Dark World, Dark Signs

The most recent issue of Cabinet Magazine has a really good article by artist and CIA expert Trevor Paglen about the iconography of military insignia, particularly of those branches of the military that "don't exist." How do you celebrate your work with traditional military regalia, Paglen asks, while retaining the secrecy which defines it? It's an interesting question.

Well, sometimes you don't. Take for example this embroidered patch, distributed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the US "black" space agency primarily responsible for the operation of military reconnaissance satellites (and God-knows-what-else). The patch was released by the NRO to commemorate the launch of a Titan 4B from Vandenberg Air Force Base -- one that boosted, according to the Air Force, a classified payload into orbit.

Classified, that is, unless you can read into the NRO's weird symbolism. Apparently, the patch -- right down to the angles of those boomerang shapes -- is a dead giveaway about the launch payload, that, it has now been confirmed, were four "Lacrosse" recon-satellittes, which give the U.S. military the ability to monitor problem spots around the world and accurately target weapons in almost real time. Yikes, that is a whole other ball of yarn entirely that I am not going to tangle with now.

On a more abstract level, these kinds of patches betray the U.S. military's deep-rooted love of insignia and symbolism. So profound was their desire to reduce, stylize, and graphically compartmentalize the event that they couldn't contain themselves from nearly giving away really classified information. It's baffling, though. Who is this highly-coded symbolism, this "formal doctrine of signs," as Charles Sanders Pierce had it, for? The people that fly the covert experimental CIA jet-planes? Most of the time, the visual rhetoric is so obscure, and yet so clearly steeped in a formal methodology of signifiers, that it's hard to see who might have the pleasure of "getting" it.

The Cabinet article has nice, full-color reproductions of some particularly oblique NRO patches, one depicting the planet wrapped up in three giant, venemous snakes flanked by the latin phrase "Nunquam Ante, Nunquam Iterum," which literally means, "Never Before, Never Again." It's enough to make me think that there's something to the whole reptoids thing.

You can also buy a slightly modded reproduction of an Air Force patch commemorating a flight test of a B-2 stealth bomber. This one boasts a classic "grey" ET and the slogan "tastes like chicken," in Latin.

Trevor Paglen, who is incidentally a really interesting artist that leads camping trips to view clandestine military bases and tracks unmarked CIA aircraft, has made an entire installation called "Symbology" addressing this issue. From his website:

"The symbols and insignia shown in the Symbology series provide a glimpse into how contemporary military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret societies, religions, and mystics: How does one represent that which, by definition, must not be represented?"