Word cities and language objects ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shiters Adam Jaworski University of Hong Kong he focus of this paper is on language objects in contemporary ‘word cities’, or urban landscapes, shaped by art and consumer culture. I deine ‘language objects’ as two- or three-dimensional pieces of writing (e.g. needlework samplers, fridge magnets, wooden or metal sculptures, etc.) that do not serve any apparent informational or utilitarian purpose, i.e. they are not ‘attached’ to or displayed on any objects with identiiable practical functions, e.g. buildings, t-shirts, mugs, paper weights, and so on. Two speciic language objects considered here are Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture and a Marks & Spencer ‘love letters decoration’. It is suggested that such language objects perform largely Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function with its key focus on form. Yet, they are also instances of linguistic performances with complex trajectories of appropriation and recontextualization of prior cultural and linguistic material (Bauman, 2001; Bauman & Briggs, 1990), while their appropriation for speciic ‘personal’ uses is best explained by treating them as ‘shiters’ — referential indexes, or signs constituted by the combination of their symbolic value and the communicative act itself (or ‘rules of use’) (Jakobson, 1971; Silverstein, 1976). Keywords: word cities, language objects, Robert Indiana, text-based art, commodiication of language, consumer culture, shiters, ‘love’ 1. Introduction: Word cities and language objects For the past several decades, the main drivers of urban development have been accumulation of capital and cultural production through ‘displaying art, generating money, making an image for the city, supplying signs and symbols, and creating public spaces’ (Zukin, 1994). Following Ritzer (1999) and others, Ole Jensen links the new cultural landscapes of cities, persisting inequalities and deprivation notwithstanding, with a shit in advanced capitalism from subsistence as a primary concern to that of ‘seeking ever more stimulating experiences’ (Jensen, 2007: 212). Linguistic Landscape 1:1/2 (2015), 75–94. doi 10.1075/ll.1.1-2.05jaw issn 2214–9953 / e-issn 2214–9961 © John Benjamins Publishing Company 76 Adam Jaworski Driven by the theatrics of the ‘experience economy’ (Pine & Gilmore, 1999), striving to develop their respective narrative frames, unique selling points, iconic sites and spectacles, post-industrial cities are branded by advertisers, lifestyle media, commerce and cultural industries with images, texts and logos as global hubs of culture and creativity. hese re-imaging and commodiication strategies involve complex processes in which the ‘built city’ is overlaid by the ‘word city’ (Greenberg, 2000: 230, cited in Jensen, 2007: 213). In this paper, I aim to examine this intensiied presence of language in the urban landscape of advanced capitalism by locating the origin of word cities at the intersection of contemporary art and consumer culture. I also want to suggest that apart from its symbolic role in the social production of space (e.g. Harvey, 1989; Lefebvre, 1991; Johnstone, 2010; Jaworski & hurlow, 2010) and its increasing presence and visibility as cultural artefact on display (Eastman & Stein, 1993), language itself has become ‘thingiied’. 1.1 Consumer culture and the ‘thingiication’ of language Consumer culture has turned goods and services into symbolic and signifying objects in their own right (e.g. Hebdige, 2000 [1988]), and it has turned symbolic resources, such as language, into commodities. he sociologists Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) have suggested that, under globalization, culture has ceased to be predominantly associated with the superstructure and has seeped into the infrastructure as it has come to dominate ‘both the economy and experience in everyday life’ (p. 4). It is along these lines that, discussing semiotic landscapes of luxury, hurlow and Jaworski (in press) discuss the ‘thingiication’ of words and the ‘wordiication’ of things — the way words are materialized and the way objects are semioticized. Monica Heller has demonstrated how the conditions of the ‘new’ economy under globalization have led to the commodiication of language. In the ‘tertiary’ sector of the information-, culture- and service-based industries, language has become part of our intellectual and communicative labour, both as skill and as cultural artefact. For example, language is now commonly found ‘attached’ to standardized, mass-produced goods in saturated markets to create symbolic added value or niche markets (Heller, 2003, 2010). Examples include popular irst names emblazoned on ‘personalized’ cofee mugs or key rings, slogans and jokes written on t-shirts, place-names of tourist destinations printed on shot glasses or golf balls, ‘local’ alphabets, words and phrases displayed on postcards (Jaworski, 2010), ‘luxury’ brand names and logos exhibited on clothes and accessories, or the word ‘love’ attached to almost any type of object imaginable, for example a photo frame (see Figure 1). Word cities and language objects Figure 1. ‘Love’ photo frame.* * All images © the author. My view of the thingiication of language stems from its widespread display and over-layering onto the fabric of the city. Language is artefactualized through binding it with diferent products and increasing presence of distinct language objects in contemporary semiotic landscape. Jacqueline Urla (2012) uses the term ‘thingiication’ in a diferent but not unrelated context of national language policy and planning. She examines the managerial practices of measuring language use and its subsequent objectiication in the Basque linguistic revitalization programmes. According to Urla, the schemas of the ‘Total Quality Language Revival’ make language ‘to be thing-iied, treated as a discrete, measaurable and bounded entity, on the grid of discrete countable units’ (Urla, 2012: 89). he same ‘logic’ of linguistic discretization, measurability and boundedness appears to apply to the production of language in the mass produced, commercial language objects discussed here. In sum, consumer culture has come to dominate late capitalist societies with its array of values, beliefs and behaviours that have linked the economic and symbolic systems in two inseparable ways: (1) material goods have acquired cultural values that index, or communicate, meaning beyond their use value (e.g. status, group membership, sophistication, rebelliousness, and so on); (2) cultural goods that were not originally associated with economic exchange (e.g. languages) have come to be produced, distributed and used in accordance with the principles of economic markets (Featherstone, 1991; see also Harvey, 1989; Lash & Urry, 1994; Fairclough, 1992). his created conditions for language to grow in prominence as both a cultural and material artefact. 77 78 Adam Jaworski 1.2 Art he art critic Lucy Lippard (1977 [1973]) has argued that the ‘conceptual’ turn in contemporary art with its focus on texts, ideas, performance, photographic and video documentation has led to the dematerialization of art. However, ‘dematerialization’ of art and its link with language must only be considered as a metaphor for a shit by the 1960s avant-garde away from formalism and a return to ‘content’. Dematerialization emphasizes conceptual art’s focus on ideas, ephemerality, impermanence and politicization of social life. At the same time, ideas were treated as inseparable from the modes of their expression and representation, hence the importance of the diferent modalities and materiality of speech, writing and other symbolic systems of signiication as well as their context of use — the physicality of spaces in which they were performed or displayed. With language as the medium of the artwork, or as the work itself, artists have self-relexively located its materiality at the centre of their practice. Some of the well-known examples include Joseph Kosuth’s installation One and hree Chairs (1965) consisting of a physical chair, a black and white photograph of the ‘same’ chair and an enlarged photostat of the dictionary deinition of the word ‘chair’; Robert Smithson’s pencil drawing A Heap of Language (1966), which takes the shape of a volcano-shaped mound of soil with language-related words written in 21 lines: ‘language’, ‘speech’, ‘mother tongue’, ‘dialect’, ‘idiom’, ‘slang’, ‘orthography’, and so on; or a number of Douglas Huebler’s photo-text pieces from the 1960s, in which the perceptual experience of a work of art is wholly dependent on its documentation (see Kotz, 2007). 1.3 Language objects Both these sources — conceptual art and consumer culture — have given rise to the emergence of text-based artworks and other non-utilitarian, largely decorative items that I call ‘language objects’. Art language objects are typically displayed in museums and galleries, and as instances of ‘public art’ (see discussion of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture below). As commercial oferings, linguistic goods of this kind can be found in git and souvenir shops, or in the ‘home’ sections of department stores as typically decorative, mostly humorous or playful objects widespread in the contemporary ‘aesthetic economy’ (Binkley, 2007). hey are text items to be hung on walls, doors, or windows, placed on shelves or desks, or worn as pieces of jewellery (e.g. a gold pendant in the shape of the wearer’s irst name). Out of numerous examples that I have seen, photographed and, on occasion, bought, some include: ‘Life’s a beach’, ‘Gone ishing’, ‘Friends gather here’, ‘Relax… and enjoy the little things life ofers’, ‘Life is too important to be taken seriously’, ‘Best teacher’, ‘maison’, ‘Dream’, ‘BABY’, ‘Welcome’, ‘Be nice or go away’, ‘I love you’ (engraved on Word cities and language objects a stone), the ‘@’ and ‘&’ sign-stands, as well as individual letters and numerals that can be bought and used to spell any word or phrase one wishes, or whole letter sets and alphabets such as letter fridge magnets. he relative semantic indeterminacy of language objects requires them to be considered as semiotic resources usable in acts of social practice such as emplacement in particular environments by speciic social actors. herefore, this paper adopts a theory of indexicality, especially its semiotic principle of the ‘double arrow of indexicality’, i.e. the fact that every sign presupposes something and entails something when it is used (Silverstein, 2006; Blommaert, 2013). In other words, every sign carries information about who produced it, and about who is selected to be its recipient, even though this information may not be immediately transparent. his is why the theory views every sign as pointing backwards to its origins, and forward to its addressees. his approach gives us access to past/historical presuppositions conventionally carried by signs/texts, and to the ways intended addressees (conceived of as ‘historical bodies’; Scollon & Scollon, 2003) understand them on the basis of the entailments they trigger. Texts are thus seen as being at once repositories of past meanings, and vehicles for future meanings (see below the discussion of the Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture and the Marks & Spencer decorative ‘love’ stand). he category of language objects is certainly a fuzzy one, especially in terms of their ‘functionality’ or ‘uptake’. For example, a pair of cast aluminium ‘a’/‘z’ bookends may be used for its intended purpose of propping up books, or both letters can be displayed as a desk sculpture for purely ornamental purposes. Other variants of language objects include more utilitarian ones sold in hardware stores, such as the PVCu, aluminium or brass ‘house’ letters and numbers, currency symbols, and so on. A stone with an engraved phrase ‘I love you’ can be bought (commodity) and ofered to a loved one as an expression of afection (git) and used by the new owner as a paperweight or for some other purpose (tool) (see Jafe, 1999, cited below). As Johan Järlehed points out in a personal note, as a result of their trajectories through social space, language objects oten embody all or several of these functions and related meaning potentials at the same time. It is also important to note that language was present in western art long before the ‘conceptual turn’ in mid-20th century, albeit with a lesser degree of autonomy, for example as inscriptions in ‘representational’ painting (Hunt, Lomas, & Corris, 2010). Precursors of contemporary commercial language objects include printed or engraved ‘home blessings’ and embroidered samplers of the late 18th and 19th centuries that were both pictorial and linguistic, for example, displaying the alphabet or inscriptions such as ‘HOME SWEET HOME’. Due to space limitations, in this paper, I deal with only one type of language objects, those that spell the word ‘love’. Before I examine the subset of ‘love’ 79 80 Adam Jaworski language objects in art and commerce, I relect briely on the relationship between love and money. Next, I discuss the LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana and its commercial variants. Finally, I conclude by commenting on the semiotic properties of language objects as ‘shiters’. 2. Love and money in art and consumer culture Love and money have always had an uneasy relationship. In his irst book of Ars amatoria (he Art of Love) written in 2AD, Ovid censures women who will use affection and love to get men to buy them expensive things. In Book Two, lamenting the calibre of the age, he states the point plainly: ‘auro conciliator amor’ (gold purchases love) (Frederick Blumberg, pc). Albrecht Dürer’s Allegory of Avarice (1507) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, shows an old, grotesque woman with a wrinkled face, toothless smile, wispy grey hair, and a sagging breast falling out of her red robe. She holds a sack full of gold coins with both her hands. Dürer’s message is not just that greed is not worthwhile because life passes quickly and avarice comes at the cost of youth and beauty but it is also erotically undesirable. If Ovid and Dürer treated money and love as antinomies, contemporary consumer culture seems to have put an equation sign between them. In the early 1960s the Beatles may have still insisted that ‘money can’t buy me love’, but love and commitment were irmly on its way to help market anything from chocolate to diamonds. According to Nigel hrit (2006) exploiting consumers’ passions and enthusiasm have become dominant strategies for marketing and selling goods. Daniel Miller (1998) goes as far as to suggest that British shoppers have recast shopping from labour to devotional love of caring for one’s family or desiring the other through consumer goods. While marketers have long exploited the link between love (or sex) and commerce, so the urban landscape has come to be more and more saturated with its linguistic and visual metonyms — the word ‘love’ and the ‘heart’ ideograph. heir presence is ubiquitous for the purposes of branding and/or embellishment of private, public and virtual spaces, commercial areas, products, and bodies. hey appear as part of decorative displays in shops and shop windows, in ads and advertising slogans, on tattoos, posters, and restaurant bills, as seen in Figure 2, where a heart was added by the server’s hand alongside a smiley face. ‘Heart’ is used as part of ‘creative’ typography, for example as replacement for the letters ‘o’, ‘v’ or the numeral ‘0’. Countless heart-shaped objects include jewellery pieces, chocolates and chocolate boxes, key rings, cushions, candles, balloons, rugs, plates, and so on, and there is absolutely no limit to the ‘heart’/‘love’ ideograph or word appearing on any object or surface known to human beings, which makes both resources part of the Word cities and language objects Figure 2. Restaurant bill with a hand-drawn heart and smiley face. global semioscape (hurlow & Aiello, 2007), or globalese, the cultural–commercial register indexing spaces as ‘global’ (Jaworski, 2013, 2014, 2015). In addition to these ‘utilitarian’ uses of the ‘heart’ ideograph and the word ‘love’, such as possibly enticing the restaurant patrons to leave a larger tip by drawing a heart on the bill (see Figure 2), one can ind numerous examples of seemingly self-referential ‘love’ language objects, such as in the collage on p. 82. hese are typically ornamental pieces made of diferent materials, such as wood, wood encrusted with imitation crystals, ceramics, metal, cardboard (playing cards), etc. As linguistic texts, their main function appears to be aesthetic or poetic, in the 81 82 Adam Jaworski sense of Roman Jakobson (1960), where the primary orientation of the text is to its own form. Collage 1. ‘Love’ language objects. Yet, as will be demonstrated shortly, language objects are also instances of linguistic performances with complex trajectories of appropriation and recontextualization of prior cultural and linguistic material (Bauman, 2001; Bauman & Briggs, 1990). As signs, their meaning potential may not always be entirely transparent or stable but their astonishing abundance suggests their potential for (self-)styling of social actors as contemporary citizens-consumers. Word cities and language objects 3. Robert Indiana’s LOVE As has been mentioned, since mid-20th century, the international avant-garde artists (including performance artists) have made language (writing, speech, sign language, gesture, and so forth) a vital feature of their practice. As writing gained more and more autonomy in (Western) visual art, pieces of text became autonomous artworks, oten blurring boundaries between art, poetry and document design (e.g. posters). While the beginnings of Conceptualism in the early 1960s are irmly rooted in the USA (Lippard, 1973), it was quickly picked up in other parts Figure 3. Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1976, Philadelphia. 83 84 Adam Jaworski of the world, oten incorporating ‘local’ languages and indexing local genres of writing. For example, the two pioneering igures of Japanese Conceptualism, Yoko Ono and Matsuzawa, both produced language-based works, with Matsuzawa, for example, indexing Shintoist paper talismans in his 1996 piece Ju (Blessing) (Merewether & Hiro, 2007). However, it was probably Pop Art in the 1960s that brought language as an autonomous mode of expression in art to broader public attention. Where Conceptual Art created a large body of relatively cryptic and esoteric text-based work, Pop Art appropriated and recycled commonplace and familiar texts, scripts, Figure 4. A group of friends pose underneath Robert Indiana’s LOVE. Word cities and language objects and discourses. Alongside the mundane imagery and iconography of the ‘everyday’ — objects, faces, bodies, activities, and so on — in their pursuit of fantastical and spectacular iconography derived from the quotidian, Pop Artists turned to language as a seemingly most ubiquitous and most democratic medium and object, not unlike graiti artists before them. Language became part of the appropriated imagery in Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘comic’ paintings and in Andy Warhol’s stylizations of mass-produced packaging, logos and media texts. Jasper Johns, one of Pop Art’s great precursors, produced his ‘stencilled’ alphabet and number paintings as de-contextualized, self-referential ‘texts’ with ‘no meaning’. For Johns, the primary motivation to use the anonymous, depersonalized yet familiar industrial and militaristic typeface was to subvert its aesthetic by recontextualizing it somewhat incongruously as ‘art’ (Morley, 2003). Graiti was appropriated by Pop Art in the collaboration between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, or in the work of Keith Haring. One of Robert Indiana’s most recognizable works, and one of the most recognizable artworks of the twentieth century, is his LOVE letter design, with the irst two letters ‘stacked’ over the latter two and with the letter ‘O’ tilted to the right. In 1964, it was irst conceived as a design for a Christmas card for his friends. A year later the New York Museum of Modern Art commissioned its Christmas card from Indiana and chose his now classic design in red, green and blue. Numerous authorized and unauthorized versions of the design followed, including the authorized issue of the LOVE stamp by the United States Postal Service in 1972, of which 330 million were sold in two years. Apart from paintings, serigraphs, stamps and other two-dimensional designs, Indiana produced a series of LOVE sculptures Figure 5. A romantic couple pose underneath Robert Indiana’s LOVE. 85 86 Adam Jaworski Figure 6. A man with his bike poses underneath Robert Indiana’s LOVE. in diferent formats, colours and languages, though most have been executed in English (Vadala Homer, 2003). he word ‘love’ was chosen by Indiana based on his experience as a child at Christian Science services, where one of the few decorative elements is an inscription ‘God is Love’, usually in gold, over the platform where the readers conduct service (Vadala Homer, 2003: 3). Apparently, LOVE was also a covert expression of his sexuality and alignment with the New York gay subculture in the late 1950s and 1960s (McDonnell, 2010; Plante, 1995), and it echoed the anti-Vietnam War slogan ‘Make Love, Not War’, tapping into the paciist ideology of the hippie era Word cities and language objects with ‘so-called love beads and free love [being] other signature expressions of the day’ (McDonnell, 2010: 96). One of the versions of the sculpture was installed at the Philadelphia John F. Kennedy Park in 1976 (Figure 3). Its elevated position allows numerous visitors to have a photo taken directly underneath it. It is clearly a popular spot to be photographed at (Figures 4–6). Despite its religious inspiration and personal meaning for Indiana, it has become one of the dominant symbols of the 1960s with its civil rights movement and sexual liberation. For example, the ‘cast of Hair was photographed in the nude, covered by an unauthorized, unsigned LOVE print in 1966, documenting Indiana’s image as a symbol for the “love generation” ’ (Vadala Homer, 2003: 8). Collage 2. Stylizations of LOVE design. 87 88 Adam Jaworski Figure 7. Marks & Spencer ‘love letters decoration’. 4. Commercial stylizations of Indiana’s LOVE scuplture Valerie Vadala Homer (2003) gives a detailed account of the approved and pirated recontextualizations of the LOVE design. It has given rise to a wide range of unauthorized, commercial recontextualizations — letter decorations, novelty items, greeting cards, logos, and so on, found in many parts of the world. In this way, it has become usable as a resource of aesthetic and afective stancetaking for anyone who may want to project their own ‘love’ onto Self (as purchaser) or Other (the intended recipient of the git), the idea that I return to below. In this section, I only provide a visual description of a few examples of the stylized LOVE designs (see collage on p. 87), and I discuss one such object in a little more detail — the Marks & Spencer (UK department store) ‘love letters decoration’ (as described on the company’s website) sold in 2010 for GBP15.00 (Figure 7). Its intertextual link to pop art, ‘high’ culture, Americanness, and the hippie era when Indiana created the original work (the sign’s presupposition), allow the buyer of this object to identify (self-style) with the ideas of collecting expensive works of art for a fraction of the price, good taste (distinction), romanticism of the ‘lower power’, ‘free love’, the anti-war movement, and the hedonism of the ‘drugs, sex and rock’n’roll’ lifestyle (the sign’s entailment). he object’s design, materiality and in-store placement, or framing, add to its sense of sophistication and luxury. he ‘stacked up’ letter design and letter ‘O’ dynamically canted sideways — clear giveaways of its inspiration by the Indiana piece — vest the object with an unsettled, dramatic appearance. he stylized, slim, elongated, dark-brown typeface gives it the appearance of uniqueness, originality and elegance, while the thin slab serifs bring with them a whif of traditionalism (the hippies have certainly grown up and reached contented middle-age in their middle-class suburbs). Apart from its decorative appeal, or visual aestheticization, the reduction of the object to a Word cities and language objects written word (the stand being the only ‘practical’ element of the design) simply ‘to be looked at’, gives it a sense of luxury through its nonchalant, non-utilitarian stance. Its in-store emplacement among sleek, white, ‘minimalist’ vases with artiicial lowers additionally frames ‘love’ as an object of lavish extravagance, yet by its close proximity to the other objects on the shelf, also a vehicle of poetic lyricism and natural charm. 5. Language objects as shiters In the preceding sections, I have considered some of the meaning potential of the two main examples of ‘love’ language objects discussed above (the Indiana sculpture and the M&S decorative stand). In this section, I turn to the theory of indexicality to suggest why so many people ind it appealing to have a photograph taken underneath the Indiana LOVE sculpture, or why consumers may want to buy the Marks & Spencer ‘love’ letter design (and many similar ones across the world). Both language objects are signs whose value can be derived from a set of associations made meaningful (shared) in the socio-economic system of which they play a part, or to which they can be indexically linked through sets of conventionalized associations (Silverstein, 1976; Ochs, 1992). Linguistic features that evoke and/or construct ‘social meaning’ become enregistered (Agha, 2003) as situationally appropriate ways of speaking and writing, i.e. as ‘registers’. hey become symbolic resources for stancetaking (expressing certainty, authority, etc.) and social identity (class, ethnicity, interactional role, etc.) (Jafe, 2009). Enregistered linguistic features with speciic social values are noticed and become pragmatically usable for recontextualization in acts of performance (stylization, irony, parody, pastiche, imitation, etc.) to index speciic classes of people or localities (Johnstone, 2009). It appears that Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture has been enregistered linking it with the values of a speciic time, place and ideology — the 1960s, the US, antiwar and counter-culture movements. he popularity of the design has spawned the subsequent proliferation of its recontextualizations as materializations and spectacles of the idea of love. he question remains, how to account for the appropriation of these performances by individual passers by, visitors, and consumers? Building on Peirce’s (1932) taxonomy of signs (symbols, indexes and icons), Roman Jakobson (1971 [1957]) and Michael Silverstein (1976) introduce a category of signs that they propose to call ‘shiters’. As Jakobson explains, According to Peirce, a symbol (e.g. the English word red) is associated with the represented object by a conventional rule, while an index (e.g. the act of pointing) is in existential relation with the object it represents. Shiters combine both 89 90 Adam Jaworski functions and belong therefore to the class of INDEXICAL SYMBOLS. As a striking example, Burke cites the personal pronoun. I means the person uttering I. hus on one hand, the sign I cannot represent its object without being associated with the latter ‘by a conventional rule’, and in diferent codes the same meaning is assigned to diferent sequences such as I, ego, ich, ja etc.: consequently I is a symbol. On the other hand, the sign I cannot represent its object without ‘being in existential relation’ with this object: the word I designating the utterer is existentially related to his audience, and hence functions as an index …’. (Jakobson, 1971 [1957]: 131–132) hus, symbols are abstract signs for which the connection between form and meaning, or the propositional value of the sign is conventional, as in the English word red, for example. ‘Pure’ indexes are non-referential signals of contextual variables (e.g. the act of pointing) that remain in existential relation with the objects they represent. Shiters are referential indexes whose meaning depends on ‘rules of indexicality’ and ‘rules of use’ (e.g. irst person personal pronoun I, or past tense marker -ed). According to Silverstein (1976: 29), abstract, propositional values of symbols are implemented in actual referential events. he referential value of a shiter is constituted by the speech event itself. Although both types are analytically separable, they merge in actual utterances. Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture is a useful example of a shiter. Looking back at Figures 4–6, we can see, respectively, a group of friends, a romantic couple, and a man with his bike on his arm posing underneath or in front of the giant word ‘love’, its conventional, symbolic meaning being known to all; its enregisterment as an artistic articulation of the ‘love-and-peace’ ideology known to at least some. Each time a photograph is taken, the ‘rules of use’ and the ‘properties of the speech event’ — the ritual of waiting for one’s turn to have a photo taken, posing in close proximity to the sculpture with no one else in the picture frame, claiming the space in the moment of posing as ‘private’ — turn LOVE into someone else’s ‘love’ — love among a group of friends, love of a romantic couple, and love of a man for his bike. he Marks & Spencer ‘love’ letter design (Figure 7) works in a similar way. While it remains on the department store’s shelf, it acts as a visual-linguistic symbol for ‘love’. he moment it is purchased and taken home, or gited to someone, the symbol enters into an existential relationship with its new environment and indexes ‘love’ in a new location, or among a speciic group of people. It can be compared to the word ‘love’ used in the design of the photo frame in Figure 1, which according to my earlier deinition is not a ‘pure’ language object due to the utilitarian nature of the frame itself. However, it illustrates nicely the fact that each time someone’s wedding photo is inserted into the frame (as suggested by the Word cities and language objects generic photo on display at the department store), the word ‘love’ indexes the love of a diferent couple. A related example is Alexandra Jafe’s account of the ambiguous status of greeting cards with their ‘pre-packaged words’ as ‘git:commodity’. Following Carrier (1990, 1995), Jafe (1999: 138) argues that we interpret the world by constantly deining, manipulating and blurring such values and relationships as ‘the public and the private, the intimate and the impersonal, the git and the commodity’. herefore, greeting cards, and the texts they carry, are ‘both intimate and anonymous, personal and generic, subject to appropriation for an array of social purposes’ (Jafe, 1999: 138). 6. Conclusion: Commodiication of love and thingiication of ‘love’ I hope to have demonstrated that art and consumer culture are two important ields of semiotic production that have contributed in recent decades to the creation of word cities — urban spaces with an ever growing presence of thingiied linguistic items interwoven into the fabric of their built environment, both outdoor and indoor. he paper also demonstrates how diferent modes of signiication may work together to construct language texts as ‘artful’ and ‘valuable’. he (commodity) value of Indiana’s LOVE and Marks & Spencer’s ‘love’ can be derived from a set of associations made meaningful and shared in the socio-economic system of which they play a part, or to which they can be indexically linked through sets of conventionalized associations (Silverstein, 1976; Ochs, 1992). In a broader sense, the commodiication of language and the resulting tension between the use value and exchange value of language objects is closely related to the negotiation of boundaries between public and private spaces, aestheticization of social life, patterns of leisure, and consumption of art. I have used the notion of shiter to account for the semiotic processes of appropriation of the meaning potential of ‘love’ language objects, both artistic and commercial, by individual citizens-consumers. Robert Indiana thought of his initial LOVE design as a one-word poem, a visual interpretation of his 1958 poem Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart that he wrote as a student in Edinburgh (Vadala Homer, 2003). his is a prime example of what Gunther Kress (2010) refers to as ‘transduction’, i.e. ‘moving’ meaning ‘across’ diferent modes. By transducting ‘love’, artists, and even more so, marketers are turning our city spaces into spaces of afect, where love (an afective state) is projected, felt, displayed, touched, embraced, bought and sold as never before. he more love is commodiied, the more thingiication of ‘love’ there is for us to see. 91 92 Adam Jaworski Acknowledgements Many colleagues and friends have helped me over several years to collect data and shape ideas that have found their way into this paper. In particular, I thank Kelvin Au, Fred Blumberg, Nik Coupland, Chris Hutton, Johan Järlehed, Aneta Pavlenko and Crispin hurlow. All errors and inadequacies are mine. References Agha, A. (2003). he social life of cultural value. Language & Communication, 23(3-4), 231–273. DOI: 10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00012-0 Bauman, R. (2001[1975]). Verbal art as performance. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 165–188). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. (1990). 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Author’s address Adam Jaworski School of English he University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong jaworski@hku.hk