[49a] Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 1, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 12-285 (pp. 166-168).

The work Flags for Organisations consists of four flags and four posters. The flags are in four middling decorative colours: yellow, blue, green and orange. They all carry the same emblem in black. The colours do not readily evoke any classical or grand political passions (the blue is not the blue of British conservativism, the green is not the green of the Levellers or of Islam). They are the harmless bright-but-not-too-bright colours of organisations or corporations.

Their common emblem is in fact the logo for the ‘people for Rockefeller’ campaign of 1968. Here we will say no more than the obvious: it is modern, unsubtle, brutal and tacky.

Each of the four posters carries a series of axioms which serves to establish the character of a fictional organisation. It may well be that the four fictional organisations over whom the flags fly are, like the colours themselves, somehow corporatist (and ultimately vacuous) in their various ways. The viewer, however, is not rendered ‘blind’ to the work if she disagrees with this derogation and believes that there is virtue in one or all of them. If she accedes to the proposition that they are all equally vacuous, she can entertain the idea of someone’s identifying with one or all of these fictional entities hypothetically or imaginatively. If she sees virtue in one of them she will presumably identify (somehow) with the relevant organisation in accordance with a counter-factual conditional: “If there were such an organisation whose principles were like this, I’d identify with it”, and similarly mutatis mutandis for the ones with which she didn’t identify. Or she might say, “If there were organisations with these principles, then I’d see certain merits in all of them.”

Simply to assert, “I agree with these principles”, might be (would be) a misreading – or an incomplete reading – of the work since it fails to account for the fact that these are the axiomatic principles for admittedly fictional organisations for which (real) flags fly. The relevant possible world starts outside the axioms themselves. 

The organisation which flies the blue flag (it could fly any of the other three colours) owes its political and organisational beliefs to the ‘humane’, ‘rational’ and ‘responsible’ but highly corporate conservativism of what is called the ‘left’ of the British Conservative party and which broadly coincides with the economic and social theory of European Christian ‘Democracy’. This is a conservative ideology which seeks only moderately and meekly (but scientifically) to regulate the predations of corporate capitalism, preferring to live in the illusions of bourgeois consensus.

The organisation which flies the green flag (it could fly any of the other three colours) is also founded in atomistic individualism. It is attached to the political and moral theories of John Rawls. Rawls is a liberal theorist much occupied with questions of fairness. Basing his theory of justice on the view that the principles thereof are to be grounded in or derived from reason itself, his influence in bourgeois politics is undeniable. Of course, the justice and rationality with which he is concerned is the justice and rationality of constructed individuals who conform to a philosophical fiction that they are themselves rational and ‘normally self-interested’. They do not exist in reality. Merely deducing the necessity of equality of opportunity does little to stay the hand of the barbarian who is already within the gates. Like the blue-flagged organisation, the green one is resolutely bourgeois. It is immune to a sense of social and political contradiction and is uninspired by thoughts of its self-transformation.

The organisation flying the yellow flag (it could fly any of the other three colours) is of the left. Some aspects of its analyses are undoubtedly realistic. Its political tendency, however, is to put the structural cart before the horse – and to overestimate the power of ideological critiques to inaugurate a desired social transformation. Its other fault is to underestimate the critical and reflective powers of the dominated. It seeks to foster resistance to the dreamwork of capitalism, believing that such resistance will provide an answer to the question of how we might change the social process from reproduction to transformation.

The organisation which flies the orange flag (it could fly any of the other three colours) is also of the left. It is of a statist and authoritarian nature and its type was much reviled by the New Left in the West, and, more riskily criticised and exposed in samizdat activity in the East. It fundamentally equates socialism with state-party control of the means of production, distribution and exchange – plus planning.  Indeed, its obsession with planning reaches a high level of absurdity and oppressiveness. It plans for fictions as other organisations philosophise for (and with) fictions, monetarise for fictions or seek to discover their political virtue in fictions.

All sets of axioms will have their contemporary adherents. All will introduce one form or another of a perceived criticism of capital today. It can be cogently argued however, that with the triumph of global capital and corporatism, all of them (or all but one of them) are critically toothless as they stand. But the viewer faces an ontological problem. What is she supposed to be looking at? What is redundant here? To the extent that the sets of axioms are of little present power, they might be thought of as texts to join the flags which fly over them as allegories of art: redundant political symbols. But the organisations of which they are supposed to be indices do not exist. We quantify them only in a possible world – a fiction in which the actual flags and the actual texts are used, believed, discussed and possibly changed. In the light of this, it would be inviting to try to develop a social theory of art in which all its middle-sized physical manifestations might be regarded as the inscrutable and redundant identifying cyphers of endlessly developing political organisations and institutions.