Semiotics of modalities of the present-day conspirological myth in discourses of marginal orthodoxy

• Main Author: Alexander Prilutskii
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: St. Tikhon's Orthodox University 2019-12-01
• Series: Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия
• Subjects: семиотика религии; модальности; конспирология; эсхатология; маргинальная религиозность; семиотический дрейф; квазирациональность
• Online Access: http://periodical.pstgu.ru/ru/pdf/article/6864

This article studies the modal structures of the present-day conspirological mythology which is popular across the followers of marginal Orthodox subcultures of the rightist-monarchist type. The object of the study is elements of the relevant discourse that possess a modal sense. The sources of the study are original texts of varying genres, pseudo-hagiographic, pseudo-prophetic, those rendering utterances of various spiritual leaders, etc. Methods of structural and semiotic analysis of religious texts make up the methodology of the study. In the initial section, the article analyses the semiotic specifi city of the modern conspirological myth and substantiates the claim that the elemental components of the modern conspirological eschatology have a mythological character. The article provides grounds for understanding the conspirological myth as an integrated system of mythological narratives which interpret socio-historical processes and phenomena as a result of determined action of powerful forces that carefully conceal their existence and any relationship with these phenomena and processes. Conspirological narratives shape the space of quasi-rationality, in which complicated cause-eff ect links are being founded by predetermined conspirological basic ideas that cannot be verifi ed. After this, the article examines the semiotic function of the prophetic modality, which is related to processes of semitic drift and allows one to interpret metaphors as symbols, and vice versa. The semiotic drift, typical of religious semiosis overall, plays a special role in the discourses of the conspirological myth, making it possible to implement hermeneutic tools of the apology of the followers: initially unclear semiotic status of the concepts allows one to interpret them as “poetic metaphors” when necessary. Analysis of aletheian modality being developed by the utterances that belong to conspirological narratives of the marginal religiosity allows one to draw the conclusion that in the result of unfolding semitic structures of mythological contraceptions a tranfi guration of problematicised utterances into assertoristic ones is taking place: “if something fi lthy may happen, it has already happened and is being successfully concealed”. Deontic modality of the elements of the conspirological myth is primarily realised in utterances, the pragmatics of which may be worded as “uniting for struggle”. The fi nal section of this study makes a conclusion about “conspirological polarity”.