Political semiotics

Аннотация. В статье анализируются современные подходы к измерению семантического пространства концепта «власть» в отечественной и западной научной традициях. Концепт «власть» относится к группе «сущностно оспариваемых» (essentially contested) концептов либо к группе концептов, обладающих чертами «семейного сходства» (family resemblance). В качестве ключевого аспекта исследования рассматривается вопрос о корреляции соответствующих единиц концептуального и языкового пространств. Ключевые слова: образ власти; политическая семиотика; социальная семиотика; потестарная имагология. Для цитирования: Cанников С.В. Методологические аспекты типологии лексических репрезентантов концепта «власть» и измерения их семантического пространства // Политическая наука.-2019.-№ 3.-С. 63-75.-DOI: http://www.

The book presents a semiotic approach to the study of power relations in the symbolic space of medieval culture.
A critical analysis of medieval texts was carried out in accordance with the methodology of European structuralist and poststructuralist tradition (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard), as well as Russian semiotic tradition (Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Stepanov, Juri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, Viktor Toporov, Sergei Proskurin).
The author analyzes the early medieval historical works of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede the Venerable, Paul the Deacon, Snorri Sturluson and other authors. The book raises questions of the realiation of the plot of teratomachia (Greek “fight against monsters”) in political culture. The murder of a monster becomes a kind of initiation of an archetypal Hero (for example, such as Theseus, Perseus, Sigurd, Beowulf, etc.), who manifests his individuality and strengthens his authority as a military leader or potential ruler through the victory over the monster. Formation of the comitatus culture and rising power of military leaders is associated with the development of ideas about the kinship of military aristocracy with the world of monsters, which is reflected in the representation of royal power.
The semiotics of power in archaic Germanic culture is identified as being of a physiological nature - the signs of power are represented by various aspects of the ruler’s body, both innate and acquired as a result of certain ritual practices, such as long hair or characteristic features of the body of representatives of the ruling Merovingian family. Such phenomena are explained through the prism of the “quasi-bodily” code of archaic culture. The psychological aspects of the perception of the physiological aspects of power are analyzed through the prism of the methodology of S. Freud, A. Adler and E. Berne.
The formation of medieval culture is considered from the point of view of the transformation of the perception of symbolic structures and the development of the practice of symbolic representation in the space of political communication. The author analyzes semiotic aspects of overcoming physiological limitations and weakening the biological relevance of power, which took place in the form of ideas about the transfer of charisma through the things of the ruler, transmitted within the framework of symbolic redistribution and the medieval gift economy.
In accordance with the methodology of K. Jung, J. Campbell and E. Meletinsky, the archetypes underlying the perception of power in medieval literature (Hero, Wise old man, Father, Shadow, Seeker, Child, etc.) are analyzed.
The author examines the methods of forming political myths in the works of intellectuals of the late antiquity - Flavius Cassiodorus, Severinus Boethius, Isidore of Seville, in particular, myths concerning the categories of equality and freedom. The medieval perception of the “barbarian” world is considered in accordance with the methodology of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school from the point of view of the dynamics of the processes of semiosphere - the interaction of the cultural core, periphery and border space of the era of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

The discourse of identity/difference has been instrumental in the formation and legitimization of the most important modern communities, whether national, supranational (like European Union), diasporic or intranational (minorities). In addition, it pervades both postcolonial notions of 'third' spaces and hybridity and New Right identitarianism. To disengage from the discourse of identity/difference, which ineluctably raises the specter of cultural essentialism, we propose to rethink the issues of community and rights, belonging and togetherness based on the notion of 'public culture', conceptualized by Appadurai as a "zone of cultural debate"; an arena where different "types, forms and domains of culture are encountering, interrogating and contesting each other." Understood as the intrinsically heterogeneous and contested terrain encompassing both policy and cultural representations, the arts and everyday social interaction, moral spaces and forms of life, the problematic of public culture highlights the inherently challenging but also explorative and experimental nature of 'commonness,' of 'living together.'

Рубрика из: Политическая наука. — М., 2016. — № 4.

М.В. Ильин. Что может дать анализ перформативов?
И.В. Фомин. Перформативы сецессии оспариваемых государств: Южная Осетия, Абхазия, Косово
Е.А. Ефимова, Н.А. Конюхов, Д.А. Панфилов. Кто и как начал Первую мировую войну?
Д.В. Алексеев, А.М. Ильин, М.В. Ильин. Кто и как закончил Вторую мировую войну?

The article focuses the possibility of elaboration of a cross-disciplinary methodological approach to formation of the semiotics of power. Four possible forms of relation of semiotic research to the problem of power are revealed upon the basis of Drechsler’s typology. The approaches of Mandoki and Siefkes to formation of the methodological basis of the semiotics of power are analyzed and compared. The author designates the perspective directions of a further research and formulates methodological prerequisites for realization of the specified directions.

In this article we investigate how political actors involved in TV debates during the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections in Romania manage the relationship between handedness (left/right polarity in hand gestures) and political orientation (left/right polarity in politics),. For this purpose we developed a multimodal analysis for some relevant sequences during these debates. The practice of integrating the meanings of different semiotic resources allows a better understanding of the meaning of verbal discourse, actions and behavior of political actors involved in a particular communication situation. In addition, the Multimodal Professional Analysis Tool, ELAN, allows the annotation and dynamic analysis of the semiotic behavior of the political actors involved in the analyzed sequences.

L’objet de cet article consiste à l’examen de deux affiches politique appartenant l’un à la partie politique de « Nea Dimokratia » et l’autre à celle de « Syriza ». Le choix s’est émané par les conditions politiques dans la Grèce le mois de mai en tenant compte les élections européennes qui sont déroulées à travers l’Europe. Etant donné qu’il y a une particularité du processus électoral en Grèce – année d’élections législatives, l’accord de Prespa qui bouleversait le corps d’électeurs – on a choisi de s’occuper de la langue politique qui est procurée par les affiches créées et projetées par ces parties.

This study proposes an analysis of televised debates for presidential elections in Romania from the perspective of the functional theory of political campaign discourse (Benoit 2013). The functional analysis of the debates can help the public to deconstruct candidates’ predispositions for one of the two great myths of the image (describing the position of any politician in relation to reality): between Narcissus, a victim of self-referencing and Pygmalion, a victim of the simulacrum. The study shows similarities with the results obtained in other states, but also reveals the significant differences that change the structure of the functional theory predictions. The differences can be explained if we take into account the different cultural perspectives on functional theory presuppositions of political discourse.

The ideas of Juri Lotman have often caught the interest of researchers and scholars from a wide range of disciplines apart from semiotics and literary studies. Often these ideas have been employed in the analysis of social and cultural relations in situations of subalternity, in the study of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic formations, and in a broader sense in the context of power relations. Interest in the use of Lotman’s work in social and political analysis gained more momentum with the birth of the so-called political semiotics. Political semiotics is a trans-disciplinary initiative aiming to exploit some innovative concepts of semiotic theory in the context of political analysis and political communication, often relying on Lotmanian concepts. Use of Lotmanian concepts in the framework of political disciplines, however, warrants the question: What was the role of political concepts in Lotman’s semiotic framework? In particular, seeing as many of these later works, including those of political semiotics, are centred around the notion of power, the issue of what ‘power’ meant for Lotman is relevant, and whether for him the word had any special meaning.

Biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower have not yet been explicitly brought together. This article attempts to find their connecting points from the perspective of biosemiotics. It uses the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of semiosis in order to approach the practices of biopower and biopolitics. The central concept of the paper is that of the ‘semiotic threshold’. We can speak of (1) the lower semiotic threshold, signifying the dividing line between non-semiosis and semiosis; and (2) the secondary semiotic thresholds, signifying the borders between different types (iconic, indexical, symbolic) of semiosis. Speaking in terms of types of semiosis means speaking in terms of different capabilities for normativity, which is why the article uses the approaches of Michel Foucault on normalization in biopower and of Georges Canguilhem on organismic normativity. As an example on which biopolitics and biosemiotics could connect, the discourse of regenerative and anti-agin...

В статье рассматриваются семиотические алгоритмы репрезентации королевской власти в европейской культуре от периода мифологической древности до завершения эпохи раннего средневековья. Рецепция знаковых конструкций, связанных с осуществлением политической власти, рассматривается с точки зрения флуктуаций семиосферы.

The article focuses semiotic algorithms of representation of kingship in European culture from the period of mythological antiquity to the end of Early Medieval time. Reception of sign constructions related to implementation of political power are considered in context of the fluctuations of semiosphere.

The present paper aims at reviewing the current state of research about the relationship between semiotics and power in Jurij M. Lotman. In the first part, the article will illustrate and review the current international researches that apply, in the political field, concepts derived from the Lotmanian theories. The article will examine two cases: the first will be that of cultural studies, where recently some scholars started employing Lotmanian concepts such as autocommunication, boundary, center/periphery. The second will be the case of the so-called semiotic theory of hegemony, developed in Estonia, that combines concepts from Lotman and Laclau. In the second part, the article will instead focus on the historical research concerning the political tropes of Lotman's theory, sparked by the reflection initiated by the researches shown in the first part. Starting from the cultural environment of Lotman's early years, the paper will illustrate how certain semiotic concepts, such as personality and dominant, acquire a political meaning when related to the cultural environment of 1930s Soviet Union.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the construction of political scenes of representation by two former Argentine presidents, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2008-2015) and Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), based on televised speeches and social media postings. As there is no political representation without staging, and any staging needs a material surface for its deployment, the comparative reconstruction of scenes of representation is required for understanding the impact of socio-technological transformations in the political field. Our analysis assumes that the political dramaturgy of representation entails: (a) that the leader must show a way of connecting with his constituents; (b) therefore, the leader must configure a preferred political subject (i.e., a predominant form of figurative citizenry); and (c) that this configuration constitutes a possible portion of the entire population that can be represented. According to our analysis, each leader is associated with a di...

This paper deals with the construction of "the people" as narrative actor. Departing from the idea of "empty signifier" and drawing on interpretative semiotics and in particular on the idea of "semantic potential" (by Umberto Eco and Patrizia Violi) , I analyze how  collective formations are narratively shaped as "the people" in the construction of a negative axis (opposition) and a positive axis (definitional traits of those that belong to the people). In the last part of the paper, I will apply this perspective on sequences from "Battleship Potemkin" (Eisenstein, 1925) and "Strike" (Eisenstein, 1925).

In this article we will analyze how political actors involved in the presidential TV debates use certain semiotic strategies to manage the relationship between gestures and their ideological orientation. We developed a multimodal analysis for some relevant sequences during the presidential debates from November 2014. For this purpose, we used a Multimodal Professional Analysis Tool, ELAN, which allowed us the annotation and dynamic analysis of the semiotic behavior of the political actors involved in the analyzed sequences.

Статья посвящена выработке фундаментальной дефиниции понятия образ государства на основе общесемиотического категориального аппарата Ч.С. Пирса. Предложена общая модель образа и насыщенный ее вариант, ориентированный на проблематику изучения образов государств. С опорой на понятия иконического знака и метафоры предложена модель образа как комплексной семиотической конструкции, имеющей в роли знакового средства некоторый первичный знак, а в роли объекта - все подобные этому знаку фрагменты действительности (факты); первичный знак детерминирует - по принципу сходства с этими фактами - вторичный (образный) интерпретант. За счет такого устройства в образе государства возникает эффект аккумуляции актов осмысления и означивания, характерных для определенного дискурса об этом государстве.