Paint it Black: Colours and the Social Meaning of the Battlefield

Xavier Guillaume (University of Edinburgh)

Rune S. Andersen (University of Copenhagen)

Juha A. Vuori (University of Turku)[i]

Abstract:

The modern battlefield is a judicial and social space as well as a spatio-temporal designation that has evolved through time. In this article we argue that the shifts in the social meaning of what the battlefield is – from a “deeply social marker of war’s limitation” (Mégret, 2011: 133) to a hunting ground of a party over its game – can be seen in the use colours on the battlefield. More specifically, we argue that the shift in the use of colours in military battlefield uniforms, from conspicuously colourful to camouflaged and blending in or disrupting shapes, can be seen as working as a semiotic vehicle to understand societal meanings attached to the battlefield. This builds on the idea that “what soldiers wear is central to the public image of the military” (Tynan, 2013a: 27), to their own modes of being and action, and to the meaning of the battlefield itself. The most evident reading of this development in colour-use tends to be a functionalist one, where the development of toned down colours and camouflage goes along with technological advances and needs in the face of more and more powerful observation and targeting tools. We offer another reading. Arguing through a semiotic analysis of colour-use, we examine colour-use on military battlefield uniforms in light of how imaginaries and practices of the battlefield evolve.


Paint it Black: Colours and the Social Meaning of the Battlefield[ii]

Battlefields have been fundamental bearers of, and markers in, discourses and practices that intimately link up with the central features of the modern concept of war (see Mégret, 2011). Constituted as a mutually agreed “space of exceptionality” within which logistical, psychological and normative constraints are applied to warfare (Mégret, 2011: 134), battlefields are also saturated with symbols, which participate in the delineation of such constraints. One such example is the distinction between civilians and the military. Yet, battlefields have always been saturated with visual and phonic symbols, whether in the form of pennants, flags, drums, trumpets, insignias, or crests. Contemporary “battlespaces” (Graham, 2009: 279-280) are also saturated with and performed through techno-culturally mediated ways of seeing (Gregory, 2010; 2011). Visual symbols have not only worked to impress and daunt the enemy, but also enabled coordinated actions within and between different units and arms, marked a warrior (later soldier) identity, including class and race distinctions (Tynan, 2013a), and ethos on the battlefield.

As this history suggests, “visuality plays a vital role in both the conduct and rationalization” (Gregory, 2010: 266) of security practices, including the use of military violence. Here, colour can be an important visual modality, whereby the use of colour in security practice is not innocent. Colour is a part of techno-cultural systems, and “mangles” (Pickering, 1995) or “entanglements” of science, art, and security (Forsyth, 2014b: 128), whereby their use is implicated in practices that “not only detect objects and people but also produce” (Harris, 2006: 102) them with certain statuses and as “surveillant subjects”(ibid.). Colour-use is part and parcel of “constructed visibility” (Rajchman, 1991).

Indeed, colour-use shapes and participates in social imaginaries, which is why their use needs to be studied systematically as part of an international political sociology. We can enter such imaginaries through three steps of investigation that become more general with every step (Figure 1). First, colour can be a particular visual modality in human communication (Kress, 2011). Second, colour-use can be a part of systems of signification that participate in meaning making in certain fields (Barthes, 1973[1964]). Finally, colour-use in systems of signification is part of systems of the sensible (Rancière, 2011 [2008]) that modulate what is considered sensible rather than noise, what can be seen, and so on.

As an example of this kind of investigation, we examine the historical evolution of colour-use in battle-uniforms. Uniforms are a particularly appropriate focus for such study, as they vest their bearers with normative expectations. Through shifts in the use of colour, we are able to understand shifts in the societal understanding of battlefields too. Previous studies of battlefields from the eighteenth to the twentieth century have tended to make a false dichotomy between a “morale-oriented and a technologically oriented battlefield” (Phillips, 2011: 569). Indeed, while the use of colour has technological, tactical, and practical implications, we are interested in how colour-use on uniforms participates in the production of social imaginaries of battlefields. Battlefields have evolved from close combat and close combat formations to longer range and more dispersed formations, which has been conceptualized in a variety of ways, e.g. as a “void of the battlefield” (Phillips, 2011: 584). The use of colour on battlefield uniforms has evolved to allow for a move away from limited and circumscribed spaces of combat to virtually limitless, multi-scalar and multi-dimensional “battlespaces” that range from the molecular to space technologies (Graham, 2009: 279-280). To study the use of colour in combat dress, offers an entry-point into the history and evolution of modern warfare, technology, violence, and social imaginaries of them. The inclusion of colour-use provides for a better understanding of the socio-materialism of security practice, as well as material presences and social relations that they create and produce (cf. Forsyth, 2014a: 250), including the visual stabilization of socio-political space (e.g. “green zones” and “red zones” in Baghdad) (Gregory, 2010).

Figure 1: From colour-use in battlefield uniforms to battlefield uniforms as a system of the sensible.

Indeed, colour-use has played an important role in the visual symbols found on battlefields. With the emergence of the modern state in Western Europe and the development of regular armies that symbolized the constitution of both the modern state (Tilly, 1990) and the modern international system, the prominence of colour-use has increased.[iii] From the emergence of the modern concept of war as early as the eleventh century (Mégret, 2011: 133), the formal requirements in regard to the delimitation of battlefields and parties involved in them reached their apex in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. The modern concept of war emphasised war as the use of violence for public purposes with organized armies under responsible command as is enshrined in the modern jus in bello. In these normative settings, colour became an important semiotic marker for differentiating between state armies, armies and civilians, and between ranks and arms. In the age of national armies, following the levée en masse of the French revolution, colours became even more crucial as markers of identities – whether of soldiers-as-professionals, soldiers-as-citizens, or the classes and races of soldiers. The use of colour in marking identities through armies is forcefully captured by their absence and use in civil war.[iv]

Evident and bright colours adorned on military uniforms helped define the modern battlefield as a social space and time, colour-use in military uniforms being part of the “series of understandings about [the battlefield] purpose and its rules” that structure “what it means to do battle” (Mégret, 2011: 133). This is what we can call the formal understanding of the battlefield, where colour-use is mostly important through its formal disciplining. As important as the development of such understandings, colour-use also plays a part in the actual practices of constituted armies as well as soldiers that constitute the battlefield. Such understandings are key, as the battlefield is now much more difficult to establish temporally and spatially than it has ever been before (Mégret, 2011). Rather than on a “field”, battles are waged in “spaces” that cannot be clearly defined (Graham, 2009). Arguably, the technological developments that enable the now global projection of force and lethality (long range missiles, drones, and so on) as well as the changing discourse on warfare to encompass more asymmetric encounters (such as guerrilla warfare and terrorism) have led to the “deconstruction” of the battlefield (Mégret, 2011: 141-152) in “late modern war” where militarized violence can occur anywhere (Gregory, 2011: 238). Beyond changes in technology and battle-tactics in this “fourth generation of war” (Hammes, 2006), we argue that this deconstruction is also linked to the symbolic practices of visual representation effected through the military battlefield uniform on this highly regulated and delimited logistical, psychological and normative temporality and space.

The end of the nineteenth century saw the development, most notably under the influence of the colonial experience (see Abler, 1999), of toned down and then camouflaged uniforms. Such uniforms are more attuned to modern battlefields in which technological change in weaponry and observation tools made obvious colours too dangerous for soldiers to adorn – a danger recognised in international law which deems camouflage acceptable in the context of battle, but frowns upon other forms of “treachery”, such as dressing up as a civilian or in the enemy’s uniform (Mégret, 2011: 137). The principle of distinction between combatants and non-combatants remains at the heart of the laws of war, and even with camouflage, uniforms and other markers retain their specific function to visually identify specific armies.

Since the initial development of camouflage by artists and scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we are now witnessing the deployment of computerised, pixelated fractal and quantum camouflage (see Brayley 2009). In such a situation, not only the battlefield is disappearing, so are the combatants: in asymmetric forms of warfare, military combatants are rendered invisible through their camouflage, and guerrillas or terrorists are unidentifiable as combatants due to the lack of uniform altogether (Forsyth, 2014a). Such developments undermine the modern norms of warfare on battlefields as well as the concept of the battlefield, as fighting is no longer an activity that is readily identifiable as a public activity and does not take place in a delimited time and space.

The most evident reading of these developments seems to be a functionalist one, where the development of camouflage goes along with technological advances and needs in the face of more and more powerful observation and targeting tools. We would however like to present another reading, based on a semiotic analytics of colour-use. Indeed, in the present article, we view the colouring of military uniforms in light of the evolution of the battlefield. Similarly to Tynan’s (2013a: 19) examination of the embodiment of military and civilian culture through the military uniform, we are examining the evolution of battlefield uniforms not as functions of battlefield tactics, but as indicators of societal imaginaries of and practices on battlefields.

This article thus offers a visual semiotic analysis of the evolution of colour-use from making battlefield uniforms visible through bright colours to making soldiers obscure on battlefields. In this evolution, the main imaginary and practice of visibility on the battlefield has evolved from one of daunting to being out of sight (Tynan, 2013a). We can see that this evolution pre-dates not only some recent technological developments within the war on terror, usually associated with this deconstruction of the battlefield, but also the changing official discourse on warfare to a more total and asymmetric one. We argue that understanding how the battlefield is now viewed as partaking in a game of hunt rather than constituting a highly regulated exceptional circumstance for violent death, can take place through a visual semiotic analysis that engages the imaginaries and practices attached to battlefield uniforms and how they convey specific meanings for battle.

In the present article, we focus on the semiotic element of colour in battlefield uniforms. From this viewpoint, the uniform as such becomes a class of sign-vehicles that has endured. Military uniforms have many features, such as insignias, buttons, pockets, straps and so on that have served many functions of distinction. These have not only included those between ranks, units, and branches, but also non-military distinctions such as class and race (Tynan, 2013a). The examination of colour in battlefield uniforms allows for the study of shifts in the social imaginary of and practice on the battlefield.

Overall, colour-use can be approached from a multitude of angles. The material and optical physics as well as the psychological and physiological aspects of colour-perception are important aspects of how colour comes about, particularly in light of the functionality of uniforms on modern battlefields. Yet, our interest here is on particular, and not general, semiotic games of colour (see Wittgenstein, 1977) and the sociology of colour-use. Indeed, we cannot determine the meaning of a particular colour, as colours are continuously used and reconfigured in political communication and meaning making in conventional ways. Yet these conventions can be studied, and aid us in understanding how colour-use is interlaced with power and politics. In order to do so, we first introduce some key elements of a chromatological analysis of colour-use in the field of security (see Guillaume et al.) to analyse military combat dress uniforms and the change in the meanings behind the battlefield and its practices. We then present the evolution of colour-use in modern military uniforms over the past centuries in Europe. We finally offer an analysis of this symbolic transformation of the battlefield, based on the transition from the bright coloured uniform to the camouflaged one.

A chromatology of war fighting: colours on the battlefield

Colours are largely omitted as a subject of research in international studies, and more generally in the social sciences (see Guillaume et al. for further elaboration in security studies). We do not think about the social and political world around us in terms of how, why and by whom it has been coloured. The social and political world we study is not even black and white like a movie of old; it is simply a-chromatic. In security studies, for instance, despite a recent surge in the attention to visual phenomena in connection to the securitization research programme, colour has remained outside its purview and, for example, does not feature in Hansen’s (2011) methodological guide on how to study images in connection to security (see also Möller, 2007; Vuori, 2010; Schlag and Heck, 2013). Even when colour has made its way into scholarship on international relations, its social meaning and references have not been noted. For example, Van Veeren’s compelling article on the “orange series” of photographs from Guantanamo – an article that seeks to “remind us, as IR scholars, to look at the diverse set of practices (beyond simply spoken language) to understand the complexity of international politics” (2011: 1721) – notes how orange comes to symbolize Guantanamo. Despite the article’s aim and the prominent place of colour, however, Van Veeren does not consider the colour itself as a signifying practice. This is symptomatic of how colour is popping up, yet still outside what is considered meaningful when studying the international.