I encountered the above image through the Facebook post by Michael Weinman, contributing editor at Public Seminar and a former professor of mine, who was greeted by this advertisement at London Gatwick. The image itself is nonsensical — a boy in a wizard’s outfit is somehow meant to advertise for HSBC ‘advance’. Someone has then drawn a Hakenkreuz on top of the boy’s head. Two facebook commentators on the image downplayed its potential explosive impact — one by arguing that the Hakenkreuz is an old Buddhist symbol and not the same as the Nazi swastika, which to me is disingenuous and implies historical denial, as anyone drawing the Hakenkreuz in this form (arms reversed) in a post-1945 European culture cannot escape evoking the Nazis. The other answer was more nuanced, because the commentator said that the graffiti might not have been in itself fascist, but instead suggested it could have been a kind of blunt, vulgar humor specific to English people.
This second interpretation is what I want to focus on. I want to show that instead of being a form of humor the graffiti in this image is representative of a strain of urbane, ironic detachment that has become pervasive in Anglophone cultures over the past decades. I want to show how this development is problematic because it occludes the reference to actual historical meaning. Then I will briefly consider what a humanistic response to this image might have looked like, before complicating this answer by posing a question regarding the limits and pitfalls of an image-dominated culture.
Anglo-influenced cultures (such as the Australia I come from) are very used to using confrontative forms of humor in order to show that “nothing is sacred.” I suppose one could argue this is a provocative symptom of free speech, or even a democratic action, which tries to show that nothing, including historical processes, is above humor. But it is unimaginable to think that an English person in the 1960s or 1970s — even after the absurdist humor of Spike Milligan and Monty Python, which dealt with the war — would have ever blindly drawn a Hakenkreuz and found it funny. Instead, I want to suggest that such humor, if that is what it is, is revealing of a kind of ironic detachment that is also dangerously ahistorical. Drawing on Frederic Jameson’s work I also want to suggest that the roots of this ahistoricity have to do with globalization, post-modernism and (some, not all, kinds of) internet culture.
The advantage of ironic humor is also the problem I have with it. By using irony, a speaker splits themselves into both a person connected to the event they ironize and a person above the event or detached from it. Irony provides a great intellectual refuge in situations that seem beyond one’s personal control, because it is a non-interventionist stance which still admits of some insight and intelligence; when successful, it can even engender a complete reversal away from the ironized-object. However, irony or irony-based humor also works because we can call to mind the absent object that is ironized. One of David Foster Wallace’s examples of irony — Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? — only works if you grew up with the 1950s sitcom Leave it to Beaver and imbibed its family mores. However, the image at Gatwick airport doesn’t even come close to stimulating reflection on the present by ironically referencing a past object. Instead, all it pronounces is: I drew the Hakenkreuz on this ad because I could, and not because I thought it would mean something in connection with a boy wizard and HSBC advance — although it might piss a few people off — but because such symbols don’t really have the power to shock or mean anymore. It is such a worldview, in which signs are disabused of their original, historical meaning, which I want to connect to the influence of globalized and commercialized online media.
In an analysis that echoes my concern for the diffusion of the potential of irony, Frederic Jameson (in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) makes a very useful distinction between parody and pastiche, saying that the latter has replaced the former but jettisoned any of its political-historical awareness or intention. In pastiche the “past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts” (Postmodernism, p. 18). In such a situation of discourse immanence, in which the validity of a claim (including humor) is secured by internal and not external criteria, objective reality is the loser, because only other internal criteria are successful in combatting the claim. One can see this theoretical point play out in an online medium such as Facebook, which both homogenizes and relativizes its content. To put it more simply, Jameson is pointing to the fact that once the texts themselves become the ultimate carrier of meaning then the truth of things can only be judged from within these texts and not according to the things they refer to, which diminishes and ultimately removes the idea of objective history.
Because the above image appeared in the same scrolling format as my aunty’s holiday pictures, a new recipe, someone’s birthday and an online petition to save Gaza, it is somehow equated with them, even though their content is not at all connected; and the fact that they either precede or succeed one another suggests a relative (although not concrete) connection. To give an example: if my response to the initial image had been to post an article discussing the symbolic use of the Hakenkreuz post-1945, I think this would have been evaluated according to the internal criteria of the medium and not the objective reality referenced by such an article, and therein lies the danger when pastiche prevails.
If, instead, I had put forward the argument that we should all pay more attention to the meaning of the symbols in the world around us, that the people who noticed but did not speak out against the public Hakenkreuz were ignoring their own responsibility for public space, or complicit in the symbol, or any other argument about paying more attention to media and acting accordingly, I would certainly be earnest in my appeals, but I would be ignoring their efficacy within communicative mediums as they currently are. I would also, probably, be ignored by the other people for whom it was “just a joke” or even more inconsequential.
In Postmodernism Jameson critiques our fascination with a stylized present as the ultimate goal of capitalism and makes a call for a return to historicity. The problem with such a “stylization” of the present, as I understand it, is that the past is presented in such a way that its meaning is subsumed under the prevailing aesthetic modes (in our society, consumerist ones) in a way which leaves no room for the past to be past: different, other, alternative, suppressed, incipient, inherited, borne. Within the terms of the debate around the image provided above, I think a return to historicity would also mean a return to sincerity. I also think that some forms of media, like memes, are actually great ways of breaking down the ahistoricity of pastiche and provoking historical meanings that lie outside of such a ‘stylized’ present. So the — admittedly quite complicated — question I would like to pose, and discuss, and try to find an answer to is: Given the current predominance of the image, given the political potential and (mis-)use of mass-market forms of online communication, what forms of historical truth-telling are possible within these media?
Lindsay Parkhowell is the Secretary for Propaganda and Poetics at the Avtomoni Akadimia, an adisciplinary, democratic arts university in Athens. He is also the head copyeditor of the ERC Project Early Modern Cosmology at the Ca’ Foscari University, Venice.
I’d be very curious, Lindsay, to hear you elaborate further on some of the connections and arguments this piece implies. One thing I’m wondering about is the connection between digital cultures and the graffiti. Are you suggestion that Facebook et al., qua digital pastiche, create the conditions for the kind of disattention to the historical freight symbols bear that the graffiti represents to you? I wonder how that would work, as an historical process. I don’t have concrete memories, but swastika-on-the-forehead graffiti feels like a trope from high-school days, which is to say in the 90s, before the advent of internet social media. But you think that this example is specially internetty?
Perhaps another angle would be to consider your initial interpretation of the graffiti. You seem to be saying that the writer assumed that this symbol had lost its power to mean. But then I wonder how we’re to understand the fact that they inscribed it in the first place. Do you think that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? Or does pastiche culture change that relation?
I’m also wondering about what conceptions of (historical) meaning you think are worth holding onto. Sometimes your formulations seem to suggest that, if we attend to it right, an historical symbol will reveal itself to have one, original, objective meaning. I don’t know Jameson’s work, but was he responding, among other things, to the critique of presumed possibility and desirability of univocal speech/writing sometimes associated with the label “postmodern”? Does he go so far as to cast doubt on that critique as of a piece with late capitalist culture? I guess I’m not sure how to reconcile the idea that an historical symbol has a single original meaning with the task of understanding meaning in such a way that the possibilities of graffiti, or for that matter the Nazi re-contextualisation of the swastika, become conceivable. Could it be precisely the disseminatory quality of signs, their necessary ability to be de- and re-contextualised, consecrated and profaned and sacralized again, that gives us reasons to be careful with the signs we utter?
I’d be very curious, Lindsay, to hear you elaborate further on some of the connections and arguments this piece implies. One thing I’m wondering about is the connection between digital cultures and the graffiti. Are you suggestion that Facebook et al., qua digital pastiche, create the conditions for the kind of disattention to the historical freight symbols bear that the graffiti represents to you? I wonder how that would work, as an historical process. I don’t have concrete memories, but swastika-on-the-forehead graffiti feels like a trope from high-school days, which is to say in the 90s, before the advent of internet social media. But you think that this example is specially internetty?
Perhaps another angle would be to consider your initial interpretation of the graffiti. You seem to be saying that the writer assumed that this symbol had lost its power to mean. But then I wonder how we’re to understand the fact that they inscribed it in the first place. Do you think that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? Or does pastiche culture change that relation?
I’m also wondering about what conceptions of (historical) meaning you think are worth holding onto. Sometimes your formulations seem to suggest that, if we attend to it right, an historical symbol will reveal itself to have one, original, objective meaning. I don’t know Jameson’s work, but was he responding, among other things, to the critique of presumed possibility and desirability of univocal speech/writing sometimes associated with the label “postmodern”? Does he go so far as to cast doubt on that critique as of a piece with late capitalist culture? I guess I’m not sure how to reconcile the idea that an historical symbol has a single original meaning with the task of understanding meaning in such a way that the possibilities of graffiti, or for that matter the Nazi re-contextualisation of the swastika, become conceivable. Could it be precisely the disseminatory quality of signs, their necessary ability to be de- and re-contextualised, consecrated and profaned and sacralized again, that gives us reasons to be careful with the signs we utter?
Lindsay, you make the interesting suggestion that the one who drew the swastika did so while assuming that this symbol had lost its power to mean. In that case, it might seem strange that they inscribed it in the first place. Isn’t it the case that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? But you provide an answer to this question. Some acts of inscription participate in the practice of pastiche. In a pastiche, the relations between sign and sign are emphasised while relations of reference between signs and that to which they are linked by what you call their “original, historical meaning” tend to be suspended. The answer suggested by your argument thus seems to me to be something like this: that it pastiche has power to mean precisely at the moment when it subordinates the historical meanings of signs to the (at least apparent) power or freedom of the observer-signifier(s).
You focus attention on how historical meanings or realities can be bracketed; I’d like to hear more about how you think significant historical realities arise for observer-signifiers in the first place. As a possible line of thought, what if we were to think about the emergence of history in relation to present needs and desires, and thus also in relation to the recent history of historical observation?
Perhaps reflections of that sort might re-inforce your thought that pastiche is a significant mode of relation to the historical, since pastiche can help to satisfy important needs, for example needs for virtuality and ambiguity in articulating a self in relation to history. At the same time, the idea of a co-articulation and thus co-emergence of history and self might suggest other issues to us. Does the pastiche diagnosis presuppose an already-constituted, so to speak non-pastiching relation to history from which it could be said that pastiche would distance the observer? If so, what if we were to observe that some observers have little access to history outside the pastisching relation? An exaggeration for the sake of argument, perhaps; but it might also help us to ask: can we conceive of the possibility of a non-pastiching relation emerging from within a pastiching one? Are “original, historical meanings” original in the sense of coming first in the order of emergence, or do they only arise later?
In considering your case study of the swastika on the poster here, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a sort of opposite trajectory to the one you suggest in the essay. Can we perhaps imagine a young person who, for example, growing up somewhere in Australian suburban sprawl (you’ll recognise my first habitat here too), got to know the swastika in the 1990s from watching Indiana Jones, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and being at least aware of various bands (some of which preferred other symbols: pentagons, Latin or more likely Petrine crosses)? Can’t we envisage this youth appropriating the swastika and using it in ways that have not so much to do with a commitment to neo-Nazism or racism, as with certain expressive-aggressive needs visited on the body of their immediate environment: carving the sign into school desks, scratching it into their own skin, drawing it on advertising faces in bus shelters? I wonder what variations you could imagine on this sort of character, and how you would want to describe these sorts of cases. Maybe a 1990s commercial culture plays a role in them something like the Facebook you describe. But perhaps the culture functions more like a reservoir of only semi- or potentially meanigful symbols, to which more meaning (and be it thoughly inarticulate, “symbolic” in Hegel’s sense) then accrues through the uses made of them by observer-signifiers? Or would you expect all such characters as the one I’ve sketched to say they carved swastikas because the symbol was without power?
Lindsay, you make the interesting suggestion that the one who drew the swastika did so while assuming that this symbol had lost its power to mean. In that case, it might seem strange that they inscribed it in the first place. Isn’t it the case that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? But you provide an answer to this question. Some acts of inscription participate in the practice of pastiche. In a pastiche, the relations between sign and sign are emphasised while relations of reference between signs and that to which they are linked by what you call their “original, historical meaning” tend to be suspended. The answer suggested by your argument thus seems to me to be something like this: that pastiche has power to mean precisely at the moment when it subordinates the historical meanings of signs to the (at least apparent) power or freedom of the observer-signifier(s).
You focus attention on how historical meanings or realities can be bracketed; I’d like to hear more about how you think significant historical realities arise for observer-signifiers in the first place. As a possible line of thought, what if we were to think about the emergence of history in relation to present needs and desires, and thus also in relation to the recent history of historical observation?
Perhaps reflections of that sort might re-inforce your thought that pastiche is a significant mode of relation to the historical, since pastiche can help to satisfy important needs, for example needs for virtuality and ambiguity in articulating a self in relation to history. At the same time, the idea of a co-articulation and thus co-emergence of history and self might suggest other issues to us. Does the pastiche diagnosis presuppose an already-constituted, so to speak non-pastiching relation to history from which it could be said that pastiche would distance the observer? If so, what if we were to observe that some observers have little access to history outside the pastisching relation? An exaggeration for the sake of argument, perhaps; but it might also help us to ask: can we conceive of the possibility of a non-pastiching relation emerging from within a pastiching one? Are “original, historical meanings” original in the sense of coming first in the order of emergence, or do they only arise later?
In thinking about your case study of the swastika on the poster, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a sort of opposite trajectory to the one you suggest in the essay. Can we perhaps imagine a young person who, for example, growing up somewhere in Australian suburban sprawl (you’ll recognise my first habitat here too), got to know the swastika in the 1990s from watching Indiana Jones, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and being at least aware of various bands (some of which preferred other symbols: pentagons, Latin or more likely Petrine crosses)? Can’t we envisage this youth appropriating the swastika and using it in ways that have not so much to do with a commitment to neo-Nazism or racism, as with certain expressive-aggressive needs visited on the body of their immediate environment: carving the sign into school desks, scratching it into their own skin, drawing it on advertising faces in bus shelters? I wonder what variations you could imagine on this sort of character, and how you would want to describe these sorts of cases. Maybe a 1990s commercial culture plays a role in them something like the Facebook you describe. But perhaps the culture functions more like a reservoir of only semi- or potentially meanigful symbols, to which more meaning (and be it thoughly inarticulate, “symbolic” in Hegel’s sense) then accrues through the uses made of them by observer-signifiers? Or would you expect all such characters as the one I’ve sketched to say they carved swastikas because the symbol was without power?
Lindsay, you make the interesting suggestion that the one who drew the swastika did so while assuming that this symbol had lost its power to mean. In that case, it might seem strange that they inscribed it in the first place. Isn’t it the case that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? But you provide an answer to this question. Some acts of inscription participate in the practice of pastiche. In a pastiche, the relations between sign and sign are emphasised while relations of reference between signs and that to which they are linked by what you call their “original, historical meaning” tend to be suspended. The answer suggested by your argument thus seems to me to be something like this: that pastiche has power to mean precisely at the moment when it subordinates the historical meanings of signs to the (at least apparent) power or freedom of the observer-signifier(s).
You focus attention on how historical meanings or realities can be bracketed; I’d like to hear more about how you think significant historical realities arise for observer-signifiers in the first place. As a possible line of thought, what if we were to think about the emergence of history in relation to present needs and desires, and thus also in relation to the recent history of historical observation?
Perhaps reflections of that sort might re-inforce your thought that pastiche is a significant mode of relation to the historical, since pastiche can help to satisfy important needs, for example needs for virtuality and ambiguity in articulating a self in relation to history. At the same time, the idea of a co-articulation and thus co-emergence of history and self might suggest other issues to us. Does the pastiche diagnosis presuppose an already-constituted, so to speak non-pastiching relation to history from which it could be said that pastiche would distance the observer? If so, what if we were to observe that some observers have little access to history outside the pastisching relation? An exaggeration for the sake of argument, perhaps; but it might also help us to ask: can we conceive of the possibility of a non-pastiching relation emerging from within a pastiching one? Are “original, historical meanings” original in the sense of coming first in the order of emergence, or do they only arise later?
In thinking about your case study of the swastika on the poster, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a sort of opposite trajectory to the one you suggest in the essay. Can we perhaps imagine a young person who, for example, growing up somewhere in Australian suburban sprawl (you’ll recognise my first habitat here too), got to know the swastika in the 1990s from watching Indiana Jones, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and being at least aware of various bands (some of which preferred other symbols: pentagons, Latin or more likely Petrine crosses)? Can’t we envisage this youth appropriating the swastika and using it in ways that have not so much to do with a commitment to neo-Nazism or racism, as with certain expressive-aggressive needs visited on the body of their immediate environment: carving the sign into school desks, scratching it into their own skin, drawing it on advertising faces in bus shelters? I wonder what variations you could imagine on this sort of character, and how you would want to describe these sorts of cases. Maybe a 1990s commercial culture plays a role in them something like the Facebook you describe. But perhaps the culture functions more like a reservoir of only semi- or potentially meanigful symbols, to which more meaning (and be it thoughly inarticulate, “symbolic” in Hegel’s sense) then accrues through the uses made of them by observer-signifiers? Or would you expect all such characters as the one I’ve sketched to say they carved swastikas because the symbol was without power?
Lindsay, you make the interesting suggestion that the one who drew the swastika did so while assuming that this symbol had lost its power to mean. In that case, it might seem strange that they inscribed it in the first place. Isn’t it the case that when people write it’s usually because they want their act to have some significance? But you provide an answer to this question. Some acts of inscription participate in the practice of pastiche. In a pastiche, the relations between sign and sign are emphasised while relations of reference between signs and that to which they are linked by what you call their “original, historical meaning” tend to be suspended. The answer suggested by your argument thus seems to me to be something like this: that pastiche has power to mean precisely at the moment when it subordinates the historical meanings of signs to the (at least apparent) power or freedom of the observer-signifier(s).
You focus attention on how historical meanings or realities can be bracketed; I’d like to hear more about how you think significant historical realities arise for observer-signifiers in the first place. As a possible line of thought, what if we were to think about the emergence of history in relation to present needs and desires, and thus also in relation to the recent history of historical observation?
Perhaps reflections of that sort might support your thought that pastiche is a significant mode of relation to the historical, since pastiche can help to satisfy important needs, for example needs for virtuality and ambiguity in articulating a self in relation to history. At the same time, the idea of a co-articulation and thus co-emergence of history and self might suggest other issues to us. Does the pastiche diagnosis presuppose an already-constituted, so to speak non-pastiching relation to history from which it could be said that pastiche would distance the observer? If so, what if we were to assume that some observers’ first encounters with history took place from within something like the pastisching relation to it? An exaggeration for the sake of argument, perhaps; but it might also help us to ask: can we conceive of the possibility of a non-pastiching relation emerging from within a pastiching one? Are “original, historical meanings” original in the sense of coming first in the order of emergence, or might they sometimes arise only later?
In thinking about your case study of the swastika on the poster, I’ve been wondering about the possibility of a sort of opposite trajectory to the one you suggest in the essay. Can we perhaps imagine a young person who, for example, growing up somewhere in Australian suburban sprawl (you’ll recognise my first habitat here too), got to know the swastika in the 1990s from watching Indiana Jones, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and being at least aware of various bands (some of which preferred other symbols: pentagons, Latin or more likely Petrine crosses)? Perhaps this context is comparable to the Facebook feed you refer to.
Might we then go further, and imagine this youth taking the swastika up and using it in ways that have not so much to do with a commitment to neo-Nazism or even racism, as with certain needs that drew selectively on some of the connotations apparently connected with the symbol and put them/the symbol in the service of an aggressive experimentation visited on bodies in the immediate environment: carving the sign into school desks, scratching it into their own skin, drawing it on advertising faces in bus shelters? Neo-Nazism and decided racism aside, I wonder what other variations you could imagine on this sort of character, and how you would want to describe these sorts of cases. One for whom the symbol stands for a caricaturish evil with which they identify? Another for whom it represents a rejected evil, not the Nazism you yourself might describe, but a crowd of stupid, deindividualized baddies? Another who perhaps delights in the detournement-effect of inscribing the swastika on images of childhood innocence produced by the advertising industry in the attempt to win over the middle-class dollar? Like I say, maybe a 1990s commercial culture could play a role in these sorts of stories something like the Facebook you describe. But perhaps the culture only sometimes functions as a blueprint for pastiching of people’s own, and at other times, or also, as a reservoir of only semi- or potentially meanigful symbols, to which more meaning (and be it thoughly inarticulate, “symbolic” in Hegel’s sense) then accrues through the uses made of them by observer-signifiers? Or would you expect all such characters to say they carved swastikas because the symbol was devoid of power?