Symbolism

The symbol started off as a mark of the failure of modernism as narrative - an ambivalent gesture as it encompasses both sides of the division between utopianism and its (inevitable?) degradation into totalitarianism. It has subsequently evolved in my mind into a blot or psychic stain; the mark of the obscene other of modernism; the repository of all the un-acknowledgable violence of the enlightenment. However, this symbolism is clouded and the mark becomes orphaned - existing as a floating shape that presages an event of indeterminate meaning. It has become a McGuffin; as it has moved beyond its origin and is now just a device, or a signifier in a sea of different futures; an ideological parasite looking for a host organism. Does the symbol in the end equalise and flatten the pre-existing meanings of the various flags and their supported ideologies under its own sign, or are the semiotics of these ideologies too strong to be subsumed?