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Dislocations. Light and Colour, Flags and Identifications

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Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative

Part of the book series: Law and Visual Jurisprudence ((LVJ,volume 1))

Abstract

The symbolic functioning of flags is related to many large topics in philosophy and in social sciences. My interest here is in the dialectics of how flags mean. Flags are polysemic and ambiguous, a kind of symbolic nodes grouping several layers of signification. Flags are not images, though, but objects made to be used not contemplated. Once raised, flags may talk. But what they say when talking depends upon the modes of use in communal practices. When used, flags contribute to the staging of an event. They are performative utterances in a specific situation. The paper begins with a short review of modern discourses on the nexus between light, colour, and emotion as unreflective forms of perceiving the world. Drawing upon studies on the contemporary production and reproduction of ways of seeing the chapter then explores in greater detail specific aspects of the dialectics of sense-making through flags. Aside from symbolising as well as iconic and spectacular modes of use banal forms of performance are taken into account. Once there, flags are signs of their own context. What they promote, the paper suggests, is not unity but configurations of common differences. Finally, the article addresses the role of flags for the assemblage of cultural identities of populations connected by digital media and the formation of society in the age of globalisation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An atlas of “Light pollution” (photopollution, i.e. the presence of light in the night environment) shows that more than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than one-third of humanity, including 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. 88% of Europe, and almost half of the United States experience lightpolluted nights (Falchi 2016).

  2. 2.

    What we need is “a purely phenomenological colour theory in which mention is only made of what is actually perceptible and no hypothetical objects –waves, rods, cones and all that– occur” (Wittgenstein 1981, p. 273).

  3. 3.

    Interestingly, studies of association between emotion and colour in four cultures showed a general similarity in emotional response to colours and “considerable agreement among all four cultures on which (colours) are good, bad, strong, and weak” (D’Andrade 1990, p. 74).

  4. 4.

    Images of the movie posters can be found online <https://www.allmovie.com/movie/letters-from-iwo-jima-v345580/review> and <https://www.allmovie.com/movie/v331335>.

  5. 5.

    The original photo of the “First Flag Raising on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, 23 February 1945”, taken by Louis R. Lowery, is available via U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. <https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-104000/NH-104150.html, the famous other one, produced some minutes after by Joe Rosenthal, via Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96515062.

  6. 6.

    As reality of a sign’s sign, it has now its own history: see Catie Drew’s “Iwo Jima at Night”, available via Federal Highway Administration. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/photos/63476.

  7. 7.

    “Ground Zero Spirit”, Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph showing fire fighters at Ground Zero, can be found at <https://sites.google.com/site/groundzerospirit/home> or in one of the 205 million “Heroes of 2001” stamps printed by the U.S. Postal Service.

  8. 8.

    Available via Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/229396/barack-obama-hope-poster.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salento, Dip. di Scienze Giuridiche, Lecce, Italy

    Claudius Messner

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  1. Claudius Messner
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Correspondence to Claudius Messner .

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  1. ULR 4487, CRDP - Centre de recherche Droits et perspectives du droit, Lille University, Lille, France

    Anne Wagner

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’i Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA

    Sarah Marusek

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Messner, C. (2021). Dislocations. Light and Colour, Flags and Identifications. In: Wagner, A., Marusek, S. (eds) Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative. Law and Visual Jurisprudence, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32865-8_2

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