Turtles all the way down!

Introduction uses a number of concepts that will be elucidated throughout the chapters in order to exhibit the book’s full architecture. If you prefer a soft beginning, please skip the introduction and start with the first chapter entitled Politicization where the conceptual network is built from ground-up. Alternatively, the appendix, How to read this book, is also a possible entry point through which students and seasoned socio-political theorist can situate the book for their purposes.

In this work, we will explore how politics play a foundational role in the creation of spacetime of social relations and conversely, how specific social conditions shape political possibilities. Political structures and social relations presuppose one another. Historical unfolding of social struggles bring forth new political technologies, and in return, material environments and technologies set ever-evolving parameters of the social relations. The idea of grounding of political sociology within this network of interdependencies constitutes the concept behind the cover image of a turtle walking on top of another turtle.

Politics is grounded on social relations, but political action seeks to transform the very grounds upon which it operates. Conversely, social life is conditioned by political determinations such as ideals, laws, and instruments of violence. Yet, groups find themselves under-represented in political bodies; they want more voice and more power.

Both of these reciprocally determining dimensions—politics and social conditions—are also subject to dynamics of time. Political communities are almost universally defined in terms of human populations. Twenty-first century technological advances—such as normalization of generative artificial intelligence—challenges the foundational definition of politics as the expression of a set of political wills forged through processes of human intersubjectivity. While human history is primarily understood as being driven by politics, it also moves according to nonhuman temporality. Crossing the typical boundaries of political cartographies, digital networks bring forward new socio-political connections, new economical practices and new aesthetic possibilities as the very parameters of space and time are subject to unprecedented change.

To tackle these challenging empirical and theoretical problems, we will start by introducing basic concepts of political sociological analysis and slowly make way into more complex topics. Throughout the chapters, exercises will accompany the exposition of ideas.

In Part I, with the idea of politicization, we will look at politics as a process instead of seeing it as a framework that’s given once and for all societal conditions. By describing the relation between social institutions and political power, politicization will be grasped as a contingent, transformative possibility. Applying the lessons of this political sociological perspective to the discipline itself, we will explore limits to the applicability of founding categories of classical political sociology.

Part II will lay out major pillars of political analysis. How did the sociology emerged as in response to modernist individualism? What are the politics of this category? What’s the difference between methodological individualism and an attention to the historical significance of certain individuals?

After examining the case of the ‘individual’ we will explore the ways in which the discipline emerged out of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works. Political sociology is interdisciplinary because the researchers combine the methods and subject-matters of different disciplines. It is transdisciplinary because these different types of study challenge each other’s assumptions, methods, and results. New fields emerge out of these interactions. Major reference points for political sociology in political philosophy, political economy and political/cultural anthropology will be discussed with this academic problematic in mind. Through this exploration, the politics of knowledge will be introduced.

We will then turn to the core political entity of political sociology, namely, the state—exploring various ways to understand it as an apparatus of knowledge, violence and governance that is justified by contested claims to legitimacy. Moving from the state to its ground, i.e., territoriality, we will problematize political space-time. Socially, how does research exhibit a bias in favor of a sedentary mode of living and how does this centering affect political thinking? What can the nomads teach us about political phenomena such as warfare and the development of new technological abilities?

Part III will discuss different dimensions of power, namely, its psychology, technologies, secrecy, political mobilizations, and violence. How did theories of power complicate the state-centric approaches? How do subjectivity and networks enter into analysis through studies of relations of power in a variety domains including media, medicine, and education? As political technologies bring forward new actionable surfaces such as population, there is a risk of eclipsing the fundamental role played by invisibility in politics. Synthesizing governmental and psychoanalytic perspectives, we will explore a number of questions on the historical nature of relations of power.

We will then move from a sense of populations dominated by the state towards creative social movements, acts of protest, and practices of resistance. How does each of these forms of organization express a different political situation? How do different types of social movements with different action repertoires, participants and resources engage with one another, state and culture at large?

In the last section of this part, we will deconstruct a central problematic of political sociology, namely, violence. Violence as the central instrument of political regimes is also that which, in theory, they exclude from political space. Authorization of what counts as legitimate political action is itself a political question (Turtles all the way down!). In drawing the limits to political participation —limits defining the parameters of who can vote, what languages and mediums are permitted/encouraged, how one travels in space, what gets remembered and who and how one gets to plan the future, and so on—the distinction between violence and non-violence becomes problematic. We will reveal dilemmas of over-use of physical language in our understanding of political power which is imported from the mathematical concept of force. What discursive, aesthetic and meta-physical perspectives are required to limit the physical conception of politics so that it can be best situated and understood?

In part IV, we will apply some of these discussion to develop a political sociology of the Covid-19 pandemic. Intensifying the theme of processuality of politics, we will look at how at particular conjecture in history where algorithmic flows took over the construction of political time from earlier media, a public health threat and its potential and actual violence formed a transitory political field. Navigating multiple and hardly separable philosophical, methodological and empirical problems by analyzing ethnographic specimens, we will end with some notes on the affectivity of mourning in digital networks.