On Flags

A flag is a marvel of compression: a nation, a faith, a team, a cause — centuries of argument — rendered at a resolution of two or three colors, legible at a kilometer. The engineering question worth asking is what got compressed out.

What survives compression is the border: this side, that side, visible through smoke. What is lost is everything else — every internal dispute, every dissenting member, every conditional clause. This is not an accident of textile technology. A flag legible at a kilometer is designed at the resolution of an army, and it performs the same service for every organization that flies one: it replaces a crowd of particular people with a single unambiguous shape. Compression is the product. Sixty thousand people in a stadium wearing the same two colors have, for the afternoon, agreed to be one thing — which is precisely the transaction, and precisely the cost.

The stadium, at least, prices honestly: the jersey comes off at the final whistle, and everyone knows the agreement was for the afternoon. The instructive cases are the flags that do not come off — and the twentieth century produced a perfect instrument for reading them. In Václav Havel’s Prague, a greengrocer places in his window the sign Workers of the world, unite! — supplied by headquarters, displayed between the onions and the carrots. Havel’s analysis turns on one observation: the sign’s text is not its message. No one, including the greengrocer, reads the words. The display itself is the message, and it says: I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace. The sign is rent, paid in symbols; the semiotics textbooks would call it phatic — communication whose entire content is the fact of itself.

Now perform Havel’s reading on the present. The profile frame added in the week everyone added one; the pin worn to the meeting where its absence would be noticed; the yard sign in the neighborhood where every yard has one; the bio line listing, in approved order, the causes and the flags-as-emoji; the black square posted on the day of squares. Run each through the greengrocer’s window and ask, honestly, what proportion of the content is the stated cause and what proportion is I am in compliance; do not audit me. The answer will vary by case — some declarations are paid for in real risk, and those are a different genus entirely; a flag raised where flags are punished is the second voice, not the sign. But the diagnostic is uncomfortable because it is accurate. Most flag-display happens exactly where it costs nothing and its absence costs something — which is the greengrocer’s arithmetic to the decimal.

Two features of symbol-allegiance deserve particular suspicion. First, flags are contracts signed in a currency you do not control. The wearer of a symbol has delegated its meaning to whoever commands it next; the pin that meant one thing at breakfast can mean another by the evening news, and the wearer is enrolled in the revision without being consulted — like a signature on a document that headquarters may amend after signing. This is allegiance’s general structure made visible: the banner outsources not just your judgment but your retroactive judgment. Second, flags invert the honest order of communication. A sentence exposes its author to reply; a flag does not converse, it classifies — it tells the viewer which pre-existing file to put you in, and files, as the sorting machines know, are where thinking goes to be stored unread.

None of this condemns the objects. Cloth is innocent; so are lapels, and so is the impulse — older than writing — to mark what one loves. The unjoined windowsill is not bare: it holds photographs of particular faces, the pennant of the town where you were a child, tokens of the particular loves that no committee can revise, because no committee issued them. The test for any symbol you are about to display is the greengrocer’s, run in reverse: if this cost me something, would I still put it up? If it cost me nothing, why am I putting it up? A symbol that survives both questions is probably love. Everything else is signage — and someone else holds the copyright.