Deconstructing a Road Sign

For the first 50 years of my life no-one thought of closing off the seafront road in storms. It was just your lookout if you were foolish enough to drive along it in those rare moments when pebbles were actually being hurled off the beach by a wild sea. The sign below shows a degree of masquerading behind a busybody concern for our welfare in the name of which all sorts of things are justified. What is more likely to be truly behind the masquerade is the Council’s fear of litigation in the event of someone’s Hyundai being dented by a stone. What is even more interesting is the elision this causes between the legal mind and the technocratic mind that likes to give the illusion of the ability to control nature and reality down to the level of a knowing and solicitous Laplace’s Demon. Law can have this new status In a technocracy so that it becomes the written expression of an anally controlling, illiberal mind. It becomes the over-mastering fabric of that mind in which we are all enclosed. This has happened almost by accident because the logic behind it is hard to challenge. It should be challenged though…..