Materialism
Reading the Signs: Formal & Material Analysis
V
ariously described as ‘a billboard which advertises nothing’ or ‘an anti-billboard’, such descriptions of Seattle Lead Pencil Studio’s Non-sign II ignore the text’s interrogative attitude toward notions of the social, the semiotic and the textual .I attempt to produce here a reading sensitive to each of these issues, not in isolation, but to a greater or lesser degree as contributing factors to the way in which the relationship between text and world is conceived.
In a sense, we can borrow from Michael Foucault, who suggests that the panoptic schema works to produce and consolidate power at ‘an intensified and perfect extreme’: the giant advertisement which interpellates the individual as both subject and consumer produces, in a single function, the double effect of capitalist ideology.
The individual is interpellated as the subject in a narrative of satisfying consumption (not dissimilar to the rhetorical satisfaction of the Catherine Belsey conceives of the disruptive Classic or Expressive realist literary form) in or interrogative text as ‘ordered in such a way which the impossibility of satisfaction and the that the discursive sequence fails to fulfil the concomitant infinite circularity of the funcexpectations it generates’ (Critical Practice). tion and effect of capital is effaced. A sort of Situated as it is on the Canadian-US border, amnesia takes place whereby each new ideoand acting as a foil, in a double sense, to a logical apparatus promises an essentially vast horizon of multi-national advertising identical – though packaged , of course, in a billboards, the text disrupts the discursive different mythological language - fulfilment of sequence of the landscape, and of the narra- various wishes and desires, yet the effects of tivity of a stream of billboards which stand as previous occasion or consumption which silent, smiling obelisks of semantic and ideo- served only to ‘reinforce […] [the] circular logical interpellation through advertisement. process’ of consumption and subjection are 24