Reading Latour 1: Tracing

I finally decided that I’d have to bite the bullet and read Latour. Not Harman, who is an explicator of Latour, or Bryant, or Bogost, who gave us the Latour Litanizer, nor even Morton, who introduced me too OOO, and whom I’ve been reading in blog-sized form. Which counts for more than you might think, as not only have I been reading, but I’ve been commenting, and Tim’s commented back. And making my own OOOish posts, on which Tim’s commented. That dialog is worth, say, 5 thick books, merely read.

But all signs pointed to Latour, a sociologist by trade. Who likes flat ontologies. And whom, so I’ve read, sees things, mere physical things, as ineluctably part of the social.

That, it seems to me, is what I need, for my specific problem is that of the graffiti site, the wall on which the marks are made, time and again. As I’ve said time and again, the site is some kind of agent in the graffiti world. And the graffiti world, well graffiti world is just a phrase, a label. That I use the term should not be taken to imply that I understand it.

Further, object-oriented ontology is, well, it’s philosophy. And I’m not sure about philosophy. What does it mean to talk about capital “B” Being, and to do so with a straight face and without crossing your fingers? Heidegger? I’ve known about him for years. Never read him. Merleau-Ponty was my man back in the day. I’m not sure I how far I can go with thinking that regards Heidegger as a living influence. & Latour doesn’t even have Heidegger in his index—I’m talking about Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, the book I bought.

No, I simply don’t know how to negotiate my way in philosophy, not anymore. And I’m not interested in reaching philosophical conclusions. My immediate task is to understand graffiti. Such understanding as I manage to scrape together will, I figure, be some kind of informal and discursive social science perhaps with a psychological twist. It’s not going to be philosophy.

No doubt whatever I do implies some philosophical stance. But I’ll let others worry about it, if, that is, there’s anything worth worrying about.

Latour.

I got the book a couple of days ago and leafed through it, wondering how to read it, for one doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning and read through to the end. See, here in the index, “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency.” Looks promising. Should I start there, you know, get a jump on it? What about “How to Keep the Social Flat”? Or, “Third Move: Connecting Sites”? Heck, why not go straight to the finish: “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social be Reassembled?”

So I leafed through the book, reading snatches here and there. And, for whatever reason, I decided to start at the beginning: “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations.” Latour’s distinguishing his approach from that other approach, the one that’s fallen to pieces. I suppose that’s what I learned as an undergraduate from James Coleman and Arthur Stinchcombe and some guy whose name escapes me, but he introduced me to Centuries of Childhood.

p. 8:

... adherents of the first [the position being set on the shelf] have simply confused what they should explain with the explanation. They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one should end with them. The believed the social to be made essentially of social ties, whereas associations are made of ties which are themselves non-social. They imagined that sociology is limited to a specific domain, whereas sociologists should travel wherever new heterogeneous associations are made.

Bingo! Wherever new heterogeneous associations are made—that’s the stuff. New. Heterogeneous. Graffiti on subway cars, new heterogeneous associations. It’s there in the histories, such as they are, the connections people made with one another through those marks on the cars. When your tag travels from one end of New York City to the other, people see it; they know your tag before they know you. And you theirs.

Latour goes on:

They believed the social to be always already there [who coined this phrase?] at their disposal, whereas the social is not a type of thing either visible or to be postulated. It is visible only by the traces [a Derrida word, no?] it leaves (under trials) when a new association is being produced between elements which themselves are in no way ‘social.’

“Under trials”—what does that mean? Stress, the traces must survive? Well, you can find stories like that in graffiti. And the trials continue.

Another line, p. 11: “But in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social [that is now being put on the shelf] is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations.” Again, graffiti resonance. What are the groups that constitute graffiti culture, their boundaries? Certainly, the writers themselves. But only them? Surely not. A fluctuating range of entities—tags, throwies, pieces, on trains, walls, canvas?

So, back in late 1972 Jon Naar was commissioned to photograph graffiti, and Norman Mailer went with him on some shoots. Graffiti abounded in the NYC subway system, on the cars, inside and outside, but also the stations, and other places as well. Do we have graffiti culture yet? With none of its members as old as 20? And these particular styles only two, three, four years old? Graffiti, yes, but only in NYC, and Philly, and no doubt little bits elsewhere. I’d say it’s too early to declare graffiti culture. No pieces yet, the practice hadn’t been invented; that was a year or two later.

Retrospectively, now that we know, sure, that’s easy. But back then, on the ground on, say, 12 December 1972: Did graffiti culture exist? Graffiti yes. But an ongoing self-sustaining cultural formation, no.

What about 1982? when Wild Style came out, a fictional story starring real graffiti writers and others on the graffit and hip hop scene—for the hip hop connection had been made by then. Or 1983, when the Style Wars documentary ran on PBS? Graffiti had survived a decade, though the City government was trying to eradicate it. Writers were being roughed up, given jail terms, and cars where being ‘buffed.’ So, it’s held up against trials. And masterpieces had become coin of the realm, that is, if you wanted to be a king.

Back in 1974 Mailer and Naar had published their book, The Faith of Graffiti. It became a bible of graffiti. Writers would pass copies around. The significant fact, of course, is simply that the book existed and was reviewed in The New York Times. Graffiti had become part of a conversation larger than the writers and their acquaintances. It was on the New York City cultural map. Surely THAT played a role in coalescing graffiti culture.

A year after Style Wars showed, Subway Art was published. That became the second graffiti bible. It too was passed around from writer to writer, along with videotapes of Style Wars and Wild Style, which would take graffiti to Japan.

Do we have graffiti culture yet?

Story at 11.