Phenomenology of the Signature
Dom Rottman
9 July 2025
Writing one’s signature is one of the small pleasures of life. And when it comes to filling out forms, it is perhaps the only. It stands out among ticked boxes and boilerplate statements, and its place at the end gives one the sense that all the meaningless meniality was actually worth something. The signature, a personal, stylized act that is different every time it is performed, is a unique expression of finality that signifies the end it has itself brought about. Paperwork is only completed once signed, transactions are valid only with signed receipts, and artwork, too, is finished with a signature or stylized initials; “So let it be written, so let it be done.” What is curious is that the signature is the most expressive in the case of paperwork, where it ought to be the most banal. While prescriptions and receipts are finished with thoughtless scribbles, and works of art typically relegate the signature to the corner or inside a book, signed paperwork is filled out prominently with a full name. I do not think I am alone in seeing paperwork as an opportunity to express myself, having spent many a bored hour writing my signature repeatedly down a page in preparation for its ultimate fate of being glanced at for seven seconds before being filed away. The signature, I think, says something about freedom—or the lack thereof—that makes it one of the last points of resistance between our lives and an anonymized, interchangeable, and ultimately expendable existence.
Documents that bear signatures, be they contracts, licenses, charters, etc., have always been taken with great seriousness. While today the signature maintains tremendous legal obstinacy, there is no reason why, historically, it should be the singular point of importance to such documents and the acts they signify. Medieval charters were ornate in their artistry and calligraphy, of which the signature was but one part—and often took the form of an intricate seal. Later documents such as the United States Constitution were still composed in beautiful script. Even marriage licenses and birth certificates have had some visual appeal, which has in recent decades been degraded to a series of labeled lines and boxes.
The reason for this de-aestheticization may seem straightforward: it’s simpler and more efficient. Still, it’s not as though clerks spent their days illustrating documents and certificates, even back then. 150 people on average get married in Las Vegas each day—would calligraphy and illustration, easily reproducible with the technology of the 20th century—let alone the 21st—really be that much of a waste of the state’s resources, and that distracting to the employee who has to nod at it and file it away? True, the exponential growth of “official” documents (read: those guaranteed with the full faith and credit of an M1 Abrams or the lawyers who can appeal to their handlers) seems to arise from acts which are largely boring. The offices of clerks are joyless places. But why should the celebration of landmark achievements such as marriages, treaties, or even laws, suffer the fate of zoning permits? In fact, insofar as the document itself becomes the only legal—and hence, the only real-since that’s what really counts—manifestation of such events, do these pieces of paper not deserve even more special treatment?
Consider marriages. Marriages have historically and globally been aesthetic events. They are conducted in public, in front of a community, and accompanied by a great celebration. Many rituals surround it: cutting cake, throwing flowers, throwing an unsanitary garter, taking pictures, painting pictures, coordinating colors, jumping the broom, reciting ancient words, reciting modern words, dipping one’s arms into pudding, walking in an arbitrary possession, putting on rings—all manners of otherwise nonsensical acts which are given great meaning. Marriage, a public structure, requires the participation of the community, who not only observe but engage in its aesthetic, convivial acts. They do not participate—or really care—about signing the piece of paper. The courthouse is a small chamber in which applause and drunken dancing is considered rude. Insofar as a piece of paper is signed at a proper wedding, it is done aside and unceremoniously, usually after the couple is pronounced as such, even though such a pronouncement technically—legally—means nothing. It is the signature which matters. Where marriage really “is” has moved from its aesthetic, phenomenological experience to the courthouse—more precisely, to the piece of paper presented therein—and the “public” has been reduced to an employee of the state who no one really knows. With all else holding no social or legal—and again, therefore real—water, it is no wonder that more cynical people view marriage ceremonies and celebrations as a bourgeois waste of time and money. And the fact that some people make such celebrations terribly boring does not help.
The point of this digression is to illustrate a process of de-aestheticization that occurs when certain acts become bureaucratized, be the culprit the state or corporations (or both at once). In this de-aestheticization, these acts become less fun, exciting, and meaningful. The extraordinary becomes increasingly ordinary. Paper becomes the common denominator of all actions which increasingly demand it and to which they are eventually reduced. There is no need for or any meaning in any illustration or aesthetic, for who would see it? As each document is reduced to blank boxes and lines, it is as if any social action is all but identical and interchangeable with any other. All that remains is the signature.
The signature’s relationship to freedom is ambivalent. On the one hand, it symbolizes willful action. Laws, contracts, marriages, transactions, etc. are social relations into which one is free to enter; otherwise, they would not need a signature in the first place. On the other hand, a signature, an expression of finality, also signifies an end to the signatory’s freedom. Consider terms such as “binding” oneself to a contract or to “sign away” one’s rights. But even this is a form of freedom in its own right; it is a relinquishment, a “letting go” of some responsibility. The signature requires, and therefore represents, a free, acting human person. However interchangeable one action may be for any other regardless of what it is or who did it, it is the unique identity of the person which is not interchangeable. However, the operative word is not identity, but unique; “I am I”—and no one else. Identity, so fashionable today, can actually be anonymized quite easily. The use of a multiplicity of labels and terms in the contemporary practice of identification actually undermines one’s unique lived experience by lumping it into an abstract group. In like fashion identity is reducible to abstract values through the use of mechanisms such as IDs and social security numbers. Even printing one’s name implies a finite variance of people. But the signature in particular demonstrates uniqueness. From this we can derive two things. Firstly, uniqueness does not arise from identity, but a capacity to act, and to act differently from everyone else, to be capable of the never before seen. Secondly, the most expressive and significant acts have an aesthetic character. This immutable quality which defines the most extraordinary and ultimately human acts is one which modernity seems intent on eliminating entirely.
Only in a world in which the aesthetic has already lost value is it possible to fear the relegation of aesthetic tasks to machines. Long before algorithms became AI, and long before algorithms became machine learning, and before machine learning computers, and before computers film and photography, a gradual process of de-aestheticization has been occurring in all matters we consider important. A dystopia of thoughtless color-vomit or interchangeable sterile, concrete shapes are the abstract and literal building blocks of a world that is no longer just easy to imagine, but one from which it is now difficult to imagine otherwise. The left’s contempt for bourgeois society in both the postmodern abstract installations of the west and the post-war Soviet brutalism of the east has been synthesized, cruelly and ironically, into the most reproducible, meaningless, obtuse, and outright hideous styles that pollute gentrification efforts from pointless remodelings to scrap metal heaps to barely convenient overpriced apartments and everything in between. In a world ruled by instrumentality, efficiency, and number go up, the process of de-aestheticization is unsurprising but nevertheless tragic. What is shameful, however, is how little resistance modern aesthetics has put up to this process in the first place. The fine arts, once held in high esteem by the ruling classes not only for their beauty but their direct relationship to the mechanics of the universe, once abruptly and rudely divorced from the worlds of STEM and finance find few champions in the masses who have either been excluded from them or have contemptuously rejected them. The fears that technology will devour the world of art and endanger one’s livelihood, by no means new, have historically run parallel, but were mostly distinct concerns. Even an optimistic perspective on technology holds that its potential to all but eliminate labor would liberate people to engage in other activities, especially those in the aesthetic realm. But it is possible that these fears are two sides of the same coin, a fear of technology’s ravenous, destructive potential. The technological advances which optimize production involve the elimination of anything aesthetic, considered inefficient and superfluous. The recent strikes in the entertainment industry arose in part from concerns about AI which could endanger artists’ jobs, and, consequently, their ability to make art, since that is their job. If aesthetic is the defining quality of human action, then the reduction or elimination of action in any area is concomitant with proportional de-aestheticization. The technology problem is that it closes some doors as it opens others. This is as true of what particular aesthetic practices and objects are possible as it is of how the aesthetic itself is conceived. Philosopher Walter Benjamin lamented how the reproducible medium of film had drained art of a particular temporal and spatial—in other words, historical—“aura” which was a crucial element of their uniqueness. At the same time, however, this apparent de-aestheticization was supplanted with a process of democratization as the world of art and culture was extended to the masses through the mediums of film and television. The advances of the internet and software were perhaps even more remarkable by expanding the participation of the masses in culture to a level where almost anyone can create and share. But this “democratized” aesthetic still remains far removed from the powers that be—also unsurprising, given that said powers have no interest in being democratic in the first place. If the aesthetic now carries a “democratic aura,” there is now all the more reason for its elimination in the affairs of the state, business, and the social order at large. It destabilizes order not only by being resistant to an enlightened, instrumental rationality that would reduce it to an abstract and exchangeable value, but now also by arising from acts which share a mutual hostility with a status quo of hierarchy and domination.
In this contemporary context, the signed contract is a menacing image of conflict where the freedom forfeit is more consequential than the sort of freedom a contract might allow. It is a straitjacket for democratic freedom but falls just short of elimination. The relationship established by the contract, however asymmetrical and/or hierarchical, at least involves a basic recognition of the human person, without whom contracts and forms would be truly pointless. A signatory’s capacity to act is therefore maintained, if minimally, since a person can only be signified by an expressive, aesthetic act like the signature. The signature, performed with a flourish, is a parting shot that expresses the limit of the forces which tend towards but never themselves arrive at the elimination of the signatory’s aesthetic—and to an extent democratic—freedom, and ultimately her humanity. It expresses the point where rationalized society ends, the final point that it cannot incorporate. A fear that this point is eroding over time and will at some point vanish is misplaced. Expressions like the signature resist rationalization because they are not merely unquantifiable but antiquantifiable, not only incomparable in terms of value but ones which demand altogether different systems of judgment. The very suggestion that the vertical, incremental, creeping process of rationalization could subsume such expressions gives undue credence and power to this process through which much of human agency has been given away. Were the signature truly subject to this destructive process, it would have been gone already, and the resistance it puts up would not have made a bit of difference to begin with. Instead, it is circumvented through different means. What makes the signed contract ultimately menacing is that the signatory will likely be violated anyway.