(1500 words or so)
On Saturday I wore my shirt that has Pablo Picasso's "flowers of peace" on the front. Here is what Picasso's painting looks like:
Pablo Picasso, Bouquet of Peace (Bouquet de la paix), lithograph, dated 21.4.58, made for the peace demonstration in Stockholm that July. Reproduction via Poster France.
It's one of my favorite Picasso pieces (not that I know that many), and one of my favorite shirts to wear. I wore it to my annual physical one time, and the doctor asked "that's a cool shirt, did your friend paint that or something?" That ambiguity is part of what makes it cool, it exists in this superposition of cartoonish and profound, childish and mature, kindergarten and Picasso.
Anyway, on Saturday I wore the Picasso shirt on my way to attending a "(mostly) vinyl DJ set" called Wooden Wisdom, featuring Elijah Wood alongside Zach Cowie. Elijah Wood, of course, stars as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings films (films, not movies). When I learned that he was now performing DJ sets and was stopping in Chicago, I wasted little time buying a ticket.
Anyway, I walked up to the venue wearing my Picasso shirt, and stood in what I thought was the line for Wooden Wisdom. As I got closer to the front, I pulled up the ticket in the AXS app on my phone, and dug my driver's license out of my wallet, ready to show both to security.
Then the security guard looked at me and raised his eyebrows: "Are you here for Elijah Wood?"
"Uh, yeah." (I still say "uh" and "uhm" and "like" way more than I want to.)
"This is a different line, go to the line over there."
As I walked away, he leaned to another security guard and said "I knew where that guy was going" as they both smirked and looked at the flowers on my shirt.
I recently re-learned from Zizi Papacharissi's excellent book, After Democracy, about Claude Lévi-Strauss' term "floating signifier," which refers to those terms which "lack any real meaning and thus are open to multiple interpretations."
This concept seems quite useful and practical. So much of human communication is the struggle to identify and verify a common referent. Are we really talking about the same thing when we use the same word? I am frequently amazed by how rarely this is the case, especially for important, ubiquitous words like "democracy" and "equality."
As a small example, I can say "I'm wearing a watch," and you can generally imagine what that means because you probably have a reasonable mental model of a watch. But there is not enough time in the day to give a sufficient explanation of the exact watch I'm wearing, including every detail, every color, every notch, every shape, every scratch, etc.
I could just show you a picture:
Garmin Forerunner 735XT. Photo from Ray Maker's review at DC Rainmaker.
And then, of course, that's not my watch. My watch has some paint specks on it and, being four years old, the sticker on the back has worn off so it's now just a splotchy white area with residue from the technical details sticker that used to be there.
Anyway, at least now we are looking at the same picture.
But the same picture can, of course, mean different things to different people! I have always worn my Picasso shirt as a meager little sign of peace: "let's all get along." It is a picture of one person handing flowers to another person: surely, an unambiguous symbol of bridge-building, unity, and connection.
To my knowledge, this was my first experience in which the Picasso shirt was used to sort me or separate me.
There is one more week until classes start, and the reality of the "floating signifier" is starting to make me nervous (among other things making me nervous). Even as a student, I knew that students do not remember much from their classes. Ironically, it is one of the things I remember from the very first day of my very first college class. The professor chuckled as he explained one of the relevant studies: "yeah by the time you graduate you'll probably forget about 90% of what you learn in this class."
At best, anything students learn in a class will be forgotten at the standard pace of human memory, i.e. the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve:
The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. The red line is what happens with no review; each green line is what happens with review. Diagram from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The "floating signifier" concept made me consider another dimension of "lossiness." "Lossy" communication, generally, means a message loses its original meaning as it's passed along. You know, the telephone game. It's one thing if a student forgets half of the material from class. It's another thing if they conceptualize the material differently, and store a memory which is entirely different from anything I imagined or intended.
My Picasso shirt might be seen as an example of a floating signifier. I intended the Picasso shirt to communicate "I'm here in the spirit of shared humanity, to cultivate peace among all fellow beings." The security guards interpreted the Picasso shirt differently "oh he is here for that concert (Elijah Wood), not this concert (the outdoor rave)."
This all happened in the span of about three seconds, by the way. After he said to his coworker "I knew where that guy was going" I turned to see them looking at my shirt. I then made eye contact with him and started over-analyzing the situation, much to my amusement.
Here is another example of a floating signifier: the Eames short film, Powers of Ten. If you have not seen the film, it is well worth ten minutes of your time!
Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten (1977), 9 minutes. Copy held by the Internet Archive, whose item also includes the 1968 draft, A Rough Sketch.
My dad showed me the film when I was in middle school, if I remember correctly. We stood in our living room as we watched, almost like a crowd stands up to show reverence for a particular person or a particular performance.
I showed the Powers of Ten film to all my students in Fall 2024, when I was teaching at Transylvania University. I showed it in "Discrete Structures" (discrete math) as well as CS1, intro to computer science (computer science counted as a "natural science" at Transylvania, so I got to teach students from all around campus). This added up to about 30 or so students who saw the film that semester, and probably an equal number of interpretations.
I read somewhere that the Eames were known for embedding messages within their films. I can't remember exactly where I read this or how they worded it. Source amnesia! Or maybe I invented my own meaning from this piece or a similar piece?
Anyway, I recently tried searching the web to see if people interpreted a specific hidden meaning from Powers of Ten. It's seen as "a classic," but I did not come across any specific, consistent interpretation(s).
Maybe Paul Schrader was right, and the film is just "a chase through a set of information in search of an Idea".
That comment sounds like a roast at first. If someone told me my work was "information in search of an Idea" ... ouch, seems like a critique. But maybe it is actually a kind of praise? After all, some of the best art is the art with a multitude of different meanings and interpretations, is it not?
I had a dream last night that I was helping feed a large crowd at somebody's birthday (August birthday), and the catering company ran out of a dish, and had to substitute it by bringing out several large pans of spaghetti and marinara. It was improvised. We all laughed. People ate the spaghetti and enjoyed it.
I don't remember what the original catering dish was supposed to be, sort of like I don't know what the original intended message of this post was supposed to be. That is what makes this a blog post and not an essay. I hope you like spaghetti.
Postscript: Reading Zizi Papacharissi's book, After Democracy, I felt a modest but tangible renewed sense of hopefulness. The book reminded me that I can be a skeptic without being a cynic, and that so many of us really do want a better neighborhood, a better city, a better democracy (in a way that many of us can agree on in practical, concrete terms!) We will work for another world, a little bit at a time.
So, at the very least, consider this spaghetti post an endorsement of Zizi's book.