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Some Cunts: Graffiti, Globalisation,

Injurious Speech and 'Owning'
Signification
Rob Cover
Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Rob Cover (2002) Some Cunts: Graffiti, Globalisation, Injurious Speech and
'Owning' Signification, Social Semiotics, 12:3, 269-290, DOI: 10.1080/10350330216370

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 Social Semiotics, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2002

Some Cunts: Graffiti, Globalisation,

Injurious Speech and ‘Owning’
Signification
ROB COVER

This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are
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governed by motifs of ownership—who has the ‘right’ to make the ‘right’ kind of
signification, whose significatory powers can be considered to be dominant, and what sorts
of ethical considerations can be applied to the granting of meaning and implication. By
examining contemporary political graffiti, issues of globalisation and debates over the
figurative term ‘cunt’, the article discusses the inefficacy of claims to significatory ‘owner-
ship’ while making a case for contingent practices of ‘fixing’ signification for local political
praxis.

So small and so large! It is here that you are at ease, man finally worthy of
your name, it is here that you are back on the scale of your desires. Don’t
be afraid of moving your face close to this place—and already your tongue,
the chatterer, is restless—this place of delight and darkness, this patio of
ardour, in its early limits, the fine image of pessimism. O cleft, moist and
soft cleft, dear dizzying abyss. (Aragon 1996: 63)

While one word maketh not a woman-centered language, ‘cunt’ is certainly

a mighty potent and versatile contribution. (Muscio 1998: 6)

It is not absurd to suggest that while the academy has, in part, been willing to
embrace a poststructuralist displacement of both the transparency of language and
the scientificity and guarantees of signification, contemporary humanist culture
maintains an oppositional—or sometimes ignorant—notion of the fixity of meaning
and the opaque representability of language, even in the face of an increasing
seepage of poststructuralist thought into its very structurality. However, in light of
the work of marginal artists, increasingly widespread critical readings, varieties in
political protest, and a growing movement against corporate, cultural and environ-
mental domination, there is evidence to suggest that signification is subject to a
series of ‘sieges’ or ‘ownership’ of the rights to signify. This ‘ownership’ of
signification over key terms shaping contemporary identity and meaning can be read
through Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘play of signification’, by which he means
that in the absence of a central presence the signifier has no necessary and
ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/02/030269-22  2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1035033022000082326
 270 R. Cover

guaranteed signified (Derrida 1978: 280). It thereby advocates an affirmation of a

‘play’ which no longer seeks to find an ontological truth in the sign but embraces the
slippage of signification (292–293).
What I want to suggest is that although I do not detect a playful affirmation of
différance in the examples I use below, there can instead be detected an increasingly
frantic attempt to ensure signification in accord with specific cultural terms and
‘contexts’. Chantal Mouffe remarks on the significatory and contextual ‘nodal
points’ which attempt to prevent the flux of the signified under the signifier and
shore up multifarious and proliferate signification (Mouffe 1995: 34). The attempt
to control, ‘own’ or claim rights to make signify can be understood as various cultural
attempts to install nodal points through various and spurious claims to authenticity,
speaking-position, right, and moral and ethical stances. What Mouffe’s point makes
clear is that although the culture of contemporary Western society has been in some
instances willing to embrace the slippage of signification such that no signifier is
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guaranteed to meet a signified unproblematically, there remain discursive and highly

‘political’ structures in place which often serve to prevent slippage or which—more
to the point—attempt to struggle for a certain purity of signification.
Where a collapse of ‘action’ into ‘speech’ is seen to be increasing in contemporary
society (Butler 1997: 1–41) and thus creating the conditions for ‘injurious speech’
as most readily seen in arguments over hate speech, defamation, and minority
vilification, this is, then, an issue that cannot be disconnected from social structures.
Furthermore, where ‘rights’ of signification are implicated in the very terms which
authorise and legitimate distribution of cultural and material wealth, labour prac-
tices, and cultural or ecological degradation, an understanding of what it might
mean to control signification is urgently required.
I take here three examples in which skirmishes figured in a question of the
‘ownership’ or ‘right’ to make signify have taken place. These examples are personal
and related: the ‘context’ of graffiti, the use of the term ‘cunt’ and the contemporary
buzz-word ‘globalisation’. I figure these examples through my interest in the growing
movement against corporate globalisation that proliferated at exponential speed
between the World Trade Organisation protests of 1999 and September 2001, and
which—for me—were experienced in the year 2000 September 11 (S.11) protests
against the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Melbourne, Australia.1 Firstly, I
consider ‘political graffiti’ in its use as a ‘right of reply’ to certain political wrongs or
injustices, such as the use of police violence against peaceful protesters. Graffiti,
here, is figured as a kind of speech or significatory system which more readily lends
itself to notions of significatory flux by virtue of the question of ownership of the
graffiti and the space on which it is written. My second example is the use of the
term ‘cunt’ as it appeared in media-captured graffiti samples following the political
support for police-enacted violence during the protest, from the point of view that
a struggle over ownership of its signification is the very cause of its sometimes-inju-
rious reading, and I follow this with an analysis of the term ‘globalisation’ as it is
battled over between protest culture and corporate or legitimate ‘political’ culture.
Where a radical, post-liberal-humanist and linguistic-aware politics might suggest
the opening of signification to a proliferation of meanings as an instrument of radical
 Some Cunts 271

democracy, the ethical question remains as to whether this is—or should be—the
case in all usages of all signifiers. The terms ‘cunt’ and ‘globalisation’ lend some
meaningful insight into how we might tackle some of the questions opened over the
flux or play of signification, and particularly as it impacts on everyday lives.

Right-of-Reply Responses, Graffiti and Appropriation

Victorian State Premier Steve Bracks was, some said, a ‘cunt’ to suggest that
anti-corporate protesters at the WEF in September 2000 ‘got what they deserved’.
A term of extreme offence seems considerably appropriate when one has witnessed
the horror of police using maximum force against non-violent protesters, or when
one has observed a police vehicle performing a hit-and-run on a protester in breach
of the legal code that forbids any driver to leave the scene of an accident. Where
increased circulation of the knowledge of sweatshop labour, the abuses of corporate
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capital, environmental degradation and Third World poverty motivates thousands of

protesters to focus their disgust at the WEF as an organisation which ignores (apart
from lip-service commentary) the imperatives of a ‘needs-based’ economic politics,
to have police violence justified by the premier warrants a reply. In the aftermath of
the protest, as fellow protesters and I found ourselves in continuing disgust and
disturbance over the baton-wielding police, the injuries of colleagues, and the
Victorian State premier’s affirmation of police tactics, the need to make a significant
right of reply became paramount.
Considerably entrenched media structures are in place throughout Western
democracies to constrain various modes of ‘rights of reply’ in the public sphere. The
Letters to the Editor pages of the newspapers, for example, have often historically
been considered a forum for reply (Habermas 1989: 31–38, 41–43). That particular
forum, however, follows a highly clichéd formula: topical, brief and plain-language
letters are selected, contested by other letter-writers, a temporally-limited debate
might ensue, but only as long as agenda-setting editorial processes permit the issue
to remain current (Turner 1993: 232–233; McCoy 1993: 146; Philo 1995: 176).
Culturally established ‘hierarchies of credibility’ work in media formations to have
particular sets of definitions and replies stated, circulated and given legitimation
while excluding or discrediting alternative positions and views (Manning 2000). As
an example of a forum for argument, such hierarchies of credibility stem the
opportunity for democratic contestation, particularly as we find it in the sense
espoused by both Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau who demonstrate a need to
maintain contingency and contestation in a radical, non-liberal democratic politics
(Butler & Laclau 1997).2 This poststructuralist point is markedly applicable to the
sorts of arguments which surround ‘right of reply’ and ‘right of speaking’ as they are
applied to the debates that occur on the letters page of a newspaper. The structuring
of the page, the formalised style of writing, and the selectivity of letters are
understood as impositions-in-advance in accord with a code. And part of this code
is the fore-knowledge of the eventual ‘shutting down’ of the argument to make space
for new discussions—a breach in the ‘reply’ function in what would ideally be an
endless, shifting contestation avoiding imposition and closure.
 272 R. Cover

Derrida has been particularly critical of the growth of the role of the media form
in defining and explicating meaning and the detrimental political effects that can
result from journalistic simplification (Derrida 1995: 426–427). He refers to the
imbalance that is caused by a party in a dispute having ‘the last word’ (431), a word
I might suggest found not in the language of a newspaper or other public-sphere
contestation, but in the language of that language: the imposition of context and
rules of debate. As he puts it in The Other Heading: ‘when the juridical or technical
difficulties do not discourage one in advance, a response is in general neutralized by
the place, framework, and delays. As long as the right of response does not receive
its full extension and effectiveness (again the infinite task), democracy will be
accordingly limited’ (Derrida 1992: 106–107).
In that sense, any reply to Bracks’ support of police brutality is less applicably
made through that sort of mediated communication, where an allegedly stable
context will de-democratise that response, affirming only the institutional arrange-
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ments that permit the authorisation of police violence in the first instance. Where
such paths of communication fail to provide a radically democratised opportunity
for ‘reply’ it would appear that a movement between (always unstable) contexts
becomes an applicable means of making that reply by a movement away from certain
‘nodal points’ which limit signifieds to signifiers. The issue then becomes not one of
signification, but of the ways in which presumed (but never) stable contexts impose
the nodal points limiting the proliferation of meanings of a signifier. If three days of
protest were available to make not only statements about the enviro-degradation and
poverty connected with corporate globalisation but also claims of grievance against
the daily brutality and violence of attending police, then it is the attempt to impose
‘context’ on the signifiers which limits the significations as much as the potential of
the significations to bring about needs-based changes.3 Derrida notes that context as
it is understood today is theoretically inadequate and in turn serves a reduction of
the concept ‘communication’ (Derrida 1988: 2–3).
Where legitimate formations and structures such as the letters page apply context
and containment to reply-functions in communication, graffiti can be considered a
less-stable, less-contextualised and more proliferate format of speech, reply and
signification. For me (with other protesters) the appropriate method of response to
Premier Bracks’ comments was through graffiti. On 16 September I spray-painted
the words ‘Bracks ⫽ Kennett: Fascist Cunt’ on a wall in Collingwood (inner-city
Melbourne), in order to link the Labour Right politician with his conservative and
overbearing predecessor (see Figure 1). Where graffiti operates to break significatory
restraint, it is performed through the shift in ‘context’ and authorship that the trace
of utterance that writing (on a wall) leaves behind without the clear identifiable
depiction of ‘author’.4 The ‘owner’—as it were—of the utterance is less identifiable
(if imaginable). If we take into account Foucault’s articulation of the role of the
author as one which establishes particular intertextual links and ways of reading
(Foucault 1977), the terms here are thus more open to multiple significations, the
illegality and offensiveness at the same time fix the reading position for many as
‘shock’—hence the appearance of the same graffiti on the front cover of Metro News
(see Figure 2).
 Some Cunts 273
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Figure 1. Post-S.11 protest graffiti, Collingwood, Melbourne. Photograph: Nicholas Verso.

This was, of course, misbehaviour: graffiti is generally considered a crime. The

necessity for democratisation in making a ‘reply’ to a political situation has often
historically warranted a transgression of laws, even for those for whom it might seem
an improbable or unnecessary activity: a person who labours in the academy, while
accorded certain social privileges and status, is not necessarily accorded the oppor-
tunity of ‘primary definition’ in, or even access to, the public sphere where that
contemporary sphere exists now only in a media-agenda economy (Manning 2000).
In the bodily pleasure of adrenalin-rushed spraypainting, in an activity at odds from
standard academic engagement, a reply was being made in a ‘political’ way different
from the usual ‘politics’ of academic writing: the audience of that reply may not have
been Premier Bracks himself, nor might it have been any of the perpetrators of the
violence, but it will be an audience of some difference from those in other (poten-
tially accessible) forums or spheres.
One way of understanding the general ban on graffiti in liberal societies is through
a notion of contestatory ‘ownership’. Walls, light-poles, shop-fronts, railway stations
and alleyways are in some sense always considered ‘owned’, whether it be privately
through a land-title or lease-holding arrangement, or as ‘publicly owned’. This is the
majority argument against graffiti, both by many ‘liberal’ or ‘reformist’ protesters,
and by ‘authorities’. But this ‘ownership’ point signals two other forms of ownership,
(1) the ‘right’ to speak (or reply) and (2) the ownership of fixed signification. In the
case of the first, there is an argument that the disapproval of graffiti is class based.
As Jeff Ferrell put it, graffiti is generally characterised as ‘deviant/criminal’ work by
a subculture organised by a ‘marginalized population possessing few traditional
economic and political resources’ (Ferrell 1999: 232). While I would suggest that
those graffitying after the S.11 protests are not necessarily among the economically
or politically non-privileged, we were in a sense among those who are not given
 274 R. Cover
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Figure 2.

access to a democratised (institutional) speaking position. Without the possibility for

contestation and reply, the actions stemming from recent protest culture attempt to
change the liberal protectorate of ‘owned’ space and make the reply where and when
possible, with whatever resources are available. The double-agenda, then, is that the
graffiti is deployed to problematise the liberal or conservative notions of space
ownership at the same time.
Although much recent academic focus on graffiti has discussed it in terms of
artwork and youth cultures (examples include Hager 1984; Ferrell 1999; Rahn
2002), graffiti has a considerable history as subcultural political propaganda. It has
been particularly deployed by groups with political/cultural stances that are usually
denied voice in legitimate media formations. For example, Queer Nation in North
America used graffiti to spread political messages on behalf of lesbian/gay issues
(Berlant & Freeman 1993: 211). But what is most striking about graffiti is the way
it often makes use of existing signs and appropriates them for the purpose of
resignification. Figures 3–5 are samples of graffiti photographed for the Melbourne-
based internet site www.cleansurface.org, which hosts a collection of several hun-
dred graffiti images from various international cities. In the case of Figure 3, set
 Some Cunts 275
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Figure 3. From www.cleansurface.org

clearly at the site of a workplace dispute, the efficiency with which the message is
communicated is through the replacement of ‘boom gates’ with ‘scabs’, converting
two sentences to one, and—with economy—appropriating the management’s sign-
phrase for the purposes of oppositional propaganda. Similarly, Figure 4 appropriates
the ‘no parking’ (or, perhaps, just ‘parking’ with an added ‘no’) to communicate a
message about masculine violence, and possibly to link it with the masculinity of car
usage (Bayley 1986). Most interestingly, Figure 5 depicts a statement critiquing the
sex-shop chain Club-X, resignifying the ‘x’ of x-rated as the ‘x’ which marks a
resignified categorisation of the shop. In a similar vein, the graffiti of Figure 1 stating
‘Bracks ⫽ Kennett: Fascist Cunt’ was added to by later graffiti artists who claim that
the use of the term ‘cunt’ was inappropriate. Figure 6 states next to the original
graffiti that ‘Cunt is a beautiful word, don’t use it on Bracks’, evidencing a process
of contestation, reply and struggle over the signification of the term. These are
points to which I return when I examine the injurious signification of ‘cunt’ below.
The claim I am making here is that as a ‘genre’ or a ‘context’, graffiti is one site
which most readily lends itself to the appropriation of previous significations and an
ongoing process of resignification as the site is added to, amended, erased or
otherwise reused; the ‘nodal points’ that attempt to secure the signification are less
secure. What is at stake in the various significations made through graffiti is that a
contestation of ownership occurs least readily: the ‘authenticity’ provided by a
named author—writing with the signifier-signature or speaking with the bodily-sig-
nature or otherwise communicating—is not present. The site is generally not
legitimated as a space for speech, which effectively implicates that speech as
 276 R. Cover
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Figure 4. From www.cleansurface.org

forbidden utterance, and thereby unstable by the very ‘temporary’ nature with which
one might expect that trace of utterance to remain. And finally, as a space in which
multiple graffiti items may appear, the graffiti itself remains without a stable
‘context’ or ‘frame’, thereby open to the resignificatory effects of other graffiti. This
can be seen to be particularly the case if one takes into account the ways in which
the ‘meaning’ of graffiti in a text is governed by, in Tony Bennett’s terms, a ‘reading
formation’. In Bennett’s poststructuralist stance, meaning is not an attribute which
a text will ‘have’, but is productively activated in the reading of the text in terms of
the discursive reading position of the reader (Bennett 1983: 218). While the general

Figure 5. From www.cleansurface.org

 Some Cunts 277
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Figure 6. Additions to post-S.11 graffiti, Collingwood, Melbourne. It reads: ‘Cunt is a beautiful

word. Don’t use it on Bracks.’ Photograph: Nicholas Verso.

de-legitimation of graffiti in contemporary Western society prevails and no doubt

operates as a specific reading formation, the complexity with which graffiti adds to
itself and to existing sign-systems can operate to disrupt that reading formation and
thereby invoke non-specificities in the production of meaning. Thus, further, the
‘ownership’ of signification becomes a less stable site, for the ‘space’ in which graffiti
makes its appearance can then be seen as a complexity of struggles for certain
significations over pre-existing ones.

Cunt, Abjection, Intentionality and Ownership of Signification

What of the term ‘cunt’ as it appears in my graffiti sample? The use of the term cunt
in the context of graffiti has a historical basis, including a personal history in which
I believe I first saw the unknown and non-understood word on a toilet wall as a child
at school. One might hazard a guess that the term then was intended to signify a
rebellion against a harsh and hierarchical institution, a mark of injury against injury.
This can be, of course, only ever a guess; after Barthes’ (1977) death of the author,
intention is no longer our field of inquiry, but a fairly secure guess. Growing up as
white, catholic and middle class in the 1970s and 1980s, the word ‘cunt’ was the
absolute forbidden utterance. Later, as an undergraduate when the word ‘fuck’
would more readily roll off tongues, ‘cunt’ was seemingly still reserved for the
worst-of-the-worst, almost a ‘protected’ term of offence for those extremes in which
one had been wronged so badly that no other insult or retribution was strong
enough. It is a word of interest for us here, partly because it is a term of injury, but
 278 R. Cover

partly because the term has retrospectively been injurious to those not ‘intended’ in
its original use.
Despite its use as a slang term for vagina, ‘cunt’ is a word which has a 500-year-
long cultural history of resignification (Hunt 2000). Despite variances, reclaimings
of the term as celebrated body-part, and a general relaxation in censorship laws
forbidding certain ‘vulgar’ utterances, cunt’s ‘offensiveness’ and ‘taboo’ status has
continued in contemporary Western culture. Where, for example, ‘fuck’ might be
commonplace in much mass-circulation film of the 1990s, it remains rare to hear the
term ‘cunt’ used in film or stage representations. Although he suggests that ‘cunt’
will very soon be as commonplace as other expletives, Matthew Hunt identifies its
taboo status as blasphemous through its linkage with sexual practice. In a cultural-
feminist pro-active account, Inga Muscio suggests that the term’s historical linkage
with femininity and womanhood has provided it with negative connotations, the
scope for injurious use, and an opportunity to reclaim and celebrate the term
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(Muscio 1998: 18 passim). ‘Cunt’ can be understood as a protected term: protected

from usage such that it be most offensive in its deployment—a term of injury which
cannot be pinned down to a group identity (such as racial and homophobic terms)
but is widely available—if rarely used—as a term of intense injury. The term in its
use today can probably be said to offend at least two identifiable groups. Firstly,
those opposed to the use of ‘foul’ or ‘vulgar’ language who view the term as fixed in
signifying offence always and are possibly—if unconsciously—reinforcing a taste-
based demarcation of class. The second and more significant group here are women
following a feminist reclamation of the term in order rightly to further a cultural
project of divorcing womanhood from terms of abjection.
In the case of that specific graffiti usage, I ‘intended’ the term to be injurious—in-
jurious to the premier who authorised police violence against peaceful protesters.
Not injurious to women. Of course, and as Judith Butler puts it, ‘the terms that one
set into the world, whether in bold citation marks or italicized and footnoted, are
subject to uses that the author cannot control’ (Butler 1993: 9). In other words, no
term commits its user to an ontological given, no term has a secure signifying future,
regardless of any notion of the author’s intention. This is perhaps most of all the case
with the use of the term ‘cunt’. The quandary, then—a personal one—is how to
understand the ways in which a signifier signifies injury to some readers and not
others, how to make the term less injurious to those not intended in the address, and
to do this despite (or in spite of, in suspension of) the irrelevance of authorial
intention.
Judging from the Metro News cover’s photograph of the graffiti and the headline
‘Harsh Words Prompt Wall of Anger’, we can presume that the cover belongs to the
first group, in which cunt is seen to be a ‘harsh word’. In this sort of usage
(intentionality) and response (reading formation), the term is disconnected from its
reference to a feminine body-part in all except its etymology. The intention in the
reply to Bracks is to be ‘harsh’ and ‘offensive’, and its reading is ‘harsh’ and
‘offensive’. The use of the headline to ground the significations of the graffiti here
would seem to understand this point: the ‘harsh words’ originate with the premier,
the wall graffitied is a ‘wall of anger’, in which the offensive terms are understood to
 Some Cunts 279

deliberately connote a provoked rage or outrage. What is perhaps unfortunate in the

graffiti is the way in which the term ‘cunt’ obscures the term ‘fascist’—a term of
response to the authorisation of police violence. This is made clear in Metro’s
deployment of the graffiti: by attempting to cover up the central two letters of the
word, the photograph draws deliberate attention to the term and makes invisible the
use of ‘fascist’ which, for the more actively ‘politicised’, is perhaps a term of greater
offence and rage. The use of a woman’s image to cover the term is notable—it draws
us back to the second group of offence.
The second group who find the term offensive are those who have reclaimed the
term in an attempt to nullify its abjection. The term’s use as a ‘reclaimed’ word is
intended to signify a specific feminine self-reference to genitalia and to displace the
derogatory connotations that occur with its injurious use. Kathleen Mary Fallon’s
Working Hot (2000), for example, uses the term as reference to female genitalia in
passages dealing with woman–woman loving relationships. A later addition to the
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graffiti (Figure 6), making the statement that ‘cunt is a beautiful word, don’t use it
on Bracks’, berates the user—me, in this case—from deploying it as an injurious
term. This would be in line with a common argument that the ‘wrongful’ use of the
term—its use to cause injury—is offensive to women.
What occurs in both Fallon’s reclaiming and in the additional graffiti is a rejection
of cunt’s abject usage to a usage which relegates the abject to an unknowability, a
re-claim that is a claim of ownership, as it were, of the terminology. Abjection, for
Julia Kristeva, occurs through rites of defilement and pollution, taking on the form
of an excluded substance (Kristeva 1982: 17). The abject operates as taboo (sexual
taboo), and can be deployed as a shaming taboo, an act which, over time, comes to
maintain social orders of exclusion (Butler 1993: 226). It is never dis-connected
from the improper, the unclean, vomit or excrement (Kristeva 1982: 2–3), the
extrusions of the orifice that upsets the cultural or psychological myth of a body
divided into the inner and the outer. It comes, then, as no surprise that the abuse
‘you cunt!’ as a term of injury is set alongside the (lesser) expletive abuses of ‘you
little shit!’ and ‘you arsehole!’—where the abuse operates as a performative: ‘I abject
you!’ (I object to you). Where ‘cunt’ operates as a defilement of the name ‘woman’,
it does so not by operating as a signifier for a body-part—an unfortunate return of
the referent—by the reduction of womanhood to prescribed genitalia, and relies on
a temporally maintained history of signification.
Butler has shed light on the various political complexities of reclaiming signifiers
in her Bodies That Matter (1993). She suggests that it

remains politically necessary to lay claim to ‘women,’ ‘queer’ ‘gay,’ and

‘lesbian,’ precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their
claim on us prior to our full knowing. (229)

Although Butler is interested here in labels signifying categories of identity and their
interpellative effect on the performativity of subjects, her point is not unassimilable
to descriptive or constative terms such as ‘cunt’—noting Derrida’s point that no
connotative term can ever be fully divorced via ‘context’ from a performative effect
 280 R. Cover

(Derrida 1988). The attempt to reclaim a word or sign is a political attempt to

embrace its abject or taboo status and make it thus non-abject.
Where the reclaiming of the term ‘cunt’ has been part of a wider feminist political
project I support, a problematic aspect of that project is the setting out of rules on
how that term is to be used, both as if intentionality determined offence and, more
productively, in embracing the point that it is in the reading that offence might
occur. I want to get away from the issue of intentionality here, but somehow it
continues to creep back in. The intention was to offend the premier, not women.
This, now, is not an attempt to justify (intentionally) the use of an offensive signifier,
but of course this essay is open to such a reading—that would be the nature of
reading in a poststructuralist world, whether we say so or not. But if we wish to
speak of intention to offend, then that offence is, regardless of intention, rooted in
the abjection the term conveys. Even if we understand that there is little possibility
in guaranteeing the signification, or even the target, we intend, we still need to ask
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how we can make use of a term that might offend a non-targeted. Where it was
necessary to use a term of sheer offence—the worst, as it were, of available terms—to
berate the premier’s advocation of violence, it would seem that the claim that ‘cunt’
should not be deployed offensively is an attempt to ‘shore up’ its signification by
showing the ‘right way’ and ‘wrong way’ it is to be used. What occurs, then, is a
contestation over signification. The second set of graffiti berating the abject use of
the term in the first set can be understood as less about the offensiveness of the term
and far more a struggle to gain or maintain ownership of a seemingly fixed
signification. That is, to install or maintain a certain set of ‘nodal points’ which make
the signifier signify in specific and exclusive ways.
A suggestion might be made that the overriding ‘ownership’ of the term ‘cunt’
belongs to women for the simple reason that it has throughout much of its history
been a slang signifier for vagina, and that as a feminine body-part it is a term directly
linked with women. Such an argument when put forward becomes less feasible after
15 years of poststructuralist feminism and queer theory have attempted to shift the
very important arguments over gender, equality and access away from a founda-
tionalist grounding in a sex/gender system with a sexed body at its core. This also
ignores how those who might identify as women—frequently transgendered
women—might likewise be offended although they have never possessed a vagina.
The argument here is to find ways in which the term might be deployed multiply
without injury to the unintended target, even after intentionality is put into question.
Censorship is, of course, one way in which a signification can be governed or
‘owned’. A particular strand of feminist theorisation would argue for a wholesale
censorship on particular uses of the term—the strand most frequently identified with
the work of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Judith Butler, who has
made significant use of various formations of speech act theory in discussions of
gendered subjectivity and hate speech, would take an oppositional stance to such
institutional censorship. She suggests that hate speech or injurious speech is always
open to recontextualisation and resignification:

To read such texts against themselves is to concede that the performativity

 Some Cunts 281

of the text is not under sovereign control. On the contrary, if the text acts
once, it can act again, and possibly against its prior act. This raises the
possibility of resignification as an alternative reading of performativity and
politics. (Butler 1997: 69)

It is in the sense of the openness of ‘cunt’ to resignification that I want to suggest

not that signifiers are always already open to signification but that there is evidence
of a contemporary struggle between significations—as if one is somehow compelled
to get-the-signification-right—and that this is a struggle intensified in the very
contemporary postmodern sensibility that signification is by no means guaranteed.
Both censorship and the imperatives of a particular signification implied in owner-
ship of the term would be antithetical to a project of democratisation of
signification—a vital task given that so many ‘political’ decisions are made on the
basis of a sense of fixed or tailored signifieds or ends.5 Maintaining a multiplicity of
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signification is necessary for such projects of democratisation,6 and the question that
this leaves is how to make it possible to speak without offending an inappropriate
target.
Indeed, such a multiplicity has been the very project of certain strands of
continental feminism, and is particularly noted in the work of Luce Irigaray. Luce
Irigaray has deployed the notion of a vagina as a two-lipped symbol to suggest that
women are, in a sense, always in contact with themselves, always speaking to
themselves, and in ways which defy phallogocentrism (the masculinist-humanist
metaphysical underpinnings of contemporary culture). Ultimately, for Irigaray,
women have a language of their own in opposition to the language of the public
domain which is underwritten by a dominant phallic economy (Irigaray 1985: 24).
While, like Butler, I would suggest that this is entirely cultural and contingent, open
to the questions of which women and what is woman, it does signal a certain point
about the ownership of signification across untranslatable lines. One might suggest
that what is spoken and meant in women’s discourse (and, in turn, how signifiers
signify) is beyond the thinkability of a patriarchal masculinist discourse which
conditions all public and contemporary speech. Taking Butler’s radical stance on
injurious speech would suggest that a term seen as injurious to women—whether by
cultural offensiveness or appropriation—is not guaranteed to be injurious. Instead,
what occurs is an injury through its signification otherwise: its use in the graffiti to
attempt a signification of negativity is seen to be in contest with its signification by a
specific, perhaps Irigarayan language. There is a breach in significations, a differing,
that is the result of an untranslatability between two languages (codes of
signification). Translation is both a linguistic practice and, for Derrida, the imposs-
ible. He claims that translation would only be possible if

a permanent code allows a substitution or transformation of signifiers while

retaining the same signified, always present, despite the absence of any
specific signifier. This fundamental possibility of substitution would thus
be implied by the coupled concepts signified/signifier, and would conse-
quently be implied by the concept of the sign itself. (Derrida 1978: 210)
 282 R. Cover

In the absence of a code permitting such fixed significations, the (cultural) language
of women and the language of (hu)manity inaugurate a situation in which ‘cunt’ can
be understood as offensive to (some) women, but may be deployed non-offensively
in other circumstances or contexts.
The ‘Political Correctness’ (PC) debates of the 1990s were one way in which
attempts were made to halt an offensive use of a term by prescribing ‘correct’ means
of usage. Although the PC debates resulted (in Australia, at least) in various
reductions to conservative counter-claims of non-privileged groups’ attempts to
control language, to arguments about free speech versus censorship and to right-ver-
sus-left dialogue, the intentions were, I suggest, contrary to a democratisation of
signification. Another, and better, alternative can be put forward. Should the
struggle for ownership rights of a signification be abandoned, and a radical
democratisation of utterances become a cultural means by which such contestation
remains playful and friendly, then the offensiveness of the remark is viewed in terms
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of a Derridean play, the playfulness of the slippage of signification (Derrida 1978:

280). In a communications-mode in which all signifiers are seen to be contested and
contestatory, and in which a proliferation of significations becomes possible, the
term can carry no offence if one remains aware of the instability of the contexts in
which it is deployed. What is required politically, then, is that in everyday speech
articulating-people are made aware of the nature of différance and embrace the
unsignifiability of the signifier such that the competitiveness to install those ‘nodal
points’—preventing multifarious signification and prompting an impossible pure
signification—is dislodged in favour of the democratic free-play of speech. In other
words, if the injurious offence itself is caused by the struggle over ownership of the
signification of the term, then undoing that claim is the remedy such that the
signifier should not signify offensively. As Butler has said of the term ‘queer’, its
political deconstruction
ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its
range, to make us consider at what expense and for what purposes the
terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have
been wrought. (Butler 1993: 229)
Although at first glance such an argument for the freedom of the signifier seems
utopian, it need not be. None of this is to suggest that various codes of signification
can ever be free of their history, but that a political mode of readership should
remain consistently aware that no term need be fixed in its significations. If a term is
deemed injurious, then an examination of how that term is deployed otherwise is the
appropriate means by which to read—and combat—that injury. As Butler has
suggested, the re-clamation of injurious language resists the older solution of
‘state-sponsored censorship’ (Butler 1997: 41). Likewise, it resists the cultural
imperatives of a ‘political correctness’ debate that, surely, presumes the sovereignty
of the individual to injure and to be injured in prescribed ways as if the terms of
injury are forever fixed. It would seem that the answer to the problem of the need
to use particular terms multiply will not be found in any return to questions of
intention, nor in any claims of ‘ownership’ of the significatory properties, contexts
 Some Cunts 283

or constraints over a term. Instead, the means by which the field of play of
signification can be opened is through a broad cultural training of readership. A key
motif that might be useful in theorising through this vast area—one which requires
far more thought than can be given here—is that recognition can always be seen as
a re-cognition, or rethinking of the signification. If the term ‘cunt’ is to be recognised
as offensive, recognised as celebrated, or if the context is what makes it recognisably
mis-used, poorly used, or used without rights of ownership, as are found in many of
the above stances I find problematic, then it should be possible for readers to remain
always aware that such recognition is bound to a re-cognition or rethinking. In other
words, all the possibilities for signification that différance makes possible in showing
that any signification is governed by the always deferred alternatives. Permitting the
term to be understood as part of a chain of significations and resignifications resists,
finally, the humanist ideal of intention while, simultaneously, dislodging the signifier
from a prescribed injury. As far as reclaiming, censorship, political correctness,
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claims to injury, and intentionality operate as attempts to ‘own’ the signification of

the term, the ownership forecloses on différance and thereby prescribes specificities
of usage—something, then, to be avoided in any politics of linguistic democratisa-
tion. Not only dis-owned, but un-owned, unknown, unknowable—there can and
should be cunts we know (but never fully) and cunts yet to come; cunts we do not
know.

Globalisation and the Right to Discuss it, Signify it, Protest it

Can—or should—a democratic process of play and continuous resignification be
deployed in all cases? I want to turn away now from my ‘response-word’ of ‘cunt’
to a second ‘test case’, as it were: the very term and issue which sparked its usage:
globalisation. What is it? How has this term been signified and can this term be
included under the rubric of an ideal politics of radical insignifiability? ‘Globalisa-
tion’ is perhaps one of the most significant keywords in recent contemporary
political and social speech: deployed frequently in media texts as a cry against
changing social conditions, or to signify corporate domination of consumer and
labour markets, or to note the inequitabilities between the West and the Third
World, or to speak of progress and technological advance, or to indicate the speed
today by which information flows. It is also, perhaps, a keyword of contemporary
social semiosis, subject to an array of significations and ones which cannot be
disconnected from social conditions in contemporary culture.
And it is a keyword that has significations which are hotly, powerfully contested,
enough to invoke mass protest, seemingly enough to warrant the violent suppression
of protesters with governmental authorisation of excessive force. The question, then,
is whether my above treatment of the term ‘cunt’ should be applied across all
signifiers. Is a freeing up, as it were, of signification a true democratisation of
signification across the board or are there cases in which it remains necessary to
continue to attempt various, albeit temporary, ‘ownerships’ of the significatory
process? Does it remain a vital democratising activity to continue to install the nodal
points that prevent the slippage of the signified under the signifier? As a keyword,
 284 R. Cover

globalisation provides an important example that suggests such ‘owned

significations’ do, in certain strategic cases, need to be contested and maintained.
One of the most important issues surrounding the S.11 anti-WEF protests in
Melbourne was the question as to whether or not corporate-sponsored organisations
such as the WEF had the ‘right’ to make decisions which not only affect Third
World poverty and ecological safety, but which have for many years been detrimen-
tal to the Third World and global ecologies. The WEF presumption of its corporate
and liberal-democratic government sponsored ‘right’ to dialogue and ‘decide’, as it
were, on these issues and the S.11 (and other) opposition to that wholesale ‘right’
congeal over the significational ownership of the concept ‘globalisation’. But the
term has been variously signified in accord with a variety of political stances, most
of which involve either a speaking-about or a disavowal of the economic and
environmental devastation wreaked by corporate expansion into Third World labour
and resource markets. To give some examples: an uncredited opinion writer for the
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People’s Daily sees globalisation as a productive ethical good on the basis that
if the countries can firmly grasp the opportunity for the revolution of
information technology, it would be possible for them to combine industri-
alization and informationization and bring about an historic leap in social
productive forces and social progress. (People’s Daily 2000)
In very simple ‘sound-byte’ terms, Premier Steve Bracks suggests that ‘globalisation
can be a force for good’ (Dodson 2000: 9). In opposition, the protest injunction
communicated by the S.11 Alliance is as follows:
Using groups such as the World Bank, the WTO and the WEF, corpora-
tions have become the default world leaders. While they profiteer from the
earth’s environmental decline and cruel labor practices, governments be-
come paid-off protagonists, lowering standards to attract investment dol-
lars in a global race to the bottom that affects us all. There are real
alternatives! Almost everyone is concerned with the state of the planet, yet
isolation keeps us feeling helpless. (S11.org.au)
Importantly, the S.11 Alliance discussion of globalisation as represented here is the
only one to suggest that there is a certain ‘ownership’ of the forces of globalisation
that must be contested: the contesting itself is the political injunction that underlies
the protests.
Yet what is flawed in all these analyses is the heaping together of several different
aspects of globalisation under the one signifier, leaving a confusion that may not be
altogether so productive as to what is signified by both the stances of WEF, WTO
and IMF forces and the S.11 protests. Media commentators discussing the S.11
stance complained that while S.11 protesters were opposed to globalisation much of
the protest had been organised via internet technologies and therefore by the very
technology which was being opposed. Such reductionist and naı̈ve statements are
clearly the result of a signifier in flux as disparate issues become de-politicised under
the one signifier of ‘globalisation’.
In his study of corporate and cultural expansion, Tony Spybey suggests that
 Some Cunts 285

‘globalisation’ can be understood to mean the growth of a European world view

‘effective enough to lead to the cultural, political and economic domination of the
globe’ (Spybey 1996: ix). He goes on to identify four elements in the trends of
twentieth-century globalisation: ‘the influences of the nation-state system, the global
economy, the global communication system and the world military order’ (1). From
the stance, then, of an anti-globalisation movement, the first, second and forth are
rightly toned negative and potentially detrimental elements, the third is double-
edged in informational and educational beneficence, and culture-eradicating detri-
ment. Spybey suggests that the nation-state governments are mutually supportive of
transnational corporations which cannot necessarily be separated from the military
order nor the communication technology as it has manifested in the ‘internet’
(64–65). In that sense, the problem of globalisation becomes the ‘leader’ role that
has been taken on by transnational corporations, and one which is evidenced in the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the new agenda for the General
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Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the use of sweatshop labour in the Third
World (while espousing the benefits of mass production to the West), and the
opposition to environmental and ecological protections such as the Kyoto Protocol.
Rather than viewing globalisation as a signifier that can or should be pinned down
to a fixed signification or dissected into corporate globalisation, economic globalisa-
tion or cultural globalisation (Euro-Americanisation), or equally into the different
‘globalisation discourses’ of business, political, cultural and academic studies, the
signifier is better viewed as a process—a process which encompasses multiple
significations, multiple benefits and detriments, and has a much longer history than
is generally understood. This process can be understood as having taken various
forms through various means, from military colonisation—as epitomised by the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial rule of Europe over Africa, South
America, Asia and Australia—through the development of machine transport, the
telegraph, television and radio, the nation, the contestation of national boundaries,
the development of the ‘speed’ and ‘flow’ metaphors of electronic communication
and electronic monetary transactions, the rhetoric of de-territorialisation, the inter-
net, the emergence of the OPEC nations in the mid-1970s, and the labour-valuation
exchange globalisation sparked by corporate use of Third World labour in order to
increase surplus value of commodity goods while promoting a commodity fetishism
in the West. Such a process, then, suggests that globalisation is the result of the
continuation of a European humanist cultural system which has attempted ‘owner-
ship’ of the signification of globalisation (or its various synonyms) by consistently
espousing it as the expansion of European ‘good’ to the regions which are ‘develop-
ing’ towards European enlightenment (which is not to suggest that it has not
historically had its ruptures and discontinuities). The internet, then, is held up as a
global educational tool, bringing about the ‘global village’ (a term not so often heard
now), without the class analysis forbidden by European liberal-humanism, especially
since it might suggest instead that globalising communication technology draws
together urban elites more effectively against a Third World under-class. What
occurs, then, with the congealment of various Euro-American exportations and
abuses under the term ‘globalisation’ is what Gayatri Spivak points out is the
 286 R. Cover

universalisation of cultural logic which suggests that micro-electronic capitalism is

universal (Spivak 1999: 334). Given the multiple signification and the instability of
the politicisation of the term, I would suggest that the signifier ‘globalisation’ is in
a certain flux, but a flux which is politically driven by the process of multifarious
Euro-American expansionisms and late-capitalist dominations where ‘globalisation’
can be understood as a process which underpins Euro-American (Western) culture
in general.
This leads me to suggest that in a certain way the S.11 anti-globalisation
protest—and its wider movement across other cities—is part of the globalisation
process (in reply) and can be understood as evidence of a struggle over ‘ownership’
of the signification, the ‘right to discuss’ and the ‘right to reply’ to corporate
globalisation and its effects. In a fortress-like tower that is Melbourne’s Crown
Casino, WEF delegates, corporate leaders and politicians discussed globalisation
and other issues, while protesters outside were permitted a statement in the form of
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peaceful protest. Civil disobedience, blockading and disruption were condemned by

politicians as unproductive, un-Australian and combated with police violence. What
is not permitted to occur is a forum for contestation between protesters and
delegates—the fences and the police lines are clearly symbolic of the attempt to
create two separate contexts: the civilised debate and the rabble of malcontents. As
corollary, then, where the protesting group included people of vastly different
backgrounds—from academics, lawyers and students to artists, grandmothers and
school-children—the contestation over globalisation, corporate domination and its
effects whether in the public sphere, through protest, graffiti or dialogued privately
is ineffective as a result of the inequitable distribution of economic and political
clout and the ways in which both remain tied with ‘appropriate’ and institutionalised
speaking positions in a hierarchicalised public sphere. Disruption, violence and
graffiti can then be understood as the necessary weapons in the face of the
inaccessibility of economic and ‘political’ arsenals—a necessary weapon in order to
draw attention to the non-democratised nature of the discussion of globalisation and
its significations.
Where the signifier ‘globalisation’ is strategically absent, however, is in what has
fast become a globalised protest movement, one indicated by a date-system based on
the reduction of the month to a letter: S11, M1, J18, N30, S26 and so on.7
However, the very idea that there is a global movement against the specific detri-
ments of corporate globalisation is not adequately acknowledged. Alan Oxley, a
former chief of staff to a Labour premier, suggests that anti-WEF protesters do not
form a true ‘movement’ but a ‘concordance of fringe opinion and a collaboration of
street politics’ (cited in Holding 2000). What Oxley ignores, of course, is that the
very concept movement is open to resignifications. Even a glance at the array of
protesters outside the Crown Casino in September shows clearly that the movement
against corporate globalisation is not merely global in terms of geography or the
concern for non-Western regions of the globe, but global in the sense of protest
style, technique and ‘identity’. Globalisation of protest is then not so much a
universalisation of protest style, but a democratisation or diversification of the means
of protest—a movement congeals here around the struggle over the signifier
 Some Cunts 287

globalisation where it tends to signify corporate domination, ‘categorised’ identity-

based marketing and profiteering at the cost of labour and environmental security.
An example of the alliance-building is the development of a group called Queers
United to Eradicate Economic Rationalism (Q.U.E.E.R.), bringing a specifically
anti-heterosexist stance into accord with an anti-corporate one.
For Oxley, a protest movement is signified only by what he sees as culturally
intelligible, recognisable and perhaps even stereotypical forms of protest, no doubt
with specific and dress-based identifiable protester’s bodies. This, once again, is an
attempt to own and fix the signification of ‘movement’, and the intelligibility of the
protester—the fact that the protester must be protester in accord with a particular
and traditional and recognisable discourse. The injunction to be (a protester)
involves, as Judith Butler has put it, ‘a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a
variety of different demands all at once’ (1990: 145). Such a demand is to be a
‘recognisable’ protester; to adopt the culturally intelligible categorical performative
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of ‘the protester’ one must continue such guarantees. What Oxley fails to note,
however, is that protest style is multiply recognisable in resignifiable ways, and that
this occurs on various levels: through bodily disruption, symbolic presence, graffiti,
lobbying, obstruction and other variations not yet known. A global protest move-
ment as an anti-corporate globalisation movement is manifesting itself as a protest
movement based on contestatory significations and a notion of difference. The very
amorphousness of dress-codes, behaviours, plays, performances, theatricality, music
and so on at S.11 suggests that the protester-subject is performed differently at
different times, yet manages to congeal the variety of performances around an
opposition to a corporate globalisation. Rather than seeing a protest of tens of
thousands in which a handful of attendees were ‘violent’ (which is not an accurate
reportage of the events at all), the difference between violent and non-violent,
between lobbyers and chanters and dancers and graffiti-artists is about a democrati-
sation of the means of protest, an opening of the signification of protest yet the
maintenance of Mouffe’s nodal point which prevents among protesters the slippage
of corporate globalisation from being signified as a negative to a positive. What
remains in question, of course, is whether or not such protests will manage effective
redress of the detriments of global corporatism. Nevertheless, the example that is set
by the protest movement as it has been operating is the very postmodern and
poststructuralist exemplification that signification is not guaranteed, that contesta-
tion over meaning occurs readily, and that a democratisation via contestation is not
only a possibility but a desirable means by which to make a start in addressing some
of the horrors that occur on the globe. The field of play on which the signifier is
fought over for ownership becomes the very terrain on which a supposedly ‘needs-
based’ political alliance emerges as an aspect of the process of globalisation.
Where advocating a radical loosening of the claims to fixed signification on the
term ‘cunt’ renders the term non-injurious, and where graffiti as a linguistic practice
enables an unstable context for speech, in the case of the signifier ‘globalisation’ a
very specific politics of continued contestation over its significations and the ensuing
chain of myth and meaning is necessary, if contingently so. This is not to suggest
that ‘globalisation’ is somehow more important a term than ‘cunt’, nor to suggest
 288 R. Cover

that a politics of anti-capitalism spoken as anti-globalisation is more important than

a feminist politics of reclaiming significations. The concern instead is partly moti-
vated by the fact that the struggle over globalisation is a struggle over the very
institutions, cultural practices and resources to make signification. While govern-
ments and corporations will defend globalisation by having it signify progress and
beneficence, it remains the task of the anti-corporation movement to continue to
show how the signifier can be—and is—linked with labour and ecological abuse. A
materialist motivation, perhaps, but one which cannot be disconnected from the
question of cultural-linguistic signification. What prevails, then, is that the struggle
for the signification of ‘globalisation’ (a struggle that occurs similarly over the terms
‘democracy’, ‘politician’, ‘common-sense’ and even ‘cunt’) provides the very oppor-
tunity for the (never stable) articulation of a politics that aims to stop the machina-
tions of ‘those corporate cunts’. In that sense, there remain, but not always, or
necessarily for long, specific significations that are best ‘owned’ and struggled over
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for ownership.

Victoria University of Wellington

Notes
[1] Not to be confused with the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which
occurred a year later. September 11 was the organised ‘name’ of the protests, referring to
the first day on which WEF members held their three-day meeting in Melbourne. An
interesting point that deserves further discussion elsewhere is how the very date September
11 as a ‘meaningful moment’ has been re-signified and re-deployed between two different
‘moments’ exactly one year apart.
[2] For Butler and Laclau, homogenisation of meaning is equivalent to totalitarian structuration
and imposition. Although discussing this in terms of parliamentary discourse, the role of a
letters page in a newspaper can be said to be antithetical to any form of democratisation,
while feigning a role as a people’s forum.
[3] I will note here that the very concept ‘needs’ remains in dispute: as with all signifiers, I do
not necessary want to see an imposed and fixed meaning, nor have I been able to pin down
one which might be understood as effective in the context of Third World poverty and
ecological protection. This does not mean, however, that the term cannot be deployed for
food, shelter, medicine, and other requirements for bodily survival. Where even the concept
‘body’ is to be disputed, it is necessary—even as contingency—that the concepts be deployed
under an unstable ethic of radical equality and resource-distribution. None of which is to
juxtapose Third World ‘need’ against Western bourgeois ‘want’ as, for example, Donald
Morton attempts (Morton 1996: 9), but to put forward a contingent ethic that links the
signifier ‘need’ with a Western policy of global resource distribution.
[4] Except perhaps in the case of ‘graffiti tagging’, in which there is a very particular economy
of naming, marking and circulation, the name in a code not easily deciphered by the
non-participant occurs.
[5] Perhaps the most recent example which highlights the importance of cultural signification
to broader ‘hard political’ questions and to their effect on everyday lives has been President
George W. Bush’s use of binary signifiers such as us/them and civilisation/terrorism in the
wake of the (2001) September 11.
[6] See Butler (1993) for a useful discussion of the term ‘queer’, in which it is viewed as more
 Some Cunts 289

productive if the term is never shut down or owned by making one sense its primary
signification. Interestingly, in the reclaiming of the term ‘queer’ it occurred simultaneously
in two forums in the late 1980s: by Queer Nation, an off-shoot of the HIV/AIDS political
activist organisation ACT-UP and, without connection, by Teresa de Lauretis in coining the
term ‘queer theory’ (de Lauretis 1989: n.2). It has later been deployed as a ‘positive’
umbrella term for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people—basically anyone
articulating an identity of significant difference to ‘heterosexual’ or ‘straight’—(Cover
1999), and sometimes as a ‘lifestyle’ of younger non-heterosexual or anti-heteronormative
personages, distancing themselves from the bourgeois excesses of an older-generational gay
culture (Buchbinder 1997: 150).
[7] Only one person in the lead-up to the S11 protests asked me ‘when is it?’ and that was
intended as a joke: the signification of the abbreviation is secured, then, through a
contextualised ‘nodal point’ via repetition.
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