How can flowers kill ? Opaque communication in political arenas

Conference in English.

Communication is of fundamental importance not only for the survival of a social group, but also for everyday sociality in social animals, especially humans. Some argue that communication, particularly through human language, defines humanity and places it above non-human animals. Despite the recognition of its difficulty and complexities, an important assumption has been that human communication is possible, if only we try hard enough.

I propose that discursive and non-discursive symbols offer communicative capabilities, but do not necessarily guarantee communication. We've paid less attention to how we ignore that we don't always communicate. Baudelaire already alerted us to this unawareness in his text Mon cœur mis à nu, in which he emphasized not only the ubiquitous absence of communication, but more importantly, the lack of awareness of this lack on the part of social actors.

The world only works through misunderstanding.
It is through universal misunderstanding that everyone agrees.
For if, by misfortune, we understood each other, we could never agree.

Baudelaire [1869] 1949: 98

But Baudelaire didn't explain how the misunderstanding came about.

My task is to develop his intuition, by first moving misunderstanding into political spaces. It can bring peace between people, as Baudelaire points out, if it takes place in ordinary circumstances. But when it takes place in political spaces, it enables political leaders to mislead their populations, who then unconsciously cooperate in their own subjugation and/or lead them towards their own annihilation.

Rather than focusing on the obvious "political symbols", such as national flags, monuments and pageantry, most of which are in fact the affirmation and display of political leaders' grandeur, I concentrate on everyday objects, such as flowers, that have been brought into political spaces. They look too ordinary to be able to harness political power. Mona Ozouf has shown how French revolutionary symbolism, in particular the official symbol of the "Tree of Liberty", derived from the May tree of popular traditions in many French regions. Republican borrowings of popular festivities made revolutionary symbolism "less alien (...) to popular sensibility."

Here, we have chosen to examine cherry blossoms in Japanese culture, as well as the European rose. They share two important characteristics - the flowers were immersed in popular everyday life as well as in the elite, and were then transformed to become important political symbols.

The symbolism of Japanese cherry blossoms is rich and complex, with a vast array of seemingly contradictory meanings: that of men and warriors seen as "men among men", young women representing life and their vital reproductive capacity for the continuation of society, and geishas, the non-reproductive women outside normative society. The flower also represents a destabilization of the social personality - it is madness, the loss of social identity, which occurs in full bloom, and the borrowing of another social identity when wearing a mask during the ritual of cherry blossom contemplation. It represents the process of life, death, rebirth and every stage in the cycle of life. Above all, it symbolizes love: the intensity of human relationships and the foundation of human sociality. Cherry trees have also come to represent the collective identity of the Japanese as a whole, as well as of virtually all social groups within society, such as neighborhood associations, schools, companies, etc.

Despite the flower's many "sunny" meanings, its painful sense of the brevity of life was transformed into a military saying: "You will fall like beautiful cherry petals after a short life for the emperor and Japan". It became the Japanese state's major propaganda trope in its quest for imperial power since the late ^19th century. The motto had been used widely and intensively during the Russo-Japanese War and the two Sino-Japanese Wars, culminating in the Second World War, at the end of which tokkotai ("kamikaze operations") were instituted. None of the pilots were aware that the pink cherry blossom painted on the side of each tokkotai aircraft represented the sacrifice of their lives. The pilots were destined to fall, like beautiful cherry petals, in order to protect the beautiful land of cherry trees. Although falling petals have long been associated with death, it was not as a sacrifice for the nation and the emperor.

Although it is indeed difficult to choose such a major symbol not only in Europe but also in the Middle East and elsewhere, I chose the symbolism of the rose because it is, like the cherry blossom, a polysemous symbol of enormous complexity. Given the spread of Christianity, immense military conquests, monarchical marriages, and intensive and extensive trade, there are similarities in the symbolism of the rose for many European cultures, although each culture has established its own tradition. The rose occupies an important symbolic place in Christianity, with, for example, the red rose symbolizing Christ's sacrifice and the white rose representing the purity of the Virgin Mary. Many European cultures also share the contradictory representation - love and loss of life and death - represented, for example, by the flower and the thorn. Cherry blossoms and the rose also represent madness - the loss of one's social identity - as exemplified by Ophelia in Hamlet, in the case of the roses.

The rose was also a popular symbol of opposition to political institutions in medieval May Day celebrations. It celebrated spring, but was also a means of expression in the villagers' opposition to their lord. This meaning was adopted by the Socialist International. With the genesis of the labor movement in Russia, the red rose became the symbol of the Socialist International and of most of the world's socialist parties. In Germany, where white represented purity, students at Munich University who opposed the Nazi regime called themselves the "White Rose".

During the European dictatorships of the ^20th century, the flower became ubiquitous in the propaganda photos of Lenin (posthumously), Stalin and Hitler, each of whom became the "benevolent fathers" of the people, and received roses from women and children. Each of these dictators sent countless people to their deaths.

Why did liberal or even radical Japanese students, intellectual and cosmopolitan soldiers fluent in Latin, German and French, as well as Japanese and Chinese, fail to notice that the meaning of the flower had changed under the military government? Why was this transformation barely noticed by the population - civilians, soldiers at the front, or even liberal intellectuals?

A similar question can be asked of roses, which in many cultures of Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere traditionally evoked love (" Love is like a red rose "), and were transformed to represent solidarity between workers, only to be co-opted by dictators who used the flower of love as a weapon of mass destruction.

I propose three lines of analysis for communicative opacity. Firstly, I propose that we move away from the mindset of systematically creating a category for every meaning. Instead, let's take meanings as part of a process (life and death) or a relationship (men and women). In this way, transformations in the meaning of a symbol can be seen as a change of scale, from life to death, or from love to suffering, without changing category in the semantic grid.

Secondly, the nature of polysemy. Rooted in layers of multi-referentiality and inter-referentiality creates a multitude of interdependent concepts.

Thesis is embedded in antithesis. However, the dynamics of a polysemous symbol lie not so much in the static fact of having several meanings, but in the symbol's role in practice. In a given social context, social actors derive different interpretations from a vast set of interlocking meanings at several levels, which constitute the semantic field of polysemy.

Thirdly, it's the aesthetics of these flowers, whose "beauty" can easily deceive people when "sublimated", to use a Kantian distinction, and assigned to patriotism or sacrifice.

These three factors work together to create a communicative opacity, especially when an everyday symbol is deployed in political spaces.