This book is about introducing the potential of relational thinking for political analysis. Instead of providing a comprehensive overview of possible trajectories for articulating a relational political analysis, we take a different tack in the chapters that follow. Essentially, we put forth a concrete relational theory of the political, which has concrete implications for methodology and conducting research, which culminate in a concrete method we call political form analysis. In addition to this, we sketch out several applications of this theory, methodology, and method. We call our approach “political semiotics” and argue that it is a fruitful way of conducting research on power, governance, and democracy—the core dimensions of the political—in a manner that is envisioned in numerous discussions of the “relational turn” in the social sciences (see Chapter 2). This way we attempt to introduce a possible route of taking steps toward “relational turn” in political science, public administration, and governance studies. But why political semiotics?
Semiotics originates from the works of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in the European continent and from those of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in America. It has been one of the earliest disciplines in the human sciences that have explicitly defined its approach in relational terms. It revolves around the notion of “sign.” Both Saussurean and Peircean concepts of sign presume it to be a relation rather than an entity: signs are presumed to be intelligible always as a part of a system of relations with other signs. In addition, unlike in the stereotyped depictions of semiotics as a form of structuralism (see Chapter 4), this system of relations is a phenomenon that is a dynamic unfolding process whose constituent elements cannot be grasped separately from the flows within which they are embedded and vice versa. This is exactly what the tradition of “relational sociology” has been proposing as a general view on social reality in both its classical and more recent formulations (see Chapter 2). It is therefore quite remarkable that virtually no-one has brought the semiotic tradition to bear on the program of relational sociology. But why political semiotics?
Thus far semiotic approaches have contributed to analyses of relations between language, power and ideology, Marxism and the systems of signification, and to the problematics of political communication, manipulation and legitimation (see Chapter 4). Nevertheless, political semiotics, as a coherent approach, has not been articulated thus far. “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, p. 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” (1993, p. 31) Lemert adds. The current book aims to move toward one possible argument for this “plausibility,” although the route taken has only very general affinities with that of Lemert.1
Our approach is based on cultural semiotics. Cultural semiotics is one of the approaches in the humanities and the social sciences that is “relational all the way down” to use Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998, p. 974) expression. We set the agenda for explicating the meaning-making and formation of power relations through the concept of translation as it is developed by the tradition of cultural semiotics (see also Chapters 4 and 5) and position the latter within the context of other approaches to the social and political reality that have Saussurean background (most notably post-structuralism). Semiotics in this view should be considered first and foremost a study of contingent articulation of meaning in communication. When we talk about “political semiotics,” then the problematic this label tries to capture is, put very roughly, the constitution of power, governance and, democracy within and through communication. Our book is the only monograph that brings relational conceptions of power and politics to political sociology, political science, and studies of public administration and governance. The “relational turn” in political science and the other aforementioned disciplines has been the primary concern of the most recent publications of one of us (see Selg 2016a, b; 2018). At the same time we cannot ignore the fact that the potential of semiotic approaches to the social or the political has been somewhat neglected in most treatments of this “turn,” even though discussion of both Saussurean and Peircean semiotics as sources of relational thinking is present in Mustafa Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for a relational sociology” (1997, pp. 300–301), the most highly cited meta-theoretical paper on the topic. Outlining this connection is therefore needed for both intellectual communities of semiotics and relational social sciences.
We aim to clearly demonstrate that Saussurean or post-Saussurean semiotics, especially as it has been developed by the Tartu-Moscow School of cultural semiotics is a “deep” relational or trans-actional approach (cf. Dépelteau 2013, 2018; Selg 2016b, 2018) to social reality. We also take stock of the insights from interdisciplinary intellectual movements such as discourse analysis and interpretive political science that in one way or another have either mentioned semiotic approaches or even referred to their approaches as “semiotic.” This way, we intend to build up a relational framework for political analysis that is coherent in both its ontological premises as well as theoretical and methodological prescriptions. But in addition to that, we intend to take our discussion further to concrete methods and examples of analyses. After having demonstrated the deep relational character of our political semiotic analysis at the theoretical and methodological level, we provide some examples of empirical analysis of various phenomena of power, politics, and governance. This way, our book could also be used as a textbook of relational political analysis and political semiotics by both students of the social sciences and the humanities.
We start Chapter 2 with an argument that informs the entire book: that the major difference between relational and non-relational approaches is not in their emphasis on the importance of social relations in their analyses, but the fundamentally different understanding of those relations. We argue that relational approaches view relations as constitutive and therefore the entities and their relations cannot be considered as being separate from one another. A non-relational approach presumes the primacy and givenness of entities that might or might not enter relations with other such entities. Relations between them are not constitutive of the entities, but something that “happen” between or among them. In most cases, the relations in that sense are presumed to be causal, which entails considering relations and entities as being separate from one another. We then move on to “test” this simple distinction between relational and non-relational approaches by the discussions between “substantialism” and “relationalism” as they are found in various meta-theoretical reflections of relational sociology. Emirbayer and various other authors have already made a point that there are several “substantialist” approaches in the social sciences: self-actional approaches characteristic of various individualist perspectives (e.g., rational choice, exchange theory) and structuralisms (e.g., structural Marxism, functionalism), and inter-actional approaches that by and large presume the social world to be grasped in terms of variables (the bulk of sociological approaches) or nodes and ties (social network analysis [SNA]). Thus, there are at least three meanings ...