Abstract
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.
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Notes
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Literature on the semiotics of national flags is abundant; classical remarks are already in Durkheim 1995 (1912): 29 (“the soldier who falls defending his flag certainly does not believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth”); for an anthropological overview, see Firth (1973), pp. 328–367; a sociological perspective is in Weitman (1998); a critique of Weitman’s ‘vexillology’ is in Pasch (1975). The literature also includes semiotic analyses of specific flags, such as the study of the cross in the Scottish flag in Pelkey (2017), pp. 60–63; for a post-colonial analysis, see Ogenga (2014). A survey of the relations between semiotics and vexillology is in https://semioticon.com/semiotix/2013/05/consider-vexillology/ For a general introduction to vexillology, see Smith (1975).
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On the semiotic code of flags, see Watt and Watt (1997), pp. 410–411.
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Umberto Eco expounds on the difference between a flag and the icon of a flag in Eco (1975): §3.5.8 (pseudo-iconic signs).
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On this aspect of the semiotics of flags, see Llobera (2004), pp. 36–37.
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A semiotic study on the “truthful flag of Sardinia” is in Sedda (2007).
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Leone, M. (2021). The Semiotics of Flags. 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_3
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