicated above in relation to Marx) as well as the classical pluralist (Dahl 1957; 1989) and elitist (Mills 1956) views of power that inform the bulk of mainstream political science. In the Haugaardian vocabulary we could say that this

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is the power to structure or confirm-structure of those who exercise it despite the efforts to destructure from those over whom it is exercised.

Referential power. The genealogy of referential family of power notions might again be traced back to at least Weber’s conception of legal-rational domination (Weber 1978: 217-226), that is, rationally legitimate power over. However, as it is argued in several normative models, this form of power might also be considered as power to in the sense of springing from people’s ability to act in concert (Arendt 1970: 52) or as “the formation of common will in a communication directed to reaching agreement (Habermas 1986: 76). In Haugaardian-Giddensian terms, this is a power where there is a symmetry between the capacities of agents aiming at structuring or confirm-structuring and the agents aiming at destructuring. Consequently, in it its ideal-typical form this is the power in the form of the force of a better argument (Habermas 1975: 108).

Metalingual power. The metalingual family of power notions could be associated with Giddens’ (1984: 41-45) differentiation between practical and discursive consciousness knowledge. Metalingual power is derived from the agents’ capacity to transform the former into the latter. In fact, as I already indicated above this could also be related to Haugaard’s notion of “destructuration” of dominant structures. This is, of course, the notion of power that radical democrats (especially Laclau and Mouffe and their school) associate with the political power par excellence. As Glynos and Howarth put it “a demand is political to the extent that it publicly contests the norms of particular practice or systems of practices in the name of a principle or ideal” (2007: 115). And of course a “radical political demand would be one that publicly contests a fundamental norm of a practice or regime” (Ibid). And as I argue in Paper IV: “a real possibility to ‘legitimately challenge’ existing consensus is characteristic for democracy in Mouffe’s view” (p. 16). In Jakobson’s terms, this would be metalingual challenging of the political code. However, in line with the discussion in Paper III about the threats that surround this “legitimate challenging” we should point out that the form of power that might emerge when the code is broken (even “in the name of a principle or ideal”) without any replacement, is emotive power.

Emotive power. The roots of what could be called emotive power are, again, pretty traditional. It was among the central concerns of Machiavelli’s Prince in its discussions on the role of fear and love as instruments of power over especially in the phase of nascent rule. We can also see them in Weber’s notion of charismatic authority (Weber 1978: 241-245) in the sense of power to. All the models of power that conceptualize the latter in terms of, for instance, manipulating emotions or the need to “constantly short-circuit all thought and decision” (Ellul 1973: 27) could be articulated into the emotive power family. Of course, the appeal to emotive power is present at least latently in all the conceptions that grasp it in terms of “threat of violence” in the roughly Weberian sense. In the Haugaardian three-fold vocabulary this form of power would be on the edge of doing away with the very structure/destructure/confirm-structure problematic altogether, since, as Jakobson

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indicates “The purely emotive stratum in language is presented by interjections” (1960: 354). Of course, as the purely “emotive communication” would amount to non-communication (in the form of unarticulated interjections), the pure “threat of violence” could be conceived to fuse into the very “violence” itself. And this is the moment when, for many major theorists - both normative (Arendt 1970) and sociological (Foucault 1982; Luhmann 1979; Haugaard 2010: 434-5) – power ceases to function. Thus “physical power is not the ultimate form of power. Quite the contrary, its use represents the failure of social power” (Haugaard 2003: 108). The point however, is that “in most complex social orders violence is blended with social power and then we get coercion” (Ibid). Similarly, the purely emotive power is, in practice, usually blended with other forms of power - and this, of course, in a way holds regarding all the six forms of power discussed here.

The program I offered for future trajectory of power research from the Jakobsonian point of view is in a very condensed form indeed, and, of course, it is not in its final shape even as a scheme. Several elements might end up altered in the course of further theoretical and empirical scrutiny. Nevertheless I believe this Jakobsonian approach to be fruitful contribution the theory of power – especially due to its inherent relation with theory of communication, an aspect that we will turn to in the next subsection.

3.2. POLITICAL SEMIOTICS AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

The title of Manuel Castells most recent book’s concluding chapter reads “Toward a Communication Theory of Power” (Castells 2009: 416). His monograph is dedicated to the working of power in the network society and draws among other things from the conception of cognitive framing (Ibid, ch 3) as it is developed by and applied to politics by George Lakoff (1987; 2004; 2009). In paper III this possible link with cognitive science was alluded in the general introduction (p. 2) and in the discussion of authoritarian populism (p. 9). This points to a further and more general theme for research: namely, semiotics in itself cannot determine which member of the power family is likely to be effective in a certain communicative context. What it can do, however, is to direct our attention to the signs of different power strategies used in public communication. To put the matter in the vocabulary of speech-act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), semiotics can conceptualize the illocutionary power of communication, but it cannot – by itself – determine its perlocutionary power.25 A comprehensive analysis of political 25 Besides the two, Austin in fact differentiated the “locutionary” aspect as well in each speech act. Take for instance the utterance by a bartender “The bar will be closed in five minutes” which is available to us with direct quotation. According to Bach: “He is thereby performing the locu-tionary act of saying that the bar (i.e., the one he is tending) will be closed in five minutes (from the time of utterance).... In saying this, the bartender is performing the illocutionary act of inform-ing the patrons of the bar’s imminent closing and perhaps also the act of urging them to order a last drink. … [P]erlocutionary acts are performed with the intention of producing a further effect. The bartender intends to be performing the perlocutionary acts of causing the patrons to believe

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communication, of course, would have to deal with the latter as well. And it is here that different studies from the field of political communication could at least partly be incorporated in the quest for elaborating a more general model of political semiotics. Thus, for instance, we could interpret through Jakobsonian lenses the four different roles for audience in a democratic political communication as proposed by Blumler (1973, cited in Blumler and Gurevitch 1996: 69-70) – the “partisan” who seeks a reinforcement of existing beliefs or “conative-phatic” audience (in Jakobsonian terms); the “liberal citizen” looking for guidance in deciding how to vote or “conative-referential audience”; “the monitor” serching for information about features of the political environment or “referential audience”; and the “spectator” out for excitement and other emotional satisfactions or “emotive-phatic” audience. Blumer’s scheme was developed by Blumler and Gurevitch (1996) into a full-fledged model discerning the counterpart roles of politicians and the media.26

There are, however, several important caveats to be made regarding this incorporation. The most obvious is the following: the field of political communication generally defines both “communication” and “the political” as well as “culture” in topographical terms. Generally, political communication is none other than the communication between politicians, journalists and audience over political issues (related to formal government) (see for instance Blumler and Gurevitch 1996; Esser and Pfetsch 2004). However, as I pointed out in section 1.2 the model of political semiotics proposed here is not completely exclusive of “arena” definitions of the political. What is important in integrating the results concerning the perlocutionary aspects of political communication and the models proposed based on them, is to acknowledge that this narrow definition of political communication might be informative to a certain sphere of the subject but a more

that the bar is about to close and of getting them to order one last drink” (Bach 2006: 150). Of course, whether the patrons believe him or not is not determinable merely from the utterance and its “locutionary” and “illocutionary” aspect. To say that semiotics is mainly concerned with illo-cutionary (or perhaps locutionary) aspect of communication does not mean that semiotics is ab-stracted from the social world as was the common view which we discussed in section 1 – on the contrary: illocutionary power (force) of an utterance in the Searlean and Austinian tradition is conceived as inextricably linked to social practices. What I mean by the above thesis could be put in the caricature form: semiotics can explain the content of the joke (its allusions etc included) and it can discern that the joke is being made (intended), but by itself it cannot determine whether anybody will laugh or find it funny at all – which would be the perlocutionary aspect of a joke. 261) The “partisan” audience corresponds to “editorial guide” media and “gladiator” politicians. 2) The “liberal citizen” corresponds to “moderator media” and “rational persuader” politician; 3) the “monitor” audience corresponds to “watchdog” media and “information provider” politicians; 4) and the “spectator” audience corresponds to “entertainer media” and “performer/actor” politician. The guiding idea of Blumler and Gurevitch is that “a highly integrated system would be one with high intercorrelations between role orientations across levels, i.e. where all the participants in the communication process share equivalent orientations and consequently speak on, or are tuned in to, similar wavelengths” (1996: 15).

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inclusive model that highlights the processual construction of all these aspects of political communication is needed.

Of course, there are analytical movements that in a way set out to highlight exactly this. Regarding the disciplines that set communication or social production of meaning at the heart of their analytical frameworks – most notably critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social semiotics – I should point out that the approach adopted here diverges from them in several respects. Since we briefly discussed the differences from critical discourse analysis in paper II (p. 446), I will comments on social semiotics. The aim of political semiotics is to move towards developing a model of political analysis that is both informed by the insights of cultural semiotic theories of the constitution of meaning in communication and is at the same time informed by the developments of conceptualizing power found in political sociology, political science, political theory and other related disciplines. It is the latter aspect that differentiates my approach from the tradition of social semiotics that at least purportedly addresses the problem of power as well. For instance, power is everywhere in the most eminent representative of social semiotics, Van Leeuwen’s, writings. It is associated with rules (2005: 48), ideology (Ibid, 38) and personal and impersonal authority (Ibid, 40, 53-55; 282), institutions (ibid, 98); statuses (2008: 81); genres (ibid, 128) and Foucauldian ‘microphysics of power’ (Ibid, 128; 131, 136-37; 2008: 128); forms of address (Ibid, 164), metaphors (Ibid 200, 204) or even space (2008: 90) and time (ibid, 76) and even viewer’s perspective in visual communications (ibid, 139; see also 141). On the other hand in Leeuwen (2005; 2008) the key word “power” is not even present in the index. Same holds for “hegemony”. Though we have “legitimation” (2005: 280; see also 2008: 20, 105-123; 2007). We have power in the index of Van Leeuwen and Kress 2006 and in Hodge and Kress 1999, but nowhere find we any attempt to theorize power and relate to the perspectives on it found in political analysis. And this is exactly what the current proposal for political semiotics attempts to do from the viewpoint of the theory of hegemony as it relates to more traditional notions of power. And another important feature of my approach is that its conception of power is not only inextricably linked to communication, but to a notion of democracy as well (a link highlighted in paper III and IV). We turn to some very brief additional remarks concerning this connection.

3.3. POLITICAL SEMIOTICS AND THE STUDY OF DEMOCRACY

As it is argued most systematically in Papers III and IV, democracy is conceptualized as a discourse. Or to put the matter in more Luhmannian jargon: “Democracy, in fact, is not really a ‘form of rule’: it is a ‘technique of systemic steering’” (King and Thornhill 2003: 110). A general further orientation for political semiotic approach to democracy could be found through juxtaposing the characterizations of democracy by Lefort (also cited in Paper IV, 5) and Chantal Mouffe.

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democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and so as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life. (Lefort 1988: 19)

instead of simply identifying the modern form of democracy with the empty place of power, I would also want to put emphasis on the distinction between two aspects: on one side, democracy as a form of rule, that is, the principle of sovereignty of the people; and on the other side, the symbolic framework within which this democratic rule is exercised. The novelty of modern democracy, what makes it properly ‘modern’, is that, with the ad-vent of the ‘democratic revolution’, the old democratic principle that ‘power should be exercised by the people’ emerges again, but this time within a symbolic framework informed by the liberal discourse, with its strong emphasis on the value of individual liberties and human rights. (Mouffe 2000: 2)

The articulation of this “symbolic framework” or democratic discourse/communi-cation is of course the most immediate research object for political semiotics. In this sense it has affinities with the above mentioned approach put forward by Wedeen:

In relation to the study of democracy, an interpretive approach that emphasizes semiotic practices allows us to shift our attention away from the minimalist, formalist notion of electoral procedures to animated worlds of peaceful contestation and political argumentation outside of electoral arrangements, to other dimensions of what might be construed as “democratic” practice. (Wedeen 2004: 285; see also Wedeen 2008: 105-113, 216)

The model of democratic communication proposed in paper III could contribute to both critical-normative as well as analytic-comparative analysis of democracy. As I argued, the “general aim of the model is to provide conceptual tools for comparative analysis of different forms of public communication in different social formations (regimes, countries, regions etc) synchronically or within the same formation diachronically” (Paper III, 17). Of course due to its discursive/semiotic interpretation of democracy, the model avoids the classical dichotomies between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” seeing democratic discourse as a dynamic and always incomplete process running the risk of de-democratization (from the viewpoint of as specific ideal of a good democracy). The types of different democracy are not exclusive and they do not indicate different “evolutionary” levels of social development. Rather, in line with the Jakobsonian understanding of language functions, all those tendencies of public communication depicted in paper III are presumed to be present in some form in each social formation fluctuating between metaphoric/Jacobinian and metonymic/pluralist poles of democracy and their status is always partly contestable. A stable democratic formation should find a balance of different democratic communication within itself.

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4. CONCLUDING REMARKS

We have reached the conclusion of our discussion. Instead of reiterating or summarizing the arguments made above I interpret them in view of a book by Colin Hay (2002) that despite its extremely modest title constitutes one of the most innovative theoretical syntheses of the last decade amounting to what he calls “critical political analysis”. Hay ends up with five general characteristics for an adequate critical political analysis. I try to interpret them in view of the points I have been making throughout the current thesis. For Hay a critical political analysis should, first, be empirical but not empiricist: we should not ignore empirical evidence but we should not presume their measurability or other properties in an aprioristic manner. This has been the general ethos informing the whole discussion, especially the sections related to the abductive theoretical logic and the analytical nature of the distinctions between structure and agency above (2.6 and the beginning of 3). In fact, the balanced view on the latter two is the second feature of critical political analysis according to Hay. In other words, it has to include a dynamic view the interdependence of structure and agency. Third, critical political analysis ought to have an inclusive notion of the political. Hence it should view politics in terms of process rather than an arena and include extrapolitical factors to its explanations as well. This, of course was the general topic of section 1.2. Fourth, it has to acknowledge the constitutive role of ideas – more generally: meanings – in the explanation of political outcomes. This is the central tenet of both discourse theory as well as cultural semiotics and was discussed extensively throughout the thesis. The same holds for the fifth feature of an adequate critical political analysis according to Hay: it has to acknowledge that political process is characterized by contingencies and unpredictability.

Now, as a way of taking the discussion further, let us consider one possible general addition that the political semiotic approach might add. In a book that happened for some curious reasons to be neglected by papers II and III in their overview of the relevant literature on political semiotics, Ahonen puts forth the following: “the road should be opened for semiotic research on the hardest core of contemporary non-semiotic political science. It is crucial to adopt semiotic approach towards both analytic and empirical ‘positivism’ and their applications without too easily rejecting anything ‘positivist’ with the consequent self-gratifying conclusion that ‘there is really nothing there’” (Ahonen 1993: 22). In several respects this thesis has shared this insight. For instance: the approach does not preclude the mainstream political science analyses to power and political communication. It does, however, highlight the need to interpret the positivist view (usually associated with “arena” conceptions of all the three keywords of this thesis: the political/power, democracy and communication) as having a specific legitimacy in a specific communicative/semiotic environment. Thus, contrary to, for instance, several strands of meaning-centered approaches (most notably that of the Essex school itself – see paper II, pp 448-449), the conceptual door is left open for the insights deriving from even the most crude forms of positivism. We should have our eyes

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open for the suitable context for which positivistic approaches have their legitimate applicability. For instance, in Paper III I actually gain insights from several researches that have been conducted in the positivist tradition. And this relates to even a more general point: most of the political science concepts (like power, democracy, authoritarianism etc) have received extensive treatment in this tradition. And since concepts do not get their meaning in isolation but rather as a part of a system or language game, I think the insights gained from positivist research programs are part of the conceptual resources of contemporary political analysis. But these insights should be reinterpreted rather than dismissed as merely misguided: they might inform our perception of the political world but can in turn be specified creatively in the course of further research.

As a way of concluding my discussion, I will put forward a general thesis that in fact derives directly from the conception outlined here and in the papers, but must be left entirely for future research. I will call it the “strong thesis of power/meaning”. Basically it amounts to the claim that not only is power founded on the production of meaning (a common thesis for contemporary political analysis after the “cultural turn”), but that the opposite is true as well: wherever there is meaning, there is power. This might sound pretty peculiar thesis for common sense on the one hand, but in a way it could strike one as truism in view of certain interpretations of Foucault. As for the latter, there are contradictory interpretations concerning whether Foucault ended up with a conclusion that every relation is power relation (see Heiskala 2003: ch 13; Alasuutari 2010). However, the synthesis of Lotman and Laclau (as summarized in section 2.1) points to the possibility of this view of power and meaning. In addition, it stems directly from the Essex school’s insistence on “the primacy of the political” in the constitution of each social order (see Glynos and Howarth 2007: 5, 68, 70) and it has important affinities with the foundations of Heiskala’s neostructuralist theory of power leading to the conclusion that “each social relation is a power relation and, therefore, power is indeed ‘everywhere’” (Heiskala 2003: 310). I will only comment here the reasons for the need of developing this thesis and leave its complications for the future. I take my lead from Alexander’s claim that “[t]o understand and explain the symbolic communications that structure civil society, a strong theory of meaning-making is required. What is needed is a cultural sociology, not a sociology of culture, a strong, not a weak approach to social meaning” (Alexander 2009: 68). Analogously I would argue that the thesis has been engaged with political semiotics rather than semiotics of politics. The underlying assumption is that in each meaningful whole – due to its asymmetry, exclusionary and heterogeneous nature (as argued via Lotman and Laclau) – there are always power relations involved. This does not mean that every study of meaning has to be obsessed with power. It only means that political semiotic approach in a way has to be just that. And consequently, similarly to the distinction between agency and structure we discussed above, the distinction of power and meaning dissolves from the viewpoint of political semiotics and is conceived as only analytical: wherever there is meaning, there is power and vice versa.

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To end with a less serious note, consider the following objection to this “strong thesis”: in what sense is “2+2 = 4” a power relation? Two things can be pointed out here. First studying mathematical structures is a highly unlikely research topic for political semiotics. Second, if a political semiotician were to engage with it she should first point out that from this structure itself you cannot deduce power relations or “the traces of contingency within structure”. A political semiotician, methodologically obsessed with power, should first point out to different surrounding structures as well as genealogies leading to the “obviousness” of this equation. For instance, such equation tends often to be treated as a universal truth valid in each possible world etc. But a political semiotician would point out that this is a purely contingent matter that in our common sense there prevails the decimal system expressed in Arabic numbers. In other words, this is a contingent conjuncture that we have this equation as phatic or reified paradigm of mathematic truth as such. An equation “10 + 10 = 100” would probably strike a mathematician almost as immediate as “2+2 = 4”. And in a way these equations are equivalent (the former being expressed in binary system). Thus, if one whishes, she can even trace the contingency back to most formal systems. What is crucial to understand from the viewpoint of political semiotics is that on the whole all meaning systems are contingent articulations in communication and cannot be completely transparent and always entail exclusions of alternative meanings. And the latter entails power relations.

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VISAND POLIITILISE SEMIOOTIKA TEOORIALE

Kokkuvõte

Doktoritöö teemaks on poliitilise semiootika kui poliitikaanalüüsi metodoloogia võimaliku väljatöötamisega seonduvad probleemid.

Kuigi juba 1980-date keskpaigast saadik on nn Essexi koolkond arendanud diskur-suse-teoreetilist hegemooniakäsitlust, mis kasutab mitmeid semiootika traditsioonist pärit mõisteid ühiskonna ja poliitika kontseptualiseerimiseks, pole siiani püütud semiootikal põhinevaid lähenemisi poliitika analüüsiks süstemaatiliselt välja tööta-da. Antud töö püüab visandada teoreetilisi aluseid uurimisprogrammile, mis ühest küljest lähtuks kultuurisemiootilisest kommunikatsiooniteooriast ning diskursuse-teoreetilisest hegemoonia kontseptsioonist, ent samal ajal põhineks ka kriitilisel dialoogil poliitilise analüüsi traditsioonilisematest distsipliinidest (poliitiline sotsio-loogia, politoloogia, poliitiline teooria jt) pärinevate võimu, demokraatia ning polii-tilise kommunikatsiooni käsitlustega.

Töös pakutav visand poliitilise semiootika teooriale ei põhine mitte niivõrd empiiri-lisest andmestikust saadud üldistustel, kuivõrd interdistsiplinaarsel teoreetilisel analüüsil ja sünteesil. Samas on selle teoreetilise töö eesmärk selgitada kontsep-tuaalseid seoseid erinevate mõistete (millest kesksemad on võim, demokraatia ning kommunikatsioon) vahel selliselt, et tulemuseks saadud mõisteline raamistik oleks rakendatav empiirilise analüüsi jaoks. Sestap on antud doktoritöö eelkõige teoreeti-line ja metodoloogiline.

Doktoritöö aluseks on neli teaduspublikatsiooni. Artiklites I ja II demonstreeritakse, kuidas hoolimata erinevast terminoloogiast käsitlevad mõjuka Essexi koolkonna diskursuseteooria esindajad (eesotsas Ernesto Laclauga) tähendustekke protsesse analoogselt Tartu-Moskva kultuurisemiootika koolkonnaga (eesotsas Juri Lotmaniga). Artiklites näidatakse, et ehkki Essexi koolkonna terminoloogia (dis-kursus, erinevus- ning samaväärsusloogika, tühjad tähistajad, liigendus [articulation]) erineb Tartu-Moskva koolkonna vastavast terminoloogiast (tekst/semiosfäär, diskreetne ja kontinuaalne kodeerimine, retooriline tõlge) on mõlema koolkonna terminoloogia aluseks olev mõisteline raamistik paljuski kattuv. Kõige üldisemalt üteldes esitavad mõlemad traditsioonid teooria tähendussüsteemi-de toimimise kohta, mis rõhutab iga tähendussüsteemi (Lotmani mõttes teksti/ kul-tuuri/semiosfääri või Laclau mõttes diskursuse) puhul kolme fundamentaalset as-pekti: 1) tähendusüsteemid on alati heterogeensed, st neisse kätketud elemendid on mingis osas alati lepitamatus pinges ning sellest tulenevalt on tähendussüsteem ning temasse kätketud elementide staatus alati ebastabiilne; 2) tähendussüsteemid on asümmeetrilised, st osad tähenduselemendid on paratamatult kesksemad ja domi-neerivamad ning osad on tõrjutud perifeeriasse; 3) tähendussüsteem põhineb mingis osas alati alternatiivsete tähenduselementide ja –süsteemide välistamisel.

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Lisaks kongeniaalsustele kõige fundamentaalsemates põhimõtetes tähendusüsteemide kontseptualiseerimisel rõhutatakse artiklites I ja II ka Essexi ning Tartu-Moskva koolkondade erinevusi, mis annab aluse nende teoreetiliste positsioonide viljakaks ühendamiseks. Essexi koolkonna kõige olulisemaks panu-seks selles kontekstis võibki pidada hegemoonia rolli käsitlemist mistahes tähen-dussüsteemi ülesehituses ning sellest temaatikast tulenevate oluliste tagajärgede välja toomist poliitikateaduste võtmeprobleemide – demokraatia ning võimu vahe-korra – kontseptualiseerimise jaoks. Tartu-Moskva koolkonna viljakas panus tule-neb eelkõige kultuuri ja kommunikatsiooni orgaanilise seose esile toomisest ning tähenduse üldteooriast tulenevate kultuuritüpoloogia printsiipide välja pakkumisest. Kombineerituna võiksid Essexi ning Tartu-Moskva koolkondade panused anda viljaka uurimisraamistiku demokraatliku poliitilise kommunikatsiooni analüüsiks. Just sellest juhtmõttest lähtub ka artikkel III, mis arendab esimese kahe artikli tule-musi veidi teisest vaatenurgast edasi, tuues sisse Roman Jakobsoni mõjuka käsitluse tähendusest ja kommunikatsioonist.

Artikkel III pakub välja semiootilise demokraatiamudeli, mis põhineb ühelt poolt Jakobsoni kommunikatsioonifunktsioonidel ja Tartu-Moskva koolkonna kultuuri-semiootika ning Essexi koolkonna diskursuse teooria sünteesil. Teisest küljest läh-tub artikkel poliitilise analüüsi (sh poliitilise psühholoogia ja poliitilise teooria) traditsioonist pärinevatest demokraatia käsitlustest ning püüab neid mõtestada Ja-kobsoni kommunikatsioonifunktsioonide valguses ning ühendada neid ühtseks ava-liku kommunikatsiooni uurimise mudeliks. Konkreetsemalt pakutakse välja kuus avaliku kommunikatsiooni ideaaltüüpi ning seostatakse 1) „autoritaarne populism“ faatilise avaliku kommunikatsiooniga; 2) „demokraatlik populism“ poeetilise avali-ku kommunikatsiooniga; 3) „klientalistlik demokraatia“ konatiivse avaliku kommu-nikatsiooniga; 4) „arutlev demokraatia“ referentsiaalse avaliku kommunikatsiooni-ga; 5) „radikaalne demokraatia“ metakeelelise avaliku kommunikatsiooniga; ning 6) „totalitaarne populism“ emotiivse avaliku kommunikatsiooniga.

Lisaks pakutakse artiklis lühidalt ka metodoloogilisi juhiseid mudeli rakendamise kohta ning selgitatakse ülal visandatud kuue avaliku kommunikatsiooni tüübi üldist tuletamise loogikat.

Distsiplinaarselt kuulub artikkel IV küll pigem normatiivse poliitilise teooria valda, ent tal on oluline toetav roll doktoritöös arendatava üldkontseptsiooni jaoks, kuna käsitleb süvitsi just „radikaalse demokraatia“ ning hegemoonia probleemi vahekor-da. Oluline iseäranis artikli III tulemuste sügavamaks mõistmiseks on selles artiklis just Laclau ning Mouffe’i „radikaalse demokraatia“ idee aluseks oleva eetose süs-temaatiline mõtestamine. Artiklis nimetatakse seda „sattumuslikkuse eetoseks“ ning osutatakse, et nn „radikaalse demokraatia“ ideaal näeb poliitika normatiivse põhi-ülesandena kõigi ühiskondlike suhete (eriti neisse kätketud ebavõrdsuste) sattumus-likkuse (st mitte-loomulikkuse) esile toomist ning sellest tulenevalt ka võrdsuse ideaali teostamist võimalikult paljudes ühiskondlikes valdkondades. Artikli kõige uuenduslikum aspekt – selle demonstreerimine, et vastupidiselt kaasaegses poliitili-ses teoorias üldlevinud arusaamale on John Rawlsi õigluse teooria võimeline

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kontseptualiseerima „sattumuslikkuse eetost“ – ei ole otseselt seotud doktoritöö põhiteemaga. Sestap võibki artikkel IV mõista antud doktoritöö kontekstis pigem toetava ning täiendavana.

Doktoritöö analüütilise sissejuhatuse eesmärk on esiteks asetada töö aluseks olevad neli artiklit laiemasse sotsiaalteaduslikku konteksti. Sellega seoses analüüsitakse välja pakutava poliitilise semiootika teooria visandi suhestumist nii peavoolu polii-tilise analüüsi traditsiooniga kui ka sotsiaalteadustes prevaleeriva arusaamaga se-miootikast. Seoses esimese aspektiga on eriti oluline, et poliitilise semiootika teoo-ria visandi jaoks keskseid mõisteid – võim/poliitilisus, demokraatia, kul-tuur/kommunikatsioon – selgitatakse poliitilise analüüsi traditsiooni põhidilemma kaudu: kas neid mõisteid defineerida ühiskondlike suhete organiseerimise protsessi või hoopis nende asukoha kaudu ühiskonnas. Teisisõnu: kas näiteks poliitilisus on defineeritud ühiskondlike suhete protsessi (välistamine, domineerimine jne) või teatud ühiskondliku asukoha kaudu (valitsus, parteid jne). Teisest aspektist lähtu-valt on oluline, et töös distantseeritakse levinud arusaamast, mille kohaselt semioo-tika samastatakse strukturalismiga.

Sissejuhatuse teine eesmärk on revideerida mitmeid artiklites esitatud käsitluste puudusi ning täiendada mõningaid neis liialt visandlikult arendatud teemasid. Kuigi nendega tegeletakse läbivalt, võiks esile tuua kolm teemat, millele pühendatakse selles kontekstis kõige rohkem tähelepanu: 1) selgemad põhjendused, miks psühho-analüütilisest arendustest tuleks Laclau hegemooniateoorias lahti ütelda ning asen-dada need kultuurisemiootilise lähenemisega (lisandus artiklitele I ja II); 2) nii in-duktiivsest kui ka deduktiivsest teoreetilisest loogikast erineva nn abduktiivse lähe-nemise laiem selgitus (lisandus artiklile III); 3) Roman Jakobsoni metafoori ja metonüümia kästiluse ning tema kommunikatsioonifunktsioonide vahelise seose täpsem selgitus (lisandus ning osalt ka vigade parandus artikli III juurde).

Eessõna kolmas eesmärk on pakkuda välja agenda tulevaseks uurimiseks. Konk-reetsemalt selgitatakse sotsiaalteaduste „igaveste“ dihhotoomiate (mikro/makro, struktuur/toimija, diakroonia/sünkroonia jne) suhestumist välja pakutavas poliitilise semiootika teooria visandis arendatud käsitlusega; pakutakse esialgne visand erine-vate võimuteooriate tõlgenduseks Jakobsoni kommunikatsioonifunktsioonide val-guses; selgitatakse töös esitatud lähenemise ja poliitilise kommunikatsiooni tradit-sioonilisemate käsitluste integreerimise võimalusi ja probleeme; ning esitatakse ka skemaatiliselt edasised uurimisülesanded demokraatia uurimiseks poliitilise se-miootika vaatepunktist.

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TALLINNA ÜLIKOOL SOTSIAALTEADUSTE DISSERTATSIOONID. Analüütilised ülevaated. TALLINN UNIVERSITY DISSERTATIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCES. Abstracts. http://e-ait.tlulib.ee/ 1. HELI TOOMAN. Teenindusühiskond, teeninduskultuur ja klienditeenindusõppe kont-

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34. KARIN LUKK. Structural, Functional and Social Aspects of Home-School Cooperati-on. Abstract. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2008. 46 p. Tallinn University. Disserta-tions on Social Sciences. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9985-58-614-3.

35. KATRIN KULLASEPP. Dialogical becoming. Professional identity construction of Psychology Students. Abstract. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2008. 34 p. Tallinn University. Dissertations on Social Sciences. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9985-58-597-9.

36. HELLE NOORVÄLI. Praktika arendamine kutsehariduses. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikooli kirjastus, 2009. 40 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste dis-sertatsioonid, 38. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9985-58-665-5.

37. TANEL KERIKMÄE. Estonia in the European Legal System: Protection of the Rule of Law through Constitutional Dialogue. Abstract. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2009. 58 p. Tallinn University. Dissertations on Social Sciences. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9985-675-4.

38. BIRGIT VILGATS. The Impact of External Quality Assessment on Universities: Esto-nian Experience. Abstract. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2009. 33 p. Tallinn Uni-versity. Dissertations on Social Sciences. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 987-9985-58-677-8.

39. LIIS OJAMÄE. Valikute kujunemine eluasemeturul: Eluaseme väärtuse sotsiaalne konstrueerimine. Eeslinna uuselamupiirkonna näitel. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool, 2009. 24 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9985-58-681-5.

40. KATRIN AAVA. Eesti haridusdiskursuse analüüs. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool, 2010. 26 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-20-6.

41. ANU LEPPIMAN. Argielamusi. Laagri- ja elamuspõhine argipäevade pereteenus sotsiaalse kogemuse tootjana. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool, 2010. 32 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675 ISBN. 978-9949-463-27-5.

42. JANNE PUKK. Kõrghariduse kvaliteet ja üliõpilaste edasijõudmine kõrgkoolis. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool, 2010. 30 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sot-siaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-17-6.

43. AIRI KUKK. Õppekava eesmärkide saavutamine üleminekul lasteasutusest kooli ning I kooliastmes õpetajate hinnanguil. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool, 2010. 48 lk. Tallinna Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-37-4.

44. MARTIN KLESMENT. Fertility Development in Estonia During the Second Half of the XX Century: The Economic Context and its Implications. Analüütiline ülevaade. Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikool. 2010 57 lk. Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. Tallinn: Tal-linna Ülikool, 2010. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-42-8

45. MERIKE SISASK. The Social Construction and Subjective Meaning of Attempted Suicide. Analüütiline Ülevaade. Tallinna Ülikool. 2011. 68 lk Sotsiaalteaduste disser-tatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-63-3.

46. TIIA ÕUN. Koolieelse lasteasutuse kvaliteet lapsekeskse kasvatuse aspektist. Analüütiline Ülevaade. Tallinna Ülikool. 2011. 60 lk Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-67-1.

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47. RAILI NUGIN. Coming of Age in Transition: Some Self-Reflexive Social Portraits of the 1970s Cohort. Analüütiline Ülevaade. Tallinna Ülikool. 2011. 75 lk Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-80-0.

48. INGE TIMOŠTŠUKK. Õpetajaks õppivate üliõpilaste kutseidentiteet. Tallinna Ülikool. 2011. 58 lk Sotsiaalteaduste dissertatsioonid. ISSN 1736-3675. ISBN 978-9949-463-90-9.