Cultural semiotics as the foundation of political semiotics

ABSTRACT Our paper relies on the cultural semiotics of Lotman which we bring to bear on political theory in order to develop a methodological framework that we have referred to as “political semiotics” in our previous work during the past decade. In our first section, we synthesize the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) of political analysis and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics. In the next section, we move further to putting forth a concrete methodological framework for analyzing social/political reality by relating theories of power, governance, and democracy to the Jakobsonian model of communication. We call this method “political form analysis”. The guiding idea of the latter is that it is not the content (i. e. substance) of communication, but rather the form (hierarchical relations of the aspects of communication) is the crucial focus of political analysis. In the final section, we illustrate our approach by explaining the constitution of the COVID-19 crisis and their governance in Taiwan. The country has had enormous success in containing the crisis during its first waves, but has also been surprisingly unsuccessful in the third phase (starting in the spring of 2021).