№ 3 - 2014
Ilyin M.V.
“Flaky Pastry” of Politics: Orders, Regimes and Practices

Saussurean notions of langue and parole provide social scientists with an analytical distinction of online and offline aspects of social phenomena. It is agency that links both aspects together or rather converts one into another and back. It is human agency that translates or encodes institutional norms into processes of various temporal and spatial scales. Respectively it decodes processes or extracts institutional norms from them. Analysis of present and historical usage of the words institutio, institutum, institution and the like shows that there is a range of homonymous terms that conceptualize different phenomena. They are offline norms, their on line applications and products of the applications, organizations that serve as agency of both encoding and decoding norms etc. Interaction of on line, offline and agency institutions results in an ongoing saturation and purification of institutions. This in turn allows to distinguish thick and thin as well as formal and informal institutions. Simultaneously all those varieties of institutions are shaped into various temporal and spatial scales. This produces a motley of overlapping and mutually inclusive entities. All together they could be best presented by an image of flaky pastry of politics. The article further presents a sequence of institutional scales, namely evolutionary orders, historical regimes and everyday practices packed into each other. Alternative ways of conceptualizing them as material objects, mechanisms, organisms, species, life forms and ecosystems are discusses in the article.