No cultural symbol, even the swastika, carries fixed intrinsic meaning.

Evidence

This provides us with a warning against those self-enclosed approaches to popular culture which, valuing “tradition” for its own sake, and treating it in an ahistorical manner, analyze popular cultural forms as if they contained within themselves, from their moment of origin, some fixed and unchanging meaning or value. The relationship between historical position and aesthetic value is an important and difficult question in popular culture. But the attempt to develop some universal popular aesthetic, founded on the moment of origin of cultural forms and practices, is almost certainly profoundly mistaken. What could be more eclectic and random than that assemblage of dead symbols and bric-a-brac, ransacked from yesterday’s dressing-up box, in which, just now, many young people have chosen to adorn themselves? These symbols and bits and pieces are profoundly ambiguous. A thousand lost cultural causes could be summoned up through them. Every now and then, among the other trinkets, we find that sign which, above all other signs, ought to be fixed—solidified—in its cultural meaning and connotation forever: the swastika. And yet there it dangles, partly—but not entirely—cut loose from its profound cultural reference in twentieth-century history. What does it mean? What is it signifying? Its signification is rich, and richly ambiguous: certainly unstable. This terrifying sign may delimit a range of meanings but it carries no guarantee of a single meaning within itself. The streets are full of kids who are not “fascist” because they may wear a swastika on a chain. On the other hand, perhaps they could be … What this sign means will ultimately depend, in the politics of youth culture, less on the intrinsic cultural symbolism of the thing in itself, and more on the balance of forces between, say, the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League, between White Rock and the Two Tone Sound. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1020

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall articulates the anti-essentialist position on cultural signs: meaning is produced by political struggle and the balance of forces, never guaranteed by the symbol itself.
• XREF: Connects to the articulation and hegemony concepts running through Hall’s work and to cultural-studies debates with essentialist ‘tradition’ criticism.
• SEED: The swastika dangling ‘partly but not entirely cut loose’ from its Nazi reference is a vivid hook for an essay on how symbols get resignified through contestation.