Destabilisation of NO message

national | miscellaneous | news report

Monday September 30, 2002 12:05

by JM Burr

A particular NO to Nice poster's internal message disrupts and subverts its intended one. A brief examination of how this works.

An Internal Pattern of Subversion Destabilises No to Nice Poster
by JM Burr (mrbyrr@yahoo.com)

It is apparent that while the No To Nice posters affixed around Dublin have their hearts in the right places, they do not have their terms in them. The item for consideration is the No poster that states very unequivocally that by voting for Nice 2 the Irish voter "Will Lose! Power. Money. Freedom." (see photo if available). Now, the order of words/ideas is important (not to mention the terms themselves), as it indicates both a conscious decision on the writer's part and an unconscious ordering of both the terms and their inseparable ideals and the logical links between them.
To begin:
The first item, Power, is important initially for its primacy, in that power itself is that which we are told that we should unconsciously seek (as an offshoot of the pleasure principle, because self pleasure indicates power over the self and the immediate surroundings). But looked at under a linguistic microscope, it can be noted that the class of words that power falls into are those of nouns, and the type is abstract. So, it's an abstract noun. Abstract nouns are those amorphous 'idea(l)s' that have no real semiotic link between concept and reality. For example, you can say that, like 'soul' (in 'he's got soul'), 'power' has no real referent (or at least no fixed one), which is both linguistically and psychologically troubling since it 'kind of' exists without a definition, that is to say, it has one that cannot really be expressed. Plus it exists as something that can be both good and bad, depending on circumstance, such as; having power is good, but having power held over you is bad.
To continue:
The second item, Money, is both important for its position and for its relatability to both the first and the second terms (you will begin to notice that all three terms are definitely interrelated, not simply because they show up in a set). Money is put second, after power, and before the third item, Freedom. Now, money is a concrete noun, different from the first item in it's apparent attachment to the real world (or an item in the real world). We can picture it (money) like we can picture a sandwich, clearly. But to increase the problematizing, in our postindustrialist, postmodern, capitalist, whatever society it (money) can be recognised as being not simply an item for hoarding or visualisation, but rather an item of not very clear definition in an equation of society. This equation of society uses money for its use value, rather than its inherent value, which is nil. Money is exchanged for work, which is in turn exchanged for time. To make it simpler, there's WORK, then the MONEY that the work is traded for, which gives you TIME, which is then traded for WORK, which is then traded for MONEY...
or rather:
... more TIME + WORK = less TIME = more MONEY = more TIME + WORK = less TIME = more MONEY... and so on.
Maybe that's not so clear. Anyhow, you get the picture. And to complicate matters, the money buys you more time, which in turn gives you less time because you have to work during some of that time. It's a great big circle, or cycle, or system, or structure that those in the capitalist system are stuck with. This is not taking into account the supposed cultural connection between money and power, our first term. It is unclear from this simple equation whether it is the subject of the cycle (i.e. us) or the cycle itself that has the power. Or rather, both are concerned intimately with the idea of a power relationship, but one has the power (money/system) and one has the power over it (us).
Moving right along:
It's time to note the third term, that of 'Freedom'. Falling last in the set, it is conspicuous that it, like Power, has no real referent (as an abstract noun), but rather exists as a feeling of not being bonded to... something. It is all well and good that this falls last in the list, showing the writer's obvious preferences to power and money over this (because in a capitalist society it can be understood that those with the power and the money are also those who possess this concept we call freedom. Naturally.) But it's not that simple. If the person concerned in this equation, J. Q. Public, is trapped within the time for trade system that I discussed above, then it is equally apparent that he/she has no real freedom, for they would be bonded/held in bondage to the endless repetition of that system. If they are not in control of their freedom, then they are also not in full control of themselves and their surroundings. Since they lack this control, then they must also lack power, which is both control over the self and (to some extent) the self's surroundings. If you don't have something, there's no way to lose it.
So the middle term, the undecidable term (undecidable in its apparent state of flux between concrete and abstract noun), has destabilised the first and the third terms, showing them to be excluded upon its inclusion. So the message that the sign was intended to carry is useless, rendered unintelligible by the choice of words/concepts used in the actual message.
But as I said before, its heart is in the right place, even if its message is not. Find a reason and vote No.