Larry Catá Backer, “Legal Semiotics, Globalization, and Governance,” in (Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek (editors)) Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Cheltenham, Eng., Edward Elgar, 2023) 61-85. Access submission draft here
Abstract: When the leaders of the United States and of the Peoples Republic of China refer to human rights, they invoke entirely different conceptions. The only thing in common is the use of the term itself. they invoke entirely different conceptions. Trouble follows incoherence and the normative gaps that this incoherence produces. The difference in meaning drives contests over the meaning of legitimate governance. These consequences affect not just governance, through law, but also the law and governance of the relation among collectives—subsumed under another term, globalization. This contribution suggests the power of semiotics to understand, analyze, and perhaps engage with both the constitution of meaning from which these collectives build and understand themselves, but also to understand the power of law and governance to organize human activity at the most granular level. The contribution starts with a consideration of the semiosis of the fundamental analytical terms: law, globalization, and governance, as a set of aligned but not integrated social-semiotic sub-systems. It then draws on this examination to re-cast the project of human rights legalities as a semiotic contestation—a system of interpenetration centered in law but structurally coupled with globalization and governance. This is undertaken by examining the difference between making meaning within systems (semiotic interiorization), and making meaning of systems (semiotic exteriorization). The role of nihilism as a legal construct (the principle for or against which legalities are deployed) emergence of contested semiotic structures ends the examination. Semiotics provides a basis for navigating what appears to be incoherence built into the simultaneous infusion of multiple meanings and key terms of contemporary legal and institutional life.