DECODING WAR

Frank Jacob, editor, War and Semiotics: Signs, Communication Systems, and the Preparation,
Legitimization, and Commemoration of Collective Mass Violence, Routledge Studies in Modern
History, London and New York: Routledge, 2021. 324pp.

By Gary Genosko

The lives of signs during war, war semiotics, and the afterlives of signs during peacetime, the
semiotics of war, constitute the two planes of the approach introduced by Frank Jacob in this
collection of essays. Ideology crosses both planes, legitimizing in the first the values of war as it
is waged, and the latter reworks the former through commemoration, but also involves the
contestation of memorials.

In “Part I: War semiotics and the question of interpretation,” the first chapter is Max Philipp
Wehn’s “Media Constructions of War and Peace during the War of Spanish Succession.” He
considers the complex semantics of the pursuit of peace through the coding of historical
newspaper reports and related texts examining the coverage at the outset, resulting from the
struggle over the entitlement to the throne following the death of the Spanish King (1700), the
failure of peace talks (1710), and the execution of the treaty (1713-14). Focusing on the threat
narratives, reference objects and the semantic field in which war and peace contrast and are
rearranged in relation to other terms, Wehn excavates how the enemy parties, the Grand
Alliance (Great Britain, States General) and the Franco-Spanish union, under the aegis of Louis
XIV the ‘Warrior King’, communicated about options for peace and the necessity of war.
Indeed, for the Alliance, the problem was that the choice of not to go to war would produce a
“dangerous peace,” (20) and the failure of peace talks in 1710 exposed the degree to which the
French wanted to negotiate and wage war at the same time, using favourable results on the
battlefield as bargaining chips; whereas the Alliance justified the continuation of war on the
grounds of failed peace talks, making war the preferred route to peace.

When reports of French defeats began to mount, and threaten the honour of the Warrior King,
a newspaper was created (Gazette de France) to hide defeats and serve the King’s honour. At
certain moments, news reports around Europe became quite “confusing,” (23) as both sides
claimed victory in certain battles, and “fake news” proliferated alongside rumours of various
peace proposals (25). After 1711, reactions to French peace preliminaries changed the subtle
construction of threat, which was then aligned with that of “throne vacancy,” and the idea of
an “ill-conceived peace could nurture further conflict” (26-7). A shift occurred in reportage, as
“common people” as victims of war became as prominent as the agents waging war, and Louis
XIV sought a “solid peace” linked to the happiness of his subjects (29); unity within the Alliance
was a condition for a whole peace, and disunity a recipe for fragmented, “separate peaces”
(34). By the end of the process the Utrecht peace talks were rich in symbolism and ceremony,
even though the prevailing idea that peace could be restored by means of war (33) remained
the dominant principle, and justice was no longer in human hands (34) as the choice between
war and peace was a matter of “faith.”

The second chapter, James Crossland and Gaute Lund Rønnebu’s “The Red Cross ‘Symbol’: The
Semiotic Duality of the Red Cross during the Occupation of Norway, 1940-45,” presents a
further historically specific case study in war semiotics, but some 1,945 years later. Although
widely recognized as a symbol of international humanitarianism, it remains on the battlefield
“not nearly as well understood as its omnipresence is accepted” (37). Crossland and Rønnebu
expose the “conflicted” character of this symbol, largely through the ambiguities that arose in
the Second World War around its abuse, focusing on the Norwegian Red Cross. Signifying the
presence of medics on battlefields was not new, as various means had been employed to
elevate them “above the fray” or “hors de combat” (39). The red cross, a Swiss flag in reverse
(40) in keeping with its Genevan pedigree, inherited thus a “Christian value” (41), which
exacerbated the so-called “neutrality” attached to it (were those bearing it thus crusaders?)
and the volunteers who were often looked upon with suspicion by xenophobes, and the use of
the shield as a cover for mercenaries was not unknown in the Franco-Prussian War, Russo-
Turkish War, and Boer Wars (42).

The combination of medical aid and political neutrality were reaffirmed again and again in
Geneva Conventions and International Red Cross Conferences, yet as the Second World War
arrived, the symbol remained very much a “totem of war” (45) and its “contradictory semiotic
values” were on display. The Norwegian Red Cross was popularly supported, and during the
invasion, joined forces with the German Red Cross to assist wounded soldiers. During the five
years of occupation, the Norwegian Red Cross retained a good deal of autonomy, and
contributed to the “normalization of life under occupation” (46-7), especially for prisoners of
war, by delivering letters, gathering information on missing persons, and providing medical,
clothing and food aid. Its exemplary status, then, is meticulously untied by first pointing to the
“surface-level praise” that was quite selective, omitting the worst of many German atrocities,
despite the belief that the invaders respected the symbol. Additionally, Norwegians were not
above utilizing the red cross to protect their personal property, prompting repeated public
warnings against such misuses (48), and the “sanctity” of the symbol was deployed by the
resistance as a cover for weapons smuggling (49). Yet these examples “raised few eyebrows at
the time” (49). Moreover, several leading Norwegian figures, with German roots – cultural,
governmental and corporate ties – who served as mediators with the occupying forces, have
largely escaped scrutiny because of their red cross connections and the “key value of
neutrality” (51). The value, however, was exploited by the German occupiers and one
collaborationist was eventually acquitted of trying to “’Nazify’” the Norwegian Red Cross (52).
But was any lasting damage done? The conclusion is no, not really, for even though such
“neutrality” was plastic, the red cross attracted “faith in the symbol as one of inherent
goodness, irrespective of how it was used or misused” (53). Post-war belief in the red cross
remained strong, erasing the negative evidence, in favour of tales of “hope, charity and
goodness.”
The first two articles, then, end with an important consideration, faith, which is not developed
in depth. However, any reader can note that if elevated beyond the human, war, peace, or the
red cross, all enjoy a blessing that rests on a public lack of confidence in the main actors.

The third and final chapter of “Part I” is Eirik Holmen’s “The semiotics of collaboration.” The
word “collaboration” acquired new meaning during the Second World War, and has been
constantly shaped by historians since the war’s end. Adopting a Peircean approach, Holmen
considers “collaboration” as a symbol that has evolved from “working together” to “traitorous
cooperation” (63) since the pronouncements of Phillippe Pétain in Nazi occupied Vichy, France,
shifting from a positive to a negative meaning after 1940. Holmen finds that there are four
strategies among historians for dealing with the word “collaboration”: the first is the Vichy
context, in which later interpretations distinguish between “ideological motivations” initiated
by the occupied and “reasons of state” (67), shifting the latter towards a “shield” theory; the
second usage refers to gradations of accommodation as “neither positive nor negative” (69);
the third is simply not using it as the word has become “meaningless” as some form of
“collaboration” was “inevitable” since the alternative was “collective suicide”; and fourth, use
of the word to describe most interactions between occupier and occupied, since “everyone
collaborated” (70). Holmen’s goal is to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of the
word as applied to the situations of the occupation, irreducible to a single motivation captured
by the “patriotic narrative” (72). In short, the generality of symbols opens them to plurality, and
the growth of the symbol “collaboration” has been encouraged by the arguments of historians
of the Second World War.

“Part II: War, semiotics, and identity constructions” begins with Karl Dargel’s “(Re-)negotiating
internment: Language, semiotics, and the German internment experience in the United States
during the First World War.” Considering the late-arriving American prisoner of war camp
system within the context of the fundamental change in the management of military and
civilian captives in the First World War, Dargel analyzes an internment camp newspaper, the
Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. The question arose, following the
declaration of war by the US in April, 1917, of how to manage the “massive number of
potentially ‘dangerous enemy aliens’” (84). Mass internment was not feasible; surveillance was
a better option; a case-by-case basis was adopted. The total percentage of actual internments
turned out to be small (8 percent of men for some period of time and 2 percent for the
duration of the war; 86). Those who failed to “self-censor” their Germanness were
disproportionately victimized.

Camp Oglethorpe was one of three; it was the largest, but short-lived (March 1917-March
1920). It was also “hybrid” since it held military and civilians, and displayed “emerging social
stratifications” (90), reproducing not only class distinctions, but tensions between merchant
seamen and criminals, collaborators and an underground movement (93). A printing press was
smuggled in, one that had been used to print menus aboard an ocean liner, and this was
utilized by an interned journalist who launched the newspaper in the fall of 1918. Holmen
observes: “While the conflict in Europe was coming to an end, the semiotic war in Fort
Oglethorpe had only just begun” (94). A total of 10 issues appeared. Each issue typically sold out and profits were distributed to the neediest (95). Poems were a popular contribution, and
images of the camp (no barb wire, rural farm fences) were evident and Holmen sees these as a
kind of counter-message to the government’s discourse of control. Outwitting the camp censor
became a game of simple encryption (substituting dashes for certain words; 99-100) and
writing in obscure dialects, sometimes mixed together (101). “Flouting the censor” lead to a
ban of the newspaper.

While Germanness was a “recurring trope” (101), the editor aimed for “high culture”
discussions of music and architecture, which he occasionally achieved, eschewing humour for
“serious” subjects, while paradoxically attempting to break free of patriotism, yet continuing to
publish odes to the fatherland. The rich archival materials used in this chapter are organized by
a light semiotic scaffolding, including dialect assemblages and resistant visual codes responding
to local censorship and political statements about the degree of national social control
exercised against enemy aliens.

The editor Jacob’s contribution, “The semiotic construction of Judeo-Bolshevism in Germany,
1918-1933,” analyzes the Judeo-Bolshevist “sinister” conspiracy utilized during the Weimar
period to amalgamate existing strains of anti-semitism and a Bolshevization scare on behalf of
National Socialism. The propagation of discourses, especially in Bavaria, followed the German
Revolution in 1918 and Kurt Eisner’s assumption of the Prime Minister’s office. Jacob considers
archival evidence based on letters received by Eisner that made extreme racist and paranoid
accusations and threats on his life by developing an existing “Judeo-Bolshevist narrative” (109)
that would soon thereafter result in his assassination the following year (the same year as the
murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht, 110). The post-monarchy situation in Germany
was rife for right-wing anti-semitic and conspiracy theorists within the National Socialism
movement as it massified itself; Eisner continued to be represented as a “foreign” puppet in
order to support the “perception of the German Revolution as a foreign [Eastern European
Jewish] and un-German development” (115). In this, biographical and historical facts about
Eisner and events were negligible; the Weimar Republic itself was characterized as “vicious”
and “perverted” (116-17), and National Socialist ideologues agitated for the fight against Judeo-
Bolshevism, the so-called “natural enemy” of the fatherland.

Most of Jacob’s attention is on Joseph Goebbels’s role as Minister of Propaganda, his utilization
of the existing semiotic system of Judeo-Bolshevism, attributing to Jewish-Marxism only a
powerful form of “mass propaganda” (120), which blinded the working-class, and countered in
National Socialist propaganda, augmented by “’Anti-comintern’ semiotics” (121), and a
virulently globalized characterization of Bolshevism as “against human civilization itself” (122);
a travelling exhibition is also cited, “The Great Anti-Bolshevik Exhibit” that circulated in 1936-7.
Jacob exposes the affective texture of “anger and fear” that National Socialist propaganda
exploited and communicated, bolstered by massive repetition, in a semiotic package that
isolated internal and external menaces. Jacob’s suggestive conclusion that lessons about
National Socialism for today should serve as a warning to explore the semiotics of
contemporary conspiracy theories remains undeveloped but well-received in the age of
ethnostate politics.
Marta Garcia Cabrera’s chapter, “The semiotics of British print propaganda in Spain during the
Second World War,” expands the existing analysis of British propaganda directed at the home
front and at occupied countries by focusing on the declared neutral country of Spain from
1939-45. Utilizing a structural conception of propaganda from Antonio Pineda Cachero, Cabrera
pursues an analysis of the objectives of the British government, thus a propagated-centred
approach about the sender’s interests, which enlists the propagandeme in a kind of
morphology (131-2). The search for propagandemes in print is expanded to include images as
well, and the first example studied is a visual contrast between two boys, each representing
values of British and German cultures in a “dichotomous-antithetical logical framework” of
positive (us) and negative (them) with conceptual opposites (135). Similar contrastive
messages are considered with regard to the projection of British naval power through merchant
marine fleets, shipping route protection of neutral ships, and the benefit for Spain of the British
naval blocade of trade from South America; and, later, discriminate, military-targeted aerial
bombardment as opposed to indiscriminate German “terrorist bombing” practices (144). Four
examples of “negation propaganda” are then analyzed, exposing the falsehood of German plans
and to discourage collaboration; the dangers of emigrating to Germany for work; destruction of
the Catholic Church by a “pagan Nazi Germany” (143); and a satirical criticism of German war
nomenclature. A more positive statement of British values of compassion and strength (145) is
also included.

The longest and most detailed analysis is of a pamphlet about German lying and misdirection
(146ff), and the struggle between two propaganda models: truth and falsehood. Negative
propagated messages about Germany are combined with propagandemes exposing duplicity
and “indifference” towards the fate of neutral nations. Taken from the final year of the war, an
example is then canvased of Britain’s affirmative messaging leans into the post-war future.

British propaganda utilized both positive and negative propagandemes, and exploited Spanish
specificities, “the importance of traditionalism and Catholicism” (153), in order to build a
semiotic structure that underlined the maintenance of neutrality, and the disastrous
consequences of collaboration, the equation of Francoism with hardship, and the enduring
values of Great Britain as protector and defender of “Christian Europe.”

A second chapter devoted to collaboration is by Steiner Aas, “The semiotics of collaboration
and resistance during the Nazi German occupation of Norway 1940-45.” Aas plots the
opportunism of the Norwegian far-right party Nasjonal Samling (NS) under the leadership of
Vidkun Quisling, which executed a coup and became a puppet government under the Nazi
dictatorship of Norway in 1940. This curious “linguistic innovation,” quisling, came to signify
collaborationists (158), and was opposed to protestors and resisters. By the last year of the war,
the Norwegian government in exile criminalized membership in the NS, and retroactively
defined members as collaborationists in post-war legal investigations of treason. The
protector/quisling dichotomy is understood through Barthesean “mythic narrative,” and its
simple, depthless and clear (165) categories. The “intricate signs” (166) of protests, like the
wearing of a paperclip on one’s lapel, are considered in their efficacity as “genuine symbols”
(166), which provoked what was considered to be an “overreaction” from the NS government.
The waning of such symbolism and the myths associated with it only began in the 1960s. The
shift toward greater nuance in research on Norwegian occupation history eventually called into
question the framework of the semiotics of war and its simple dichotomies, while
acknowledging the adequacy of such signs during the period for those who experienced them.

Manu Sharma’s chapter concerns “Postage stamps, war memory, and commemoration: A case
study of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.” The first 8 postage stamps issued by the
Provisional Government of Bangladesh on July 29, 1971, function in four ways: first, as an
international appeal for recognition of the new state; a declaration of sovereignty; a revenue
generator; second, as a visual icon of liberation; third, as an important text for studying public
history; fourth, serve as official state visual archival material (184-5).

National, regional and international geopolitical, economic, linguistic, issues set the context for
the war of liberation, and the government in exile was joined by defecting diplomats from East
Pakistan. In London, graphic artist Biman Chand Mullick, who was known for his design of the
Ghandi stamp for the British Post Office, was tasked with designing the first stamps. Stamps, as
Sharma notes, are “emblematic devices” and “the ultimate tool of regime legitimation” (187).
These tools are also mobile, and in the context of post-colonial nation building, carry “powerful
visual narratives” (189) as well. The “maximal” feature of such stamps is iconic-visual; the
indexical dimension is a logo of the issuing country; and the symbolic is a linguistic sign of the
nation. While these features may blur and blend, in Mullick’s work, the choice of colour is
significant in the first stamp: red to mark the new nation’s location relative to India and the Bay
of Bengal, augmented by the country’s name in Bengali and English, and a map, with its capital,
displaying precise longitudinal and latitudinal lines.

The second stamp adopts a more narrative approach regarding “the massacre at Dhaka
University” (192) with indexical colours – the yellow of the University, and red for the blood
spilled; the third stamp is an index/symbol number of the new country’s population; the fourth
bears an official flag; the fifth a ballot box, linked indexically to the squashed election results in
1970; the sixth shows a broken chain, release from the shackles of West Pakistan; the seventh
an iconic image of a national leader; and the eighth simply states “support Bangladesh” and
bears the highest purchase price. This collection of stamps fit into Peirce’s second trichotomy
without further attempts at refinement.

The final chapter in section II is by Gal Hertz, “Semiotics beyond agency: Violence and meaning
in the theater of war.” Working with three theatrical case studies, Hertz analyzes the “crisis of
signification” in each play in which “violence … [is] a response and an acting out of a semiotic
impasse” (201). The mutual imbrications of violence and language disturb signification and
precipitate both an emptying of signs and a performative reconstitution of meaning.

Beginning with Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Hertz shows how
this study calls into question agency itself, as far as it is attached to individuals and their inner
struggles, in favour of “stag[ing] the constitutive process of desire” itself (215). Desire is neither
located in the subject-less subjectivities of the play, nor in the objects they insatiably pursue,
making insatiability a signifier of subjective detumescence.

Turning to Hanoch Levin’s Murder, which situates itself in the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, Hertz maintains the play addresses “violence for violence’s sake” and explores the
“crisis of meaning” (2019) by responding that the fundamental question – why? – that it is
unanswerable, neither by perpetrators nor victims, all of whom are nameless characters.

Ending with Moataz Abu Saleh and Bashar Murkus’s New Middle East, in which a female victim
struggles to engage socially a male soldier who is in the process of burying her in sand, only to
succeed once she expires, even then, the silence following this execution is “saturated with
meaning and becomes unbearable” (221). The promise of a new future, an Arab spring, is
empty, and it is this impasse that the play exploits.

By focusing on what violence does, rather than symbolize, Hertz concludes: “how violence
excites, desires, transgresses boundaries or reconstitutes them, and how a semiotic of
performance – beyond agency – allows a different way of looking and coping, and readdressing
these needs” (223).

Part III, “War, semiotics, and politics,” circles back to earlier themes. Fredrik Wilhelmsen’s
“’National decay and national resurrection’: The semiotics of Quisling’s conception of history,”
returns to the figure of Vidkun Quisling in order to diagnose his specific blend of fascism in the
Norwegian context. While usefully paired with Aas’s study, Wilhelmsen adds little of a semiotic
nature to Quisling’s deployment of stereotypical binaries that play out in a narrative of
“national rebirth” (palingenesis) (231), overcoming racialized decay and decadence, and
regaining a primordial greatness (golden age). In Quisling’s discourse about end times, the
“millenarian myth, the old Norse idea of Ragnarok” (235) serves as end and beginning, as long
as the “alien influence” is purged. Dichotomies of doom and racial cleansing are the part and
parcel of fascists imaginaries, and the pair of apocalypse and palingenesis served Quisling’s
party during the occupation, pushing forward towards a future greatness. Wilhelmsen rightly
wonders how a “motley crew” of Vikings, Nazis, etc. can cohere to redeem a future Norway in
this “cherry-picked” history (243).

While Wilhelmsen exposes the essentialized “semiotic binaries” used by Quisling (245),
sometimes “binary semiotics” (251), the adjectival deployment of semiotic does not modify the
largely descriptive account that this chapter offers. While the political-theoretical sources for
“radical negativity” and “semiotics of enmity” are noted, in the case of Carl Schmitt’s influence
on the right, they are of limited application in Quisling’s vision (255).

Hans Otto Frøland and Martin Steffensen revisit the semantic mapping of collaboration in
“Legitimate or improper economic collaboration? The struggle about the past after the German
occupation of Norway.” Following the contributions of Holmen and Aas, the authors adopt a
legal semiotic lens through which to map the “penal demarcation” of “improper,” that is, legal
as opposed to illegal economic collaboration with the occupying force. The thesis that the
“’improper’ never settled consistently” (261) guides the analysis. Working in an asymmetrical
relationship based not on force but temptation, Norwegian businesses, especially the
construction industry, were “almost completely engaged” (261). The investigation of “national
treason” after the war did find “blameworthiness” in “economic treason,” which in some
instances was downplayed, compared with “ideological treason,” which was much more
serious. Looked at in terms of legal definitions of “improper,” there appeared to be specific
time sensitivities at work that made early occupation practices different from later occupation
practices. While “improper activity with the enemy” had a foundation in criminal law, economic
relations with the occupiers would cast a wide net, catching even “indirect” assistance, which
made it a crude tool to use; whereas the Treason Ordinance of December 1944 focused on
political-ideological treason.

Economic collaboration was so widespread that subtle delineations were suggested that
prioritized specific kinds of profits, especially those deemed “excessive” and those involving
“military power” (268), but this recommendation was not adopted by the government in exile
(270), yet it would return later. Using the Ordinance, attention rested on businesses that
initiated collaborations, expanded themselves, and the like, but it remained unworkable, until
the Supreme Court reinterpreted it in 1946, and the aforementioned military support provision
was revisited. The definition of “improper” remained fluid, however, and collaboration with
direct “military relevance” was not easy to determine beyond the obvious. The Supreme Court
was left to specify what was meant by “improper aid to the enemy” (273), and early examples
emphasized “national blameworthiness” and only “direct military importance” was considered
prosecutable (275). By the late 1940s, these terms were still subject to debate and “gray areas”
persisted (277), and the question of residual “civilian benefits” of military projects entered the
discourse of “improper.” Ultimately, due to this “compensatory” logic and further
inconsistencies, “the notion of ‘improper’ economic aid to the enemy never found a consistent
meaning” (279). The focus here is on semantic change through inexact institutional
interventions over time.

Katarzyna Balzewska’s “Eastern Europe in the shadow of a propaganda war: Józef Mackiewicz
and totalitarian propaganda,” addresses the failure (“counterproductivity,” 287) of Nazi
propaganda in Eastern Europe – a “hostile semiotic territory” (284) – in the Second World War.
Guided by the reflections of Polish political writer Mackiewicz, Balzewska details how Poles
identified the “sarcasm and bitter irony” (285) in Goebbels’ ridiculous borrowed concepts and
everyday segregation tactics. Reading “Nazi news upside down” (286), resistance tactics
recoded such messages through graffiti and deconstructed signage, as well as in the mouths of
characters in Mackiewicz’s novels who jokingly applauded the effects of Nazi propaganda in
building a broad pro-Soviet consensus in Polish society. While the German grip upon Polish
society tightened, speech itself was overcome with a “semantic of silence” (288) and recourse
to non-verbal communication was widespread. After the Soviet retreat from its occupied
territories in 1941, and the atrocities committed (especially the Katyn Massacre), the Germans
attempted to capitalize upon them, but the “hypocritical” nature of such messages, and the
anti-Soviet intent, served as a vehicle for Judeo-Bolshevik hate in yet another instance of the
kind of anti-semitism outlined above by Jacob’s contribution. What is different, however, is the
“crack” that this strategy opened in German propaganda, as it backfired inasmuch as the names
of Jews murdered by the Soviets were acknowledged by witnesses from the international
community. For Balzewska, “it was probably the first and last time during the war that the Nazis
were forced to officially admit that the Jews had been victims of the war” (290).

The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland brought with it new lessons for propaganda studies. A
different “grammar” (291) was at work, one in which fakery, constitutive redefinition of words
(“first free elections,” 292-3) were ubiquitous. This situation of “semanticide” produced a kind
of entropic decline in mentalities, a “psychologically exhausting” (295) experience of
encirclement in a charade of communication. Using a hybrid resource pool of literary and
historical documents, the lessons of the two propagandas for Poland are set in stark contrast.

The “Epilogue: War semiotics in the post-cold war world,” contains a single chapter by Rolf
Hugoson, “Brinkmanship: A cold war parody of statesmanship.” Hugoson approaches the
meaning of “brinkmanship” through a robust semiotic lens, first assaying the use of Greimas’s
actantial model in the context of nuclear arms discourse, then turning to the translation of
“brink” as a key to term’s dramatic force – “so far, merely a hypothetical entity” (304). In the
time of the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer (2023), then, the abyss of an unthinkable
nuclear arms conflict must reckon with the historical edge-play of pro-nuke 1950s American
diplomacy. But Hugoson asks against the grain whether brinksmanship during this period had a
parodic dimension. It is an “ambiguous sign” that can be exploited, in the theory of Gérard
Genette, by nuanced classifications (here, it is the satiric and ironic modes, with ludic and
polemic trace elements, at play). This brings irony into the picture as a “pastiche of
statesmanship” (307), as the theorists of the RAND Corporation contributed to the definition of
the “art of bargaining” by importing game theory, for instance, supplemented with somewhat
simplistic “slope” narratives, ironically “dependent upon chance” (309). By the period of the
early 60s and Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the paratexts of John F. Kennedy’s set of analogies
about the situation at hand are brought into the open, as he addressed “the abyss of
destruction” through the threat of a naval “quarantine.” Utilizing Barthesean terms of logos
versus praxis to describe the discursive continuation of pressure as opposed to a “deadly”
outcome (315), Hugoson delineates the mere logos of the Soviet response, having lost the
element of surprise, falling back on a discourse of “toleration” of nuclear weapons (termed
animalistically, “smelly goats”) by both sides. Kennedy may have avoided “parodical
brinksmanship” (317), and eschewed the value of abstruse game theory, but what about
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un and duelling “button” sizes? While this seems like pure logos,
especially framed as parodic tweet, one needs to be reminded that once pushed, the red
button is still a figure, logos; it is, rather, the football or briefcase, with the presidential “biscuit”
code, where there is genuine praxis. Hugoson, in utilizing multiple narratological and literary
semiotic sources, puts the semiotic back into this collection that tends to skew toward the
simply semantic.

Gary Genosko is Professor of Communication and Digital Media at Ontario Tech University. 

Currently he has three books in production. As author, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum (University of Alberta Press), and as editor, Harley Parker, The Culture Box: Musuems as Media (University of Alberta Press), and as co-editor, Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (Bloomsbury).