Ringo's "Peace and Love" and the Problem of the Empty Signifier

Ringo Starr just wants "peace and love." What could possibly be wrong with that?

Screenshot from @ringostarrmusic

For his 85th birthday, former Beatle drummer Ringo Starr expressed just one wish in a video message to his followers: that everyone join together “at noon, wherever you are, all over the world” in a display of “peace and love”—his signature mantra, always accompanied by a V-shaped peace sign gesture.

Ringo’s pious wish continues to endear him to his millions of fans and followers. As one of the most beloved members of The Beatles—due in part for his apparent, perhaps deceptive, simplicity—Ringo’s seemingly naïve insistence on the continued importance of peace and love, in an age of cynicism and violence, feels oddly refreshing.

Ringo was never the sort of outspoken activist that, say, John Lennon and Yoko Ono became—famous for their strong antiwar statements at the height of the Vietnam War. Nor was he the kind of spiritually charged ponderer George Harrison turned into; after Harrison’s death in 2001, his family released a statement noting that “he often said, ‘Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.’” And unlike Paul—was always more musically oriented, less politically engaged—Ringo’s post-Beatles career, while yielding a few gems, lacked the artistic shine of Wings or McCartney’s solo output. Instead, Ringo narrated Thomas the Tank Engine. And yet, clearly, there was something in Ringo and his bandmates’ common point of origin—The Beatles as a project extending beyond the “merely” musical, branching into an aesthetics, politics, and spirituality of transcendence—that continues to resonate in his “peace and love” message today.

As the dreams of the 1960s begin to fade from view, its ideals and slogans increasingly seeming like the fossilized remnants of a bygone age, Ringo’s commandment takes us back to some healthy, basic principles. Indeed, peace and love might even seem like perfectly decent foundations for a reconstructed progressive politics: for isn’t much of today’s politics premised on exactly the opposite—hatred and war? In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli forces—more than 600 near aid delivery sites run by the infamous, ill-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. From the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests of thousands of law-abiding immigrants, tourists, and even U.S. citizens by ICE, to Putin’s more than three-year-long illegal war of imperial aggression against Ukraine, we seem to be moving away from—not toward—something like Ringo’s world.

There’s nothing particularly new about such horrors, of course. Just this week, the world commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were killed. In part, it is the continuity with the horrors of the twentieth century into the twenty-first that is shocking, the very absence of change deepening these tragedies because so many had thought the grimness of trench warfare, genocidal acts, and fascist brutality had been left behind in the previous century—with the post-9/11 wars of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya more like anachronistic remnants on this side of the new millennium, but strictly speaking belonging to the previous one.

In a world fractured and beset by war and hatred, then, why shouldn’t we—even at the risk of sounding ridiculous—embrace Ringo’s “peace and love” mantra as a guiding principle for a reconstructed politics?

The Trouble with Signifiers

The problem is, of course, that all basic terms in politics are essentially what some social theorists have called empty and even floating signifiers—that is, they are (i) liable to be filled with virtually any kind of meaning, lacking definite content in and of themselves, and (ii) their meaning can evolve, devolve, or change depending on time and context, including the alignment of powerful actors in specific historical situations.

A “signifier” is simply a sign—a word, image, symbol—that signifies; that is, it carries and transmits meaning. But a signifier is often essentially empty: it can be filled with a particular sort of meaning, and it can be rewritten, overwritten, and even erased outright by powerful actors. And it is often floating, bobbing along on the current of history, steered by dominant actors and shaped by historical contexts, and suspended within webs of related meanings.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was particularly interested in this issue—which he thought of as the problem of symbolic struggles: contests over the meaning of the “symbols” that rule over, and through, us. Bourdieu was interested in the problem of symbolic power, meaning the force to shape “hearts and minds.” Naturally, there’s more to power than the symbolic dimension: we are also ruled by hard-edged, material things, like money or military force. But symbolic power is enormously important—an often “invisible” form of power more ethereal than guns, missiles, or bank accounts, but just as, if not more, efficacious. Two key forms of symbolic power—concepts and categories—capture how we think about the world (e.g., a concept like “freedom”) and how we partition the world (that is, how we categorize things, including people and social groups). Indeed, one of the key lessons of Bourdieu’s work is that we live in a world beset by symbolic power, including categories and concepts—especially as they come to filter into our minds through the educational system, the media, and the overarching workings of the state.

Take an example close at hand: the very idea of “love,” now transposed into political terms—that is, the question of what constitutes a caring, nurturing, protective politics. Perversely, the Trump administration itself frames its sweeping ICE arrests as the highest form of “love” of country and society, allegedly keeping cities and towns safe from violent, dangerous criminals: “While the press looked the other way, President Trump PROTECTED America,” as the White House recently posted on its Instagram account. The Trump administration’s social media accounts are filled with portrayals of their hateful, hate-filled policies as precisely the opposite: as care for the community, as an attempt to instill safety and security, and—as abhorrent as this must seem—a “love” for the community, often seemingly understood as the domain of an ethnicized “people,” or ethnos, rather than a generalized demos of universal subjects. One of the ways in which the Trump campaign, and later administration, has been able to generate support for its policies, has been through its carefully calibrated representational labor, portraying what are divisive, destructive, and costly (in both fiscal and human terms) policies as a kind of (loving) defense of nation, society, people, and state. In fact, like all fascisms, Trump’s fascism relies on a continuous expenditure of effort signaling the leader’s love for his people—his people, mind you, a subset of the true population—even at the expense of millions of others.

Or take the very idea of “peace”: what could possibly be wrong with wanting peace? But if we think about it for a moment, many—perhaps most—wars have been framed by their instigators as paradoxical wars for peace. Consider Israel’s war in Gaza: its stated intention is to bring about pacification, preventing the kind of horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. But clearly, the war has extended far beyond its stated intent: it has long since turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence, taking the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with plans to corral Gazans into an ever-narrowing strip of land. Israel’s “peace” in Gaza is riddled with war crimes. True peace—as most members of the international community would understand it—would require a very different approach, involving something like a UN Security Council-backed international peacekeeping force to stabilize the situation, help secure the return of hostages, stop Israel’s daily attacks on Gaza’s devastated civilian population, and facilitate humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts. Notice that these are competing—and in many ways diametrically opposed—notions of that same word, “peace.”

The signifier, in other words, is overdetermined. All truly important political keywords have this essentially empty, fluid, or “liquid” quality about them. Consequently, they are subject to both contestation and redetermination.

“Freedom” is another striking example: a rallying cry of the French Revolution’s popular revolutionaries, it gradually morphed into the hallmark concept of Reagan- and Thatcher-style right-wing economic (neo)liberals, in which freedom came to connote the liberalization of market relations: the freedom to buy, sell, and transact in the marketplace, unimpeded by an overweening regulatory state. But the left continues to hammer away at this narrowly right-wing conception of the idea of freedom, insisting on the hollowness of market liberties without economic and social protections that enable people to “live freely.” Relatedly, a (negative) freedom from external constraints—often the concern of centrist liberals—has been critiqued for lacking the enabling aspect of a (positive) freedom to act and live in a full range of capacities. Even a seemingly innocent, apparently self-evident term like freedom, then, is the subject of ferocious ideological struggles, which will likely never stop raging as long as there is history to be made.

We are ruled by empty, floating signifiers that are loaded with particular meanings through apparatuses of communicative or symbolic power. One key lesson of social theory is that words do not possess meaning in and of themselves but acquire meaning as determined by powerful social actors. Which understanding of a signifier ultimately prevails depends on the outcomes of symbolic struggles.

Peace and Love—Yes, Please!

Is all of this to say that we should just abandon Ringo’s ideas as either hopelessly naïve, or worse, impossible to pin down, because all signifiers are bound to be vacuous, floating in a slipstream of competing (propagandistic) attempts to redefine and overwrite them?

On the contrary, the proper lesson to draw is that we can cherish certain ideals, including the shorthand political keywords that encapsulate them, and even fight to build a world on top of them, but we have to recognize that their meanings are always—inherently—going to be slippery, contested, and contestable. Nefarious actors can get at words and pull them in unsavory or dangerous directions. Political leaders can deploy techniques of communication to shape hearts and minds, converting hatred into “love” and war into “peace.” Even as we employ seemingly innocent terms in our everyday political discourse, we must be mindful of how opposing factions can appropriate and redeploy those same words with their preferred meaning in mind.

And that’s the risk with Ringo’s approach. In recent years, he has shown more interest in social justice issues. During the Black Lives Matter protests, he expressed his support for the movement, sharing a powerful statement from his former bandmate McCartney, writing: “As my brother Paul said The Beatles always stood for equal rights&justice and I’ve never stopped working for peace&love ever since.”

Specifying the content is important. In an age of spectacle and spectacular opposition, vague sloganeering or anodyne generalities are always at risk of being captured by odious political actors. Ours is an era of co-optation—of overwriting and redirection. Ringo’s message, if left underspecified, is vulnerable to this. Moreover, there remains an element of the spectacle in Ringo’s promotion of the phrase: as The Atlantic observed of one of his peace-and-love celebrations earlier this year, “Throughout, the Ringo habitat stayed blissfully sealed off from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, national reckonings, crises of democracy, and things of that nature.”

But despite that—perhaps even in spite of himself—Ringo’s “peace and love” mantra retains the power to inspire. It takes us back to the bed-ins of John and Yoko, to the marvelous simplicity of some of the world’s great spiritual and political traditions, and peels back the calcified cynicism of an era devolving into fascist authoritarianism.

Symbolic struggles never end. History keeps spinning. As long as words have power—in other words, as long as there are humans left to speak and interpret within social collectivities—there will be battles over meaning. That shouldn’t stop us from embracing Ringo’s inspiring commandment. But it does mean that we have to clarify our terms—and be prepared to defend them. Peace and love.