Indeed, as Edward Wesp and Haun Saussy argue in a recent pair of posts at Printculture on the flag desecration debates in the US, one problem with the way in which the desecration amendment is conceived is that it is not the material flag (which, in the end, is nothing but a piece of cloth, paper, etc) which people feel must be protected, but rather the abstract ideals which it symbolizes. As a signifier, furthermore, the flag has an inherently contingent relationship with its referent, and consequently the precise limits of what counts as an American flag are themselves impossible to specify. As Wesp puts, the debate overlooks the way in which
the materiality of the flag raises a set of specific and potentially absurd questions about the nature of enforcement: such as “how much would something have to look like an American flag to be protected under such an amendment?” There’s the classic 51-star flag hypothetical, but what about a parodic dollar-sign-for-stars switcheroo? A picture of a flag? How about a negative image?
Applied to the Journey West controversy, we might ask how to differentiate between a digital representation of a flag (which is itself a symbol of an abstract ideal), an intentional parody of the same flag (e.g., dollar-signs-for-stars…), and a visually similar image which actually bears no relationship to the flag at all.
This question of the power of visual simulacra and the limits of representation, in turn, has implications not only for the Japanese flag controversy itself, but also relates very directly to virtual protests which followed. Like the digital flag, the on-line protests are virtual copies of real-life political protests, which themselves function (like flags) as symbols of abstract ideals. The question, then, becomes whether the on-line protests can be regarded as protean political protest (insofar as both are, at heart, symbolic engagements with power), or are they more fruitfully regarded as parodic bastardizations of “genuine” protests (the same way that, for instance, a representation of a protest within a movie does not constitute an actual protest).
In considering these questions, it is useful to note that the Journey West protest was not an isolated incident, but rather was part of a growing phenomenon in on-line gaming in general. Significant precedents include the famous late 2003 Everquest mass march to protest an issue concerning the relative strength of the warrior class (the game designers darkened the sky over the protest as a gesture of implicit solidarity), which was preceded by in-game candle-light vigils following the 9/11 attacks. Similarly, a January 2005 World of Warcraft demonstration (consisting of thousands of naked gnomes) to protest problems associated with the warrior class (the game was only two months old at the time) was followed a year later by another protest over War of Warcraft’s owner Blizzard Entertainment’s refusal to allow Sara Andrews to host a GLBT group within the game.
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