I am delighted to post for comment a short essay the draft of which I have just completed. The essay, Bannermen and Heralds: The Identity of Flags; the Ensigns of Identity, serves as a foreword to a marvelous collection of essays to be published under the superb editorship of Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek and is entitled Flags, Identity, Memory: Critiquing the Public Narrative through Color.
The Foreword, of course, focuses on flags. But flags must be understood as a gateway--viscerally compelling, they are powerful and powerfully evocative markers of meaning, of the constitution of identity and of the challenges to that constitution. Flags are political shorthand that directed toward the masses produces a powerful managerial tool for the incarnation of a "people" and the infusion of that people with characteristics. It is also the site around which those who manage meaning embed that meaning (the textual baseline of symbol) in the flag. And much of that is done through the construction and manipulation of color and color meaning. The Ukrainian Orange Revolution was quite distinct from the Orange Parades of the North of Ireland. And yet both embedded in a simple field of color a world of meaning. In the contemporary context that meaning making produces a powerful tool for the great global amalgamates of meaning--the Chinese Belt and Road, the America First, and the European Union as concept, community, and as Xi Jinping offered-- a means of "building of a community with a shared future for mankind."
The Abstract and Introduction follow with links to download the draft.
Larry Catá Backer
Pennsylvania State University
Schools of Law and International Affairs
University Park PA 16802 USA
Lcb11@psu.edu
Abstract: Though flags have been considered from any number of perspectives, it is useful to revisit the notions of flag, community and identity, in the shadow of globalization. Just as globalization has challenged until recently settled ideas of identity and its organization among states, religions, and affinity communities, so has globalization changed the spaces within which flags can be constructed and deployed in the service of each of these, in defining their boundaries and in marking the fields on which they battle. At the same time, the identity of flag and identity continues to serve as that great cauldron in which the abstract is incarnated, flesh is made spirit, and spirits are amalgamated into reconstituted creatures who now provide the great inhabitants of the ecology which globalization has produced. A flag, within these ideological walls of significances, can be said to constitute a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base. At the same time, the flag continues to be of immense importance in the management of identity and the control of perception. Both serve the ends of those groups and institutions around which the emerging global order is being reformed. Section 1 considers the flag as a transition from the physical to the metaphysical, from an object, to an idea, to an identity, and to the aggregation constituted thereby, and then ultimately challenged and reconstituted. The flag, then, can be understood as swaddling cloth, shield, badge, and shroud. But this function of the flag as object, sign and conceptual universe of identity is usefully understood through a history of meaning. The flag is itself not merely an object that constitutes identity and serves as a vessel for the ideology through which identity is constituted (and eventually challenged and reconstituted), but is itself a container of a universe of self-reflexive meaning. To understand the concept of flag as a self-conception is a necessary first step to understand its outward manifestation in its constitution of identity and the reconstitution of the individual. With that as a basis, Section 3 can then better engage with the objectivity of the flag as in the world as meaning and as history. Here one can at last encounter the flag in its best-known space as symbol, but now from a richer foundation. Section 4 then moves the discussion back from the flag as object-sign to the text that is embedded necessarily in the signification of flag. Section 5 then concludes with a return to the object of this work—flags, color, identity—in the shadow of the flag as object, as sign, and as a constituting element of identity that in the process is itself constituted.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to write this Foreword to "Flags, Identity, Memory: Critiquing the Public Narrative through Color" edited by Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek. The semiotics of meaning, and identity beyond the cavernous life-world, Lebenswelt,[1] of words offer a great opportunity to a chance to consider not just the past (the drapery of flags and standard bearing) but the future in a world in which meaning returns to a symbology in which the Word is no longer at the center of any performance or memory of meaning. Though flags have been considered from any number of perspectives, it is useful to revisit the notions of flag, community and identity, in the shadow of globalization. Just as globalization has challenged until recently settled ideas of identity and its organization among states, religions, and affinity communities, so has globalization changed the spaces within which flags can be constructed and deployed in the service of each of these, in defining their boundaries and in marking the fields on which they battle.
At the same time, the identity of flag and identity continues to serve as that great cauldron in which the abstract is incarnated, flesh is made spirit, and spirits are amalgamated into reconstituted creatures who now provide the great inhabitants of the ecology which globalization has produced. A flag, within these ideological walls of significances, can be said to constitute a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base.[2] “Coats of arms and flags are parts of a wider realm of graphic symbolism which characterizes the social and political organization of human societies around the world” including “seal logos, medals, decorations, uniforms and regalia.”[3] Yet that graphic symbolism does more than characterize social and political organization—it serves as its incarnation and exercise; not just of the organization but of its essential constitutive ideology as well. Those who serve the flag, like those who served the coats of arms—or the Crescent or Cross for that matter, also serve the persons or institutions who exercise authority and by so serving also incarnate in themselves the ideology that imbues the symbol with substance.[4] For these bannermen and heralds, the flags are ensigns of identity, and the identity of flags can only be understood as an expression of merger of people, of object, and of identity in the relationship between individual, community and cloth.[5]
This Foreword is divided into five parts, and mostly for the convenience of the reader. It could as easily have been read without them; the section markers are themselves signs and an invitation to an interpretation with which one is free to engage. The object, at its greatest level of generality is to align conceptions of flag, as object, sign, and interpretive vessel, with a parallel idea of the flag as both states of affairs (as categorical objects, as the vessels into which interpretation is poured and consequences built in the world) and situations of affairs (as a reference base for judgment, the baseline basis for “flagging”).[6] The flag, then, as verb and noun, as thing in itself and as the thing it incarnates; the flag as the act of constituting a thing and serving as its embodiment, as the site within which an identity outside of the individual is constructed from an amalgamation of autonomous individuals into a composite being; this flag itself becomes both the language and being of meaning through which the individual becomes a population,[7] a population can be disciplined[8] measured against the identity encoded in the flag,[9] and which acquires a capacity for speech without the usual markers of text—a language of shape, color and symbol.
But with that in mind, it is useful to first consider the flag as a transition from the physical to the metaphysical, from an object, to an idea, to an identity, and to the aggregation constituted thereby, and then ultimately challenged and reconstituted. The flag, then, can be understood as swaddling cloth, shield, badge, and shroud. But this function of the flag as object, sign and conceptual universe of identity is usefully understood through a history of meaning. The flag is itself not merely an object that constitutes identity and serves as a vessel for the ideology through which identity is constituted (and eventually challenged and reconstituted), but is itself a container of a universe of self-reflexive meaning. To understand the concept of flag as a self-conception is a necessary first step to understand its outward manifestation in its constitution of identity and the reconstitution of the individual. With that as a basis, Section 3 can then better engage with the objectivity of the flag as in the world as meaning and as history. Here one can at last encounter the flag in its best-known space as symbol, but now from a richer foundation. Section 4 then moves the discussion back from the flag as object-sign to the text that is embedded necessarily in the signification of flag. Section 5 then concludes with a return to the object of this work—flags, color, identity—in the shadow of the flag as object, as sign, and as a constituting element of identity that in the process is itself constituted.
NOTES
[1] Husserl E (1936)
[2] Rosado Haddock, G. E., & Ortiz Hill, C. (2000), p. 35.
[3] Smith W (1999).
[4] This applies to a broad range of banners and heralds far beyond the narrow confines of official national flags. Santino J (1992).
[5] JK Laughton (1879).
[6] With a significant nod to Husserl E (1973).
[7] Foucault (2008) p. 87-114.
[8] Foucault (1995).
[9] Backer (2018), pp. 160-170.
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