Things Fall Apart

Channel letter signs are an ubiquitous feature of urban landscapes. When left unattended - locked away in a cage or mounted up high for maximum visibility - these texts are subjected to the forces of weather and gravity, the letters cracking and falling off their tracks.

While these signs may seem to be the trivial detritus of advertising, the disorder of this crudely set type, now abandoned by the hands that set them in place, reveal the frail and contingent nature of everyday acts of speaking and writing.

In our lives, we often feel lost when past acts of understanding seem to fall apart, leaving one in a crisis of expression. We are left with our own neglected alphabet, damaged by time, of words sheared forever from their origin. And despite this chaos, we do survive to inscribe new meaning, to re-order the signs of the past into a pattern, a present, that is intelligible. It is this implication of both loss and hope that makes these forgotten signs beautiful to me, as visible riddles about the transient character of language, memory, and the passing loneliness of public places.

Joe Hermer is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is presenting a paper at Legal Spaces, 'Begging the sign: policing gift relations to the homeless'. Send email.