7.1 The LL in the Perspective of Time
7.1.1 Mediating Time in the LL: The Observer’s Present
From the preceding discussion, it would appear that a general characteristic of the LL unit is that it performs a speech act in the sign viewer’s present by displaying an act of writing that occurred in the past. The dual nature of the LL unit as the mediator between what was once the sign instigator’s present and the present time of the sign viewer establishes a metaphor. Taking the sign viewer’s point of view, the time at which an LL unit was emplaced can be understood as THEN time, in contrast to the NOW time, when the LL unit is perceived: the metaphor is that THEN IS NOW. In the example of the street name plaque, the plaque as an LL unit continues to perform the act of nomination in NOW time, even though the emplacement of the act took place in THEN time. The default expectation is that speech acts such as nomination, enticement, regulation, and so forth, which take place in the NOW time of their emplacement, maintain their force continuously into any future sign viewer’s NOW time. In principle, no matter how old the LL unit, its presence in NOW time makes its expressed speech act one of current relevance.
The reality of the LL is not as simple as this default expectation. Part of the fascination of an LL unit from antiquity is that it brings the sign instigator and the sign viewer into discourse across a chasm of time: in this way, people from the past actually speak to us. Although the THEN IS NOW metaphor still holds, the reliance of LL units on implicature and background knowledge means that the sign viewer in NOW time may not have enough information to interpret the LL unit of THEN time fully. The historical LL unit in Figure 1.12, for example, is comprehensible for a sign viewer who can understand the Latin and the religious symbolism in NOW time, but it is also obscure, since the referents of <A:F> and <M:F>, which were understood in THEN time, are no longer known. Though the LL unit has lost its original function, it has added the function of indexing the general past in today’s LL in a way that was not anticipated by the sign instigator. A tourist searching for the experience of history, a local official proud of the antiquity of the city, or an individual who dislikes the continuing presence of a remnant of colonisation may interpret the present-day LL unit in different ways, but in all cases the LL unit interpellates the sign viewer and brings them into contact with the original sign instigator and with those who have successively repurposed the unit.
Other LL units add time reference not only to the NOW time of the sign instigator’s present, but to an earlier time invoked by the text. Historical commemoration, as in Figures 1.14 and 6.9D, uses direct reference to index a time before the sign instigator’s present. In so doing, the LL unit brings the sign viewer into contact with both the THEN time of the sign instigator and the earlier ‘time before time’. The unofficial street name plaques in Figures 4.16 and 4.17C emerge as disruptive not only because they bestow names that are not officially recognised, but because they interrupt the unmarked NOW time of the street naming system with references to THEN times which the official system does not recognise. Since the political authority in most jurisdictions claims a monopoly on the use of street name plaques to commemorate historical times, the injection of unofficial or subversive THEN times by an LL unit can have major political implications.
Despite the complexity of time relationships in the LL, most LL research relies on data which is collected by the observer in the present and analysed accordingly. Particularly where quantitative methods are used, the picture which emerges from fieldwork may be presented as if it describes the LL at a fixed moment in time, but this observer’s present is almost always an interval of some duration. Reliance on the observer’s present does not rule out the possibility of looking at the time factor in the LL, since LL units of the present can commemorate the past, retain messages and indexicalities from past political and linguistic regimes, adapt to new contexts of use, show the physical effect of layering new elements onto old LL units, and so on. Examples such as Pavlenko (Reference Pavlenko2009), Marten (Reference Marten, Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni2010), Woldemaram (Reference Woldemaram2016), Train (Reference Train2016), Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael (Reference Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael2016), Bock and Stroud (Reference Bock, Stroud, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019), Blackwood (Reference Blackwood, Malinowski and Tufi2020), Phan (Reference Phan2021), and studies edited by Blackwood and Macalister (Reference Blackwood and Macalister2020) show a range of approaches to time factors in the LL. A smaller number of studies – such as those by Pavlenko (Reference Pavlenko, Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni2010), Guilat and Espinosa-Ramírez (Reference Guilat and Espinosa-Ramírez2016, Reference Guilat, Espinosa-Ramírez, Malinowski and Tufi2020), and Moore (Reference Moore, Pütz and Mundt2019) – integrate historical documentation and evidence from the more remote past into the analysis of the present. This approach creates two observer’s presents: one from the documentary record and a later one from contemporary signage.
A conceptually different approach incorporates Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981 [1937–38]) notion of the chronotope into the analysis. For Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981: 84), the chronotope denotes ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in literature’, in which ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’. Time, in this analysis, ‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’, while space ‘becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (see also Bemong and Borghart Reference Bemong, Borghart, Bemong, Borghart, De Dobbeleer, Demoen, De Temmerman and Keunen2010 for a review). LL studies which see the display of time and space in terms of chronotopes include Pietikäinen’s (Reference Pietikäinen2014) analysis of Sámi signage in Finland, Lyons and Karimzad (Reference Lyons and Karimzad2019) on uses of nostalgia and modernity in India, Guissemo (Reference Guissemo, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019) on postcolonial Maputo, and Baro’s (Reference Baro, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019) analysis of authenticity in Johannesburg. My argument, however, is that the fusion of time references in the space of the LL is a necessary feature of the LL in general, and that displays which appear as specific chronotopes are examples of much wider patterns. In the following section, I therefore suggest an approach which treats the LL as a dynamic confluence of times, in which the observer’s present is not taken for granted, but understood within a more complex whole.
7.1.2 Fragmenting and Uniting Time in the LL
Though the THEN IS NOW metaphor sets the general tone for the LL, other aspects of the time factor enter into research methodology and the conception of the LL. Consequences follow, for example, from recognising the observer’s present as an interval, rather than a point in time. It is only over an interval that the observer can perceive and process a multiplicity of LL units. The more the observer’s present extends geographically, the more it will necessarily extend in time, whether the extension is to observe all the signage on one street, a city district, or an entire city. The extension of time also brings in the inevitability of change. Some changes are regulated by periodic factors: many commercial sign units are lit up and turned off at various times in a daily and weekly cycle, seasonal LL units are emplaced and replaced, national and community holidays and commemorations carry their own LL engagements, and so on. The LL in today’s NOW time may resemble the LL of NOW time yesterday or tomorrow, but it will also differ in ways that range from the minute to the dramatic. The LL units of passing buses, vans, and people as sign instigators or sign animators provide an instability to the LL, but these units are an integral part of what constitutes the LL at any given time and call for suitable observation techniques.
The language of research methodology makes it possible to package observations from extensions in time and space as if they occurred in a single, truly synchronic, moment. I can say that the fieldwork from Astoria which is reported here was conducted between the 19th and 25th April 2017, but even this short interval is not a synchronic moment. The LL as I report it was revealed only successively, through my emerging familiarity with the territory, and my record takes only a small account of the comings and goings of mobile LL units and of any changes in stationary LL units, whether periodic or unpredictable. The figures in Table 5.2 look like synchronic observations, but since they come from nearly a week of observation, there is no guarantee that they represent the reality of any actual moment in time: a marker of Greekness seen on one day could be gone or supplemented by an additional marker on the next day, and the table cannot show this change. I already know of several changes to the LL as I have presented it in this volume: a Turkish restaurant had replaced the Bombay Restaurant (Figure 1.5) by the time of my latest visit to Brighton in 2018; I understand from the internet that Bartunek’s (Figure 6.5A) has changed its shopfront, and the vernacular dog cleanup messages of Figure 6.12D and 6.12F are no more. Capturing the dynamism of the LL, both in the psychology of the observer’s perception and in the tangible landscape, is a challenge which calls for further methodological development.
A deeper problem for the time structure of the LL is the array of THEN times which confront the observer. Within a particular spatial segment, one LL unit may be from Time1, and be emplaced next to a unit from Time2, while a nearby LL unit from Time3 may partly obscure one from Time4. Though there is, as I suggest in Chapter 6, an environmental editing which influences the terrestrial distribution of units, it is far from rigorous and is not focused on time. Even if, as in Figure 6.14, the signage on rubbish bins lies at the margins of the zone of pedestrian flow while shop signs occupy the boundary between this zone and the zone of commercial public space, there is no systematic way to predict which LL units from these spatial zones will have older or more recent emplacement times. Within the idealisation of instantaneous observation, the observer’s present sees all these units at once in NOW time. It is also in this time that a quantitative approach gives a picture of the distribution of code choices within the LL. Crucially, however, the NOW of the observer’s time is completely different from the NOW time of the sign instigator. The THEN time indexed by each LL unit in the observer’s present is based on its own original NOW time. The code choices, message content, emplacement features, and pragmatic force for each LL unit stem from this THEN time, and not from the observer’s present. The discrepancy between THEN time (indexed in the sign instigator’s NOW time) and the observer’s NOW time gives rise to the metaphor THEN IS NOW for each individual unit. This metaphor cannot not hold for the LL as a whole, because each LL unit indexes a potentially different THEN time.
Though the gap between the sign instigator’s present and the sign viewer’s present forms a temporal context for the LL unit, the unit itself also has internal temporal qualities. These qualities include (a) temporal reference, in which the text of the LL unit refers directly to time; (b) alignments to time signalled by language choice, scriptography, visual imagery, choice of medium and ground, and other such strategies which work as time inflections attached to the referential message of the unit; and (c) unit time as indexed directly by the LL unit, not as the result of the sign instigator’s choice but as a consequence of the unit’s status as a physical object. Time inflections are free to roam over a variety of temporal references: one LL unit from the current time may use an art deco typeface to index some notion of the past, while another may index a periodic event such as the New Year and refer to an impending celebration which is part of a regular cycle of New Year commemorations stretching to a past in antiquity. Unit time is often indicated by natural consequences such as the degenerating effects of weathering, fading, and incidental damage, but may derive from such features as the choice of medium and ground. Gilt lettering in windows, the use of neon signage, and hand painted fascia signs were all more common at certain times in the past, and the default expectation now is that such signs in the observer’s present are relatively old. A sign instigator can take advantage of this expectation and add a time inflection to a new sign, using features which look old in order to index continuity, authenticity, nostalgia, or the coolness of retro fashion.
The fundamental principle which emerges in this necessarily brief critique is that the observer’s present is a convenient fiction that collapses a dynamic, changing landscape into a steady state for the purpose of analysis. This fiction is comparable to the notion of the specious present associated with William James (see Andersen and Grush Reference Andersen and Grush2009 for a review). Becker (Reference Bell and Valentine1932: 226–27) invokes this concept in his approach to history, pointing out that the ‘specious present’ can be a relatively short period (as in ‘the present year’) or a more extended one such as ‘the present generation’; whatever the period chosen, it inevitably contains ‘more or less of the past’, from which ‘the future refuses to be excluded’. The same principle holds for the LL. The observer’s experience of the LL includes a multiplicity of elements from the pasts of different sign instigators, inflected by time references within each LL unit, and pointing towards the future behaviour, affect, and cognition of people who are interpellated by LL units. The LL, in other words, is not only what is seen directly in the idealised observer’s time, but is composed of discourses that spring from other times and which index still more times – past, present, and future.
The complex and multivocal fusion of times in the space of the LL is anticipated by other approaches to space and time. In Chapter 4 I cited Bender’s (2002) view that ‘Landscape is time materialized’. Conversely, Ethington (Reference Ethington2007: 466) argues that ‘the past cannot exist in time: only in space’. Consequently, ‘natural or cosmic “time” cannot be a container or background of any spatial sort, in which to travel. Time is travel’ (p. 472). Whether we see the landscape as the materialisation of time or time as a succession of places is a question that goes beyond the scope of LL research. Either way, these considerations determine that the LL cannot be understood only in the fictionally instantaneous present of the observer’s time, but must follow the complex interweaving of times brought together in the landscape. In the rest of this chapter, I explore some aspects of this time factor in the LL.
7.2 Capturing the Present
Figure 7.1 shows a simple setting which illustrates the complexity of capturing the present in the LL. Figure 7.1A includes four LL units, while Figure 7.1B shows five. Unlike the LL ensemble or assemblage as I have discussed in Chapter 6, these units do not work together towards any sense of common purpose. I refer to them as an LL aggregate to reflect both their relative independence and their co-presence at the moment of observation; methodological issues pertaining to LL aggregates are discussed further in Chapter 8. Most prominent in each photograph is a milestone at the left, giving the distance from the spot of emplacement to the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin’s city centre in one direction and the village of Malahide in the other. To the right of the milestone is a graffiti tag, over which are the remnants of a poster; though only the taped edges of the poster are now in place, they imply the presence at one time of a notice that was placed over the graffiti. Figure 7.1A also shows a van with the inscription <M. K. Plumbing & Heating> in the far distance; a closeup view is in the inset at the bottom of the photograph. This van’s signage includes visual images which use icons to index plumbing and heating services, and a telephone number.
Figure 7.1 Milestone aggregate
Other elements in the semiotic order of social life are visible in Figure 7.1A and fit into Scollon and Scollon’s (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003) concept of the semiotic aggregate: traffic lights and signal boxes to the right, traffic signs whose backs are included in the photograph, and the planting of daffodils maintained by Dublin City Council, barely visible at the right of the black car in the inset. These features are not visible in Figure 7.1B, in part because of the angle of the photograph, but also because the foliage in Figure 7.1B blocks the view of some of these units. This seasonal factor is not trivial, since it conditions the sign viewer’s experience of the LL by changing the lines of vision and perception. Figure 7.1B contains two new LL units: a sticker which says <SAVE TOLKA PARK>, placed inside the frame provided by the defunct notice seen in Figure 7.1A, and a directional traffic sign using Irish on the top in a smaller font and English on the bottom in a large font using all capitals, with an arrow to indicate the direction for traffic to follow. The inscriptions in Irish and English carry the same meaning. The van in Figure 7.1A is not present in Figure 7.1B, but another van is; the implication is that while the presence of any one van in this area is transient, the presence of vans which may carry signage in this line of sight is a recurrent event.
The time relationships captured in Figure 7.1 provide a focus of interest. I took the photograph in Figure 7.1A at 11.34 in the morning on 10th February 2021 in Dublin; Figure 7.1B is from roughly the same spot, and was taken at 9.32 on 28th September 2021. These times co-ordinate the observer’s present with a world-wide system of timekeeping and create a sense of the instantaneous, but they only indicate a fraction of the temporal structure of the scene.
Though the milestone is the most prominent element, it has no internal marker of its time of emplacement, nor does it make any other temporal reference. It is pragmatically an assertive, putting a locational and directional fact on display. As with most LL units, the milestone implicates much more than it says, and external evidence is needed to understand the implicatures. This milestone is one of a series which, according to Montgomery (Reference Montgomery2004), was initiated shortly after 1810 as part of a programme to improve the postal service between London and Dublin. The establishment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland following the Act of Union, which took effect in 1801, had by this time brought Ireland more directly under British rule. Linking the postal services of London and Dublin was legally a matter of internal communication, and substantiated a prevailing notion of empire: see Hughes (Reference Hughes2015) for further detail. As part of this development of the postal system, the first of these milestones marked the road between Dublin and the harbour at Howth, while subsequent milestones marked the route for nearby Malahide. The NIAH website gives the milestone in the figure a date of ca. 1850. The GPO which is indicated on the milestone was opened to the public in 1818 as another part of the improvement of postal services. As Buckley (Reference Buckley2016) and Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2016) explain, the GPO was the culmination of a series of developments for a central Dublin post office, which shifted the centre towards business rather than administrative authority.
The postal history points to other aspects of this milestone as an LL unit. As shown in Figure 4.8, contemporary signage in the Republic of Ireland uses kilometres to measure distance. While historic milestones routinely give distances in miles, miles from the time the stone of Figure 7.1 have political significance. As Montgomery (Reference Montgomery2004) points out, the miles which these milestones refer to are not Irish miles (2.048 km), but the shorter English statutory mile (1.609 km). Both systems were in use at the time the milestones were erected, but the use of English miles on a Dublin–London postal route was an indexation of colonial rule.
The milestone in Figure 7.1, however, is not only a trace of a past act of emplacement: it is also a speech act in an ongoing present. Since the unit is still approximately two miles from the GPO and seven miles from Malahide, the assertive which it originally expressed is still valid, and is still relevant to the viewer. The temporal metaphor THEN IS NOW is upheld here, showing the present of an LL unit as an elastic present, which stretches from the time of emplacement to a continuing succession of sign viewers’ NOW times. The sign instigator would have been aware of the milestone’s broader role in the political and social world of its time, but has pared down the text to the speech act necessities of place and distance. Pivoting around this continuity, the markedness values of the LL unit have changed: the unmarked monolingual English code choice and the markedness attached to using English statutory miles in the sign instigator’s time clash with the markedness filter of the sign viewer’s present, in which bilingual signage in Irish and English and distances in kilometres are the unmarked choices. Adding background knowledge to the minimal message in the LL unit enables the sign viewer to engage in deeper interpretations of the LL unit, understanding what appears to be nothing more than an old milestone as the remnant of a past world of empire-building, colonialism, and infrastructural development.
The bilingual LL unit in Figure 7.1B adds a competing version of the THEN IS NOW metaphor in its expression of a directive. Unlike the milestone, its emplacement is visibly temporary, and its indexicality is to movement in the immediate future, as dictated by the conditions of nearby roadworks. The use of large black letters against an orange background introduces global intertextuality, as exemplified by the similar visual format for the Rue barrée signage in Figure 1.8B. The use of Irish and English emerges from the same political and linguistic era as that of the sign viewer’s present, showing its relative recency and its participation in a globalised system of LL units for traffic direction. The milestone and the Malairt slí sign both express valid speech acts and use the THEN IS NOW metaphor. For the milestone, however, THEN is a remote time whose full indexical values are hidden from most present-day sign viewers, while THEN for the road traffic sign belongs to a recent past with direct, current, and short-term relevance.
Further difficulty in fixing the observer’s present arises in considering the other LL units in the figure. The graffiti tag to the right in the photograph belongs to an unspecified time in the relatively recent past. With external evidence from Google Street View, its inscription can be dated to a time between July 2018 and September 2019; inside knowledge in the graffiti community might help to date the tag and understand its indexicality more precisely. The fragmentary tape remnants of an A4 size poster are on top of the graffiti inscription and must therefore be newer. The <SAVE TOLKA PARK> sticker in Figure 7.1B is newer still, and the sign instigator has used the frame of the former A4 poster to give the sticker visual salience. These stickers refer to plans for the closure of the nearby Tolka Park football grounds and, according to Martin (Reference Martin2021), started to appear in the area early in 2021. On this lamppost alone, we can thus identify three distinct layers of unrelated LL units. Each unit provides its own, independent THEN time which determines its pragmatic value and engagement in the LL.
The vans in Figure 7.1 add the element of mobility to the observer’s present. The van in Figure 7.1A had signage emplaced in what is THEN time for the sign viewer, but its engagement with a sign viewer depends on where the van is at any given time. Moments after this photograph was taken, other viewers engaged with the same LL unit in a succession of other locations. The configuration shown in Figure 7.1A thus represents the LL at a specific observer’s present which may never occur again. The presence of another van in Figure 7.1B suggests that commercial vans pass through this area on a regular basis and frequently stop at the traffic lights in the right-hand part of the picture. The regular visibility of such commercial signage distinguishes this area from more residential suburbs or pedestrianised areas of historic preservation, and enters into the social knowledge of the LL in this locale. Rather than disrupting the coherence of the LL, such fleeting LL units emphasise the reality which is lost if only stable units are considered: that the LL is never a static collection of objects, but a continuing display of discourse.
Though the difference between Figures 7.1A and 7.1B is simple, such small changes show the instability of the supposed observer’s present. Time reference in the space of the photograph also relies on the ability of the LL unit to point to the future. The milestone expresses a continuing truth, regardless of the changes in political structures and systems of measurement that have taken place over the years; the relevance of this truth (as opposed to the historical implicatures) is to the future movements of the sign viewer. The graffiti tag implies novelty and currency, which may be lost as the inscription loses its referential power over time or as a consequence of erasure by civil authorities; unlike the milestone, this genre does not entail an expectation of permanence. The remnant of an earlier notice dating from a time after September 2019 has already lost its outward expressive power, and its physical state points towards its future disappearance. The van indexes the sign instigator’s act of enticement for the sign viewer to become a customer, but this message is only expressed fleetingly in this location. Though it is, quite literally, here today and gone tomorrow, it can resurface in an unpredictable fashion and become part of the observer’s present once again. The Tolka Park sticker may be obscure to outsiders, but at the moment of emplacement, it is directed towards the future acts of the sporting and political establishment. The Málairt Slí sign is a direct directive about traffic movements in the immediate future of the sign viewer.
To summarise, the snippet of LL in Figure 7.1 presents not just six LL units, but six different time configurations that engage the sign viewer in this particular space. Unlike the dialogic graffiti of Figures 1.9 and 6.2, the LL units of Figure 7.1 operate with almost no reference to each other. Though there is a methodological convenience in working with the LL on the basis of an observer’s present which unites all these units into a single data set, this supposed present – in which the moment of observation must reckon with speech acts and temporal references from many different times, discourses, and orientations toward the future – can only be seen as a point of departure for deeper investigations of temporal reference in the LL.
7.3 Ghosts and Remnants
Figure 7.1 showed an LL unit which long predates the contemporary sign viewer’s present but which nevertheless retains its core pragmatic function. Many LL units date physically from earlier times but have lost their original pragmatic functions and have not been artfully repurposed as in Figure 1.12. I discuss such units in this section as ghosts and remnants, which represent different configurations of function and physical completeness. A ghost is an LL unit which is largely complete but which has lost its original pragmatic and referential function, usually due to changes in real world circumstances such as a business becoming defunct, a product going out of production, etc. Ghosts typically remain in the open space from the time of their emplacement onwards, unlike uncovered signs which, having been covered over at one time, become fleetingly visible before being covered by new signage or construction (see Ong 2021 and discussion in Chapter 8). The best-known type of ghost is the ghost sign, which has attracted attention in local histories and in various popular and design-oriented treatments, but which is now attracting scholarly attention from historical, social, and artistic points of view: see further the papers edited by Schutt, Roberts, and White (Reference Schutt, Roberts and White2017). Most of these ghost signs are wall paintings, but I use the more general term ghosts to include other LL units.
Figure 7.2A shows a painted ghost sign in the name St. Lawrence Warehousing Company, which originally occupied the landmark Montreal building now known as the Entrepôt Van Horne, built in 1924. Though the building has been through changes of ownership and function and is now in a state of decline, it retains large-scale painted signage and the industrial water tower that reflects its earlier history. As Wagner (Reference Wagner2016) explains, this development gives the building special significance within its locale. As an LL aggregate, the special significance of the building is the retention of its English-language signage, since such displays are now contrary to language policy in Quebec. This use of English is not simply a code choice, but a display designed to be seen from a long distance and to occupy a dominant position in the skyline: the scale is a commercial statement in its own right. The extensive graffiti at the bottom of the building, however, brings the aggregate into the present linguistic era.
Figure 7.2 Ghost signs
Figure 7.2B indexes changes over a longer time span. This art nouveau building was designed by Gerrit van Arkel and opened in 1900, replacing several earlier buildings. It was constructed for Max Büttinghausen, a photographer who was born in Germany in 1847 and settled in Amsterdam in 1873: see Krabben (Reference Krabben1993) for further details. It is referred to as the Gebouw Helios ‘Helios building’, which connects sunflower motifs on the building with the Greek sun god Helios and, according to Helios, an intaglio printing process for photographs known as heliography. Büttinghausen died in 1906, and the building went through various changes of use, including the conversion of the lower part of the building to a café in 1909 and the closure of the photography business, which remained upstairs until 1929. The ground floor of the building was occupied by the Tokyo restaurant at the time I took this photograph, but the tiled evidence of Büttinghausen’s photography salon remains. Code choices include the use of the photographer’s name, the French spelling artistique (cf. Dutch artistiek), and <FOTOGRAFIE> ‘photography’ which is spelled identically in Dutch and German. It is difficult to decode precisely the values attached to these choices, but the use of French for the arts follows a common prestige pattern. The LL of Figure 7.2B thus includes not only the contemporary speech act of enticing customers to the Tokyo restaurant, but an earlier act of enticement, in which photography, artistic design, and linguistic values are indexed by LL units. The retention of this signage, despite its loss of current pragmatic or referential force, in turn indexes art, culture, and history in THEN time.
The ghosts in Figure 7.3A and 7.3B are of a different kind from Figure 7.2, but they also use language that indexes space and THEN time. Jonesborough (Baile an Chláir in Irish) is a community in Armagh in Northern Ireland, close to the border with Co. Louth in the Republic, and situated off the main motorway between Dublin and Belfast. Since the establishment of the Irish Free State and, subsequently, the Republic of Ireland, the value of the Irish pound was consistently maintained on par with the pound sterling in the UK. The two currencies became decoupled in 1979 after Ireland joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the UK did not. Relative values of the Irish punt Éireannach, or simply punt, and the pound sterling fluctuated from that time onwards, but in 2002 the Euro became the currency in the Republic while the UK (and thereby Northern Ireland) retained the pound.
Figure 7.3 Ghosts and remnants
The fuel pumps in Figures 7.3A and 7.3B are from an abandoned fuel station in Jonesborough, and reflect its position near the border on a heavily trafficked cross-border route. Since currency fluctuations and changes in taxation rates can affect the relative price of fuel on either side of the border, and since cash customers may only have one currency with them at the time of sale, the choice of pricing facilitates cross-border purchases. The ghostly display of the word punts is significant here. The Irish word indexed the political divide between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland from the decoupling of the currencies in 1979 to the replacement of the punt by the Euro in 2002. The neutral designations <IR£> and <GB£> for Irish and British pounds were widely used at the time, and could have been used here. Instead, the word punt (using an anglicised plural form punts, rather than Irish puint) accommodates the Irish language. The pump labelling is thus a symbolic display which captures a moment in an ongoing political history.
Not all evidence of past discourse is as fully formed as the LL units of Figure 7.2. The abandoned fuel pumps in Figure 7.3 are in decay, but the remnant in Figure 7.3C shows that even fragmentary remains can carry significance. Such remnants are usually retained for historical, visual, or practical reasons – sometimes by accident – when another function has taken over in the same spot. The remnant in Figure 7.3C belonged to a video rental business in Astoria. The place name Athens is a typical marker of Greekness as discussed in Chapter 5. The signage which remains does not indicate if the video business had any connection to Greek video culture, or if it marked Greek community connections in other ways. What is clear from the <WAXING TREATMENT> display in the upper right part of the figure is that a beauty salon was in this location when I took the photograph. In the changing social context of the city, a marker of this kind is more than just a marker of a business that is no longer present. This remnant indexes the decline in video rental outlets globally; locally, it could index the decline of Greekness in the area.
7.4 Layering the LL
The discussion of Figure 1.13 drew attention to the layering of past and present in a Victorian letter box. In this case, the LL ensemble includes inscriptions from several different times within a unified presentation. Layering has been defined in different ways in LL research and other fields, but broadly speaking, there are two possible focal points in most definitions: the individual unit, and a network or complex of units within a single area. Glassie (Reference Glassie and Pocius1991: 264), for example, refers to ‘creative layering’ as a meaningful change which occurs in the context of use and modification: a shirt once bought becomes ‘a component in a composition of attire that informs on you’, while houses, cars, and other parts of the material world have layers of meaning added by owners who modify the original. Leeds-Hurwitz (Reference Leeds-Hurwitz1993: 161) focuses this sense of layering semiotically, arguing that ‘when an old sign acquires a new meaning yet retains the original meaning as well, that is layering’. In this understanding, layering usually happens because of changes over time or reception by new audiences: a schoolchild’s backpack may appear to the parent as simply a container for carrying objects, but ‘the additional meanings conveyed by minor differences in color, material, or design matter to the child who must display the backpack before peers’. Scollon and Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003: 137) also focus on the individual unit in layering, seeing it when ‘a sign is attached to another sign in such a way that one is clearly more recent and more temporary’; these changes are ‘not part of the original semiotic design’. Backhaus (Reference Backhaus2007b: 131–32), however, takes a different perspective on layering in the LL, formalising the term to refer to ‘the coexistence of older and newer versions of a given type of sign’, which, especially, ‘lays bare different linguistic states in the recent history of the city’. For Backhaus (Reference Backhaus2007b), layering can be seen in differences of language, script, spatial design, and information in LL units from different times in the Tokyo LL.
Examples I have introduced thus far have shown layering at the level of the individual unit, with or without modification of the original intent, and at the level of systems within the LL. In addition to the post box of Figure 1.13, the defunct street name plaque in Figure 4.17C shows layering at the level of the LL unit. In this case, though, it is not the original text which has changed. Rather, new meanings have been added for new audiences because the original street referent is gone, and the LL unit now indexes a critique pertaining to contemporary urban development. Lou’s (Reference Lou and Jaworski2016) account of the Sammy’s signage in Figure 4.3 suggests a dynamic in which the sign unit becomes an object of interest. The sign’s meaning developed from indexing the restaurant owner and his business (in THEN time) to a more general indexation of what Lou (Reference Lou and Jaworski2016: 216) calls ‘the discourse of entrepreneurship’, involving the success of the business in the context of British colonial rule. This discourse in turn invokes a ‘discourse of nostalgia’. These new layers of meaning, available to the sign viewer in NOW time, arise from the changing social and political circumstances of the signage rather than from any change in the text.
Connections between LL units also form a focus for layering. We have seen, for example, the older system of street name plaques in the Republic of Ireland which use Irish respellings in traditional orthography to present names derived from English, in contrast with the newer system that uses only modern Roman letter shapes and makes fewer orthographic modifications towards Irish: the plaques in Figures 3.5D and 3.5E name the same street, but chronological layering displays the Irish form in different ways between the two sign units. Examining this point in further detail, Figure 7.4 illustrates layering in the system of street name plaques in Montreal. Earlier practice in the city allowed for street names which were monolingually in English. As part of the large-scale change in language policy in Montreal and Quebec more generally, French odonyms are now required, although there are circumstances in which French-dominant bilingual signage is possible: see Bisson and Richard (Reference Bisson and Richard2015) for further detail. Figures 7.4A–D show four distinct layers of LL display which reflect not only the change in language policy (where both names and generics such as Street versus Rue are subject to regulation) but the role of historical marking and potential interest to tourists.
Figure 7.4 Layering in the Montreal LL
Figure 7.4A comes from the oldest layer of street name practice, which uses the English generic <ST.> in a small font and the proper name <MAGUIRE>. The street was given this name in 1876 by Pierre Beaubien and references Beaubien’s son-in-law, Hannibal Dellagenga Maguire (Patrimoine – La Toponymie website). Figure 7.4B shows an older Francophone plaque, using the French generic <RUE> in a small font and the proper name Dante, referencing Dante Alighieri. Since this street name has been in use since 1922 (Patrimoine – La Toponymie website), it can be assumed that an older street sign would have used the <ST.> generic. The newer Montreal style in Figure 7.4C is also monolingual in French, but includes the logo of the city of Montreal in red at the left. A further innovation in street name signage is shown in Figure 7.4D. Street name plaques in the Old City (or Vieux-Montréal) use a distinctive style which includes a decorative serif font with a light colour against a bright red background and a decorative frame, rather than the sans serif black font against a white background used elsewhere in the city. This layer of street name practice marks the historical origins of the city, and in so doing provides a visible prompt to identify areas of interest for tourists. The layering of this network encodes its own historical development, while the odonyms themselves also index conceptions and attitudes to history. Layering in these examples is thus not only significant as an indication of changing practice in response to language policy, but as a way of creating a network of THEN times united by the common function of location and wayfinding in the NOW experience of the sign viewer.
Layering as a response to language policy is not, however, confined to public signage. The adoption in 1977 of the Charte de la langue française ‘Charter of the French language’, widely known as Bill 101 or loi 101, in Quebec had profound sociolinguistic effects, as reviewed, for example, by Levine (Reference Levine1990) and Bourhis and Landry (Reference Bourhis and Landry2002). These developments have had a formative influence on the field of LL research itself. Notable among the provisions of Bill 101 and succeeding measures are the ways in which private signage is required to put French in a dominant, and often exclusive, position. The replacement of old signs by new signs which conform to language regulations is a simple, though sometimes expensive, response to changing policy. The physical layering in Figure 7.4E is another response, which keeps the old policy visible while conforming to the new one.
The company denoted by the signage was founded in 1922 by Louis Berson. The sign in Figure 7.4E was put in place in approximately 1947; it is now also a ghost sign, since the business has moved to a new location (see Freed Reference Freed2015). Though the LL unit conforms to the regulated use of French in the designation <L. BERSON & FILS> ‘L. Berson & son’, the English word <SON> can be read underneath the equivalent French Fils. With fils painted over son, layering in this case is a simple physical act. This particular sign also became the subject of controversy because the Hebrew word matzevot ‘monuments, gravestones’ is written in a larger font and in a higher position than the French monuments (see a report with an interview featuring Marvin Berson at https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=580754). Waller (Reference Waller, Singer and Seldin1998: 205) reports that the deviation from the strict letter of the law was eventually allowed, with arguments made that the religious and communal importance of Hebrew justified its significant appearance in this context.
7.5 Markers and Remembrances
Remnants in the LL index a past time because they survive from it into the present, despite the loss of their original function. This section, however, considers LL units which use the sign instigator’s NOW time of emplacement to refer to a THEN time of the past. References to THEN time can be to specific events such as a visit from a head of state or the opening of a specific building, or to more diffuse series of events or eras, such as wars, buildings or communities which are no longer present, and epochs in history. Depending on the historical referent and the nature of the sign instigator’s discourse, these references take different perspectives on the relationship between time and space. Markers unite THEN and HERE because the event or events which they refer to happened on the spot where the LL unit is emplaced; remembrances have more general spatial reference and may, as in the case of war memorials, commemorate events whose precise place is far away or unknown. Both types of LL unit perform speech acts in the present which are intended for sign viewers of the future to read as evidence of a selected past. They are comparable to Nora’s (Reference Nora1989) notion of lieux de mémoire ‘sites of memory’, combining the ‘material, symbolic, and functional’ in a ‘play of memory and history’ (p. 19), where memory ‘remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting’ and history ‘is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’.
The LL unit as a marker is illustrated in Figure 7.5, which expresses a particular historical perspective on urban development and gentrification. Chicago’s Maxwell Street area rose to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a multi-ethnic area, known for its open-air market, its role in the development of the blues, and other aspects of cultural life. Part of the district was destroyed for motorway construction, while most of the rest was torn down in the expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Maxwell Street has been documented extensively: Berkow (Reference Berkow1977) takes an approach from oral history, while Cresswell (Reference Cresswell2019) applies the insights of urban geography into an analysis of the development, redevelopment, and representation of Maxwell Street. Other documentation can be found at the Maxwell Street Foundation website. Because of extensive building and community displacement, nothing of the social history of this area can be seen by the present-day viewer. Instead, installations as shown in Figure 7.5 provide historical background material.
Figure 7.5 Remembering Maxwell Street
Figure 7.5B shows one side of a free standing display in its entirety; the other side is devoted to Maxwell Street as the ‘Birthplace of the Chicago Blues’. The photographs complement blocks of text, but I concentrate in Figure 7.5 on the text, shown in Figures 7.5A, C, D, and E. The text emphasises ethnic and cultural diversity, yet neither the text nor the photographs attach value to language. The text in Figure 7.5A mentions Yiddish, but the photographs do not include any LL units which use Yiddish or any language other than English, despite documentary evidence such as Bledstein’s (Reference Bledstein2017) photo report which shows LL units from this period using Yiddish and Hebrew. What the remembrance in Figure 7.5 does is to portray HERE as a place which showed ethnic diversity and commercial activity over a 100-year THEN period. The linguistic diversity which was a part of this heritage is erased by a focus on commercial activity from an almost entirely anglophone perspective.
The remembrance of war, genocide, and violent death opens the way for displays of language and more general semiotics that have been studied from a variety of points of view. Santino (Reference Santino2001), for example, ties in visual displays on murals and installations with verbal discourse in the Northern Ireland Troubles, while later developing interdisciplinary perspectives on ‘spontaneous shrines’ which engage in the ‘public memorialization of death’ (Santino Reference Santino2006). Abousnnouga and Machin (Reference Abousnnouga and Machin2013) and Macalister (Reference Macalister, Blackwood and Macalister2020) focus on war memorials; Kosatica (Reference Kosatica, Blackwood and Macalister2020) on Sarajevo’s War Childhood Museum; Wee (Reference Wee2016) on the LL and the generation of affect in Arlington National Cemetery; Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael (Reference Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael2016) on an artistic ‘counter-monument’ and its role in the remembrance of the persecution of Jews in Berlin; and Kailuweit and Quintana (Reference Kailuweit, Quintana, Malinowski and Tufi2020) on remembrance and the public in ‘grassroots memorials’ arising from terrorist attacks in Madrid and Paris. Wee and Goh (Reference Wee and Goh2019) raise a number of related points under the heading of ‘theorising affect’. Since space limitations prevent a full-scale discussion of these issues, I discuss here an instance of bringing time and space together in the LL, which makes more use of silence than of discursive text.
Figure 7.6A shows a memorial in front of the Protestant church in the centre of Fränkisch-Crumbach. A statue depicts a soldier with a gun who is kneeling with hands clasped as if in prayer. His face is turned downwards, and his helmet is pulled over his forehead. Behind him are five tablets with the names of those from the village who were killed in the German war effort in the First World War. The names are arranged alphabetically by date, and Figure 7.6B shows one such tablet in detail. In keeping with many German memorials of this time (see Koshar Reference Koshar2000: 98–103), this installation is striking in its relative silence: there is no verbal inscription on the plinth or anywhere else on the memorial. Only the inscription of years, the crosses at the head of each list of names, and the non-verbal evidence of the statue give an indication of what the memorial is for. This use of silence is a code choice which demonstrates the importance of discourse properties in the LL. The silence is not incidental, but fits within a general principle identified by Nora (Reference Nora1989: 19) that ‘the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting … in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs’.
Figure 7.6 Great War memorial
Names, however, play a significant role in this LL ensemble. The small size and inter-dependence of the village community, whose population was just over 1,700 during these years (Fränkisch-Crumbach, Odenwaldkreis Reference Fränkisch-Crumbach2018), meant that many people listed on the plaques would have been known to passers-by: the deaths were personal. The crosses, as with symbols more generally, are polysemous. They index the shared German military identity of all those listed on the tablets, but if read as Christian symbols, they cannot reflect the personal identities of the three Jewish people named in the memorial. The remembrance in Figure 7.6 thus indexes the deaths of individuals which took place in THEN times that are spelled out by year. While the marker in Figure 7.6 uses the THEN IS NOW metaphor to bring the deaths of these individuals into the NOW of the sign viewer’s present, the remembrance in the figure also unites the different remote THERE spaces where these individuals died to the HERE of the village monument. Space and time are united in a single LL in which THEN IS NOW and THERE IS HERE. The image of the soldier thus uses iconic semiosis to provide a model for contemplation, while the linguistic elements of silence and naming focus the contemplation on those who were killed.
7.6 Repurposing the Past
The intentional invocation of the past is not limited to markers and memorials, but frequently provides sign instigators with a means to index other values. Indexations of the past in the LL are frequently oriented towards authenticity, nostalgia, and community. This indexicality often uses the logic of heritage, which Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett1995: 370) describes as ‘not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed’ but, rather, as ‘a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past’. Being ‘time honoured’ can mean concretely that a locale has been in business for a relatively long time, but it can also rely on more abstract conceptions of antiquity and cultural origin. Figure 7.7 shows a health club in Dublin using indexicality in the LL to align itself with putative ancient values.
Figure 7.7 Repurposing ogham
The banner in Figure 7.7 may appear initially to the sign viewer as a monolingual English name and advertisement. Each <O>, however, contains a smaller display of the Irish ogham writing system: this inscription is used repeatedly in the shop frontage. Ogham is a writing system which was developed for the Irish language before the introduction of the Roman alphabet (whose earliest Irish texts date from the sixth century). Though there is much about the use of ogham that is not certain, McManus (Reference McManus1991: 1) localises its initial development to the southern part of Ireland, and suggests a date of the fourth century. It is generally agreed that the system was developed by people who knew the alphabet and grammar of Latin, and while most of the surviving texts which use ogham are stone inscriptions with memorial or marking functions, it may also have been used on less durable media such as vellum and wood. The script continued to be used marginally in later texts in the Middle Ages. Most ogham writing relies on the inscription of lines along a vertical or horizontal axis, depending on the medium. As McManus (Reference McManus1991) explains, the correspondences between ogham and the Roman alphabet are well established: see also the Ogham in 3D website for archaeological documentation. The ogham within the <O> of the upper part of the banner can be read from left-to-right, and that of the bottom part from bottom-to-top: in both cases, it spells the Irish word sláinte ‘health’. The merger of modernity in the English language with tradition through the oldest written form of Irish is intentional: the Icon website boasts that ‘central to our logo is the ogham symbol representing health, love and happiness at the core of our organisation. Ogham is the earliest known form of Irish script and is also symbolic of our iconic heritage’. Though there is no nostalgia expressed for Irish life as it actually was in the fourth century, an earlier writing system specific to the national language has been repurposed to imbue the modern health club selectively with time-honoured values.
Time reference in the heritage mode is deeply extendable, and frequently indexes an imagined past which lies outside the world of industrialisation and urbanisation. The concept of nostalgia refers directly to this confluence of time and space. As Fuentenebro de Diego and Valiente Ots (Reference Fuentenebro de Diego and Valiente Ots2014) detail, the word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medic, using Greek roots (nosos ‘return to the native land’ and algos ‘suffering, affliction’) to express the German term Heimweh, today translated as ‘homesickness’. Hofer’s concern was with the trauma suffered by soldiers far from home, but in English, according to the OED, the term has been used since 1900 to refer to a longing for the past, including a ‘sentimental evocation of a period of the past’. That the original sense of pain for displacement in space has gravitated in usage towards a sense of longing for the past has a counterpart in the tendency of the LL to bring time and space together in units or assemblages of nostalgia.
Where tourists are concerned, the indexation in NOW time of a pre-industrial past in THEN time can give an exotic location extra value as an authentic experience of local culture. Authenticity of this kind is signalled by linguistic choices and imagery in Figure 7.8 from Strasbourg. Tourism in Strasbourg frequently relies on the display of a distinctive Alsatian identity, expressed linguistically and through regional cuisine. Chez Tante Liesel uses a French language matrix, but points to its authentic Alsatian persona in a number of ways. As in many parts of the world, an affectionate kinship term (tante ‘aunt’) for an older family member functions as part of the restaurant’s trust-building exercise. The name Liesel points to an Alsatian (Germanic) linguistic form rather than towards French: the Chez Tante Liesel website indicates that Valérie, Eric, and Emilienne are in charge, with no evidence of an actual Liesel. The term <Winstub>, while cognate with standard German Weinstube ‘wine bar’, is widely recognised as Alsatian and adds lexically to local authenticity (cf. also Bogatto and Hélot Reference Bogatto, Hélot, Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni2010: 284). The traditional lettering, use of old-fashioned curtains and rustic objects in the window, as well as the menu (with a strong emphasis on local specialties using Alsatian terms such as <Bibeleskes>, literally ‘chick’s cheese’, a local speciality of soft white cheese), reinforce the claim to authenticity. This assemblage, however, is not a remnant: its current incarnation was only five years old at the time I took this photograph, and the building had earlier housed a shoe repair shop. Nevertheless, by a conscious display of linguistic and other indexicalities, the sign instigator brings the THEN of an unspecified but appealing past as well as a distinctively local NEAR space into the NOW of the customer in search of authenticity.
Figure 7.8 Nostalgia Chez Tante Liesel
A more complex assemblage of linguistic and visual communication linked to local oral tradition is shown in Figure 7.9. The locale is in the area of the 1941 ‘North Strand Bombing’, when German aerial forces let loose a bomb killing 28 people and damaging or destroying over 300 homes, despite Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War. The vista is dominated by the mural in Figure 7.9A. A bilingual Irish/English sign at the left of the mural designates the area as a Memorial Garden. Figure 7.9C shows a different perspective, which includes a stone monument dating from 1991 in remembrance of those who died in the bombing. The text of the monument is in Irish and English, and Figure 7.9B provides a closeup view.
Figure 7.9 Historical assemblage: ‘Do you know the Five Lamps?’
The mural was painted in 2015 by members and associates of the Swan Youth Services group in Dublin’s north inner city; it presents an overview of Irish history from a local community perspective (see Five lamps website for details). This history is depicted visually by iconicity and indexicality. Themes referenced by the images include, from left-to-right: (1) Vikings, who played a pivotal role in medieval Ireland and are connected to this locale by the Battle of Clontarf which took place nearby in 1014 and is popularly seen as the turning point in the retreat of Viking power in Ireland (see Duffy Reference Duffy2013 for a contemporary review); (2) the burning of the GPO (cf. Figure 7.1) during the 1916 Easter Rising, which was also a turning point in the campaign for an independent Ireland; (3) the North Strand bombing; and (4) contemporary music and community activity.
Also visible in the mural is an image of the installation known as the Five Lamps, shown in Figure 7.9D. This structure is very close to the Memorial Garden, and was erected ca. 1880 following a bequest to provide two water fountains in Dublin: for history and earlier photographs, see Hiney (Reference Hiney1987). The water fountain originally had four basins and could provide water for people and horses. While the lamps provided light, the ‘five lamps’ name is also popularly said to mark the five converging streets where the fountain is situated or to commemorate five battles fought by the British Army in India (Five Lamps Revisited website). In a further illustration of layering, the installation has developed from its original practical purpose and has taken on its own identity as a fixture in the community, which, as the NIAH website points out, ‘derives from the role of private patronage in tackling the slum conditions of the period by the provision of clean drinking water at the fountain which would otherwise have not been available to the local population’.
Understanding the verbal and visual references to the Five Lamps in the mural requires not just knowledge of the erstwhile water fountain and lampstand as a physical object, but an understanding of its social meaning in providing some relief to a disadvantaged part of Dublin. More to the point, though, is that Dubliners from this area will know the expression Do you know the Five Lamps? as a traditional catch phrase which can be used in a humorously aggressive way to draw attention to an outsider’s status, to reject unwanted amorous advances from a male speaker, or in other such ways. I have often heard the phrase used or alluded to, but Lordstilton (website comment) gives a narrative account which expresses its use clearly. In this account, Dub and culchie denote, respectively, a person from Dublin and an outsider from other parts of the country, while bollix, bollocks ‘testicles’ is well-known in Irish and British slang:
the five lamps was used as a way of telling people they were annoying you and you’d like them to stop … ‘Do you know the five lamps?’ If they were a Dub they knew what was going to be said next and would leave you alone … If they were a culchie they’d say they do know the five lamps …next would come ‘well go and hang your bollix off it’.
The Memorial Garden, its monument of remembrance, and the mural thus use not only Irish and English in an act of commemoration which follows the contemporary pattern for civic commemorations, but visual imagery that indexes the local in the context of national history, and in-group language which is obscure to the uninitiated. The assemblage which the sign viewer finds HERE, in short, uses strongly local reference to bring together THEN and NOW in a way that spans from the Viking period to present-day banter which might be heard in nearby social encounters.
A final example in this category illustrates a principle of anti-memory, in which the sign instigator ironically comments on the resistance of historical events to the changes which the sign instigator considers desirable.
The historical specificity of the inscription in Figure 7.10 shows its force as a political commentary. Though it is impossible to know exactly when the inscription was put up, I took the photograph on 14th March 2017. By this time, Enda Kenny had been Taoiseach (the head of government) in the Republic of Ireland since March 2011. Following a general election in 2016, however, Kenny had been in a politically weakened position due to the government’s reliance on opposition party support for a minority government. Mounting political pressures arising from Brexit proposals in the UK eventually led to Kenny’s resignation in June 2017. The inscription in Figure 7.10, is thus not only an intertextual inversion of the familiar phrase gone but not forgotten, but a timely commentary on the unfolding of events which declares the embattled head of government to be forgotten, even though he was not yet officially gone. The emplacement of this inscription next to an abandoned building – with its rotting pillars, padlocked door, and graffiti-tagged main door – complements the linguistic message.
Figure 7.10 Forgotten but not gone
