Trevor McClintock looks at Big Ben as the quintessential Post-modern Signifier

The Space where the Building Was.

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 masterpiece ‘White Noise’ the author tackles topics as varied as media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism and the state of the American family in the mid-80s. One of the main areas he returns to is the overwhelming consumerism that had started to engulf America. It’s this need to constantly consume that is at the heart of one of the books finest moments, and the subject of this latest Trevor McClintock post.

In a segment entitled ‘The most photographed Barn in America’, DeLillo writes about two men going to visit a tourist attraction, along the way they see many signs that say ‘The most photographed barn in America’, once they get there, they see many tourists taking photos and one of the characters remarks ‘No one sees the barn, Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn’.