Hortus Semioticus welcomes the newest postdoc to the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Ilana Hartikainen. To celebrate we asked Ilana to introduce herself, and you can find her introduction below!
Let me get this out of the way: I just started a postdoc at the Department of Semiotics, and I am not a semiotician.
Are you still reading? Brilliant! I’m Ilana (Lani) Hartikainen, and I did my PhD at the far qualitative end of political science at the University of Helsinki before moving to Tartu. My work so far has been based in Laclaudian discourse theory, and my dissertation research looked at the relationship of populism and democracy through the lens of collective memory. According to those who follow Ernesto Laclau’s approach to populism, populism is not an ideology, but a form of doing politics – a “mode of articulation”, as he put it (Laclau, 2005, p. 34). In this theoretical tradition, populism is an inherent part of democracy rather than a threat to it; I argued that populist movements can pose a threat to democratic systems, if the discursive repertoire, or, more simply, ideological content articulated in this populist form is anti-democratic.
The natural question, then, is what I mean by “anti-democratic”. I’m not interested in the institutions or systems that a democratic government runs on, but rather in its discursive backing, and specifically in the collective memories that underlie it. In my dissertation, I argued that we could approach democracy as a hegemonic interpretation of the past that favorably interprets that figures and events that led up to the founding of a democratic state, but as the focus there was populism, I didn’t adequately theorize this argument. Now, the goal of my postdoc is to do the theoretical heavy lifting to conceptualize democracy this way, as a hegemonic memory culture or narrative, and to propose this as a new way to see the problem that political scientists have been tying themselves in knots over: democratic backsliding.
I’ll bring this down to earth with an example that comes up frequently in my research, which has so far mostly been empirically based on Czech politics. In the hegemonic Czech interpretation of the past, former president and jailed dissident Václav Havel is a hero, who bravely fought the communist regime for the sake of Czech democracy. We can see this hegemonic representation in, for example, the fact that the Prague airport is named after him, or in the statues of him dotted across the country. According to right-wing populist leader Tomio Okamura, however, Havel isn’t a hero, he’s an idealistic failure of a politician, whose ‘truth and love’ politics did nothing but create the problems that he and his party are trying to solve. I would argue, then, that this contestation over the memory of Havel, a major symbol in the narrative of Czech democracy, represents a contestation not just over memory, but indeed over democracy.
While I’ve deeply enjoyed working within the bounds of Laclaudian discourse theory and I firmly believe in its utility, I wanted to use this postdoctoral period to challenge myself and immerse myself in a new theoretical space. Laclaudian discourse theory and its associated analytical tools are a good hammer, but I want more tools for my toolbox. I had seen presentations by Mari-Liis Madisson (Associate Professor of Semiotics) and Tatjana Menise (former Research Fellow in Media Semiotics, also completed her MA and PhD at the department) at various conferences, and I was really inspired by their work and by the questions that they were using cultural semiotics as an approach to explore. In my view, political science as a discipline has not been particularly open to more humanities-based takes on the topics that it centers, democracy included. This is not great for me, a political scientist by training who is trying to establish myself in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Mari-Liis and Tatjana’s work on essentially political issues through a semiotic lens reminded me again of why I’ve always disliked that polisci exclusivity. By coming to Tartu, I hope to learn how to apply cultural semiotics as a theoretical and analytical approach in my own research, and in doing so, to ask questions that I never would have seen before.
In the end, I’m doing this work because I believe that, while imperfect, while at its best a constant work in progress, democracy is the best system that we’ve come up with to provide rights and freedoms to as many people as possible. We have many ways to measure its strength and to try to protect it, but I think that memory studies as a field can offer even more than it has so far. I hope that cultural semiotics will help me in my effort to build and use those tools.
And to end with a bit of shameless self-promotion – if you’re interested in following my project or looking into the themes of my previous work, I invite you to check out and possibly subscribe to the Substack newsletter that I co-founded with my colleague Zea Szebeni, Peripheral Politics.
References:
Laclau, E. (2005). Populism: What’s in a name? In F. Panizza (Ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (pp. 32–49). Verso.
Photo credit: Ilana Hartikainen