A Theoretical Moment in the News
From the LA Times: “Navy to Mask Coronado’s swastika- shaped barracks”
The navy is about to renovate these barracks at considerable expense, even though these barracks have apparently been swastika-shaped since the late 1960s.
They have only become visible as swastikas since the advent of google earth, and satellite imagery.
Before that, they weren’t anything with any symbolic resonance, because they were visible to no one.
The controversy over the swastika-shaped barracks calls a number of theoretical ideas to mind.
1) Saussure and structuralist linguistics: that words and other signs have an arbitrary and conventional relationship to things and concepts. In this case, the swastika inadvertently created by careless architecture evokes and recalls the racism and genocide of the holocaust, and understandably upsets some people. There is nothing inherently racist, however, about the sign itself; but that was the use to which it was put by the Nazi party- both in the past and in the present.
2) The fact that the swastika is seen as a symbol of evil today belies its benign origins as a symbol of good luck in the ancient world. It is still seen today in Buddhist temples in Japan and Korea. V.N. Volosinov wrote in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that signs (words, images) can be have their meanings hijacked and redirected for ideological purposes.
3) The reaction to the satellite images is also a classic reader-response moment. The architects and builders of these buildings had no intent to make these barracks into Nazi insignia. Only the act of viewing (via new technology unimagined at the time of their creation), reception, and interpretation turns them into swastikas.
Notes for week 4
katie wrote:
This raises a very interesting point. What defines meaning? A swastika has certainly become a deep symbol, understood by most of the world to represent hatred and destructive violence. But there is nothing inherently evil about this shape. As you mentioned today in class, it was previously a symbol of good luck – which is, I believe, the reason that the Nazi party was drawn to it.
This is similar with words. It is not the actual word that holds the meaning, but the context. Over time, this meaning can actually shift, depending on how a word is used. There is nothing finite about words: as Derrida intimated, the very act of defining a word requires the use of other words…whose meaning is just as unspecific as the word being defined.
It is the context which decides the meaning. Which begs the question: does it really matter what shape our buildings are? If no one were to see them, they would never have been changed, so why change them now. Is it the idea of the shape, or the idea of people seeing the shape which causes the problem. Because, of course, there is nothing evil about the swastika, it is only how people perceive it.
Posted 01 Oct 2007 at 9:50 pm ¶
Max wrote:
Another interesting part of this is that even if somebody had noticed this and been offended by it, say, 15 years ago, it probably wouldn’t have taken off unless it had been a slow enough news day to run the story. Thanks to the internet, however, images can be spread around much more quickly, and people can become aware (and outraged) about events like these much more easily than in the past.
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 6:17 pm ¶
Jamie Goldberg wrote:
I think that like words, society changes the definition of symbols over time. It may seem arbitrary, but things must shift as culture shifts. One hundred years ago no one would have looked twice at these buildings. However, after the Nazi movement, the swastika has been engraved in the minds of society as a symbol of evil. Just like people don’t spout off racial slurs in society, due to their perceived offensive nature, people can’t venerate offensive symbols. The designers of these buildings may have inadvertently designed them in this shape, but it seems questionable why they would not change them once they realized the error. The buildings must be changed because people know of their existence. Society has defined these shapes as evil, and in response people have become offended by the knowledge of their existence.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 10:36 am ¶