The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol

Current Issues in Linguistics
Pragmatics Module
Context, Pragmatics and Multimodal
Discourse
Ways of Seeing the World
in 3D
acknowledgement
The following presentation was first given
At
3rd International LAUD Symposium
Landau, Germany
March 27-30, 2006
The Migration and
Reconstruction of a Symbol
An exploration in the dynamics of
context and meaning across
cultures
Presented
by
• Dr Leo Francis Hoye
The University of
Hong Kong
leofrancishoye@hkucc.hku.hk
• Dr Ruth Kaiser
Managing Director
Kaiser Consult
kaiser@kaiserconsult.com
1. The Setting
Hong Kong
China
Fall 2003
Early August 2003
• SARS outbreak over
• New-found optimism across Hong Kong
• Need to re-boot local economy
• Need for radical marketing initiatives
2. The Players:
Enter Izzue.com
• Izzue.com – a territory-wide fashion chain with
flagship stores in Central District
• Economic pressure to restore financial position
• Ambition to make fashion brand „benchmark of
the latest desirable products‟
3. Devising a strategy
• If art aspires to the timeless, „advertising has a certain
impatience with the world‟ (Hoffman, 2002: 10)
• How can Izzue.com propel their autumn collection, be
daring, provocative?
• How can they impact on this culturally diverse,
prosperous East-meets-West community?
• Marketing team decides to exploit a military theme
4. Some precedents
• „Shockvertising‟ model of Italian clothing franchise Benetton
• Benetton brand of advertising is „a Rorschach test of what you bring
to the image‟ (Olivero Toscani)
Examples
• Chairman Mao and artefacts from Cultural Revolution loom large
locally and elsewhere
• Communist regalia widely used commercially in Europe and former
bloc
• An Italian winemaker (Vini Lunardelli) uses images of Hitler and
other dictators as a marketing tool for its „Historical Line‟ of wines
5. The plot:
A symbol rides out
5. A symbol rides out …
6a. Outcry
9th August 2003
“Nazi-themed fashion promotion
outrages shoppers”
Walking into any fashion chain Izzue.com’s 14 stores is like taking
a trip back to the dark days of Nazi Germany – with swastikas
and party logos displayed on the walls and flags hanging from the
ceiling.
The symbols and reference to Adolf Hitler – are also emblazoned
on clothes for sale.
Niki Law, South China Morning Post, August 9, 2003
6b. Outcry continues …
• Local Chinese and expatriate community protest
• International/local media protest
• Simon Wiesenthal Center (Los Angeles HQ)
protests
• German Consul protests
• Israeli Consul protests
6c. Outcry continues …
Apparently, some believe that the use of images of Hitler, swastikas
and other Nazi symbols connote the symbol’s strength. In fact, these
images should remind the people of Asia of their own suffering at
the hands of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany’s ally during World War II.
Indeed, we owe it to the six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust
that Nazi symbols should forever invoke the horrors of genocide,
racism and anti-Semitism that Hitler and his henchmen brought on the
world.
Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, 11 August 2003
“It’s totally inappropriate because these symbols of the Nazi regime
stand for cruelty and crimes against humanity”, remarked the German ViceConsul in Hong Kong. “It is unbearable to think that anyone can
design a marketing campaign that desecrates the deaths of millions of
people”, echoed his Israeli counterpart”.
Niki Law, South China Morning Post, August 12, 2003
7. Self-Justification?
9th - 12th August 2003
"We always have a military theme. We had American military
uniforms last summer and we have the German one this summer.”
Niki Law, South China Morning Post, August 9, 2003
“This is Hong Kong, and Chinese people are not sensitive about
Nazism … People should not be too sensitive. It is simply the
work of a very politically ignorant and insensitive designer …
We’re not sure that this issue is so serious that we have the
whole thing pulled. It would cost millions of dollars to replace
the line. Most of the complaints are from foreigners [sic], but
our customer base is local Chinese. Even the local [Chineselanguage] papers didn’t make a big deal out of this.”
Niki Law, South China Morning Post, August 12, 2003
8. Izzue.com acts
• Under local and international pressure,
Izzue.com removes Nazi regalia
• Under further pressure, Izzue.com
withdraws its entire line of offending
fashion items
9. Analysis: Overview
• „Commonsense view‟: Izzue.com just got it plain wrong.
• „Cynical view‟: the advertising campaign successfully
grabbed the public‟s – and the media‟s – attention
• „Intercultural view‟: unintentional misunderstanding of
Nazi symbology‟s recontextualised significance
• Pragmatic view: explore how symbol as VISUAL
PRAGMATIC ACT (VPA) means within different contexts
of use, and how redeployment across cultures is
mediated by a matrix of interdependent discourse
practices
10. A pragmatic perspective
Key themes
• Relevance of context
• Power of the visual
11a. Experiencing the visual
• Shifting contexts in which images appear makes viewing
images a dynamic and complex activity
•
as symbol is a graphically potent visual image
• “The capacity of images to affect us as viewers and
consumers is dependent on the larger cultural meanings
they invoke and the social, political, and cultural contexts
in which they are viewed. Their meanings lie not within
their image elements alone, but are acquired when they
are „consumed‟, viewed, and interpreted. The meanings
of each image are multiple; they are created each time it
is viewed.”
(Sturken & Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 2001: 25)
11b. Experiencing the visual …
• We actively read rather than passively look at images
• “If the circumstantial evidence surrounding any act of creation is part
of that act [our italics], can any reading ever be said to be final, even
if not conclusive? Can a picture ever be seen in its contextual
entirety?”
(Albert Manguel, Reading Pictures, 2002: 35)
• Examining the swastika in its “contextual entirety” entails exploring
the meanings of the symbol over the millennia. We do not read such
loaded symbols with innocent eyes
• When we view a visual image, we infuse it with our own
experientially-driven meanings (Scripts/Event Schemata)
• Swastika no exception; we need to read it in its contexts of use
12a. Invoking context
• In Pragmatics, context is recognised as “quintessential pragmatic
concept” (Mey 2001: 14); “as one of the necessary pillars of any
theory of pragmatics” (Verschueren 1999: 75f)
• Context often understood as a „given‟ – we all know what it is –
rather than subjected to analysis or review
• Invocation of context may lead to understanding of the
contextualised object rather than understanding of context itself
(Schegloff 1992: 193)
• Our view = “no object is intrinsically autonomous”
12b. Exploring Context …
• Object shares integrity with context in which it exists
• Need to underscore “transformative” potential of context
• Context has mediating effects and modulating effects
• Context is a complex dynamic
12c. Exploring context …
12d. Exploring context …
• Defining contextual processes: recontextualisation (vs.
decontextualisation, displacement)
• Recontextualisation involves dual processes of contrast and
transformation
• Context as a dynamic: contextual triggers and contextual
drivers
• Contextual elements form network of connections >
Contextual Matrix Analysis
13a.
Contextual triggers
• Contextual trigger = stimulus, causal phenomenon which may act
as a trigger and set in train a series of powerful and interlocking
contextual drivers
• Fall 2003 a number of potential/actual triggers at work:
Socio-economic impact of SARS
Internationally – need to rebuild HK as Shopping Paradise
Locally - renew demand for consumer goods
Revivify marketing initiatives (Benetton „model‟)
13b. Contextual triggers …
• Unique synergy of contextual triggers enabled Izzue.com to create
series of Visual Pragmatic Acts – here the invocation of Nazi
symbols for commercial ends
• These visual acts elicited a variety of responses from the local
Chinese, expatriate, and international communities
• The responses can be accounted for in terms of different
Contextual Drivers.
• (CTs + Symbol) > VPAs > CDs
14. Contextual drivers
• In present case, we identify four major Contextual Drivers:
The nature of symbol and the swastika itself
Public discourse on genocide and Holocaust
Historiographical practice
Media focus and preoccupation with Nazism and
the Third Reich
15. A Visual Pragmatic Act
• Izzue.com‟s appropriation and recontextualisation of Nazi
symbology creates complex set of Visual Pragmatic Acts
(VPAs)
• Concept of VPA analogous with Mey‟s theory of Pragmatic
Acts – all communication is situated activity, where agent
and act performed are viewed within a given context
(2001: 94)
• VPAs involve adaptation to environment: their instantiation
derives force from the situation in which they are deployed
(Cf. Mey 2001: 219)
• VPAs meaning derives from synergies created once user, symbol
and concrete circumstance interact (Mey 2001: 219-223)
16. A Multi-modal Pragmatic Act
17a. Swastika as symbol
• “It was the strength of fascism in general that it [the swastika]
realized, as other political movements and parties did not, that
nineteenth century Europe had entered a visual age, the age of
political symbols, such as the national flag or the national anthem –
which, as instruments of mass politics in the end proved more
effective than any didactic speeches.”
(Mosse 1999, cited in Hedller 2000: 60)
• Discourses surrounding swastika are contextually significant:
Swastika “earliest known symbol” (Wilson 1894)
Swastika has rich socio-cultural and contextual base,
(uniquely disparate in its origins and global reach)
Swastika has rich iconographic diversity prior to
Nazification
17b. Swastika as symbol …
•
Nazis viewed swastika as “that
symbol of resurrection, of the
revival of national life” (Whittick
1960: 272)
•
Usurpation of swastika by NSDAP
lasted for only a short span (19201946) in symbol‟s severalthousand year history
•
Swastika had pivotal status in
context of Nazi propaganda
machine: Hitler and swastika are
as one. In Leni Riefenstahl‟s
Triumph des Willens (1935),
Hitler, symbol, Fatherland are
inseperable and interchangeable
17c. Swastika as symbol …
• To read the Nazi swastika is to invoke the atrocities enacted by
the Nazi regime
• Its adoption and recontextualisation in HK as a marketing tool is
inappropriate: marketing strategy cannot divest such a powerful
symbol of its associations: “The total history of swastikas is less
relevant to the present meaning of this sign than its more
recent associations” (Hodder 1982: 213)
• Swastika is a Value Symbol (after O‟Neill 1999)
• Two core properties are affect (people have strong attitudes toward
the idea the symbol represents) and polysemy (the symbol unites
various ideas under one cognitive entity), and thus creates a
synergy among the emotions attached to each of them (O‟Neill
1999: 7)
17d. Swastika as symbol …
• Current discussion in EU about banning of other symbols, such as
Soviet hammer and sickle
• Yet for many, Communist symbology fundamentally different: Nazi
enterprise benchmark of evil
• The Left is seen as more acceptable: “All of us in the intellectual
world know people who have been communists who have changed
their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?”
(Pierre Ryckmans, cited in Hobsbawm 2003: 130
• British polymath, Michael Halliday refers to demise of communism
in not altogether negative terms, invoking his Failed First Time
principle
18. Historiographical Practices
•
The numbers of people murdered by Stalin‟s tyranny far surpass those
killed in the Nazi camps. The numbers of Mao‟s victims are yet greater, Pol
Pot killed a far higher proportion of the population than Hitler did. Yet, even
after thinking about Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to turn towards Hitler still
seems to be to look into the deepest darkness of all. If we hope for a
humane world, Nazism is what Nietzsche might have called our antipodes.
(Glover, 1999: 317)
•
Finkelstein (2003: 143) offers conservative estimate that there are at least
10,000 studies devoted to Nazis and Nazi Final Solution. Extensive media
coverage; internet coverage; frequency of new works on Hitler – cf. Evans‟
trilogy, Pt. II The Third Reich in Power (2005)
•
Historiographical practices sustain awareness of Nazi regime and its
attendant symbology through either explicit or exclusive focus or
comparison with other totalitarian figures and regimes
19. Reading the Holocaust:
Reading the Symbol
•
The literature on genocide in history and Nazi Holocaust in particular is
immense
•
Holocaust benchmark of institutionalised evil and persecution: “The
experience of the Jewish Holocaust changed everything and, it is
likely, will for ever determine and delimit all discussion of genocide
and all attempts to define and penalise the crime”.
(Rubinstein 2004: 306)
•
Mao responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime (Chang &
Halliday 2005); Stalin oversaw deaths of some 50 million Russians (Overy
2004); Nazi tally much lower but they pursued deliberate policy of
genocide and “the creation of a continent-wide killing machine and the
single-minded pursuit or extermination as policy”
(Rubinstein 2004: 312)
20a. Implications and conclusions
A Pragmatic perspective
• Validity and explanatory power of using dynamic
contextual approach – Contextual Matrix Analysis –
here used in discussion of symbol as Visual Pragmatic
Act
• Contextual Triggers > instantiation of VPAs >
Contextual Drivers > series of interdependent
discourse practices
20b. Implications and conclusions
(Intercultural) Pragmatic Agenda
• Agenda can be broadened to investigate
visual/multimodal discourse
• Applying (intercultural) pragmatics can lead to social
empowerment and informed sensitivity =
Intercultural Pragmatic Awareness
• In present case, IPA takes us beyond structuralist/
semiotic/stative reading of symbol and enables us to
understand how it means, why it means, where it means;
and how meanings resonate in real, societal contexts
The End