3 - The Revolutionary Symbol Has No Power: A Semiotic Reading of Hybridity

Summary

It is often argued that symbols have ‘power’ (cf. Wydra, 2012) in revolutionary actorship. Such claims are questionable and can be considered naive for several theoretical and methodological reasons: they understand the specific notion of the conventional ‘symbol’ as a general concept for all types of representation (that is, a symbol here means the general conception of ‘sign’; cf. Bellucci, 2021); they understand ‘symbol’ quasi-realistically as something parasitic on the real (that is, as a ‘mere symbol’ that stands in opposition to the ‘real’); or, conversely, they understand the symbol idealistically as something truly real. All perspectives are deeply flawed from a semiotic point of view since they perform these ontological cuts not to describe or understand the meaning-making processes better but to reduce and reify them (cf. Wight, 2006, p. 2). This searing semiotic naivety continues when one starts to talk about revolutionary symbols as also having some ‘iconic’ power or being symptoms (or indices) of something else. The aim of this chapter, then, is to attempt to explain some of the foundations of a semiotic theory suitable for thinking about hybrid revolutionaries. The term ‘hybrid’ comes from biology but, as is obvious, the concept itself has expanded its semantic scope:

Hybridism, after its metaphorical cultivation, presumes the existence of at least two initially separate and essentially different entities of which at least one can (but does not necessarily have to) be a (biological) agent. These entities, by intersecting with one another, acquire a novel joint-identity, not directly derivable from the characteristic of either party. The emergence of ‘hybrid’ marks the birth of a new quality that is not reducible to its initial components. (Mäekivi and Magnus, 2020)

The chapter offers a theoretical reflection on hybrid revolutionaries as semiotic entities or, better stated, semiotic processes. The reason for adopting this perspective is that hybrid revolutionaries are, by definition, communicative processes and associated with meaning formation. However, what exactly is meant by ‘communication’ and ‘meaning-making’? First, the communicative entity is a mixture of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic layers – that is, semiotic regularities. Agencies of hybrid revolutionaries are semiotic processes since they are relational.