The Constitution of Fear and the Performance of Crisis: The Dialectical Mimetic Semiotics of the Constitutional State and the Signification of Preambular and Extraconstitutional Texts

Abstract

Constitutions are studied as rational expressions of political calculus aligned in time, space, and place. But constitutional emergence from the womb of conflict are born in emotion-anger, vindication, joy, and faith in a shared future; and they never stray far There is a semiotics of constitutional emotion; and a connection between the semiotics of constitutive emotion and constitutional text-as norm and form. It is the state and profundity of that emotion, perhaps more than the calculus of rational governance, that propels a people to statehood, and statehood to take its particular form. The state of emotion must be maintained, honored, and performed, if it is to carry the state forward from the moment of its emergence, through the long period of time when the founding generation, and their emotional imaginaries are long dead, and the context in which that emotion was felt and understood become incomprehensible outside of its time. It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalize and direct their own collective political emotion. The focus will be on the way that emotive context-a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; and a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. To those ends the essay first looks to a powerful instance of emotive semiotics, the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), and its reflection in the subtextual mimetic dialectics of threat and crisis and resolution in the U.S. federal Constitution (1789). It then considers its value as a template for the constitutionalization of separation in the 21st century through the lens of the preambular texts of the Chinese (1982) and Cuban (2019) constitutions. It then considers its transnationalization in the context of the Kosovo Declaration of Independence (2008). Both express anger driven clusters of emotion with constitutive effect but from very different starting and ending points. For the United States, the traditional form of popular solidarity and independence-grounded in fear, crisis and its resolution-and originating in and through popular action (even if elite directed). For Kosovo, the emerging form (at least for subaltern states)-also grounded in fear, crisis and resolution, but enveloped in a network of expectation and approval from more power and transnational actors. Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. American Constitutional Convulsions in the Search for the Structures of a More Perfect Union. 3. The Marxist-Leninist Variations: A Glimpse at China and Cuba and Foreign Corruption. 4. From the State to the Techno-Bureaucratization of Dialectics of Fear and Crisis: A Glimpse at Kosovo. 5. From Template to the Mimetic Constitutionalization of Fear/Crisis. 6. Conclusion.