Turtles all the way down!

In this work, we will explore foundational themes of political sociology. Thus, our cover image of a tortoise walking on top another tortoise. This introduction already uses a number of concepts that will be elucidated throughout the chapters. If you prefer a soft beginning, please skip the introduction and start with the first chapter entitled politicization.

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

Both of these dimensions are also subject to dynamics of time. Political communities are almost universally defined in terms of human populations. 21st century technological advances such as normalization of generative artificial intelligence challenges the foundational definition of ground of politics as expression of a set of political will based on human subjectivity. History moves also by nonhuman temporality. Crossing typical boundaries of political cartographies, digital networks bring forward new socio-political connections, new economical practices and new aesthetic possibilities as 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 out 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 at 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 defined as a contingent transformative possibility. Applying the lessons of this political sociological perspective to the discipline itself we will explore ways of limiting 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 a response to modernist individualism? What is the politics of this category? What’s the difference between methodological individualism and an attention to historical significance of certain individuals?

After the case of “individual” we will look at how 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, politics of knowledge will be introduced.

We will then move ways of understanding the core political entity of political sociology, namely state, as an apparatus of knowledge, violence and governance justified by contested claims to legitimacy. Moving from State to its ground territoriality, we will problematize political spacetime. Socially, how does research has bias towards 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 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 complicated 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, 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 population dominated by 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 is its central instrument and the thing political regimes, in theory, exclude from political space. Authorization of what counts as legitimate political action itself is a political question (turtles all the way down!). In the drawing 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—violence and non-violence becomes problematic. We will reveal dilemmas of over-use of physical language in our understanding of political power from which mathematical concept of force is imported. What discursive, aesthetic and meta-physical perspectives are required to limit physical conception of politics so that it can best be situated and understood?

In part IV, we will apply some of these discussion to develop a political sociology of 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 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 affectivity of mourning in digital networks.