Ott Puumeister

The article deals with the biopolitical underpinnings of the Estonian national identity construction which is analysed by concentrating on public media coverage of (1) the Estonian Population and Housing Census 2011; and (2) the passing of the Registered Partnership Act in 2014. The object of analysis is the discourse – or the manner of speaking – that becomes apparent in the discussion of these cases. It is called the discourse of survival, since the main aim of national identity construction is to ensure the perseverance and preservation of this identity. This enables us to insert political identity construction into a biopolitical framework in which the political subject is understood as a fundamentally finite living being. In conceptualizing biopolitical finitude and the accompanying need of survival as the logic of identity construction, the article suggests the semiotic logic of this type of identity process as auto-communicative solidification of identity that has a presentist temporal structure.

The article proposes a semiotic interpretation of the concept of biopolitics. Instead of a politics that takes “life itself ” as its object and, as a result, separates life as an object from subjects, biopolitics is read as subjectification – a governmental rationality that constructs social ways of being and forms of life, that is, social subjectivities. The article articulates this position on the basis of two concepts: Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt and Michel Foucault’s dispositive. While the former makes it possible to show that the process of life can be conceptualized as subjectification, the latter enables us to argue against an interpretation of biopolitics as a totalized structure of power intervening directly, without semiotic mediation, into “life itself ”.

The article gives a brief overview of the publication of the journal Sign Systems Studies. Throughout its publication period that started in 1964 the journal has been edited by a group of Tartu semioticians; the publisher has been the University of Tartu Press. While the first 25 volumes mainly contained articles in Russian, the next 25 volumes have predominantly been given out in English. We provide a list of thematic issues and a complete bibliography of the articles that have appeared in the journal during its entire publication period from 1964 to 2022.

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-aging medicine is used.