Ceci N’est Pas Propaganda

What a great example of the absolutely ambiguous nature of signs.

via If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger…

You know it means something, and something important. Not only because of the classic propaganda poster stylings, but because of the evocation of the swastika, and the extreme violent of the hand gesture, and the desecration of widely-known sacred object.

But what is it saying? Is it a pro-Nazi poster, claiming that the Bible is the enemy, and it should be violently stabbed? Or is an anti-Nazi poster, claiming that the Nazis are the enemy, because they would do such violence to a Bible? Do you react more strongly to the soul-violating desecration of the Bible, the physical violence of the bayonet, or the symbolic violence of a swastika? What are your emotions being harnessed to support? Should you be stirred by this violent harnessing, or feel even more violated for someone attempting to hijack your emotions for a cause you do not support?

On a wall during wartime, we would instantly know the answers to these questions, because the context clues would unite with the signs that are present, and meaning would flow. But as it is, it is “ceci n’est pas propaganda”, because the force of its meaning as propaganda has been removed, by a disavowal similar to Matisse’s famous surrealist move. You know it is propaganda, but at the same time forced to admit it is only a meaningless sign intending to be propaganda, because the meaning it intends to have has been disturbed by a cutting of the context net. So it intends to be, and yet is not, while still clearly being.

Until, you realize the caption is written in ENGLISH, thereby re-uniting you with the context. If it is assumed to be a legitimate, vintage poster from the war against the Nazis, then the context was obviously that of England or America, or another English speaking country, which all happened to be on the same side of the war. Therefore, context is re-established by divorcing the language of the sign from the immediacy of your own context. The caption is no longer a mere caption, but an “English caption”, which is not just the transmission of a message but a contextual message itself.

You might, as I did, not being a native French speaker, be amused by the fact that in French, negatives are actually given a conjugation that to English speakers might appear to be a double negative with the “ne (no) ‘est (it is) pas (not)” construction. And so the binary separation between “is” and “is not” in English, in French is a separation that unites a phrase around the verb, and thereby twice cuts the verb off from the sentence rather than simply modifying it. And then the difference in language adds additional ironic context to an ironic picture-phrase combination.

But in the case of the propaganda, the language difference is the only thing to deliver us from irony. Unless, of course, the caption was rephrased to say “This Is Not The Enemy”. Or, better yet, “Ceci n’est Pas Le Adversarie.”

I’d also like to introduce the swastika that was marked on the Arizona Capital in refried beans, after the controversial passage of the law illegalizing non-legal immigrants in the state, a potentially ironic response to a political controversy fraught with its own ironies.