Political Semiotics

Political semiotics*

WOLFGANG DRECHSLER

Abstract

The current article is a problem-oriented look at (the image of) political

semiotics from the sphere of the inquiry into the political. It first looks at

the relevant features of the political and semiotics, and then addresses polit-

ical semiotics, both contents-wise and as the two elements relate to each

other. A sketch of how political semiotics exists today follows — first con-

cerning the context of political science, and then as far as the actual output

is concerned, which is then systematically evaluated. The final chapter

presents three thinkers who represent di¤erent paths to possible political

semiotics: Cassirer, Jung, and Uexkull.

Keywords: political semiotics; political science; glottocentricity; ideology;

Johann J. von Uexkull.

I asked Susan to take a look at this, and she

tells me that after Barthes there’s no point

translating this Kant.

—Eco (1994 [1972]: 44)

1. Introduction

When the last attempt at a general survey of political semiotics was made

— namely, Pertti Ahonen’s introductory essay to his edited collection,

Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics (1993a) — it was possible to

call it, ‘A Copernican revolution in political research,’ without a questionmark (1993b: 16–17). And Charles Lemert, in the same book, could ask,

‘Who . . . could have dreamed of the extent to which virtually every cor-

ner of the human and social sciences would be, today, touched by the

ideas and literature of semiotics?’ (1993: 31).

Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 73–97 0037–1998/09/0173–0073

DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2009.003 6 Walter de Gruyter

If we look at the situation today, the perspective has surely changed, or

at least is very di¤erent: there was no such revolution, and particularly lit-

tle was touched within political science. Political semiotics, as a field and

as regards fashion, institutions, and influence on other areas, in spite of

quite a number of publications in its realm, some very good, has — if

anything — regressed more than progressed. On the one hand, this is notsurprising, since, as Ahonen has pointed out, ‘semiotics and related orien-

tations have given legitimacy for people with intellectual aspirations to

turn from questions of politics, the macro-society and the international

system and its injustices to questions involving subjects, subjectivities,

minds and selves’ (1993b: 5). Bourdieu’s similar criticism of semiotics’

‘apoliticy,’ that it treats ‘the social world as a universe of symbolic ex-

changes and . . . reduce[s] action to an act of communication’ (1991: 7),

is well-known. And indeed, ‘Semiotics, certainly, has for the greater partof its history been a rather apolitical enterprise’ (MacFarquhar 1994: 61).

On the other hand, there is the vast potential that the semiotic perspective

— or, better, some semiotic perspectives — can bring to the analysis and

understanding of the political, and indeed what could be called the need

of political semiotics for political analysis, more so perhaps in the last de-

cade and in the ones to come than ever; thus, the area is very well worth

investigating.

A dozen years after Ahonen, this essay will therefore attempt to brieflysketch out where political semiotics stands today, why it stands there, and

how it may, and could, develop. Yet, contrary to Ahonen — with whom I

share both the main sub-field of political inquiry, as well as various insti-

tutional a‰liations over the years — my perspective is that from outside

the semiotic scientific community. ‘Clearly sees, who sees from a distance,

and through a fog, who participates,’ says Lao Tse, but it surely makes

omissions and injustices easier as well. The works discussed and cited are

exemplary, but they do not form an inventory. The current essay there-fore is a problem-oriented look at (the image of ) political semiotics from

the perspective of inquiry into the political.

2. The political and semiotics

Any essay on political semiotics is right away confronted with the fact

that a definition is di‰cult since both concepts, the political and semiot-ics, are at best very vague, and that the collocation has likewise no clear

meaning. Because this essay is both empirical-analytical and normative,

i.e., setting out to find out what political semiotics is like and what it

could be, stronger definitions than the ones that are in fact used — and

74 W. Drechsler

none are, really, used — might be misleading. Yet, we need to narrow the

scope somehow, just in order to be able to make any meaningful state-

ment at all.

3. The political

As regards the political, there are, to be sure, many more, and much

clearer, definitions — and we might, in the academic context, just say

that political is anything that concerns political science. We may add,

however, that we have some definitions of politics for semiotics that are

almost exclusively by Ahonen (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991b), and they canbe easily followed here as well. Particularly helpful is his 1987 essayistic

piece, ‘Semiotics of politics and political research,’ where Ahonen refers

to the di¤erence between the two (1987: 143), stating that ‘political re-

search tends to be more abstract and conceptual than politics’ (1987:

149) and that what ‘is politics is di¤erent in di¤erent contexts’ (1987:

145).

What politics is must therefore be understood not only as what politics is accord-

ing to any single of the competing views, but politics also consists of the di¤erent

conceptions concerning what politics is as well as / the competition between these

views. (Ahonen 1987: 145–146)

The key point is that ‘Politics has to do with power, but there need be

synthesis of the rationalist view and the view which emphasizes anony-

mous structures, processes, and e¤ects’ (1987: 146). ‘Political research

studies structures, processes and e¤ects of the generation and regenera-

tion of political meanings’ (1987: 149), and it ‘covers the entire generation

and regeneration of meaning in politics and in mixtures between politicsand what is less politics’ (1987: 149–150).

What is crucial here is that the definition of the political becomes

meaningless if it moves away either from power (never mind how em-

bedded or potential) or from institutions — not exclusively, but vitally,

politics is about formalized and legitimized hierarchies in a public context

(but cf. Neumann 2003). This definition will strike many a reader as

forced or even Schmittian (see Schmitt 1991 [1932]), but it is just meant

to describe what is typically political, not to delineate the field. As worth-while, important, and right as interdisciplinarity and the dissolution of

disciplinary borders and definitions generally is, the purpose of this essay

is to look at the contribution of political semiotics to the specifically po-

litical mode of inquiry, i.e., to the scholarly inquiry into the genuinely

Political semiotics 75

political. It is therefore heuristically — but also methodologically —

valuable and valid to proceed with a narrow, even ‘traditional’ concept

of politics and political science, because it focuses the argument (which is

never more than a heuristic one, anyway). If, by doing so, we lose too

many concepts of the political that were included in the last decades,

namely, sociological and anthropological ones, and thus also narrowdown the field of political semiotics (factually at the cost of ‘French’

theory, including Greimas), then the price paid might have been too

high, but, once again, the argument — whether one agrees with it or not

— will be clearer for it, and thus, hopefully, more productive both for

those who reject it and those who would agree, let alone for those who

are in doubt.

4. Semiotics

The problem is even greater with the lack of definition of semiotics, due

to what appears to be an incessant dodging of the definition (see, for fear

of infinite regress, Sebeok 1997: 291), and the same is surely true for the

meso-field of sociosemiotics (Randviir 2004: 44–45), to which political se-

miotics belongs. Lotman’s ‘semiotics is a method of the humanities, which

is relevant to various disciplines and which is defined not by the nature ofits object but by the means of analyzing it’ (2000 [1990]: 4) really provides

no answer, and Eco’s suggestion that ‘semiotics is in principle the disci-

pline studying everything which can be used in order to lie’ (1979 [1976]:

7) is as interesting as it is in some sense very political, but it is too general

as well. This way, anything could be semiotic, and so the present essay

would have no focus. If semiotics is really communication in general,

then — as most of political science necessarily involves communication

of some sort — political semiotics becomes its own ‘zero signifier’ (cf.Randviir 2004: 8–9)

If we go back to the acknowledged foundations of semiotics, we will of

course find Saussure (1916) and/or Peirce (1932) and then, more often

than not, somehow combine the two (cf. Eco 1979 [1976]: 14–16). Of

these, for political semiotics, the Peircian definition of a sign as ‘some-

thing which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capac-

ity’ (1932: 228 — a superfluously exact reference if there ever was one) is

superior, as this is the (even) more social model. In our context, the defi-nition by Eco that ‘a sign is everything that, on the grounds of previously

established social convention, can be taken as something standing for

something else’ (1979 [1976]: 16) is very productive, but it is too general

still.

76 W. Drechsler

‘In light of such fluidity, the only feature that can be said to di¤erenti-

ate semiotic from other scholarly discourses is the prominence within

it of the concept of the sign’ (Steiner 1989: 47). However, semiotics is

not the study of symbols, so that perhaps we may come up with the

working hypothesis to call semiotics in its clearest form the study of —

s.v.v. — symbolic interaction, and with a focus on structure (not —indeed, emphatically not — structuralism) and context, rather than on

the symbol in itself. Semiotics necessarily and factually focuses on a sys-

tems approach, i.e., not on the isolated symbol.

Since meaning is grasped first of all as an unanalyzed totality, one has to disentan-

gle the structures of mediation which [l]ead and allow us to justify the superficial

articulations — and eventually, at the very end, the lexical units — of its manifes-

tation. (Landowski 1984: 75)

5. Classification

So much for the political and for semiotics; but for political semiotics, the

question now is, how do the two elements relate with each other in order

to produce a new whole? To answer this, I would suggest the following

di¤erentiation of works that involve both politics and semiotics as they

do exist:

1. political statements by semioticians

2. political work based on semiotics

3. specifically political semiotics (akin to political philosophy, say)

4. semiotic theory that may be used in political analysis

While all four ideal types exist, there are of course mixtures and fusions(although not many), and normatively — from a science-theoretical as

well as practical standpoint — they are not of the same value. Category

1, for instance, does not really qualify for political semiotics at all. Um-

berto Eco’s often brilliant political pieces (but, see Ahonen 1993b: 7), for

instance, are generally not semiotic; he occasionally uses semiotics for his

analysis, but if he dislikes Berlusconi for all kinds of (right) reasons, this

is not semiotic just because he is a semiotician.

Regarding category 2, Ahonen has said that ‘No new science of ‘‘polit-ical semiotics’’ will ever truly arise, but the term is best applied to ‘‘polit-

ical science’’ drawing on the semiotic inspiration’ (1993b: 9). This is a

modest concept, but it includes the bulk of what can be called political

semiotics today — applied work by political scientists, more often even


by philologists, sociologists, and sometimes even anthropologists and psy-

chologists dealing with semiotics. There has been almost nothing in this

realm by the more senior figures of semiotics themselves, and much of

the work by non-political scientists is not genuinely political under the

perspective we use here. (Of course, this does not matter at all as the

works themselves are concerned, but it is important for categorizationand thus for the sub-field.)

Category 3 would be closest to what the concept itself seems to promise

— a genuine semiotic approach to political matters that evolves out of se-

miotic thinking but is necessarily linked to politics, in the sense of politi-

cal philosophy, which after all is not ‘political science drawing on the

philosophical inspiration’ either. We may say already that this is the rar-

est category of them all, and it is sometimes debated whether anything

like that actually even exists. The two obvious exceptions that will be pre-sented below, one implicit and the other explicit, are in fact by scholars

who are now acknowledged as semioticians, but did not define themselves

this way.

Category 4, which like category 1 is not political semiotics proper but

can become part of it once it is applied or linked to the political, com-

prises such works as the three basic books by the ‘Three Great Men’ of

post-war semiotics (Eco 1979 [1976]; Lotman 2000 [1990]; Sebeok 1999)

— almost completely free of political references or content. (And the pic-ture does not change very much if we consider anyone from Saussure and

Peirce via Levi-Strauss, Morris, and Jakobson to today’s Posner, Danesi,

and Deely.) The potential, once again, is clearly there, but to realize it,

another scholarly act is necessary, and that act is political-semiotical, not

the basic work.

This leaves us, basically, with category 2, with which we will concern

ourselves for the following sections, until in ‘Neglected options,’ below,

we will actually meet some protagonists of category 3.

6. Aspects of semiotics

In order to get closer to our aim both of describing political semiotics as

it is and suggest potential further development, it may first be necessary

to deal with some key features of contemporary semiotics outside of its

definition, so as to see how it may fit with today’s (and tomorrow’s) polit-ical science and political inquiry generally. This chapter is the most out-

siderish one and thus clearly controversial and will — as discussions have

shown — in its findings not be shared by many a semiotician; but I have

found no remedy against that.

78 W. Drechsler

7. Glottocentricity

Probably the biggest divergence between what the general public assumes

semiotics is — inasmuch as it knows anything about it at all and does not

reduce it to ‘killing monks’ — and what it really is, is between symbols,

understood in an everyday manner as visual, and language. This is di¤er-ent from the di¤erentiation between symbols and symbolic systems as re-

ferred to above. But semiotics today strikes me as largely a linguistic, or

even philological, exercise and comparatively little concerned with signs

and symbols ‘proper’ — as even intellectuals and academics would as-

sume a ‘science of signs’ (Danesi 1999 [1994]: xi) to be. Sebeok is right

when he says that the ‘distinction which is most immediately pertinent

here . . . is the one between non-verbal signs . . . versus verbal signs . . .’;

this is in accord with Locke’s famous modern coining of the concept ofsemiotics, in which he ‘does establish two points: first, that ‘‘words,’’ or

the verbal, constitute but one class of signs; but that, second, for humans,

this class is a privileged one’ (Sebeok 1999: 107).

In spite of Sebeok’s brilliant example of a ‘Kremlin watcher, in the

former Soviet Union, [who] observes the proximity of a member of the

politburo to the party secretary on May Day and surmises the member’s

current status’ (1999: 3) for (political) semiotics, the mainstream semioti-

cian will probably hasten to agree with him that ‘‘semiotics is superordi-nate, that is, subsumes linguistics’’ (1999: 105) or, that ‘linguistics is a

structurally rather than functionally autonomous branch of semiotics,

the rest of which encompasses a wide variety of non-verbal systems of

signification and communication which, in humans, flourish side by side

with the former, related in reciprocity’ (1999: 114–115). Eco, just margin-

ally di¤erent in his semio-theoretical writings, would say here that ‘Semi-

otics aims to study the entire range of sign systems (of which verbal

language is the most important) and the various processes of communica-tion to which these systems give rise’ (2000 [1990]: ix).

So, one of the most interesting aspects of semiotics as an academic dis-

cipline is that it fell victim — if one wants to see it that way — to the lin-

guistic, indeed glottocentric, propensity that in some sense, and in some

tradition, it was destined to overcome (cf. Zito 1984). One could also

say, of course, that this is what semiotics is, and always was, never mind

the possibility or even desirability of another focus. There are many rea-

sons for this: historical, such as the rise from linguistics (if we considerSaussure especially); methodological, if semiotics considers, as Eco, ver-

bal language simply as its most interesting part and thus deals with it;

science-sociological, because most semioticians these days work in Mod-

ern Language departments; the now quite outdated — but in some places


still resilient — fad to declare everything a text, a very semiotic habit

(Randviir 2004: 7, 19–20), and the accompanying use of ‘‘reading’’ sim-

ply in place of ‘interpretation’ generally, etc. And it should be underlined

that, of course, language and texts are in fact what the analysis of human

interaction, and certainly of the political, should be concerned with —

what is implied by the term glottocentricity, however, is an emphasisthat has turned into an almost exclusive focus, at the neglect of other

possibilities. And what seems clear is that the concern with language has

driven out, or at least seriously diminished, the interest in visual signs in

semiotics proper, as well as in political semiotics.

8. Ideology

It may well be debated whether ‘all sign systems are ideological by na-ture’ (Randviir 2004: 44) because, while they of course are reduced mod-

els of reality, they would only become ideological if one develops a belief

in them because one cannot deal with the complexities of one’s world

(Kaiser 1984: 27–28). There are two aspects of the ideology of semiotics

that are actually not compatible, but they are combined in many a field

regardless: Marxism and postmodernism (including the latter’s various in-

carnations) (Ahonen 1993b: 4). Because both have more to do with atti-

tude, habitus, and historical conditions within the respective Lebenswelt

of ‘Western’ semioticians than with anything else, however, i.e., with the

attitude of protest against a perceived normalcy, both are extremely com-

patible in spite of their mutual exclusivity. Of course, politics is a matter

of context; the head of Marx symbolizes either the regime or the rebels,

according to whether one is in Havana or Coral Gables — or whether

one is Lotman, Sebeok, or Eco. In addition, here, semiotics might be split

regionally — it is probably not wrong to say that ‘in the United States,

semiotics has retained its formal quality, and has been only slightly af-fected by the postwar Marxism that politicized semiotics in England and

informed Barthes’s Mythologies’ (MacFarquhar 1994: 79).2

Historically, semiotics of this latter kind and structuralism both

emerged in Paris, and at the same time (Eco 2000 [1990]: vii; see ix; Aho-

nen 1993b: 1; Landowski 1984: 70). And the French way of semiotics

links the field very closely to the ’68 movement. That does not mean that

anything in semiotics is Marxist at all, but it slid into an epater le bour-

geois framework following Barthes with his ‘essential enemy (the bour-geois norm)’ (2000 [1957]: 9; see Lemert 1993: 31; cf. still Ahonen 1987:

152–154), leaving open to doubt how bourgeois (if, then, this is a bad

thing at all, and if almost all semiotic thinkers are not heavily bourgeois

themselves) such an attitude is in the end.3

80 W. Drechsler

Semiotics and related disciplines have continued to attract radical spirits, includ-

ing a minority of Marxists who have relinquished their doctrine but preserved

some of their cherished memories of their revolutionary days through the ultra-

radical nature of such orientations as ‘post-structuralism’ and the likes. (Ahonen

1993b: 5)

Semiotics’ link with structuralism and post-structuralism (Ahonen 1993b:3) guarantees its existence within the penumbra of postmodernism, al-

though even a friendly definition of postmodernism shows that this

cannot be a hospitable environment for semiotics, which is about commu-

nication and perception but in itself scientistic and built on a 1900s view

of ‘reality’ (which is not ‘wrong,’ it’s just not postmodern). Postmodern-

ism, it should be mentioned, likewise has a reactionary, conservative po-

tential, more extremely apparent today but less so a decade or two ago. If

nothing matters and if there are no values, then economics does not mat-ter either — the ultimate anti-Marxism, but also anti-development think-

ing; a kind of reverse Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that seems to imply that

if we can change the use of words, reality will follow. (Sometimes this is

the case; for economic matters of genuine concern, it surely falls far too

short.) Therefore, postmodernism, such as it was, and actually all Critical

Theory, strongly enforced the powers that be in that it removed all possi-

bilities to challenge them (cf. Drechsler 1997: 329–331).

But of course, as long as one stays in academe, this does not matter;attitude does. The ‘semiotician that went to the market’ (MacFarquhar

1994) has long been back, i.e., semiotics is probably one of the most

purely academic, indeed self-focused academic disciplines today. This

means that the result of semiotic research does not have to be policy-

relevant and a ‘reality check’ is missing even more. The act of analysis in

semiotics is by and large su‰cient, nothing follows or has to follow; this

means that certain questions do not even pose themselves, and nothing

becomes relevant except the approval of one’s peers.

9. Political science as a discipline

So, how does political science as the ‘host’ discipline for political semiot-

ics look? First of all, within political science, it is fair to say that most

members of the scientific community cannot even say what semiotics is,and those who can, are not really familiar with it. It is not a sub-discipline

at all, and the main professional organizations, APSA (American Politi-

cal Science Association), IPSA (International Political Science Associa-

tion), etc., do not have sub-sections on semiotics.


Political science overall is heavily scientistic today, so there would

potentially be no formal problem with semiotics’ scientism; to the con-

trary. But just a glance at the mainstream handbooks about the ‘state of

the discipline’ (see Goodin and Klingemann 1998 [1996], useful critique

by Schmitter 2002; and Katznelson and Milner 2002) shows both the

scientistic, pseudo-empirical bent and the virtual freedom of anythingsemiotic. Perhaps it is the vagueness of the concept, and the abundance

of other possibilities to analyze speech, communication, etc., that is hin-

dering the development of a serious sub-field of political semiotics.

Because, for example, glottocentricity is particularly strong in political

science, the ‘tradition of political science accentuates politics written

down in texts’ (Ahonen 1991a: 225). This has been very nicely analyzed

by Ahonen (1991b: 264–266).

The expansion of the concepts of ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ to politics with a nonverbal

content form is artificial, and there are established methods and techniques for the

analysis of discourse and texts and few to tackle nonverbal politics. The analysis

of the generation of meaning in politics remains, however, deficient if the research

neglects the nonverbal substance as a bearer of politics, although at the present

stage of ignorance the most that can be made are suggestions . . . it remains di‰-

cult to tackle these political, politicized and politicizing substances systematically

from the point of view of the generation of meanings, because the substances are

so numerous and mutually related in such a complicated manner. (Ahonen 1991b:

264, 265)

‘The concentration on the verbal level . . . has led to a neglect of such non-

verbal dimensions as the visual and the auditive aspects of structures, pro-

cesses and their e¤ects’ (Ahonen 1987: 152). So, what we have here is a

shared epistemology that has nonetheless not led to a fusion of researchprograms within an ‘inter-disciplinary’ sub-field.

10. The output of political semiotics

At this point, one should take a look at what can be properly termed po-

litical semiotics, i.e., the respective works as they exist today (category 2).

There are not many of them — as Ahonen already said, ‘We have Peirce,

Saussure, Cassirer . . . Sebeok . . . Lotman and Eco, for instance, but wehave too few studies of politics and related topics inspired by only one of

these authors at a time let alone by only one of the many works of each

author’ (1993b: 23). What is interesting as well, once again, is that very

little that can be styled political semiotics does make direct reference

82 W. Drechsler

to ‘classic’ semiotic discourse (i.e., Saussure / Peirce or Eco / Lotman /

Sebeok); references to Barthes and Foucault, of course, much less Levi-

Strauss and Greimas, are common.

Apart from the French sociological and anthropological tradition,

there are two main clusters of political semiotics: an early American one,

with a tendency towards symbolics, and a more recent Scandinavian one,with a tendency towards linguistic analysis. As regards the former, there

have been plenty of post-War (American) political science studies of sym-

bols and politics, from the works by Harold Laswell (an excellent survey

in Dittmer 1997: 559) via Thurman Arnold (1935) to Murray Edelman’s

work (1964, 1971, 1977). All are symbolical, none is semiotic, as there

is little attention to structure and context — but especially in Laswell

(1990 [1931]; Laswell and Leites 1949) we already find the crucial focus

on ‘governing with signs.’In some sense, the landmark of this kind of political semiotics is Lowell

Dittmer’s 1977 essay, which aims at a synthesized form of political cul-

ture and in order to do so, utilizes semiotics, seeing political symbolism

as the core of political culture specifically (1977: 557, 558, 562, 582). Low-

ell sees symbols — quite correctly — as not entirely dependent on context

(1977: 557), which however places him just out of the semiotic main-

stream. He, too, shuns definition — here of ‘symbol’ (1977: 558). Still,

even though there was little impact, a model of political culture based onsemiotics, based on much Barthes and Levi-Strauss, has been developed

(1977: 566–581).

The most important contribution to political semiotics of this kind

in recent years has probably been the combination of some semiotics,

identity formation, and classic political science by Ulf Hedetoft, largely

based on his massive, cumulative Danish PhD thesis, ‘Signs of nations

— Studies in the political semiotics of self and other in contemporary

European nationalism’ (1995). The Hedetoft approach has become some-what paradigmatic (see Hedetoft 1998; also Marks, Wilson, and Ray

2002). Mainstream in focus and not overly concerned with semiotic

theory, Hedetoft’s thesis — or better, chapters 1–4 (1995: 121–148),

based on a Danish essay from 1991 — provides a framework and is,

unusually for a thesis, quite even-handed and balanced regarding several

of the theoretical issues. It semiotically connects political symbolism in

the fields of identity, symbols, and culture (1995: 121) and assesses the

specific nature of symbols in a comprehensive manner (1995: 121–122).Semi-independence, long use, shifting definability, creation versus reality,

and context-dependency (1995: 122–124) are well-recognized and the

semiotics-specific focus on the system (1995: 122) is well done. Case

studies (such as the ‘wrong sign’ of the European passport [1995: 125–


127] and the excellent treaty on singing national songs [1995: 140–142])

are equally good. Hedetoft’s main focus is not semiotics, but rather the

EU; that the chapter also serves as a theory paradigm seems almost

unintentional. The result, in any case, is perhaps the best analysis of EU

symbolism.

What is problematic is Hedetoft’s insistence on political symbols — notsymbols of politics, as he defines it (1995: 142) — as loci of resistance

against the government and more of the people; the use of symbolism by

the government he sees as an aberration and cites ‘fascism’ as an excep-

tion: ‘political symbols do not primarily organize emotions for the ‘‘su-

perstructure’’ of politics and state (fascism is here an exception) — often,

indeed, it rallies loyalties against the current encumbents of power for a

variety of reasons’ (1995: 143). This is just performatively stated, not jus-

tified; it is also plain wrong, not only if we look at other totalitarian (Rus-sian, in various forms) and populist regimes. Perhaps it shows what has

been called ‘the view from the Stockholm suburbs’, i.e., a generally Scan-

dinavian propensity to see the conflict-free situation of a basically happy,

peaceful, just, and wealthy democracy as ‘normalcy’ — and here, we may

not only think of Foucault, but also of Carl Schmitt (1991 [1932]), let

alone remember the state of state and politics on earth during all of his-

tory and even during the times we live in.4

How important the non-verbal in politics is can be seen from MarthaDavis’ brilliant analysis, ‘Presidential body politics: Movement analysis

of debates and press conferences’ (1995). And, indeed, ‘It would seem un-

necessary to make a case for the importance of the subject’ (1995: 207).

Highly interesting here is the di¤erence between intentional and uninten-

tional messages, and the possibility of having both, and di¤erent levels of

interpretation (in the end a hermeneutic aspect, less a semiotic one strictly

speaking).5 However, had Davis’ essay not appeared in the present jour-

nal, one would think the essay to be political psychology; there is no se-miotic theory whatsoever in it. Still, the importance of such research, and

a fortiori of well-done research like that, becomes very apparent.

Penultimately, there are some other very good single examples of

micro-studies in the semiotic context — for instance of an explicitly sym-

bolical campaign, the Singaporean courtesy campaign — which integrate

linguistic and visual components (Lazar 2003 — though the essay ‘un-

masks’ something that is already explicit). In this study, the softness of

symbolic interaction is emphasized, but Foucault’s criticism of this is re-membered (2003: 219–220). There is Ahonen’s own political-semiotical

analysis of photography (1991a), exercised through several images of

Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, a very Barthesian example of how

things could be done.

84 W. Drechsler

Other examples are various studies of national symbolics (such as Ar-

vidsson and Blomqvist 1987). Most of them tend not to be semiotic, but

some are, and what perhaps amounts to the most successful example of

this kind of political semiotics, because there is some — if very little —

interaction and a critical debate within the present journal, is ‘vexillol-

ogy,’ the study of — mostly national — flags. A basic essay by SashaWeitman (1973) was followed by a critique (Pasch 1975) and a synthesiz-

ing case study of the Third Reich flag (Hill 1982), all interesting and of

particular quality. It is the latter combination that is particularly valid:

Perhaps we cannot be convinced that white is the universal color of purity and

hope or that a star is an emblem of aggression, but if the nation-state that prints

tourist brochures codes these items in such a way, it would seem well to explore

the patterns in these arbitrary assignments as Weitman has done, while subse-

quently doing some historical digging in Pasch’s meticulous manner so as not to

be trapped into naıve conclusions. The most exciting aspect of these two articles is

their introduction of semiotics into the world political scene. (Hill 1982: 135)

Unfortunately, the follow-up to this kind of research seems to be meager.

11. The is and the ought

So, on the one hand, even the scientistic approach of semiotics does not

seem to have captured political science’s attention. On the other hand,

structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism have almost faded

away; hence the decided loss of fashionability (and clearly, this is the

most important criterion for academic success) of the discipline, area, or

field. But what there is is in itself viable: a biotope, an ecological niche

maybe, but it does exist. There is still a very considerable output of semi-otic and semi-semiotic literature. And as long as there are some academic

appointments, journals, book series, conferences, etc., a field can flourish,

but it becomes dependent on that niche. I would say that political semiot-

ics is now basically functioning within this context, yet it does not have a

larger appeal beyond it. It is very likely that there will always be a su‰-

cient number of semiotics venues, and some milder political science ones,

within which such research can flourish — and there are promising and

even good examples for this type of work, from Hedetoft’s e¤orts viabody language analysis to vexillogy.

And if, as Odo Marquard says, ‘science is what recognized scientists

recognize as science’ (1985: 199), then there is no problem. Thus, semiot-

ics does not really need to rethink its direction, because everything is just


fine. Yet, there are reasons why it may be said to be a pity that semiotics

has so oriented itself (i.e., only so) and that political semiotics looks the

way it does — if, then, this analysis is correct.

If semiotics is just a kind of linguistics — even claiming universal para-

digmaticity but, in the end, not delivering — then it is not particularly in-

teresting, and all the more so as far as political semiotics is concerned.The reason is that there are many ways, methods, and disciplines dealing

with linguistic aspects, and many of them may be much more interesting

and important, and fashionable, for political science — from Chomsky

via hermeneutics to the reemerged study of political rhetoric — than

semiotics is these days. What is always interesting is what is not done

otherwise. And linguistic, language, and discourse analysis models are a

dime a dozen. If we agree with the proposition that semiotics covers all

communication, then semiotics pertaining to language is prima facie theleast and not the most interesting one for political semiotics, because too

many other schools and tools can cover that area already.

Second, the potential for political science and related fields, indeed for

any political analysis, is absolutely immense, as our world, by and large,

is moving strongly from verbal to visual interaction — held up only by e-

mail, chat, and SMS. As Hedetoft rightly concedes, ‘‘the life of the citizen

in modern nation-states is pervasively imaginary, su¤used with images on

all levels, to the extent that image and reality interweave and sometimesfuse: ‘virtual reality’ (1995: 143; cf. Ahonen 1987: 152). As has been said,

the current youth generation (born between 1979 and 1990) is basically

one whose ‘perception of reality is aesthetic’ and which ‘communicates

via symbols, not via concepts, discourses, or programs’ — one of the for-

tes of Pope John Paul II, who ‘emphasized symbolicism’ and ‘could make

himself understood via symbols, even when his voice had become almost

inaudible.’1 We can observe how strongly the truly uphill battles of the

most recent democratic revolutions — in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, orKyrgyzstan — depended on images to hold the groups together and sus-

tain the protest.6 So, as important as language and its analysis were, are

and will remain, it is really vital to cover the area — which semiotics, es-

pecially in its form of political semiotics, decidedly has the potential to do

but, by and large and overall, does not.

12. Neglected options

In my opinion, three figures and their approaches are excellent examples

of what specifically political semiotics, i.e., category 3, could be. Two of

the most interesting classics of semiotics, from the era between Saussure /

86 W. Drechsler

Peirce and Eco / Lotman / Sebeok, are also among the most interesting

ones for political semiotics. They are also interesting because neither of

them would have defined himself as a semiotician, and because the two

between them may be said to form the two poles of an ellipse which

covers today’s semiotic attitude: Ernst Cassirer, the humanistic philoso-

pher, and Johann J. v. Uexkull, the theoretical biologist. To this, I wouldadd C. G. Jung’s theory of the Archetypes, because it refocuses on a spe-

cial kind of symbolic interaction that has been comparatively ignored by

semiotics. The task of this segment, obviously, is not to explicate the po-

litical semiotics based on those three men, but rather to hint at the respec-

tive potential.

13. Ernst Cassirer

What makes Ernst Cassirer interesting for political semiotics is that, be-

cause of his specific kind of Neo-Kantianism, we are likely to find a com-

bination of ethical / moral, and that may mean political, and epistemo-

logical and even aesthetical approaches. And, indeed, in his last great

work, the one that is the most semiotic and that has established his repu-tation in the field, An Essay on Man (1944), through Cassirer’s emphasis

on symbolic interaction, he develops the possibility to conceive of uto-

pias, which stand here for a general possibility of further human societal

development, on the basis of semiotics (1944: 60–62). ‘It is characteristic

of all the great ethical philosophers that they do not think in terms of

mere actuality’ (1944: 60). We cannot advance if we do not think in uto-

pias. Cassirer’s work on utopias recognizes very well that they are not

meant to be ‘realized’ (1944: 61; see Drechsler 2005: 636). His primary ex-ample is Plato (Cassirer 1944: 61), whose heuristic utopia, the Politeia, is

indeed a symbolic construct understood in the Cassirer sense (Drechsler

2003: 216–218; 2005: 636). ‘Rousseau’s description of the state of nature

. . . was a symbolic construct designed to portray and to bring into being a

new future for mankind. In the history of civilization the Utopia has al-

ways fulfilled this task’ (Cassirer 1944: 62). As Cassirer points out,

The great mission of the Utopia is to make room for the possible as opposed to a

passive acquiescence in the present actual state of a¤airs. It is symbolic thought

which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability,

the ability constantly to reshape his human universe. (1944: 62)

In other words, if politics is partially about the ought towards which the

is — in public arrangement — has to be moved, then the ought (which is


the utopia) can only be conceived as a product of symbolic thinking and

indeed interaction. Cassirer did not fully develop this thought, but pre-

cisely to follow it carefully, in the context of his work, would be the chal-

lenge to this kind of genuine political semiotics.7

14. C. G. Jung

Perhaps the central message of Eco’s first two novels (1980, 1988), his

best and most semiotic ones, is that existing, ‘accidental’ signs are made

into reality by a form of construction, in which they are ‘hijacked’ by peo-

ple who master them. This is an illustration of his statement that

semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is every-

thing which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This

something does not have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in

which a sign stands in for it. (Eco 1979 [1976]: 6–7)

Considering the semiotic attention to construction, communication, and

decoding, it is surprising that semiotics generally, and political semiotics

certainly — with the exception of Hedetoft and his followers, who how-

ever do not get to the heart of the matter — have often neglected this phe-nomenon, i.e., signs that are not meant and emitted but rather taken in

both senses — taken as signs and taken by someone. In extenso, a further

question that would be most interesting to propose in the political con-

text, one that goes against the grain of semiotics and its structural pro-

pensity, but that clearly adds a key dimension to the entire discourse, is

then to ask whether those signs might indeed mean something in spite of

their not being emitted — i.e., that they truly signify something as such

and per se.Thinking along these lines leads quite directly to Jungian psychology,

especially to the Archetypes. (Not as the only possibility of course, but

this is the most obvious.) It is well-known that Jung was notoriously

imprecise regarding the meaning of Archetypes: the acultural claim to

universality — ‘ubiquitous in space and time’ and ‘a unit in which all in-

dividual souls are identical with each other’ (Jung 1973: 136) — is rather

o¤-putting. One may, however, say that there is no reason to limit the Ar-

chetypes to this understanding. Once we look at Archetypes as generallyvalid, but not always and everywhere valid; as culturally conditioned but

not created; then we may get a sense of their importance in the context of

political semiotics. (And, as an aside, because it is also important for

semiotics: any theory becomes stronger if it relinquishes the claim to uni-

88 W. Drechsler

versality, which really is a form of physics envy; if something in the hu-

man realm is just true more often than not, that is quite su‰cient.)

Jung himself, as is well known, used the Archetype method to analyze

politics, most famously, or at least in our context most impressively, per-

haps, in his 1936 essay, ‘Wotan,’ an interpretation of emerging Nazism in

Germany (1964 [1936]: see esp. pars. 389–391, 395). Here, the relativiza-tion of the context is particularly obvious: ‘When it is quiescent, one is no

more aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy’ (1964

[1936]: par. 391).

It was not in Wotan’s nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He simply

disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained invisible for more

than a thousand years, working anonymously and indirectly. Archetypes are like

riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at

any time. (Jung 1964 [1936]: par. 395)

There have been many Jungian investigations of politics or political fields,

such as in organization theory, and focusing on its usability (see, e.g., Ja-cobson 1993). But it seems that no connection has been made to (politi-

cal) semiotics. It is obvious, however, that the archetypal quality of sym-

bols and the system they form will be the strongest ways to communicate

politically if mastered; paired with the notion of charisma, they may re-

sult in the most important political qualities for the take-over of any

unit, because if a politician can access the archetypes, through the person

or actively, then he or she should indeed be able to unleash a powerful

potential.

15. Johann J. v. Uexkull

Finally, we arrive at Johann Jakob v. Uexkull, certainly one of the re-cently most prominent representatives of semiotics and generally ac-

claimed as the father of the ever-expanding field of biosemiotics, placed

into this position largely by Sebeok. He may be the one bridge towards

the sciences — and still away from linguistics — for semiotics; he may

be the one rescue from ‘physics envy’ that even establishes its own biol-

ogy. And Uexkull has actually produced works in all four categories.

However, this also presents some serious problems — though most of

them have not yet become apparent — because within the politically-correct academic established post-Left, there are certain taboos that can-

not be broken or, if they can be broken, are so only with great di‰culty.

It seems (this has not been researched and discussed well enough either in

Uexkull or in semiotics circles) that Uexkull breaks them.


Uexkull’s theoretical use for political semiotics is perhaps best realized

in category 4, in the most ‘neutral’ of the Uexkull books, his magnifi-

cent autobiography, Niegeschaute Welten (1936). Here, the famous half-

spheres of Umwelt (politically 1933 [1920]: 39–43), with their much-

investigated parallelism to Lotman’s semiosphere (Lotman 2000 [1990]:

129), might be most promising, although attempts to use his more biolog-ical works in the sphere of political semiotics are probably more obvious

for many semioticians (cf. only Mandoki 2004: 97). The question, how-

ever, is whether one should approach Uexkull in any political category,

and ironically, the reason is that Uexkull is the main contender for cate-

gory 3, i.e., for a work that really promulgates a political semiotics in the

sense of political philosophy.

This is his Staatsbiologie (1933 [1920]), read best in parallel with the re-

spective segments in his popular work Biologische Briefe an eine Dame

originally from the same year (1920). Here, Uexkull establishes a highly

original, comprehensive model of the state, based on its economic func-

tions, that arises from his concept of Umwelt and his bio-theoretical views

in an integrated way. (Of course, this is not a textual, but a body meta-

phor, and thus non-semiotic to some; see Randviir 2004: 13.) As a result,

he calls for a monarchy as the only way to organize a state (1933 [1920]:

29–30), and actually one that is not linked to a majority of any sort (1933

[1920]: 36, 67; 1920: 105). Moreover, as with all state biologies, the hu-man person is reduced to qualified animal status, rather than seeing in

the overcoming of that status the specifically human and thus specifically

political. There are iron laws (1920: 104). And if one likens the state to a

body, one almost by necessity will start talking about parasites (1933

[1920]: 71–76).

Closer to contemporary politics (and so category 1), but not entirely,

Uexkull sees the press as a pathology (1933 [1920]: 60–61) and displays

a very aggressive hostility towards the Weimar Republic (1920: 129).Yet, in the Staatsbiologie, there is only one — of course positive — refer-

ence to Hitler (1933 [1920]: 71), and that one seems rather second-

thought. Additionally, this work is, for its time, not anti-semitic at all

(where such statements would be expected, they are completely missing;

1933 [1920]: 73–76); it was also published in an (Army) press that served

partially as almost an ‘inner emigration’ publisher, the Hamburger Ver-

lagsanstalt.

Still, the Staatsbiologie is perhaps as harsh a model of othering as onecould possibly come up with; one that is all the more severe because it is

not about perception but about reality and necessity. It seems that, with

the — in many ways very deserved — renaissance of Uexkull going on,

some serious investigation in this regard is called for. On the other hand,

90 W. Drechsler

many ‘left’ thinkers have been very ready to forgive Heidegger his Nazi

a‰liations because his thought was so helpful for them; the same is true

for Carl Schmitt, whose anti-democratic views were very productive for

the ‘left’ as well. With Heidegger, even arguments that his Nazism was

not incidental and careerist but central to his thought8 have not really

been able to dislocate him from his position of fascination and interest.So, Uexkull might just be interesting enough that he, too, will be ‘for-

given.’ This will be easier because — more like Ernst Junger rather than

Heidegger and also Schmitt — Uexkull was, as it seems, no real Nazi, but

rather a right-wing anti-democrat (cf. Drechsler 2000b: 89–94; Allik and

Drechsler 1999).

Still, this may make easier the adoption of his biological work and even

the Niegeschaute Welten (category 4) for semiotic theory, including polit-

ical semiotics, but it may be doubted whether the specifically political se-miotics of the Staatsbiologie will ever, or at least any time soon, be taken

up, and all the better. And yet, the Staatsbiologie remains, if I see cor-

rectly, the one systematic monograph in specifically political semiotics

that we do have. A bad example, perhaps, but an example — and thus

proof that such a thing is possible — nonetheless.

16. Coda: The dog in the night-time

Thus, whether Cassirer, Jung, and Uexkull are semiotic thinkers whom

one should follow in their specific line of thinking in political semiotics

remains a completely open question. What they demonstrate is that such

genuine political semiotics is, in fact, possible and has been done. On a

more modest yet still vital level, the political is not understood as some-

thing that can only be understood semiotically, but also, so that political

semiotics becomes an also non-glottocentric mode, among others, of in-quiry into the political. This may not be necessary for semiotics, nor for

those who practice political semiotics today. But it is, if not necessary,

then certainly highly desirable for political science, or for anyone con-

cerned with political analysis. Political science as it exists, especially in

its glottocentric fixation — which has a good reason, just as it has in se-

miotics, but which is particularly harmful in this very combination —

needs a systematic, scholarly, theoretically rich and all-encompassing

approach to the non-glottocentric aspects of its field. Political semioticscan accomplish this, as long as semiotics is not too exclusively glottocen-

tric itself.

This is all the more so in the twenty-first century with its visualizing

propensity, but it is true generally. The — arguable — failures of political


scientists to, yes, understand the success of figures such as Ronald Rea-

gan, or, to take a by now more familiar and impressive example, Evita

Peron (with her multi-layeredness from the historical person, the persona

in history in Argentina, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical [Lloyd

Webber 1978], to the latter’s movie version starring Madonna [Parker

1996]), is arguably due to glottocentric analysis which, ironically enough,clouds access to what these two people wanted, stood for, and actually

achieved in terms of genuine policy, and what ‘the people’ found in her.

Evita is also a perfect example of the mastering of the Archetype (con-

sciously, semi-consciously, unconsciously — no matter) as a way to polit-

ical success that is, importantly, not just show but also the fulfillment of

genuine desires.

Scholarship, in its impetus, may take two forms of promoting its find-

ings: to convince everyone that the result is right, or to o¤er a possibleexplanation to those who share the view that there is a problem. As re-

gards political semiotics, it could be claimed that the glottocentricity of

semiotics — if it exists — is actually ‘okay’ or even necessary and inevita-

ble for political semiotics because political science, in spite of all its

attempts at (quasi-) self-mathematization, shares this very feature (cf.

Drechsler 2000a). In addition, all those who do political semiotics today

are, by definition, doing so already, so obviously what they are doing is

right if Marquard is right. And finally, from political science there maycome the claim that all is well and that there are actually no lacunae in

research and understanding due to its glottocentricity — if it exists. But

if one agrees that there is such a deficit as described, and for the reasons

presented, then the argument that a non-glottocentric political semiotics

is potentially the best remedy for it seems, I think, rather credible indeed.

Notes

* I thank Anti Randviir first of all, as it was he who persuaded me to write this essay —

even if he probably did not imagine what shape it would actually take. He also provided

important comments and support throughout the gestation process. Likewise, I would

like to thank Rainer Kattel, Eugenie Samier, and especially Pertti Ahonen, whose work

this continues — if on another level — for their thoughtful and thorough comments,

many of which I incorporated. My research assistant, Benjamin Merkler, could not

have been better, and the work would hardly have been completed in time without

him. I am grateful to Ingbert Edenhofer for his careful reading of the text and many

suggestions for improvement, and to the ETF (Grant 5780) and Tallinn University of

Technology for research support.

1. Mario Kaiser, Ansbert Kneip, and Alexander Smoltzyck, ‘Das Kreuz mit den Deut-

schen,’ Der Spiegel 33, 2005, 136–151.

92 W. Drechsler

2. Epistemologically, what is interesting in our context is the location within science and

scholarship. Ahonen is right in seeing the historical ambiguity of semiotics between sci-

entism and humanistic attitudes, neither doing su‰ciently well to convince the critics. At

one point, semiotics may indeed subjectively have been seen to provide ‘useful weapons

in the struggle both against positivism and Marxism, yet without abandoning a funda-

mentally critical attitude towards culture, society, knowledge, and methods and tech-

niques of knowing and doing’ (Ahonen 1993b: 3; cf. 1991b: 270).

However, from today’s perspective, it is the scientism that strikes one; the search for a

world formula-like explanatory paradigm. Criticism of semiotics as being too soft (Aho-

nen 1993b: 6) is really not heard anymore. Indeed, ‘semioticians . . . have been exposed

to accusations for new kinds of ‘‘scientism’’ ’ (Ahonen 1993b: 8, 22–23) with some rea-

son. Semiotics’ technical aura, its methodological, value-free make-up, all the technical

talk about structures lends itself to that.

The ‘reality connex,’ i.e., the question of whether there is an independent world out-

side of our conceptualization or cognition, does not pose too much of a problem in our

context, because it is elegantly evaded. This has sociological and epistemological rea-

sons. As far as epistemology proper is concerned, the key is Sebeok’s claim that ‘semiot-

ics is not about the ‘‘real’’ world at all, but about complementary or alternative actual

models of it . . . semiotics never reveals what the world is, but circumscribes what we can

know about it; in other words, what a semiotic model depicts is not ‘‘reality’’ as such,

but nature as unveiled by our method of questioning’ (1999 [1994]: 4; see 1997: 291–

292). (Naturally, any perception of the world becomes part of the world — nowhere

more so than in politics.) In Sebeok and others, we then find a focus on studying

‘whether or not reality can exist independently of the signifying codes that human beings

create to represent and think about it’ (Danesi 1999 [1994]: xii). And as Landowski puts

it, ‘the semiotic approach allows us to avoid this metaphysical option: in order to

explain the existence of ‘‘sense,’’ (whatever its content), nothing needs be taken into ac-

count other than the human competence to produce such sense’ (1984: 71, see 72). But if

we look at communication only and not at its object, semiotics of this kind is well-

placed to handle the problem, and if we insist on a reality independent of our perception

of it, we may simply ignore that debate entirely.

3. While semiotics is sometimes credited with displacing the centered white, Europeanized,

heterosexual male (Lemert 1993), by and large, this is still an accurate description of the

average semiotician. Additionally, the Eurocentricity of semiotics becomes particularly

apparent once one realizes that the abundance of ‘non-European’ sign systems (Chinese

and Islamic models come to mind, the latter often Aristotelian in scope, so that there is

even a bridge) has virtually been missing in semiotic discourse until today.

4. In this context, one might also mention a school that focuses on language and linguis-

tics, with a typical attention — derived from various ancestors — on what I would call

‘de-othering,’ i.e., the creation of a framework that complains about a construction of

the ‘other’ and thus tries to relinquish this (e.g., Said 1979). Works of this type are often

counted as political semiotics, although there is extremely little semiotics there, easily

gathered from the list of references. The edited volume by Riggins (1997a) is an excellent

example — this is really critical discourse analysis, concerned with ‘the usefulness of lin-

guistic perspectives and concepts in advancing the study of prejudice and social inequal-

ity in modern multicultural societies’ (Riggins 1997b: 1). But Riggins is not to blame for

the un-semiotic approach; what is wrong is to call this semiotics, which he himself —

and his colleagues in such enterprises — rarely do. Still, there are some excellent exam-

ples on the borderline of heavily textual-linguistic semiotics, such as an essay on other-

ing in Parliamentary speech (Van Dijk 1997) and especially Conklin’s superb study of


the dominance of the legal discourse in legal matters as a power and defining discourse

(1997).

5. As an example, the one televised debate between the candidates for German Chancellor,

Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel (September 4, 2005), is perfect, because while

Merkel clearly won by argument and Schroder annoyed all but his most loyal

supporters by his macho, paternalist, dismissive rhetoric and body language, a surpris-

ing majority of the audience actually thought that he had won — and so, of course, he

had.

6. Renate Flottau et al., ‘Die Revolutions-GmbH,’ Der Spiegel 46, 2005, 178–199.

7. One might add here another important point that Cassirer can bring to political semiot-

ics, and that is his brilliant, originally Kantian point in which he falsifies the scientistic

view that ‘reality is the same as determinedness,’ and that ‘determinedness only exists in

those sciences which determine events or things in space and time’ (Kautz 1990: 209; see

Cassirer 1939: 59). First, as Cassirer demonstrates in his critique of the ‘first emotivist’

Axel Hagerstrom — in the very useful paraphrase by Timothy Kautz — ‘determined-

ness is the result of an interaction, or a sum of interactions, which come into existence,

or are kept, in a matrix of judgment. ‘‘Determinedness’’ thus is precisely not a simple

aggregate or a simple, given intuition but rather the result of (symbolic) negotiations

[Vermittlungen]’ (Kautz 1990: 213). And ‘determinedness never derives solely from the

‘‘things’’ in space and time, just because they are in space and time: an apparent objec-

tivity in the imagined placement of every thing in a space-time system of coordinates is

not a su‰cient description of the world because it is precisely the kind of relation that

remains undetermined’ (1990: 214). In other (simplifying) words, things are not deter-

mined in time and space, but at the very least, someone must determine them there —

and, the world being what it is, tell at least some other person that this is so. (Note taken

from Drechsler 2000a: 248–249.)

8. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Der Holzweggenosse. Volkisch und ragend: Heideggers Nahe

zum Nationalsozialismus,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 31, 2005.

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Wolfgang Drechsler (b. 1963) is a Professor and Chair of Governance at Tallinn University

of Technology 3drechsler@sta¤.ttu.ee4. His research interests include public management,

innovation, and political philosophy. His publications include Good and Bad Government

(2001); Friedrich Nietzsche: Economy and Society (co-edited with J. G. Backhaus, 2006);

and ‘The Contrade, the Palio and the Ben Comune: Lessons from Siena’ (2006).


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