Making the Image Everything

By 1981, new wave acts on both sides of the Atlantic (and their counterparts in art and postmodern theory) had spent half a decade interrogating the sign and playing with its instability. They weren’t always thinking about ‘sign’ in the same ways: some focused on word play and language games; others dealt with the musical sign — how, for example the synthesizer disconnected sound from the musician playing it; still others considered personality and what happens when the signs of personality float independently from an actual person. All of these approaches led to the same place, however. If the sign was disconnected from its referent, if signifiers — of every type — no longer pointed to concrete signifieds, reality itself was suddenly in question.