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This paper is a semiotics analysis of national symbols, especially national flags, seeking to insert its emergence in the context of the formation of the modern National States. The methodological approach is critical and interdisciplinary, capitalising on the contributions of Semiotics, History, Sociology and Philosophy. The flag of Brazil is analysed in a detailed manner, as a complex symbol, formed of shapes, colours, natural elements and words. From the historical point of view, the flag of Brazil is a symbol, which safeguards the past of the Brazilian Empire inside the symbol of the Republic of Brazil. From the semiotic point of view, one can see in the plan of expression a set of symbols, which allows us to realise the level of significance, there lying the dialectical conflicts of the history of Brazil. From the point of view of the current political scene, it seeks to analyse the new and main role played by the national flag, in its re-emergence among many demonstrations, and the rebirth of nationalism, within the context of economical, moral and political crises. This allows us to assess the meaning of Brazilian modernity and its future challenges.

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.

After an outline of the history, design and uses of the Australian flag, this paper considers the media frenzy and public outcry surrounding the publication of research findings identifying a relationship between the flying of Australian flags on cars for Australia Day and racist attitudes. While the findings did not surprise many social scientists, given the semiotics of the flag and its increasing use as a symbol of exclusion, they were apparently highly contentious for portions of the Australian public. This paper describes and analyses the public reaction using three case studies from among the hundreds of examples. An email, a blog discussion, and a newspaper article, are analysed to demonstrate overlapping themes focussed on racism, patriotism, and nationalism. The chapter concludes that the publicity flagging the relationship between flag use and exclusionary nationalism actually may have worked against the goal of producing a considered debate about appropriate forms of nationalism and flag use, delivering the flag into the hands of exclusionary nationalist.

In the passage of the Course in General Linguistics where Ferdinand de Saussure first foresaw the necessity to develop a new discipline called “semiology”, “nautical flags” are prominently listed among its objects of inquiry. Flags, indeed, are naturally interesting objects for semiotics, not only because they signify through a systematic display of forms and colors, but also because of the specific pragmatics of such display. A flag can be thought of abstractedly, as an array of symbols, but it features also a specific materiality, wherein two elements particularly stand out: (1) the flag is generally a textile; (2) this textile is meant to interact with a natural element, the wind. Flags are so symbolically important also because they seem to acquire an individual agency when they wave in the wind, and therefore to confer this autonomous agency to the cultural ideas which they stand for. The paper investigates this particular semiotics in relation to opposite ideological usages of the Italian national flag, meant to signify an either inclusive or exclusive identity.

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.

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.

Discussion of the role of flags at music festivals.