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  • This chapter explores philosophical and semiotic considerations pertaining to the relation between word and color and some of its social effects in four steps. 1. Flag. A first step concerns the flag as a social symbol made by fixed varieties of colors. Its colors refer to social patterns, in Occidental culture formatted along the classical theory of social contract and its individualistic, mechanistic and rationalistic features. Displacement and togetherness seem deeply engraved in the mind of the flagging individual(s), a mind often at far distance from any specific flag-event. 2. Colors. The second step is on colors and the slogan ‘colors like words’. The central question regards the words, which should serve as a parallel to colors. If a color depends on a linguistic expression, then the basis of that expression is important for color and color-experience. 3. Speech. The third paragraph emphasizes the study of the word by means of considering ‘speech’. Basic is the difference between langue and parole. ‘Word’ understood as langue functions in the slogan ‘colors like words’ whereas ‘word’ understood as parole is neglected. ‘Speech’ as the context for ‘word’ is therefore researched as a source of word–color semantics. 4. Digit. ‘From langue to parole’ is not a single static path amidst differing contexts. Recent mutations concern digital language as a future global context: (a) names play a new and different role in digital language structures, as the Internet and its multiple use of names and passwords daily demonstrates; (b) codes, in particular color codes, function like words and texts, as the website ‘electronic color code’ suggests; (c) communication unfolds beyond the limits of human will and attention; (d) the concept of O/other, the most vital component of human life and communication, does not remain unchanged in a life based on digits.

  • The book deals with the identification of “identity” based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as “the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances”. While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways. The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time.

Last update from database: 11/13/26, 4:10 AM (UTC)